Do you believe that habitual overtime is your ticket to success and advancement? Time for a reset.
Five Reasons You’re Killing Yourself Working Overtime, And How To Stop
30 Thursday Apr 2015
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in30 Thursday Apr 2015
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inDo you believe that habitual overtime is your ticket to success and advancement? Time for a reset.
30 Thursday Apr 2015
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inKiva Zip just joined forces with startup incorporation service BizFilings by CT
30 Thursday Apr 2015
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inAfter a decade in space and four years in orbit, Nasa’s Messenger spacecraft reaches the end of its mission and crashes into the surface of Mercury.
30 Thursday Apr 2015
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inA24’s Keira Knightley, Chloe Grace Moretz dramedy ‘Laggies’ will also be available for streaming by Prime members.
30 Thursday Apr 2015
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inThis dad of two quit his job to become a successful author. This is how he did it.
30 Thursday Apr 2015
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inDavid Cameron is the first of three party leaders to be quizzed by a BBC Question Time audience, the final set piece event before polling day.
30 Thursday Apr 2015
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inAfter all the dog ate my homework excuses from the IRS and Justice Department, 6400 more ‘lost’ emails are recovered. And the IRS warns us how expensive it is to reveal things, suggesting we never should ask.
29 Wednesday Apr 2015
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inRoyal decrees move kingdom away from gerontocracy, but it remains closely controlled by king’s clan
29 Wednesday Apr 2015
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inNo, that isn’t a Star Wars droid you’re looking at, but it might be the action camera you’re looking for. This is the Bandit, TomTom’s new GoPro rival and bold venture into new waters.
It might sound like a strange move for one of the world’s leading sat nav companies to make, but TomTom started down this road with the launch of its 2013 Runner watch and the subsequent sports wearables that have followed.
The Bandit doesn’t just want to be better than the GoPro at quality high-octane video capture, it also wants to make the entire user journey of capturing, editing and publishing as streamlined as possible. But before we get onto that, what’s the Bandit actually like in the flesh?
The red and white pattern does have the look of something from the Star Wars universe (R4-E1, if we’re really putting our finger on it). It’s compact but weighty – not dissimilar in size to the Sony AS-100V or GoPro Hero4 – and feels like it could take a tumble without flinching.
It’s also been designed to use the same type of one-touch button TomTom uses on its running watches. Most of your direction interaction with the Bandit happens through this four-way directional pad, the rest takes place on your smartphone. There’s also a small red button on the bottom that’s used for turning the device on.
Anyone who’s used a TomTom sports watch will also notice that the Bandit uses a very similar interface.
TomTom’s baby (which costs £309/$399) can capture 1080p video at up to 60fps and 4K at 15fps, as well as 16MP photos. You’ve also got a range of modes like burst and time-lapse to choose from.
As I mentioned earlier, TomTom’s all about streamlining the creative process. As such, the Bandit has a built-in media server which eliminates the need to download your footage before you edit it.
Meanwhile the in-camera motion sensors and GPS (of course it features GPS) help to pick out the most exciting bits of your footage, using a combination of acceleration, G-Force and your own heart rate (if you’re paired with a monitor).
Those moments will then be tagged with colourful icons when you’re sifting through the footage, helping to hasten the editing process. You can also tag highlights manually with a button on the camera itself.
Speaking of the editing, the smartphone app has a nifty feature that lets you shake it to make a movie. The app will find the first and last clips you took in a session and then randomly order the ones it feels are most exciting and place them in between.
Considering this is a brand new territory for TomTom, it’s done an impressive job with its first action camera. Furthermore, its aspiration to streamline the capture-to-publish process should be commended, and we’re looking forward to properly putting it through its paces down the road.
The Bandit has the potential to be a product that gives GoPro a run for its money, but it comes from a company that’s yet to form a reputation in action cameras. Can it make a dent in this market? We can’t wait to put it to the test and find out.
We’re still collecting our thoughts on the Bandit and will update this further soon.
29 Wednesday Apr 2015
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inThis weekend I ran a marathon. That’s genuinely a sentence I never thought I’d type, and it still feels quite odd. Whilst I was prepared for it to simultaneously be the best and worst experience of my life, it was neither. I don’t really know how I feel about the whole thing.
There are two responses you get from people when you tell them you’re running a marathon. The first is the overwhelmingly supportive and incredulous, from people who are much more used to you clutching an espresso martini than doing any form of competitive sport. The second is much less enthused, from the fundraising-weary if-I-give-you-twenty-quid-will-you-stop-talking-about-it brigade. It almost inevitably prompts the question “what time are you aiming for?”.
Now. I am by nature, as anyone who has ever played Monopoly with me will testify, a hideously competitive person. I don’t like losing and I don’t do it very often, but I suddenly found myself in a competition that I couldn’t win. Not only that, but surrounded by friends who were doing much better than me in training, and were definitely going to make good time on the day. So I wasn’t sure what I was aiming for, and when I had the inevitable bad training runs, I found them really demoralizing. Far from being inspiring and uplifting, I was finding the whole process a bit soul-crushing. The lowest point was when a group of us ran the Windsor Marathon Prep Race, which is 20 miles. The route was five laps of four miles and I’d paced myself according to my training plan and was running a slow, steady pace that I was really pleased with, until one of the marshals tapped me on the shoulder at 16 miles and asked me to stop running. There were only five runners left on the course and they said they were packing up, so we could run the extra lap if we wanted but we wouldn’t get a time as the race had officially finished. In a move typical to anyone who knows me, I told him where he could stick his polite request and carried on running, encouraging the other four people to do the same. We were all training for the marathon and we’d just encountered everyone’s worst nightmare – being made to feel like you’re not good enough.
The charity I ran for was the Mental Health Foundation, and having family members and close friends who suffer with mental health issues meant I’d always been around people who were encouraged to talk about their challenges, however big or small. The first step is to realize that acknowledging you need help isn’t a weakness, and the next, much harder step, is asking for it. So I told the friends I was training with how I felt; that I found it really hard to support them because their successes only seemed to make my perceived failure worse. That the faster they got, the slower I felt.
One of my clients and best friends, Vikki Stone was one of those people; a similarly competitive force of nature, and a much faster runner than me. She was also at Windsor and had finished ahead of me, so I called her to say I was going to do the last lap, even though it wouldn’t count. Halfway round, I got a text from her saying she’d fought with them until they agreed to keep the course open, and that all of us would get an official time, and more importantly, a goody bag. Knowing you’ve got someone backing you when you’re feeling so shit makes a huge difference, and undoubtedly helped me finish that 20 miles.
The same thing happened yesterday. I struggled to keep up with all the tweets, Facebook posts and texts of encouragement in the morning, and seeing my mum, my flatmate, people from work and some of my best friends on the route gave me the Mario-esque power-ups I needed throughout the day. I had some brilliant moments, some really terrible moments, and a lot of jelly babies. Contrary to what I’d been told to expect, I didn’t feel elated when I finished. I just hurt a lot. But I did it, and I’m proud that I did it, and my time (5:44 as it happens) doesn’t really matter. But I guess that’s the lesson: Sometimes putting one foot in front of the other is harder than it should be, and it’s okay to tell people that, because they’ll help you through it.
Ps Vikki Stone finished in 4:44.
You can still contribute to Corrie’s fundraising for The Mental Health Foundation here: http://www.virignmoneygiving.com/corriemcguire or Vikki’s fundraising for The Dog’s Trust here: https://www.justgiving.com/vikkistone/