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Innovation Blues

Free online speed reading software | Spreeder.com - 0 views

www.spreeder.com

reading speedreading tools productivity speed learning lifehacks

shared by Innovation Blues on 14 Oct 12 - Cached
  • preeder.com is free online speed reading software designed to improve your reading speed and comprehension. Spreeder is a free service provided by 7-Speed-ReadingTM.
  • Speed reading is the art of silencing subvocalization. Most readers have an average reading speed of 200 wpm, which is about as fast as they can read a passage out loud. This is no coincidence. It is their inner voice that paces through the text that keeps them from achieving higher reading speeds. They can only read as fast as they can speak because that's the way they were taught to read, through reading systems like Hooked on Phonics.
  • However, it is entirely possible to read at a much greater speed, with much better reading comprehension, through silencing this inner voice. The solution is simple - absorb reading material faster than that inner voice can keep up. In the real world, this is achieved through methods like reading passages using a finger to point your way. You read through a page of text by following your finger line by line at a speed faster than you can normally read. This works because the eye is very good at tracking movement. Even if at this point full reading comprehension is lost, it's exactly this method of training that will allow you to read faster. With the aid of software like Spreeder, it's much easier to achieve this same result with much less effort. Load a passage of text (like this one), and the software will pace through the text at a predefined speed that you can adjust as your reading comprehension increases.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • To train to read faster, you must first find your base rate. Your base rate is the speed that you can read a passage of text with full comprehension. We've defaulted to 300 wpm, showing one word at a time, which is about the average that works best for our users. Now, read that passage using spreeder at that base rate.
  • After you've finished, double that speed by going to the Settings and changing the Words Per Minute value. Reread the passage. You shouldn't expect to understand everything - in fact, more likely than not you'll only catch a couple words here and there. If you have high comprehension, that probably means that you need to set your base rate higher and rerun this test again. You should be straining to keep up with the speed of the words flashing by. This speed should be faster than your inner voice can "read".
Innovation Blues

TrueCrypt - Free Open-Source On-The-Fly Disk Encryption Software for Windows 7/Vista/XP... - 0 views

www.truecrypt.org

security encryption software opensource tools cryptography windows linux

shared by Innovation Blues on 14 Oct 12 - Cached
  • Free open-source disk encryption software for Windows 7/Vista/XP, Mac OS X, and Lin
  • Free open-source disk encryption software for Windows 7/Vista/XP, Mac OS X, and Linux
  • Main Features: Creates a virtual encrypted disk within a file and mounts it as a real disk. Encrypts an entire partition or storage device such as USB flash drive or hard drive. Encrypts a partition or drive where Windows is installed (pre-boot authentication). Encryption is automatic, real-time (on-the-fly) and transparent. Parallelization and pipelining allow data to be read and written as fast as if the drive was not encrypted. Encryption can be hardware-accelerated on modern processors. Provides plausible deniability, in case an adversary forces you to reveal the password: Hidden volume (steganography) and hidden operating system. More information about the features of TrueCrypt may be found in the documentation.
  • Innovation Blues on 14 Oct 12
     
    "Main Features: Creates a virtual encrypted disk within a file and mounts it as a real disk. Encrypts an entire partition or storage device such as USB flash drive or hard drive. Encrypts a partition or drive where Windows is installed (pre-boot authentication). Encryption is automatic, real-time (on-the-fly) and transparent. Parallelization and pipelining allow data to be read and written as fast as if the drive was not encrypted. Encryption can be hardware-accelerated on modern processors. Provides plausible deniability, in case an adversary forces you to reveal the password: Hidden volume (steganography) and hidden operating system. More information about the features of TrueCrypt may be found in the documentation."
Innovation Blues

Ben Franklin on Patents; in which he provides a Selfless model for Sharing an... - 0 views

