Today is the shortest day of the year in the northern hemisphere. The sun is at its lowest point. From today on, days will again become longer. Above the arctic circle, there is no day. Below the antarctic circle, however, there is only day. Find out more about winter solstice on Wikipedia.
The last couple of days, I was studying several sources in order to find out how to make my training plan for December until February to improve VO2 max. High VO2 max results in good freediving performance and breath holding. Today, I stumbled upon this website that summarizes it quite well.
Here the link.
In summary, one should do some short high-intensity interval trainings, but also some regular interval trainings during 4 minutes with 2 minutes recovery break (slow jogging). I hear already two questions araising.
Of what I figured out in the last couple of days was that in order to improve VO2 max, high-intensity interval training is required. This boils down to my traditional 10x 200m sprints with 2 minutes recovery (walking). here, sprint means really going to almost maximum possible speed.
In order to push the lactatic threshold, however, a more moderate interval training is required. In fact the 5x 4 minutes at or a bit above the lactatic threshold and 2 minutes break (walking).
Also, one long run is still advisable in order to recover the muscles.
So, in practice, this is difficult to translate without over-training.
I suggest the following
During my times as a sprinter, once per week 10x 200m was enough. Every week, we got better. In the beginning, we were not able to sustain the 10x. Only about 7-8 times. But quickly, we got used to the effort.
Let’s see in December.
In an article about methods of getting organized, the newspaper Ouest France (print and online) cited a quote from me. see here.
La méthode GTD. C’est l’abréviation de l’anglais Getting things done (pour que les choses soient faites), leitmotiv du gourou américain de l’organisation : David Allen. « J’ai fait la liste de tous mes projets professionnels et privés, même si leur réalisation me semble lointaine, confie le bloggeur Herbert Bay. Je les ai classés, ce qui libère mon esprit, puis je les décompose. Faire le tour du monde en voilier peut sembler un rêve inaccessible. Mais si je divise ce projet en petites taches réalisables, petit à petit, j’avance. » La méthode conseille aussi de classer les choses à faire selon les endroits où l’on se trouve (au téléphone, devant l’ordinateur ), puis de s’acquitter tout de suite des tâches qui prennent moins de trois minutes.
Even if the address of this blog was not mentioned, I noticed increased traffic (see screenshot)
Source: kooaba
Do you use your iPhone to remember things by taking pictures of stuff? For instance wine labels, furniture, book covers, newspaper articles, food, recipes, receipts …? Congratulations: you use your iPhone as a visual memory! This reduces information overflow and keeps your brain free for more important stuff.
You understand how efficient it is just to snap a picture in order to remember something visually.
But you may have noticed that your camera roll quickly turns into a mess. Everything is mixed (holiday pictures between wine labels, and newspaper articles). Furthermore, these collections can become increasingly large, holding thousands or even tens of thousands of pictures. Think of how many photos you took with your iPhone in the last 3 years and extrapolate that to the next 30 years. Overwhelming.
Just as you, we needed a better solution. We imagined a mobile camera app, which was specifically tailored for serving you as a visual memory. Which brings order to the chaos in your camera roll. Which lets you easily search and organize your visual memos and even creates a safe backup for you if your iPhone falls in a lake 
. This is exactly what our new product kooaba Déjà Vu aspires to do for you.
How does this work? Watch the video below for a short intro.
Convinced? vote here). Alternatively, you can also register for just the web account.
Not convinced yet? To sum it up, the features of Déjà Vu as of today are
Ok, we think you should really Paperboy and Vivino. The goal of these apps is to respond to user needs where image recognition is key element to solving the problem. This is driven by the notion that just offering visual general visual search just doesn’t cut it.
Throughout the last five years, we had the chance to talk to many of our users and collect their feedback. One thing that constantly came up was the fact that many of them use our apps to remember things, rather than to interact with them. For example, when people used kooaba Visual Search to take a picture of a book, it was often to remember it for buying it later, rather than having instant access to reviews or shopping options. The same holds for kooaba Paperboy, where from the three benefits (Share, Explore, Remember), the one that’s consistently reported as the most popular by users is Remember.
