Technology and giving back

I am a strong believer in the concept that technological innovation can and should be a strong driving force for the good in the world. The Internet, while full of porn and cat pictures, has given us a great way to share knowledge, experience and rally people to a common cause. Still, doing charity work in the classic sense requires spare time, money, or other resources. But now, thanks to technology, you can help the world with nothing but a smartphone (though, I mean, charity is one of those things where more is better).

The Vodafone Foundation, in cooperation with the Garvan Institute of Medical Research, released an Android application called DreamLab. The idea is simple - as you probably know, every smartphone is essentially a tiny computer which is powerful enough to rival PCs from a couple years ago. When the phone is not being used, all that power is wasted. DreamLab puts that power to use for good to fast track cancer research.

I have been using the application for a while, and I personally think it is great. It turns on only when the phone is plugged in and fully charged and you never even notice it otherwise. It does require a network connection, but it is easy to set up data limits if you don't have unlimited Internet access.

According to the app, Garvan is already working 686 times faster than it could have without it. But there's no reason to stop at this point, right?

You can download the application here.

If no one makes a program I need, I'll just make it myself

Oh yes, the option to write your own software is one of my favorite perks of being a programmer.
For example, I noticed that the following patter has become way to common in my life:

• I stumble upon promising movie (book, game, article, whatever) on the Internet, which I am too busy to check it out immediately.
• Wait a couple of days and forget all about it.
• I have some free time and have no idea I want to do.

For some reason, I was not able to find any application to help me with this problem. Apparently, the common solution is to just make a list of Evernote or something, which sounds like too much work to me. So, I made my own application which handles this problem for me. You guys are free to use it too, if you want. It is open source, too. 

I will probably be improving it a bit in the following weekends, but I'm also open to feature requests. Enjoy!