Kovaxlabs

My humble contribution to the vast sea of knowledge of the Interwebs.Alex from Paris

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I'm at the #32c3, the annual Chaos Computer Club conference in Hamburg and I guess I'm a real hacker now

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Life update #42

I’m just not good at keeping a diary of my life. In a way, it’s a weird dilemma as I have a tons of things to share because I’ve been working on so many interesting projects lately and yet it’s precisely why I can’t find the time to post about it... Who cares really? I much prefer this than the other way round!

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"Make something people want" including a company that people want to work for

Sahil Lavingia, Gumroad

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Focus on the long term, and always do what’s right to grow the company and not make short-term decisions. And outlast everyone one.

 Adam D'Angelo, Quora

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Introducing the "Awesome Features" column

I'm passionate about the web and I can't help but always look at a website or an app with a "professional" prospective. I'm fascinated by details and brilliant features that you can barely notice, sometimes so subtle but efficient than it amazes me. So I've decided to share the most interesting things I've found in a new column of this blog called "Awesome features". It will consists of tiny case studies about very specific features and details I've noticed here and there.

"Devil is in the details"

[geek-play-blog]

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It’s not about ideas. It’s about making ideas happen.

Scott Belsky, Behance

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Piper is joining my home automation network!

Last winter I was working on a DIY home security system using a Raspberry PI with the camera module and a PIR sensor. But I didn't have much time to work on it and could go much further than a basic frame by frame webcam. I had made all the plans but not enough time to implement it...

In the meantime, the "Internet of things" has exploded and dozens of Kickstarter/IndieGogo projects have joined the movement to provide all kind of home connected objects. Of course, the security aspect of the home automation is being quite covered by great projects like Canary, Sentri and my favorite one, Piper.

Honestly those three projects are equally awesome but Piper is the only one to be available already. It's also the only one that has a builtin Z-Wave controller which is the protocol I chose for my home automation projects last year. It's unfortunately not as cute and sexy as Sentri and Canary but I will work on that!

[1041uuu]

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The most awesome GIF tumblr I've seen in a while -> http://1041uuu.tumblr.com/

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I went to WebSummit 2014!

And it was amazing :)

I had the chance to attend the summit with my company TheBeautyst.com as part of their Alpha program. So we had a booth for a day, access to the conferences and invitations to various events in Dublin.

I attends quite a lot of events around the Internet of things, wearables and connected objects as I'm very interested in those at the moment. I also had the chance to attend a party at Google HQ which was brilliant and I met a lot of interesting people. In overall, I loved the events because it gave me a lot of motivation to see all those inspiring people talking about what they build or were building.

I'm not gonna lie, I hope to be on one of the stages one day :) I would be terrified probably but I know I have what's needed to be a great speaker.

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"Mondays are grand, you just hate your job" - Seen in Dublin during WebSummit 2014

Life is too short to be stuck in a job you hate. You should be excited every Monday to get back to work on something you love and believe in.

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I got a Pebble Watch!

It's been a while since I've posted here but who cares really :)

So lately I've been very interested in the massive movement of connected objects, wearbales and Internet of things in the startup world. I've been tinkering for a couple of years now with Raspberry Pis, Z-Wave controllers, etc. but it feels like now there's a lot more fascinating projects going on, especially on Kickstart.

After attending a great session about wearables at Web Summit 2014, I've decided to invest in a Pebble watch to start working on some DIY/Wearables/Home automation project on my own.

This beautiful pebble on the right is joining my casio calculator watches :)

I went for the Pebble because I like that's a bit retro with a low-res screen and mostly because you don't have to charge it every night thanks to that! I also appreciated that they have a good Javascript SDK to start writing apps for the watch very quickly. And honestly their pixel art website is one of the most beautiful I've seen lately. 

They have a fantastic dev environnement called CloudPebble that allowed to already write an app without any hassle. But that will be for a future post!

[beauxtravelgifs-blog1]

Anywhere

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If you like travel and GIFs you should check out our hejorama affiliated Tumblr called beauxtravelgifs!!

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The Silent Traveler of Midnight Sun Film Festival

A silent short black and white GiF story, about a silent traveler heading to Midnight Sun Film Festival in Lapland, Finland

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But for a startup to succeed, at least one founder (usually the CEO) will have to spend a lot of time on sales and marketing.

Paul Graham in one of his best essay (to me)

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A startup is a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.

Eric Ries

Startup definition #1

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Quick update

I updated the right bar of this website a little bit which I wanted to do for a long time.

I

  (yes I also really wanted to share a GIF today...)