What do you do with your free time?
Do you spend it creating, or do you spend it passively consuming?
Typically, we all do a mixture of both (we are human, afterall), but in this TED video from Clay Shirky, he explains how the 1 Trillion hours of free time can impact our society in the most positive way.
One point that struck me is how new media is giving us a chance to *create* instead of just watching tv (he seems to point at TV as the root of all evil, haha), especially when he points out that Wikipedia was built out of roughly 1 percent of the man-hours that Americans spend watching TV every year.
Shirky gives two examples of how cognitive surplus has been used to “create” something of value – first off, LOLCats. Second – Ushahidi.com, which has allowed Kenyans to sidestep government censorship and report on acts of violence in real time and has since been deployed worldwide in a variety of useful ways (after becoming open source).
In his book Cognitive Surplus, Shirky forecasts the thrilling changes we will all enjoy as new digital technology puts our untapped resources of talent and goodwill to use at last.
So readers of the Techyness, how do you use your cognitive surplus?
A Major Undertaking: Naming Your Wireless Network
Ode to linksys unsecured wireless networks. (And XKCD comics, of course)
I’ve named my car. (Amelia)
I’ve named my blackberry. (Lanesberry)
Even my alter ego has a name. (Lane Dog)
So why wouldn’t you take the same care with naming your wireless network? This topic was brought up while talking to @ethansen on episode 15 of the podcast that we co-host, Millennious.
Personally, I don’t like default settings on anything. If you have the option to customize, why wouldn’t you?
In doing some tough research on what to name my new network in Houston, I thought to look into some top naming ideas for wireless networks:
Via MacRumors Forums,
My internet has not yet been hooked up in my new apartment in Houston, but lets just say I’ll be in a situation very similar to the xkcd comic above.