Design Challenges by the Design Council have social impact

Design Challenges | The Impact from Design Council on Vimeo.

Really pleased to see this new video by the Design Council on the impact Design Challenges have on fostering innovative solutions to big social problems.

And I'm really happy we were one of the winners of the "Living Well with Dementia" challenge, which allowed us to build Grouple.

Use two Dropbox accounts at the same time on OSX

I've always found it a pain that Dropbox doesn't support syncing to multiple accounts at the same time, e.g. to my work account as well as to my personal one.

Of course, I could share the contents of one with the other, but I only have a free Dropbox account for my personal files, and I like to keep work and personal content separate.

After some Googling, I came across this blog post by Daniel Mann that shows you how you can sync multiple Dropbox accounts to your Mac:

http://theterran.com/blog/2012/6/14/use-two-dropbox-accounts-on-one-computer.html

The gist of it is that you simply run two separate Dropbox instances at the same time using the Automator to run a shell script:

HOME=$HOME/Dropbox-personal /Applications/Dropbox.app/Contents/MacOS/Dropbox &

You even can setup your Mac to automatically run the Automator .app in your System Preferences > Users & Groups > Login Items.

Check out Mr Mann's blog for step-by-step details on how you can set up multiple Dropboxes on your Mac.

The abundance of slowness

My friend, who took a year off to explore caves around the world and who just started a new company, sent me this article about slowing down:

https://medium.com/content-creators-curators/348a9f60e176

It really resonated with me.

It reminded me of my own lessons learned from the start-up that I built and exited.

Our frantic days are really just a hedge against emptiness. – Tim Kreider, NYTimes.com

Todo.txt workflow for Alfred

Using Alfred on OSX over the past few months has been such a revelation. When I design for software, I usually tend to work either with my Wacom pen and tablet in hand when I'm sketching / drawing, or with both hands on the keyboard when I'm coding.

When I'm doing the latter, I really appreciate Alfred's keyboard-based everything so that I can keep both hands on the keyboard and just get on with things.

For those who haven't tried it, Alfred is kind of like a combination of the Search Box in the Windows Start Menu and AutoHotKey - the automation tool for Windows.

Recently, I found an automation Workflow in Alfred that allows you to access Todo.txt from within Alfred. It's available on GitHub here:
https://github.com/benignoc/alfred-todotxt

The workflow does require that you have Todo.txt, which is a really awesome todo list app that uses a simple text file to keep track of your todos:
https://github.com/ginatrapani/todo.txt-cli

And you'll also need Alfred with the paid-for PowerPack:
http://www.alfredapp.com/

Open source Super Mario Bros in HTML5

This HTML5/JavaScript remake of Super Mario Bros takes me back to my childhood, when often times I would go over to a friend's house to watch these magical pixels being pushed onto the television screen from their Nintendo Entertainment System.

Back then, I was allowed only to watch but not play in MarioLand. Today, not only can I indulge in some Princess Peach-saving action in a box-standard browser, I also can take it apart and delve into its open-source underbelly to see what makes Bower tick.

How far we've come in democratising pixels and bits. Looking forward to the next decade when we open up design and healthcare.

http://www.fullscreenmario.com/

And here is the source code on GitHub:
https://github.com/Diogenesthecynic/FullScreenMario