Nick Projects

In a previous post I mentioned using desktop stickey notes for all kinds of temporary sort of issues.  I have pretty much stopped this process.  The problem I found with the system was… that it was way too easy to create 50 or 60 minimized stickey notes that became out of site and out of mind.  I liked the ability to click a button and have a place to copy and paste a phone number or jot down a quick note,  but I wasn’t disciplined enough to manage that information so it just hung around until I got sick of looking at it.   I was sort of inspired by this 18 minutes to keep your schedule on track article and started messing with paper todo list templates. My default paradigm is “paper sucks” so I replaced the process with the tools below.

Texter:

Over the past few weeks I’ve been getting a lot of millage out of a LifeHacker program called texter ( Texter).  Texter gives you hot keys to write repetitive text quickly.  The tool is great for programming,  but also for things like email signatures or your mailing address if it isn’t part of your existing signature.  I have been using texter to pre-format text documents for todo list items.   Simply typing .todo gives me a prompt for a new todo list item.

DropBox:

Since Note Pad takes up almost no memory and launches super quickly I have been keeping my ToDo lists inside of a simple text file.   To facilitate synchronization I have been using the before mentioned drop box to keep files in sync between my desktop, laptop, and work computers during the day.  I’ve come to like drop box because it keeps local copies of files rather than using the net to access everything.  This makes launching files much faster.

Samurize:

Finally I missed the ability to have information omnipresent on my desktop, but have been able to  set up a sweet program called Samurize to keep my text files open and in my face.  Samurize is described in more detail on lifehacker ( Samurize Info)  I also made a 2 minute video on how to set up a config file for samurize.  The program isn’t super user friendly,  but it doesn’t seem to suck up much processing power and it works well.  I think the coolest thing I’ve been able to set up with this is the ability to right click and edit the original notepad file.  This is shown in my video here:  http://screencast.com/t/zCVgjSnS8

The Future:

The only thing I don’t really have is mobile synchronization or alerts.  I didn’t have all of this with stickey notes, but it isn’t quite as cool as remember the milk either.  I’m thinking about making a web page that emails me my todo list every few hours during the day.  This would push it to my mobile phone pretty easily.  I would still have to cross things off the list from a computer because drop box doesn’t allow editing from a web page yet,  but I can live with that.

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A while back in my post about collaboration while working in a group over the internet;  I mentioned Meebo and that I hate meebo.  This is still true,  but I have found a replacement for the ad-bloated POS.  It is called Chatterous and it makes it easy to have many people on the same conversation.  Chatterouse provides the typical chat interface via their website,  but they also integrate with jabber or G-chat so that you can add a chat room to your instant message utility (digsby).  This eliminates all of the annoying adds from meebo,  but also makes it super easy to make sure you are logged into your chatroom each morning.  There is no browser to close, nothing to open each day.  You just fire up the IM and your golden.  I stongly recomend this format if you work with a few people at once and need a quick way to stay in touch.

Good Job Chatterous!!

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Feed My Inbox is a cool service that alows you to subscribe to blogs for email updates.  We have added their subscription box in the bottom right hand corner of the screen.  Another cool use I have discovered for their service is the ability to monitor craigslist categories via email.  This makes it easy to stay on top of all kinds of potential summer steals.  All you have to do is add the craigslist RSS URL to the feed my inbox page and your set.

Check out the video tutorial

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Screen recording is an incredibly useful invention.  It allows you to show people what’s going on in your PC record tutorials of how to perform functions and document errors in software when they come up.  In this article I am going to talk about a few screen recording tools that I use and why I use them for different purposes.  

My Primary high quality screen recording tool is Camtasia (www.camtasia.com).  Camtasia has great quality screen and audio recording capacities.  It has a killer noise reduction function for  using mediocre computer microphones in noisy areas.  Camtasia also has a great editing wizard that allows you to quickly fix your recordings without having to start over again.  The downside is,  the system isn’t cheap.  It’s a completely worthwhile expense if you are running a training group or find yourself making screen recordings all the time,  but for a casual user it’s not economical.  

Jing (  http://www.jingproject.com ) is a great tool for casual screen recording and image grabbing. It doesn’t have as many cool features as camtasia for editing or noise reduction, but it does have a super simple interface and very easy file uploading capacity.  You can upload to a few services and also your own ftp location with the push of a button.  This is great for those ” the button is here” conversations over the phone.  

BB Flashback (http://www.bbsoftware.co.uk/Home.aspx) is another cool screen recorder that has a very unique feature,  it lets you run rolling recordings that don’t exceed a certain file size or recording length.  This allows it to run like a tivo on your pc giving you time shift power over what you have done.   I will often find myself hitting buttons in software to get something done and then forgetting what series of steps I went through to get something done.  With bb flashback you can just rewind and see what you did.  The company sells screen recording software for several specific purposes and has versions at different price points.  Their developer version is designed for testers to produce perfect error reports including all kinds of relevant information.  They also have an express version that is a great free alternative to camtasia.  It provides more functionality than jing but less than the full software suites.

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This is a great free app that is perfect for anyone who has multiple exchange in boxes that they need to keep track of.   The application pretty much does what it sounds like,  it allows you to embed your email or calendar, or both on your windows desktop.  so that you don’t have to go clicking around when you need to find something.  I really don’t know why there is no default outlook view that allows you to see both your calendar and your email in one screen,  but there’s not and this allows you to get that and more.  

Check out the page below to download:
http://www.outlookonthedesktop.com/

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I understand that this is a fairly broad statement.  There is a lot of room to make outlook better.  I mean if outlook was half as efficient as Gmail people wouldn’t be flooding to the service.  Xobni allows more efficient processing of contacts and attachments.  It also provides some interesting statistics about your email use.  Finally it helps integrate your email data into a few social networking tools.

