Joel Dehlin

Tinkerer

Joel Dehlin — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 16:53:26 +0000

I’m a tinkerer.

A good friend (who was also a direct report) painted a mental picture of me standing beside a cookie jar with my mother out of the room, debating with myself about whether I should dive in and grab a cookie.

This, he explained, was my inherent “Don’t confuse operational or implementation problems with the need for changing strategy.”

- From Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths & Total Nonsense, Pfeffer & Sutton.

Google Realtime Search

Joel Dehlin — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 15:00:25 +0000

Google recently announced a dedicated page of tools for its realtime search functionality. According to Google, the new search capability lets you search/view real-time updates from social sites, blogs, and news articles. Check it out!

new.lds.org Now Available!

Joel Dehlin — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 16:58:26 +0000

new.lds.org is now available!

Some new features:

Great new search (try out the facets!)
Prophets and Apostles Speak Today
Church News and Events
Church Organization
Temples
Humanitarian Service
“Our Heavenly Father’s Plan”
New e-store
New Ward Calendar (with Google Calendar integration) and Ward Directory
My Notebook (this is amazing and will sync with your mobile device in about a month or so). To try it out, login and go to scriptures or general conference. When you mouse-over a paragraph, you can tag and mark stuff and type in your own notes.
And so on, and so on…

The team was up all night against harrowing opposition and went live at 5:00am or so. Conference, magazines and manuals go back to 2002 or so, but we’ll be loading more content each day, eventually reaching back to the 1970’s. We will have Spanish and German versions available before October conference.

We’re finding and fixing bugs so please give us feedback.

Enjoy! (And spread the word…)

Mobile Augmented Reality (MAR)

Joel Dehlin — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 15:23:06 +0000

MAR apps are becoming more popular ever since Yelp snuck in a hidden feature for iPhone 3GS users which combined GPS overlayed markers for businesses on the camera view of the phone. Layar, one such platform lets users build custom layers atop the camera view for a mobile device.

Twitter SAP Tools

Joel Dehlin — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 15:03:59 +0000

Combine Twitter with PowerPoint! A set of tools available here can help you view tweets and lots more as you present.

WiTricity

Joel Dehlin — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 19:18:12 +0000

Wireless electricity! We’ve all seen wireless toothbrush charging and this is the next generation in efficient power transmission. WiTricity’s technology however goes a step further by embedding the coils under the ceiling, a wall, or even a desk and whatever device is within the range gets powered without wires. The technology was developed by an MIT team for which the leader won the MacArthur (a.k.a Genius) award. With efficiency reported over 90% – it seems like a promising technology. Read more here.

Safe Plug

Joel Dehlin — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 15:00:45 +0000

This is a fun piece of simple technology to save power and increase safety of electrical outlets.It uses small little slip on RFID tags on the plugs themselves and are plugged in to the “safe plug” outlets. Plugs cannot work otherwise and can potentially be remotely monitored or even controlled. These could be used to save energy, monitor individual and specific devices, prevent fires, etc. Think of all the meetinghouses that could be rescued from power siphoning and potential fire hazards. The gentleman who invented this was a featured speaker on TED.

New Spice

Joel Dehlin — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 14:00:43 +0000

The BYU Library made a video that parodies the well-known Old Spice commercial. The video went viral and to date has received almost 2 million views on YouTube.

Go BYU Library!

Green!

Joel Dehlin — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 15:00:50 +0000

Energy cost-cutting begins at home. According to this article, local city administrators in England, Scotland, and Belgium have posted maps that contrast heat escape in homes, offices, and industries. A creative way to pin-point and address rising energy costs. Only time before this comes to the US – may be an extra hot edition of Google or Bing maps.

Group Think City

Joel Dehlin — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 18:37:32 +0000

Interesting article on why groups fail to share information effectively. I thought the article would claim that in some environments people horde information intentionally to benefit themselves in some way. But no, the point was that people typically withhold information which isn’t already agreed to or well known by the group they’re with

(?)

Seems bizarre, but the research they cite claims this is true.