Some fun things to do to slow down your friends' productivity

Sometimes you notice that people you are in contact with work far too quickly. It can be an over-zealous boss or an over-ambitious employee or your brother in law who is organising a pub quiz you do not want to attend to. Here are some hints how you can send data for feedback to them to keep them busy for a long long time.

• If your Word document contains complicated tables, export it to PDF.
• If your Word document contains text only, it is unfortunately far too easy to extract it from a PDF with ctrl-A ctrl-V. To increase the challenge, use the encryption options for PDF and choose the option "Cannot Copy". You can do that in programs like Adobe Acrobat Pro, Indesign or Mac OS X's built in PDF export.
• Export PowerPoint documents as JPEG files. (Yes, there is a Save As option to export every single slide as JPEG!)
• For complex Excel formulas, copy them and then paste them as pictures in a mail.
• If you are lucky enough to use Microsoft Outlook as Mail client, send all mails with the option "Prevent Copying". Note that it only is fun, if the recipient has the same mail client. Other recipients will be able to copy the text like a normal mail.
• Share your data in HTML on some website, and use some of the methods described for example here to prevent copy from the site. That is not fool proof fun, however, as there are plenty of ways around the methods, like simply disabling javascript. Use only for computer neophytes, who are just learning to hate their computers.
• Pay special attention to long codes and IDs like ISBN or keys to WiFi networks - always send them as inline images, so the recipient has to retype them. It is all the more fun, if the rest of the text, which has no importance whatsoever, is normal characters that can be copied.
• Whenever you send text as images (and that should be often), make sure the text is slightly too small to read comfortably. If the reader easily can tell the difference between "H" and "N", you should probably decrease the font size.

If you only follow these simple rules, you will have plenty of fun with your friends. Not only that, after a very short time, you won't have any friends left to bore you.

Amazon Kindle vs. Apple iBooks

It seems that the available content with Amazon and Apple is roughly the same, so which is the better product - Kindle or iBooks?

Some features that are better with the Kindle:

• You can read books on a Kindle device in bright sunshine. Reading in bright light is difficult with any iBooks enabled device.
• You can read your Kindle books on any of the following devices: Kindle (Keyboard, Touch, Fire...), Windows PC, Apple Mac, Android Phone, Android tablet, Windows Phone, iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad. With your iBooks books, you can only read them on the last three devices.
• The Kindle has a built in French - French dictionary, if you read French but need help with some words.
• The Kindle has a built in Italian - Italian dictionary.
• The Kindle has a built in Portuguese - Portuguese dictionary.
• The Kindle has a built in Spanish - Spanish dictionary.
• The Kindle has a choice of UK or US English dictionary. iBooks only has one English dictionary, as far as I can tell.
• Pages turn quickly and the application loads fast in the Kindle readers. iBooks is substantially slower in my experience. On the iPhone 4G, iBooks is hardly even usable.

Some features that are better with iBooks:
... This section will be updated as soon as I come to think of any.