Lifehacker: Most Popular DIY 2008

A great list of DIY projects from 2008 and all time.  Check out this Lifehacker article: Most Popular DIY Projects of 2008 (and All Time!) My favorite for 2008 is the Camera Stabilizer!

Elluminate Collaboration and Support

Last year my organization purchased an online collaboration tool called Marratech.  We used this tool for online meetings, collaboration, online demos, and technical support.  Shortly after we purchased Marratech, it was acquired by Google.  Marratech has not been developing the tool for a few months and needless to say it stopped working correcting on Mac OS X 10.5.5.

Marratech has since entered into a partnership with a company called Elluminate, “the market leader in education-based collaboration with over 3 million users in 185 countries.”  Elluminate looks similar to Marratech, but has much more functionality and is very e-learning friendly.  We are evaluating Elluminate in house this week.

Aside from using Elluminate for work purposes, they offer a “Three for Free” web conferencing solution.  Three for Free gives you real-time collaboration with up to three participants using interactive features such as:

• Two-way audio
• Interactive whiteboard
• Direct messaging
• Application sharing
• File transfer
• Synchronized web tour
• Live webcam
• Breakout rooms

The free vRoom allows for 3 concurrent people.  It is cross-platform and easy.  I plan to use it for family and friends for technical support.  I love iChat, but not everyone has a Mac that I can take advantage of iChat screen sharing.  Elluminate looks like a great alternative and a great free application.

Beer Goggles for Mail

What a concept!  Ever hear of “drunk dialing”?  Ever call an ex after a night of drinking? That was so 1985.  This is 2008 and we communicate with e-mail, twitter and SMS.  Google just protected us from regretting a drunk e-mail by deploying Mail Googles:

Sometimes I send messages I shouldn’t send. Like the time I told that girl I had a crush on her over text message. Or the time I sent that late night email to my ex-girlfriend that we should get back together. Gmail can’t always prevent you from sending messages you might later regret, but today we’re launching a new Labs feature I wrote called Mail Goggles which may help.

When you enable Mail Goggles, it will check that you’re really sure you want to send that late night Friday email. And what better way to check than by making you solve a few simple math problems after you click send to verify you’re in the right state of mind?

Twitter and cell phones need to put in some “Tweet Goggles” and “Text Goggles”.

Checking e-mail just wastes time

How often do you check your e-mail?  Every 10 minutes?  Every hour? Or everytime the mail icon says you have new mail?  You might want to rethink your approach if you want to be productive throughout the day.  The Sidney Morning Herald ran a story called Email becomes a dangerous distraction.  The article concludes that

it takes an average of 64 seconds to recover your train of thought after interruption by email (bit.ly/email2). So people who check their email every five minutes waste 8 1/2hours a week figuring out what they were doing moments before.

I am sure the same can be applied to Instant Messaging and other distractions on the web.

Ubiquity: Coolest Firefox Plug-in Yet

An absolutely amazing plug-in for Firefox has just been released.  It is called Ubiquity.  As Merlin Mann put it, it is Quicksilver for Firefox.  Ubiquity is “An experiment into connecting the Web with language.”

The easiest way to explain Ubiquity is through thier introduction video.  The video displays some of Ubiquity’s capabilities, as well as, explains how the development framework works.  Mash-ups are cool, but being able to create them on the fly will revolutionize the web.  Mozilla really got this one right.

Jott and Evernote: Never Forget Again

Ever hear something on the radio that you want to remember? Ever see a book you want to buy and can’t recall it when you get home?  Has your boss ever told you to do something at the end of the day?  I am sure you can recall many times when you wish you had a piece of paper or some method of jotting down something you may need hours or days later?  The answer is Evernote and Jott.

Evernote is a repository for just about anything in your digital life.

Evernote allows you to easily capture information in any environment using whatever device or platform you find most convenient, and makes this information accessible and searchable at any time, from anywhere.

Evernote is cross platform with applications for Mac OS, Windows, Windows Mobile and now the iPhone 2.0.  Evernote will capture many different things such as:

• Webpages using WebClippers
• Wine labels
• Whiteboards
• Scribbles
• To-dos
• Photos with text recognition

The best part of Evernote is that it is free with a premium model.  I have been using Yojimbo for sometime, but I think I am going to completely move to Evernote.

Now here is the nail in the coffin for me, Jott integration with Evernote.  Jott is a free service that converts your voice into multiple formats including e-mail, text messages as well as and “links” to applications like Twitter.

So picture this, it is 2 minutes before you need to leave for golf league, you are walking our the door and your boss wants you to contact someone first thing in the A.M.  You have a choice, march back to your office, fumble around for a pen and post-it and write a note to yourself.  Or you can call Jott and have the service setup a reminder as you walk out the door and make your tee time.

Now picture this, you are listening to the radio and you hear a good song, concert event or a anything else you can imagine.  You can stop your car and write it on the back of a piece of garbage paper. Or you can call Jott and have it sent to Evernote.

Way cool and free!

