#StealThisIdea – Using GIFs For Teaching Our Children

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Using GIFS for Teaching. I’m no historian of modern education, but one thing I can say for certain is that the medium of instruction used to teach our children has rapidly changed, and will continue to do so for as long as children are being educated. Gone are the days of encyclopedias, textbooks and pen and paper. In are the days of tablet classrooms, educational apps, AI tutors and Wikipedia - and even that's a little outdated to kids. I believe there’s nothing new under the sun. Any innovation is, in some way, a combination of two pre-existing concepts. Communication + Electricity = Telephone. (Over simplified but indulge me.) Telephones + Radio = Cellphones. (Okay, I think I’m losing my way here, but you get the point.) A brilliant YouTube video, “History of Japan”, opened my eyes to the opportunity that exists to repackage educational content. It takes Japan’s entire [Read more...]

The 56 forgotten links

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Every Friday, with my email newsletter (the Random Roundup), I round up the best 5 things I came across on the internet that week. And let me tell you, I come across a lot. Below are the 56 links and stories that I ended up leaving out of the first 10 editions of the newsletter. I went and gathered them all up off the cutting room floor put them into this list. I've left them messy and unordered - go ahead and choose a few at random. Enjoy! http://edition.cnn.com/videos/cnnmoney/2017/03/08/mostly-human-dead-irl.cnnmoney/video/playlists/atv-mostly-human/ https://medium.com/@alexandriawilliams/50-companies-hiring-100-remote-workers-and-digital-nomads-578f04d23876 https://heatst.com/tech/he-will-not-divide-us-livestream-placed-in-middle-of-nowhere-but-4chan-still-found-way-to-troll-it/ [Read more...]

Save your eyes and save your time with one iPhone setting.

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While tinkering in my iPhone settings, I happened upon a clever little setting you can use to save your eyes and your time. It's a great little hack that has worked well for me over the past two weeks. Hope it helps you too! If you have an iPhone, Head into your Settings -> General -> Accessibility -> Accessibility Shortcut. Select: “Invert Colors” “Reduce White Point” “Color Filters” Read on to see how and when to use them. To save your eyes: 1) Invert your device’s colors. The built-in color palette favors bright colors. Triple click the home button and choose “Invert Colors” before bed every night. This will make your phone appear darker, making early morning screen time much easier on your eyes, especially when trying to switch off that damn 7AM alarm. 2) Soften the harsh “White Point” Apple screens are vivid, sharp and have that [Read more...]

#StealThisIdea – Startup Shuffle

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The idea is simple really: A website with one giant shuffle button that, when pressed, will bring up a random and an insanely useful article/resource/tool that any startup founder, employee or switched-on person should know. Directories like StartupStash are incredibly useful too, but you have to know what you're looking for. Sometimes serendipitously stumbling upon a golden nugget of wisdom at the opportune time almost reassures your work. It would feel like fate. Sometimes it's just damn cool to stumble across something useful you otherwise wouldn't know to look for, nevermind know how to find. The same material goes around the same circles - with Startup Shuffle, happenstance brings timeless content back around - often "just when you needed it." Please steal this idea and hit me up to chat about some monetization and marketing ideas.

You get good by doing and this is why

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It's simple really. Will you be the ones sitting around theorising and "researching." The ones too afraid to start for fear of failure? Or will you be the ones who show in day in day out, pushing out work on the regular? Not afraid to fail, always willing to improve. You see, humans learn by doing. We get good by doing. It's through incremental steps that we become masterful in our pursuits.

#StealThisIdea – Travel To Where You’re Rich

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For some, the destination of travel is less important than the cost. When I chose to travel to South East Asia, it was mostly because my currency was stronger than theirs and the cost of living was cheaper in their region meaning the 3 month holiday would be comparatively cheap for my currency. I planned the route and activities after this realisation and off I went to have a brilliant time with a very thin wallet. Now imagine a website or app whereby you enter your home country and have it throw out a list of all the countries where it would be comparatively cheaper for you to travel to - taking into consideration the currency and cost of living figures for every country on earth. So, a map of the world would appear: Green countries show where it is cheap for you to travel to. Yellow show where it is about the same cost of traveling as it would be around your own [Read more...]

Six Friends Dinners: Meet and connect with the great people in your city

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Imagine sitting down to a dinner with 5 genuinely cool and interesting people like yourself. You’ll share a meal, share a drink, share your story and have others share theirs. It’s really all about sharing a connection with other people and bridging the gap from strangers to friends.   You won’t be sold anything, indoctrinated or have any of your organs harvested. This isn’t a dating agency, a Pokemon Go meetup or a networking event - It’s a way to meet the types of people you wish you knew but always complain about not being able to find.   It’s a no-strings-attached coming together of people you’ll probably really like - I call it “Six Friends" Dinners and it could be what you and your city has been missing. HERE’S HOW IT WORKS A Six Friends Dinner brings together 6 people who, mostly, don’t know each other. The organiser of the Dinner (the “Host”) phones up to invite one [Read more...]

Symbols

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I've slowly come to the realisation that there exist many universal truths - thoughts, ideas, and meditations that appear and reappear in our collective writings, teachings and even consciousness. Service to humanity; gratitude; a sense of self and purpose are just a few. Pity we seem to keep forgetting all the good ones! These are the ideas that regardless of religious, political or moral orientation seem prevalent in the human psyche. We humans just keep coming back to them. These Truths are all around us, if only you know where to look. They can be found in biographies, fables, novels and stories. In religious texts, historical events and even everyday cliches. When reading a passage, recalling a moment or penning a realisation - I aim to find, synthesise & categorise such Truths into a system I've developed. A system of Symbols. I've come up with 15 or so phrases, [Read more...]

#StealThisIdea – Morning Routine App

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Most people find making a morning routine easy enough but sticking to it near impossible. I wish someone would #StealThisIdea and make an app that would encourage you to stick to your morning routine through automation. You configure your default Morning Routine and have it run every morning. It would be a combination of Workflow (an actions and automation app) and a timer - allowing you to trigger certain apps to open and actions to start at certain times. This is a generic morning routine: Alarm Gratitude Journal Glass of Water Meditate Exercise Shower Breakfast (recipe) Now, the Morning Routine App to keep you productive, on time and accountable in the morning: You set the start time of the Morning Routine App for 6AM. The Morning Routine App begins which triggers your Alarm to go off at 6AM. Once you've switched off your [Read more...]

How Tech turned me into a runner.

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I’ve always been a fit and healthy guy. Sports throughout my childhood and teens with some on and off weight training into my 20s. Running though? "Nah, not my thing" I’d always say!   Well, I’ve turned that around and I mostly have tech to thank for it.   On a hike with some friends, we got chatting about fitness and exercise. They insisted that I give running a real chance; that I’d love it and all of its benefits. I was skeptical  to say the least as I stood by the stubborn notion that “I’m just not a runner.”   That is until they told me about the Nike Running App. That’s where it all changed.   I was to find out about this smartphone app that tracks your runs, provides training programmes for certain distances and has a social feature to add friends. All very nice, but the real kicker was when they showed me the Social Leaderboard.   Now [Read more...]