In fact, even when talking to people that do not use any kooaba app about how they use their mobile camera, many of them mention the fact that they use it as their visual memory. Why is that? Having a camera integrated in your mobile phone has changed the way we take pictures. First, of course, the pictures are digital, so taking one doesn’t cost you a dime. Second, you have your mobile phone always with you. Third, snapping a picture is probably the simplest, fastest, and most intuitive way to remember anything.
These are the reasons that led us to create kooaba Déjà Vu.
Of course, we have many more useful features for Déjà Vu in mind than the ones we offer in this first release – some of them will launch as early as this month. Also, the use-case of a visual memory in general opens a whole bunch of new possibilities for image recognition. This is still our core competence and we do not plan on retiring from innovating here.
Speaking of which: what will happen to our visual search apps? We will continue focussing on covering verticals for visual search with our platform, and Paperboy as our main product. kooaba Visual search will be discontinued in the midterm (we will offer tools for migrating your data to Déjà Vu).
We are still only at the beginning of what’s possible for image recognition. Dealing with digital pictures in a smarter way will pose a growing challenge and will lead to lots of new applications. For the time being, we are really excited about Déjà Vu and eager to hear what you think about it. Try it. And let us know your ideas and thoughts here.
Herbert and Till,
and the whole kooaba team.
P.S. Shhhh, did you 
Source: kooaba
Giorgio Armani (together with Manor) offers a price reduction of 20 Swiss Francs on any of its perfumes or cosmetic products. To get the reduction, consumers have to take a picture of one of the corresponding billboard ads (also working for fragrances for men). This Smart Ad was set up by our partners APG (JCDecaux) and Vanija.
Try it with the image below. Download PosterPlus or kooaba Paperboy on your iPhone (or Android) and take a picture of the interactive billboard ad.
Interactive billboard ad - kooaba Smart Ad
This Smart Ad is great because of the following five reasons.
.Here, a picture is literally worth 20 Francs, but the campaign is probably worth much more than a thousand times its price.
The newly released text editor iA Writer is using a minimum amount of features in order to make writers focus on the essential and being more productive in what really matters… writing. iA Writer re-invents the text editor. Watch the video.
Icons and menu tool boxes are OUT, shortcuts (which are faster and therefore increase productivity) are IN again. It reminds me of the old days when I was using the simplistic text editor vim in order to write C++ code. However, with iAWriter there are much less shortcuts to learn than with vim as the main task of iA Writer is not to code, but to write. I was a great fan of vim as it is one of the most powerful text editors for coders while being extremely simple. Now, I am a great fan of iA Writer for similar reasons. Simplicity and focus, which both increase productivity.
What I also like is the courage of the inventor Oliver Reichenstein (Twitter: @iA) to underdo his competition. He was aware that with the given resources he could never beat Microsoft Word by building a software with even more features. Therefore, he built a really simple tool with almost no features, stripped down to the essential, but still extremely powerful.
iA Writer is not the only tool I like because of its siplicity. The productivity tool Things is probably the most used app I have. I use it for Desktop and on my iPhone where I use it more than phone calls, or text messages. It is just great.
I am not paid by iA Writer, and I don’t know Oliver personally even if we are both Swiss and Switzerland is small 
. I write this because I like iA Writer and because I want to test my new gadget. Meaning that this post is obviously written with iA Writer . There is one thing missing. A shortcut for links. I am tired of writing href=”http://…
Great TED Talk of Simon Sinek. The author of the best seller “Start with Why” has a simple but powerful model for inspirational leadership all starting with a golden circle and the question “Why?” His examples include Apple, Martin Luther King, and the Wright brothers — and as a counterpoint Tivo, which (until a recent court victory that tripled its stock price) appeared to be struggling.