movingtofreedom.org/...ben-franklin-on-patents

ben franklin patents sharing cooperation freedom History

shared by Innovation Blues on 10 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • Ben Franklin on Patents; in which he provides a Selfless model for Sharing and Cooperation; Inspires us with his Generosity; and Lends Moral Authority to the Principles of Free Culture…
  • in 1742, invented an open stove for the better warming of rooms, and at the same time saving fuel, as the fresh air admitted was warmed in entering, I made a present of the model to Mr. Robert Grace, one of my early friends, who, having an iron-furnace, found the casting of the plates for these stoves a profitable thing, as they were growing in demand.
  • Gov’r. Thomas was so pleas’d with the construction of this stove, as described in it, that he offered to give me a patent for the sole vending of them for a term of years; but I declin’d it from a principle which has ever weighed with me on such occasions, viz., That, as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously.
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  • Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography
  • Reading about free software specifically and free culture in general causes a dangerous uptick in my idealism index. Idealism in the sense of hoping and even believing that we can all get along. (Somehow. Someday.) That we can help each other. I think I had a healthy share of idealism growing up but gradually over the years I’ve addressed this vulnerability by developing an outer shell of jaded cynicism. It’s much more comforting to have no hope than to have hopes that can be crushed. However, there is a good chance with this strategy that your heart will shrink a couple of sizes.
  • But then I read essays by Richard Stallman, listen to speeches by Eben Moglen, and read and listen to many other hopeful voices, and I start to see something better. Like Fox Mulder, I want to believe. Which of course is dangerous. You leave yourself open to ridicule if you believe. You might be dismissed as being naive. To which of course we should say, “So what?” I want to believe that we can do better.
  • The great moral question of the twenty-first century is: If all knowledge, all culture, all art, all useful information, can be costlessly given to everyone at the same price that it is given to anyone — if everyone can have everything, everywhere, all the time, why is it ever moral to exclude anyone from anything? If you could make lamb chops in endless numbers by the mere pressing of a button, there would be no moral argument for hunger ever, anywhere. I see no system of moral philosophy generated by the economy of the past that could evolve a principle to explain the moral legitimacy of denial in the presence of infinite profusion.
Innovation Blues

Welcome to virtualdub.org! - virtualdub.org - 0 views

www.virtualdub.org

software opensource editing tools freeware virtualdub capture windows Video

shared by Innovation Blues on 14 Oct 12 - Cached
  • Innovation Blues on 14 Oct 12
     
    "VirtualDub is a video capture/processing utility for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows platforms (98/ME/NT4/2000/XP/Vista/7), licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL).  It lacks the editing power of a general-purpose editor such as Adobe Premiere, but is streamlined for fast linear operations over video.  It has batch-processing capabilities for processing large numbers of files and can be extended with third-party video filters.  VirtualDub is mainly geared toward processing AVI files, although it can read (not write) MPEG-1 and also handle sets of BMP images. I basically started VirtualDub in college to do some quick capture-and-encoding that I wanted done; from there it's basically grown into a more general utility that can trim and clean up video before exporting to tape or processing with another program.  I released it on the web and others found it useful, so I've been tinkering around with its code ever since.  If you have the time, please download and enjoy."
Innovation Blues

ImageMagick: Convert, Edit, Or Compose Bitmap Images - 0 views

www.imagemagick.org/...index.php

image graphics software opensource tools imagemagick programming php

shared by Innovation Blues on 14 Oct 12 - Cached
  • Innovation Blues on 14 Oct 12
     
    "ImageMagick® is a software suite to create, edit, compose, or convert bitmap images. It can read and write images in a variety of formats (over 100) including DPX, EXR, GIF, JPEG, JPEG-2000, PDF, PhotoCD, PNG, Postscript, SVG, and TIFF. Use ImageMagick to resize, flip, mirror, rotate, distort, shear and transform images, adjust image colors, apply various special effects, or draw text, lines, polygons, ellipses and Bézier curves."
Innovation Blues