Searching for a Better RSS

I love RSS feeds.  They keep me up to date with world and local events, technology news and some daily funnies.  If you do not use RSS, you should.  If you have never heard of RSS, you are not alone.  Here are two sites to get you started:

• Commoncraft: RSS in Plain English (video)
• Lifehacker: RSS for newbies

Most RSS readers display news like e-mail.  There is a pane that contains all of your feeds, akin to e-mail folders.  And then there is a pane that has the news titles, similar to a message.  Finally, a pane to display the story, think about this like your preview message pane in your e-mail client.  This paradigm for RSS works for most and has worked for me for quite some time.  However well this works, there is a better format for news that has been around longer than computers, its called a newspaper.

Newspapers display news in a large format, page layout with headlines, graphics and stories all available to the reader to browse.  Some stories catch your attention, others don’t.  The only problem with a newspaper, besides its lack of dynamic content, is someone else is deciding what goes on each page.

A new RSS reader has arrived with the release of Leopard.  The reader is Times from Acrylic.

Instead of treating news like email (as most RSS readers do), Times presents you with headlines and photos from a variety of sources all in one place, letting you more easily discover the news you want to read. Like your own personal newspaper, you can put feeds into separate areas, create pages for different subjects, and more.

I have been using the trial version of Times for a few days and really enjoy looking at my feeds.  I have found two downsides to Times. The first is the price of $30.  I think I will pay for it to support the developers, but other apps like this are free or in the $15 range.  The second issue I have will hopefully be a feature enhancement; Times does not give you control over how many stories in each feed nor give you control over the page layout.  Give us some control!  Great app, hopefully others will take notice and start changing the way we look at RSS.

Unix Crosses Over Productivity

I try to keep my approach to productivity and life as simple as possible.  I do not like a bunch of clutter in my personal or work life.  I am not sure where this philosophy stems from, I am sure childhood, so far it has served me well.

I am drawn to systems that are simple, non-obtrusive and get out of your way when they are no longer necessary.  I think this mentality is why I am also drawn to Unix.  Unix has many simple, single use utilities such as cat, more, ps, kill, etc, that serve a single purpose.  Yet, when strung together rival more complex programs.

Lifehacker ran an intriguing article entitled Applying Unix Philosophy to Personal Productivity.  The article applies the 17 rules of Unix philosophy listed in Eric Steven Raymond’s book free online book, The Art of Unix Programming to productivity.  If you enjoy Unix, personal productivity and GTD, then this article is right up your alley.

The article helped me start inspecting my Unix geekdom.  I thought I was fairly proficient in Unix having used it day-in and day-out for about 10 years.  It occurred to me that I had never heard of the 17 rules of Unix philosophy.  Here they are from Wikipedia’s Unix Philosophy entry:

Rule of Modularity: Write simple parts connected by clean interfaces.
Rule of Clarity: Clarity is better than cleverness.
Rule of Composition: Design programs to be connected to other programs.
Rule of Separation: Separate policy from mechanism; separate interfaces from engines.
Rule of Simplicity: Design for simplicity; add complexity only where you must.
Rule of Parsimony: Write a big program only when it is clear by demonstration that nothing else will do.
Rule of Transparency: Design for visibility to make inspection and debugging easier.
Rule of Robustness: Robustness is the child of transparency and simplicity.
Rule of Representation: Fold knowledge into data so program logic can be stupid and robust.
Rule of Least Surprise: In interface design, always do the least surprising thing.
Rule of Silence: When a program has nothing surprising to say, it should say nothing.
Rule of Repair: When you must fail, fail noisily and as soon as possible.
Rule of Economy: Programmer time is expensive; conserve it in preference to machine time.
Rule of Generation: Avoid hand-hacking; write programs to write programs when you can.
Rule of Optimization: Prototype before polishing. Get it working before you optimize it.
Rule of Diversity: Distrust all claims for “one true way”.
Rule of Extensibility: Design for the future, because it will be here sooner than you think.

Other References:

• Basics of the Unix Philosophy

drop.io: Simple private exchange

Do you use YouSendIt?  Drop.io is an alternative.  It is much easier to use, has no sign-up, and has many advanced features.  You can create multiple “drops”

• web
• email
• phone
• fax
• widget

You can even subscribe to a “drop” via RSS.  The free version has a 100M limit, but with $10 you can get up to 1GB.

If you want to see how it works, check out this “drop”: http://drop.io/mradomskiblog1

Friend me, please!

I have been using Facebook for some time now. It is a great platform to keep in touch with friends and family, and reconnect with those that have been distant. I am making a point to try to stay up to date with friends and connect with some new people. It was one of my New Year’s resolutions.

Every week I listen to the TWIT podcasts and hear how much fun, how useful and what a general time killer Twitter is.

What is it?
Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing? Bloggers can use it as a mini-blogging tool.

So if you want to friend me, join me on Facebook and Twitter.

• Facebook Profile: http://www.facebook.com/people/Mike_Radomski/676771753
• Twitter Profile: http://twitter.com/mradomski