Nick Projects

If you follow any of the tech blogs you have probably heard that apple has banned all moderately arousing straight content.  Gizmodo posts that they pretty much have left it wide open for gay content though. Which pretty much proves what I have always thought about apple products.

Actually,  this issue does illustrate why I despise most of Apple’s new product line up.  Apple basically told a bunch of developers that even though they went through the rigorous process of getting an app approved to be on the app store and agreed to bend over for apple’s revenue share agreement;  their apps were no longer good enough because apple doesn’t like them.  When the Iphone first came out I had conversations with developers I know about how the app store was oppressive,  they argued that their phones ran much better because code was inspected and conformed to quality standards.  While I didn’t agree with this I could at least respect the logic.   No more, Apple pretty much proved that if you use a device they produce they are going to dictate exactly how you use it and can change its mind on a whim.  What’s next,  will you only be able to put Itunes downloads on Ipods?  Will apple have the rights to read your emails?  Will apple remove face book if it signs a deal with MySpace?

Who knows?  Sorry all you suckers who bought Iphones!!

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Sometimes its difficult to follow a blog. Especially one that posts irregularly (like this one). FeedMyInbox makes it easy to stay on top of different blogs. To subscribe to the nickprojects feed just use the form at the bottom of my right menu.

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Somethings just aren’t good for powerpoint.  Powerpoint is great for giving presentations and using as a tool for speeking,  but watching a powerpoint without a speeker leaves alot of holes.  Prezi is cool because it is good for showing large concepts with relationships between them.  You can construct large diagrams and walk people through what is going on without loosing the concept of the relationship as a whole.  

Also the resulting presentatins are really cool.  Prezi is fun to play around with and it makes pubishing very simple.  I would urge any powerpoint user to take a look at prezi as an alternative or just to spice things up once in a while.    

As an example I made a really quick prezi of how NickProjects.com works.  Check it out at this URL: 
 http://prezi.com/64602/

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As a gadget person, I come across all kinds of data.  One of the issues I run into is finding a way to archive that data or find it again when I need it.  There are a few tools I have been using and like for this purpose.

Wordpress is treated more as a blogging solution than a personal database.  But,  if you think about it the two aren’t really all that different.  Both allow you to organize information in a way that’s easy to search and find.  Both allow file uploads and linking to external documents. So,  why split hairs.  

The truth is,  that wordpress is really easy to use and has so many plugins that it is a great way to aggregate information public or not.  Of course,  it is a web based platform so if you want to be archiving your tax documents you probably don’t want that on a web server anywhere.  Luckily,  there is this way cool company called jumpbox (www.jumpbox.com) that distributes virtual machine images of many web based platforms and wordpress is on their free list.  If your interested in wordpress check them out.  

  Evernote is a more traditional personal database.  In my opinion the best feature of evernote is that it has amazing OCR capabilities.  You can even search on handwritten documents and not so great scanned images.  The downside of evernote is that it is really designed to archive information to a central website.  This is a double edged sword.  On one hand it’s great to be able to sync notes across multiple computers and handheld devices.  On the other your space is limited and your security is a bit suspect ( although probably just fine).  Evernote also makes it easy to archive emails and websites which is pretty cool.  

Zotero is a solution designed for academic purposes.  Like evernote it can clip websites for archiving,  but it allows you to store all of your data locally or on a private solution like jungledisk.  Zotero also records academic standard source citation information.  This is great if you are researching to get a paper out or if you tend to do research for this purpose.  Zotero is also able to pull source information off of most academic databases.  

Mendley is sort of like zotero,  but it has a social component.  Mendeley is good if you are working in a group and have an academic focus. Mendeley should be able to handle larger data sets than zotero,  but again the focus is on community research.  I keep thinking a platform like this would make a great solution for a small programing group.

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The goal of communications software for a work from home situation is to allow remote users to share ideas as freely and easily as users in the office.  I outlined an ideal implementation in article one and haven’t been able to find a perfect solution yet,  but I have found many solutions that get close.

My favorite solution is video.  Just having a camera on all day provides a ton of information and communication opportunities.  You know when people are on the phone, when they are away from desks, when their upset or happy,  this is probably the best type of collaboration I have used.  The downside is that it can be sort of taxing on your bandwidth.  Especially if the majority of people on the system are in an office and talking to one or two external people.

TokBox
For video conferencing I recommend tokbox.  Tokbox is a great flash based site that allows you to have live video chats with several people at once.  The system supports pause and mute functions.  It also has a pretty robust text chat feature which is great.  I tried this system for a few weeks with about 6 people.  I feel like it did succeed in extending a great office environment to people working out of the office,  but sadly had to stop using it because 4 people were in the same office which made the system take up way too much band width.  If you were working with people who were all spread out and there was no central office I think this would be a fine solution.