When you open xobni you will notice how the side bar fits nicely into outlook,  it’s more stylish than the typical outlook interface and it crams a ton of information into it’s small amount of screen space.  When you click on an email xobni gets to work.  It checks a few social networks to find information about the person and company that sent you a message.  Xobni then lets you know all of the file attachments and groups that the contact is associated with.

Groups is a fairly intelligent and unique feature that looks at all of the people who have ever been cc’d on an email chain that a contact was included on.  I correspond with a variety of IT groups so it is interesting to see who tends to get CC’d on a client’s issue or who may need to know about a specific problm impacting a client.  Also in a large organization it may keep you from having to dig up information about the chain of command for a contact.  Also,  it’s just cool data mining, although scary.

If that isn’t enough xobni will provide you trivia about your email usage, for example who emails you most often and who do you most often email you.  I think it’s amazing how many CRM features xobni is able to provide from a simple look at one’s email rather than using a overblown bloated system like Exchange Server.

Good Job Xobni.

http://www.xobni.com

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Key lemon is a cool free program that allows you to login to your computer using only a webcam.  The system is not the smartest facial recognition that I’ve ever seen,  you need to be in approximately the same position and angle when looking at your computer and also not drastically change your appearance with things like glasses being on or off.  However,  the system is free and is still quite good,  and darn impressive to see work.

Using a free system like keylemon with a cheap webcam proves one thing to me.  Facial recognition is amazing. People worry about rfid tags and implanted computer chips to confirm your identity.  Those thing will probably become irrelivant in the wake of a really powerful facial recognition systems.  Imagine if bestbuy could link your face to your credit card information and identify you from their security cameras everytime you entered the store.  They could record everything from the frequency of your visits and purchases to the types of things you like to look at when you are in the store.  The power of this technology for mareting entities everywhere could be truly amazing.  Unfortunately the annoyance to consumers could be equaly as intense.

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Desktop Stickeys

Sometimes you just need to jot something down.  Unfortunately, cluttering your desk with little notes and pieces of paper is hardly a user friendly organization.  Also, it’s pretty wasteful both monetarily and environmentally.  Fortunately, there is a free solution that allows most of the benefits of little sticky pieces of paper everywhere.

Desktop Stickeys by Zhorn Software is by far the coolest application I’ve found for managing this task.  They system is light weight and allows plenty of customization options for the look and feel of sticky notes.  You can change the color the title bar and minimize sticky notes easily.  Also you are able to assign quick keys to sticky notes to show and hide and create new notes.  This prevents you from stumbling around your desktop when you need to write down a phone number.  Another really cool feature is the ability to make sticky notes disappear and pop up at different times.  You can set mini-reminders to do different things right from your sticky note.

While this application won’t work for non-computer related tasks,  I constantly find myself in front of a computer screen,  so having notes on my desktop is the most obvious place for me to keep them.  This application works great and has been making my life easier for several years now!

Desktop Stickies by Zhorn Software

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Dial2do is an amazing free service that allows you to interact with digital services through your cell phone using your voice.  While this type of service has been available through other platforms dial2do is truly powerful because of the services it can work with.  For example you can post to twitter by simply dialing your assigned number and saying twitter and what you would like to post.  People viewing the post will see a transcribed version of what you said and a link to the actual audio recording.  I have used Dial2Do in a variety of settings and found that their speech recognition is pretty amazing.  It very rarely mistakes commands or spoken words for messages.

Another good feature of Dial2Do is the ability to listen to information from web based sources.  For example if you avidly follow lifehacker (www.lifehacker.com) you can simply subscribe to the feed on dial2do and listen to their RSS feed on your way to work.  This is like podcasting on steroids because you are actually getting the information delivered real time to your phone.  It’s also good if you need to pretend to be bussy to get out of a situation.

I use this feature in conjunction with my T-Mobile fav five plan so that I don’t get charged for calls to the service as listening to a few news sources on the way to work can rack up some charges.

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Drop box is a worthwhile tool for doing some basic file synchronizing between a few computers.  I don’t know if I would recommend it for storing your life’s collection of digital photos,  but if you had a handful that you wanted to move between your laptop and desktop it would be a good tool.  Likewise I wouldn’t keep my MP3 collection on it,  but if there were a CD I wanted to listen to at the office drop box lets you move the files fairly seamlessly.   Drop box is a good service because it’s goal is to synchronize files across the internet.  This means that the idea isn’t to be accessing files from a web disk or a web based location, rather, they are housed on a local computer and then uploaded and downloaded.  This is a good way to go for web based storage because no matter who you are,  your local computer is faster than the internet.

Also Dropbox has some team features other than synchronization that makes it worth mentioning.

• Drop box allows you to access your files online.
  This is a cool feature for college students and other people who find themselves using public or computers that are not their own but still want their stuff.
• Drop box keeps a revision history.  This is a pretty good thing for most people who find themselves revising documents.  Or even worse work with other people who revise documents.  Each time a file is synchronized a backup of the original is kept.  This way if you accidentally save over your changes or someone else s you can roll back to the previous copy.
• Drop box allows you to share files with other people.  This is sort of cool.  With Jungle disk you would have to set up a unique bucket and trust people not to snoop through your stuff.  With drop box you can say mom gets to see this folder but not others. ( not that I encourage hiding things from your mother)

In conclusion,  I have Jungle disk set up and working well so I probably won’t be using dropbox for too much, but it is a good solution if you aren’t ready to comit to a full online storage solution.

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