What Caffeine Actually Does to Your Brain - 0 views

lifehacker.com/...ne-actually-does-to-your-brain

caffeine science coffee brain self Improvement

shared by Innovation Blues on 10 Aug 12 - Cached
  • affeine is one seriously misunderstood substance. It's not a simple upper, and it works differently on different people with different tolerances—even in different menstrual cycles. But you can make it work better for you.
  • Luckily, one intrepid reader and writer has actually done that reading, and weighed that evidence, and put together a highly readable treatise on the subject. Buzz: The Science and Lore of Alcohol and Caffeine, by Stephen R. Braun, is well worth the short 224-page read. It was released in 1997, but remains the most accessible treatise on what is and isn't understood about what caffeine and alcohol do to the brain.
  • caffeine actually binds to those receptors in efficient fashion, but doesn't activate them—they're plugged up by caffeine's unique shape and chemical makeup. With those receptors blocked, the brain's own stimulants, dopamine and glutamate, can do their work more freely—"Like taking the chaperones out of a high school dance,"
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  • Normally, when adenosine levels reach a certain point in your brain and spinal cord, your body will start nudging you toward sleep, or at least taking it easy. There are actually a few different adenosine receptors throughout the body, but the one caffeine seems to interact with most directly is the A1 receptor.
  • it functions as a supremely talented adenosine impersonator. It heads right for the adenosine receptors in your system and, because of its similarities to adenosine, it's accepted by your body as the real thing and gets into the receptors.
  • Caffeine Doesn't Actually Get You Wired Right off the bat, it's worth stating again: the human brain, and caffeine, are nowhere near totally understood and easily explained by modern science. That said, there is a consensus on how a compound found all over nature, caffeine, affects the mind.
  • caffeine very clearly doesn't press the "gas" on your brain, and that it only blocks a "primary" brake. There are other compounds and receptors that have an effect on what your energy levels feel like—GABA, for example—but caffeine is a crude way of preventing your brain from bringing things to a halt. "You can," Braun writes, "get wired only to the extent that your natural excitatory neurotransmitters support it." In other words, you can't use caffeine to completely wipe out an entire week's worth of very late nights of studying, but you can use it to make yourself feel less bogged down by sleepy feelings in the morning.
  • The effectiveness of caffeine varies significantly from person to person, due to genetics and other factors in play. The average half-life of caffeine—that is, how long it takes for half of an ingested dose to wear off—is about five to six hours in a human body. Women taking oral birth control require about twice as long to process caffeine. Women between the ovulation and beginning of menstruation see a similar, if less severe, extended half-life. For regular smokers, caffeine takes half as long to process—which, in some ways, explains why smokers often drink more coffee and feel more agitated and anxious, because they're unaware of how their bodies work without cigarettes.
  • amines or cocaine; its effect on your alertness is far more subtle.
  • The general consensus on caffeine studies shows that it can enhance work output, but mainly in certain types of work. For tired people who are doing work that's relatively straightforward, that doesn't require lots of subtle or abstract thinking, coffee has been shown to help increase output and quality. Caffeine has also been seen to improve memory creation and retention when it comes to "declarative memory," the kind students use to remember lists or answers to exam questions.
  • What's important to take away is that caffeine is not as simple in effect as a direct stimulant, such as amphet
  • regular caffeine use has also been shown to decrease receptors for norepinephrine, a hormone akin to adrenaline, along with serotonin, a mood enhancer. At the same time, your body can see a 65 percent increase in receptors for GABA, a compound that does many things, including regulate muscle tone and neuron firing. Some studies have also seen changes in different adenosine receptors when caffeine becomes a regular thing.
  • A 1995 study suggests that humans become tolerant to their daily dose of caffeine—whether a single soda or a serious espresso habit—somewhere between a week and 12 days. And that tolerance is pretty strong.
  • You start to feel caffeine withdrawal very quickly, anywhere from 12 to 24 hours after your last use. That's a big part of why that first cup or can in the morning is so important—it's staving off the early effects of withdrawal. The reasons for the withdrawal are the same as with any substance dependency: your brain was used to operating one way with caffeine, and now it's suddenly working under completely different circumstances, but all those receptor changes are still in place. Headaches are the nearly universal effect of cutting off caffeine, but depression, fatigue, lethargy, irritability, nausea, and vomiting can be part of your cut-off, too, along with more specific issues, like eye muscle spasms. Generally, though, you'll be over it in around 10 days—again, depending on your own physiology and other factors.
  • Beyond the equivalent of four cups of coffee in your system at once, caffeine isn't giving you much more boost—in fact, at around the ten-cup level, you're probably less alert than non-drinkers.
Innovation Blues

I dug deep into the last 9 months of r/postcollapse and found the following posts that ... - 0 views

www.reddit.com/...deep_into_the_last_9_months_of

PostCollapse

shared by Innovation Blues on 10 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • PostCollapse
  • Top ten ways not to survive (xpost from /r/survivalist) 9 months ago by Theon Skills to surive the end of the world as we know it (xpost from /r/survivalist) 9 months ago by Theon Why the Survivalists Have Got It Wrong. Transition Culture 6 months ago by [deleted] From disaster mitigation to nutrition to raising livestock, this online database has all the information you need 6 months ago by Dodged The WHO Model List of Essential Medicines- absolutely essential reading. 6 months ago by Baeocystin Best form of defense in a country where firearms are illegal? 6 months ago by EldestPort Simple Critical Infrastructure Maps, and a systemic approach to threat modeling 5 months ago by hexayurt Pocket Ref: A must have! 5 months ago by PwnwallJackson US Army Field Survival Guide pdf 5 months ago by samattos
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