Category Archives: Internet

Late night conversation-friendly cafés in Wellington

Tim Haines is looking for quiet cafés/meeting spaces:

I’m looking for a quiet cafe/meeting place where we can find a bit of space, hang out for the whole afternoon, buy good coffee (to enjoy AND compensate the cafe), and use Cafenet. Of particular interest is being a few meters away from anyone else – so it’s not noisy, and you won’t be easily overheard.

He mentions Olive Café, and while I haven’t been there, walking past it, it doesn’t feel gritty enough for me 😉

A great meeting place I enjoy regularly is Katipo Café, which is upstairs from the 1-2-3 Dollar shop on Willis St, near New World Metro. It has good food, decent coffee, and my style of music — but not so loud you can’t hear the person next to you, unlike Espressoholic

Espressoholic has CaféNet, but it’s WAY too loud there at times, especially when it’s packed. It’s good for working by yourself though.

Unfortunately, they don’t have CaféNet at Katipo, but if you can get a seat near the window, you can get enough of a signal from somewhere near by.

…

From my point of view, quiet cafés in Wellington, especially those that are open late night, are far and few between.

A thought that has crossed my mind is there is definetely a niche for a quiet designer/geek café in Wellington. It might focus on CaféNet and good coffee and food, but also be a venue for public geek meetups and seminars: have a projector and sound setup, recording speeches and putting them up on the café’s podcast…?

Food Internet Outside Work 2 comments

Google Notebook Firefox Extension Easter Egg

I just got myself a Google Notebook and I think I like it! Taking snippets of text from webpages and archiving it online privately or publicly is pretty cool.

I especially like the simple Firefox Extension. It adds a little ‘open notebook’ to the browser’s status bar, which when clicked pops up a little in-page pop-up where you can type text or capture selected text from the current page. Very nice!

I did find one pretty neat feature that the Google Notebook help pages doesn’t mention. Right click the button in the status bar, and you’ll find an Enable ‘Note This’ button option. Enabling this doesn’t seem to do much straight away, and in fact, it took me a while to figure it out. But when it’s enabled, try selecting some text, and a little [+] button will appear at the end of your selection — click it to add your selection to your currently selected notebook! Neato 😀

So uses for Google Notebook? I could find it useful for keeping a list of things I want to post about, a shopping list, inspirational quotes, or maybe even for some GTD loving. What will you be doing with your Google Notebook?

Blogging Internet Reading Software Work 8 comments

Blanket Man has a Posse

I was stunned and amused to overhear some of my collegues say that Blanket Man has a wikipedia page. Turns out his name is Ben Hana.

Wow. This is pretty awesome, because while a lot of people don’t think he should be on the street, he is, so the least we can do is learn more about his reasons.

Internet New Zealand Outside Reading 17 comments

Rad Rad Robo-Glutbook


Rad Rad Robo-Glutbook
Uploaded to Flickr by Glutnix.

Here’s Glutbook, my 12″ iBook mac laptop sporting some new cult-of-mac jamming adhesives!

  • Technorati sticker, obtained at WE05 Sydney (thanks Tantek!)
  • “OBEY with caution – Blind Acceptance can be hazardous”, bought years ago in an Obey sticker pack I only just remembered I had
  • Rad Rad Robotank from Strong Bad Email #139: Portrait, custom printed for NZD$15 at a sign printer here in Wellington called Asign. Supplied a EPS and it was printed and laser cut ready for sticking on in less than half a day! Awesome!

I know some mac-zealots (namely Kodiak) are gonna hate me for doing it. But that was part of the fun 😀

Creativity Hardware Internet Photos Random 1 comment