Review

With a few days of interval I received two very different ways of reviewing data collected by users of “activity trackers”. The first one came from Jawbone (although I don’t own the UP, I might have subscribed to one of their mailing-lists earlier) and is also publicly available here. Named “2013, the big sleep” it a kind of infographics of how public (and mostly American) events influenced sleep of the “UP Community”. Here data about all (or at least a lot of) UP users were aggregated and shown. This is Big Data! This is a wonderful and quantitative insight on the impact of public event on sleep! But this is also a public display of (aggregated) individual data (something that UP users most probably agreed by default when accepting the policy, sometimes when they first used their device). ...

This week, I nearly emptied my internet quota by downloading and seeding the new Fedora Core 11. For those who don’t know yet, Fedora is a Linux-based operating system that showcases the latest in free and open source software. What I particularly like in this GNU/Linux distribution is that its developers prefer to make changes to the original software instead of applying fixes specifically for Fedora ; in this way, all the other distributions may also take advantages of the improved software. You’ll find many reviews and " tours" on the web about this new Fedora. In the next paragraphs, I’ll just highlight some of the most interesting points I saw until now. Coming from a Fedora 9 also helps to pinpoint the major improvements (mainly from a user point-of-view). ...