Voxli
For voice chat there is a cool program that just came out called Voxli.  Voxli is designed to be an alternative to programs like teamspeak,  but it doesn’t require a server setup.  This makes configuration super easy which is always a plus.  Voxli allows you to assign a hot key to your microphone so that each time you press the hot key you are broadcasting.  This makes carrying on conversation very simple during the course of the day.  Voxli has some support for text chat, like tokbox,  but it is not as sophisticated as it could be.  Also there is not any security on the site yet,  so if you are whining about customers go ahead but if you are talking about my credit card application its not a good fit. 

Meebo
For plain old text chat the best I’ve found so far is meebo rooms.  I pretty much hate meebo, but basically can’t find anything better.  Rooms can be locked down and the chat features are relatively sophisticated.  Meebo also integrates with many IM clients which is nice,  but it’s no digsby.  My biggest gripe with meebo is that it is exceptionally bloated with advertising,  also I would much prefer to have chat as an offline application rather than having to blow an entire browser window on a chat screen. 

Campfire
Campfire is a better system than meebo,  but it isn’t free so It’s a mixed bag.  Campfire is more business oriented and keeps good logs of what was said.  Much of the chat that comes across our meebo room is about youtube videos so logs are not really required.  For me I don’t get enough utility to justify the cost,  but that’s just me. 

Yammer
For an even more removed solution Yammer is a pretty good way to keep people in the loop.  Yammer is like twitter but for business.  I would think of it this way,  If you wold like a company news letter but don’t have the time, resources, or motivation to write a daily publication;  you can use yammer.  Yammer gives people the ability to constantly update their status during the day so that everyone else can see what’s going on.  This is good for companies that need limited communications between departments.  For example I don’t really need to know that the accounting department is really amuzed by the benny lava video on youtube,  but if they post something like working with client x about renewing.  I may be interested in knowing that client x has something going on right now. 

Blellow
Finally, being at home by yourself,  or just working at a small company will leave you with a lack of people to ask questions to.  Blellow is a good solution for this,  blellow is like a twitter for communities.  With blellow you can ask groups of people their opinions on a variety of topics and if you are asking for help you can rate their responses.  This is a good way to artificially increase your talent pool when you really need it.

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In any job there will be a certain amount of hardware required to be effective.  Working from home is no exception you will want some stuff that may not be typically required for an office type environment.  This stuff will make your life more pleasant so eventually you will want to have most of it.

First: you want a second computer to run communications off of.  Since I haven’t gone into communications yet you may not see the relevance of having an independent machine dedicated to coms,  but it’s the way to go.  Having items on different machines helps in a few ways.  First it is a natural division of labor,  You won’t fill your chat screen with sticky notes,  because you won’t have a sticky note program installed on your coms machine.  When the image your editing crashes your PC,  your coms machine will still be up.  Also it keeps your communications separate from your work.  No one needs to have IM notifications popping up in the middle of their screen all day,  it’s annoying, and when you work from home it happens even more often.  A division of labor is a good way to go.

For a comms laptop I recommend something with average processing power,  and a nice screen.  You can use a touch screen PC if you plan on also using this box for a stereo or some other fun things.  Otherwise a cheap Ebay laptop will cut it.  I strongly recommend using synergy to connect the two machines.  Synergy allows you to share a keyboard and mouse across multiple machines.  This makes having a second computer effortless.  Hopefully in the future some of these functions can be docked to smaller dedicated screens like the ones showed on gizmodo in the linked post,  but these items are hard to come by.

Also you will probably want to pick up a web cam and a microphone.  In my experience microphones that come with web cams are pretty bad quality.  Their good enough to get the job done,  but will drive people crazy if you use one all day.  Monoprice.com has great deals on this type of stuff.  If your office telephone is something IP based and you will be using it from your computer,  you may be able to use a headset for both.  Skype has a wireless headset/microphone that they endorse which looks pretty good.  If your office phone is an actual phone or not built into your computer,  it’s sort of annoying to juggle putting on and taking off your headset all day.  I would recommend a good desk microphone for that environment.

Now that hardware is taken care ouf,  we can get into the more fun business of software to facilitate all of this work from home fun!.

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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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This is a cool trick I came up with a while ago and it works quite well and doesn’t really cost anything. First,  buy really really cool olive spears and put them in your olives like you would in the martini.  Then just put them in a bag and freeze them.  When you put them in the martini they will be frozen and keep the drink extra cold.  They won’t dilute your drink because they don’t have any extra water in them and by the time you finish the olives will be thawed so you can eat them.

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The video shows how the case works.  There is a printable template in the linked website so you don’t have to be good at orgami.  Just a cool way to move CD’s around when a binder won’t do.

Printable Template

Via Lifehacker

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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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