mynoteIT: Online notetaking for students
Submitted on May 11th, 2007 by admin
Filed under Productivity and Software
No. of comments Comments Off
I just finished up my next to last semester in undergrad, and in my time at college I’ve tried a lot of different ways to keep notes including a few computer based. One was to use MS Word, which was pretty lacking, another was MS OneNote, which is great, and another was to type stuff in GDocs so I could access my notes from any computer. The problem with GDocs is how limited it is for formatting. I found a pretty good solution in mynoteIT. It keeps your notes online like GDocs, but has more features. You can share your notes so other students on the site can look at them and you can search for their notes to see if they help you. I still find myself shifting between this, grid paper, and MS OneNote, but it might be perfect for some people.
Dave has a Top Ten, and so does the Dalai Lama
Submitted on May 10th, 2007 by admin
Filed under Productivity
No. of comments (1)
I ran into this about a month ago at lifehack.org and thought it was worth sharing. The top ten tips from the Dalai Lama, which I think are stong ideas that most people could agree with. Check out more information at The Ririan Project, but they are as follows:
10. “Be gentle with the earth.�
9. A loving atmosphere in your home is the foundation for your life.�
8. “Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.�
7. “Open your arms to change, but don’t let go of your values.�
6. “Share your knowledge. It is a way to achieve immortality.�
5. “Remember that silence is sometimes the best answer.�
4. “Spend some time alone every day.�
3. “When you realize you’ve made a mistake, take immediate steps to correct it.�
2. “When you lose, don’t lose the lesson.�
1. “Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk.�
The Joys of Jott
Submitted on May 10th, 2007 by admin
Filed under Email and Productivity
No. of comments (3)
A big part of “Getting Things Done” is the getting stuff out of your head and into a trusted system. Nowadays I don’t leave my bedroom in the morning to let the dogs out without paper and a pencil or pen. This works well most of the time, but there are times that I am walking or driving and writing isn’t easy. I’ve been looking for a good way to get around this for months now and finally found it a little while ago. It’s a new service called Jott. Jott allows me to dial a number and leave a voice message. That message is then transcribed and can be sent to me, or if needed as an email to a contact. To many people this may seem a bit silly and overly connected, but as a capture tool it has been great. The service is free (for now at least) and does a pretty good job of transcribing what you say. In addition to handling words you can also spell out something, which I thought could be useful with a little scripting to send commands to a unix computer.
Windows Mobile 6.0 Office for Windows Mobile 5
Submitted on May 10th, 2007 by admin
Filed under Portables and Software and Windows and Hardware
No. of comments (2)
I recently picked up the “Cingular 2125″ Windows Phone. As a previous user of a Pocket PC, I thought it would have similar MS Office file capabilities built in. But I was wrong.
With the new version of Windows Mobile that is now available, they have finally added Office capabilities to the smartphone software, but this hasn’t done much good for those still stuck with Windows Mobile 5. Now someone has pulled the apps from a Windows Mobile 6 and ported them over for 5. I haven’t personally tried this yet, and it is certainly out of the range of what Microsoft would probably reccomend, but it seems like a potentially useful fix. I plan to try it soon, and if any readers have, comment on the success of it.
Web based “Writer” to help you focus
Submitted on May 10th, 2007 by admin
Filed under Productivity and Browsers and Blogging and Software
No. of comments Comments Off
First off, I have to say its nice to post again after a long time away. I hope Martin and I can get this going again because I really enjoyed the site. In the time that we have been away I have become very interested in “lifehacking.” I’m into David Allen’s Getting Things Done, and other ways to live smarter. I hope to post quite a bit about that. In that vein is what I’m going to mention here. It is called “Writer” and it is a neat Web 2.0 app. Basically a while back there was a program that someone made for OSX called Darkroom, and this is a web based (and therefore cross-platform) clone.
The program gives you a very simple interface to write. In the default mode there is a black background with green text. It lets you save things and edit them later, but thats about it for features. The feature is the lack of distraction. When I was doing some stuff for school this past semester I found it very useful, because I have a terrible tendency to get involved in something else. Check it out: Writer
The new Hotmail is pretty impressive
Submitted on May 8th, 2007 by admin
Filed under Reviews and Email and Services
No. of comments (2)
A long time ago, the only real e-mail options available were AOL and Hotmail (and maybe Earthlink). As the web expanded, many new services have cropped up and replaced these as the new kings of e-mail, particularly Google’s GMail and the recently redesigned Yahoo! Mail. Not to be left behind, Microsoft has spent the past year or two beefing up its Hotmail offering and has finally relaunched it as Windows Live Mail. What they have come up with is definitely a step in the right direction.
Ubuntu expanding to the mobile world
Submitted on May 8th, 2007 by admin
Filed under Portables and Software and Linux
No. of comments Comments Off
I’m a huge Linux fan. In fact, I’ve been running it as my main operating system for close to five years now, so I was really excited to hear that the good folks over at Ubuntu are developing a version of the extremely popular distro for mobile devices. While Linux on mobile phones and PDAs isn’t anything new, the huge popularity and ease of use of Ubuntu could help the market expand drammatically. The mobile version of Ubuntu is expected to be released in October of this year along with the next release of the desktop version, Ubuntu 7.10.
[Via TechWorld; more at the Ubuntu Mailing List]
Get Firefox to speed dial webpages
Submitted on May 8th, 2007 by admin
Filed under Productivity and Browsers and Software
No. of comments Comments Off
Firefox is an extremely popular browser, and while the download itself comes with no extra features, one of my favorite things about the browser is how many extensions are available which can add all sorts of functionality to do almost anything you want. Extension creators sometimes copy functionality available in the Opera (see BitTorrent, built-in RSS feeds, widgets, etc.) browser and add it to Firefox. One of the newest additions is the Firefox Speed Dial extension which displays screenshots of nine different webpages providing quick and easy access to any of them. While you can’t rearrange the pages’ order, it could be a worthwhile addition to those of you who do a heavy amount of web browsing.
[Via Download Squad]
Better spam management for WordPress
Submitted on May 8th, 2007 by admin
Filed under Blogging and Security
No. of comments (2)
One of the things I did before I decided to start blogging again on TipMonkies was to beef up the security around the site. While a blog is still young, you may not have many problems, but as its popularity increases, so does the chance of receiving mail and comment spam. WordPress comes with the fantastic Akismet plugin which does an amazing job at catching comment spam, but it can sometimes mislabel legitimate comments. Enter Simple Spam Filter, which allows a blog administrator to easily sort through comment spam based on common keywords found in such comments. Definitely a worthwhile addition to any running a WordPress-powered site.
[Via UneasySilence, thanks Jason!]
Sync notes, photos, and more w/ Conduit
Submitted on May 7th, 2007 by admin
Filed under Storage and Productivity and Software and Linux
No. of comments (1)
Backing up your data is extremely important, because quite frankly, you never know when your data will become corrupted. The problem with backing up data, is that it can sometimes be a little tedious. Enter Conduit, a small Linux application which makes the process very simple.
At the moment, I’ve only tried backing up my TomBoy notes to BackPack, but it’s also possible to save photos from F-Spot to Flickr, the ability to sync folders, settings files, e-mails to GMail, and more. It’s still an early release and a bit buggy, but is an excellent tool which will prove extremely helpful. Conduit is free and available only for GNU/Linux.
