mynoteIT: Online notetaking for students
Submitted on May 11th, 2007 by admin
Filed under Productivity and Software
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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
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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
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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.
Web based “Writer” to help you focus
Submitted on May 10th, 2007 by admin
Filed under Productivity and Browsers and Blogging and Software
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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
Get Firefox to speed dial webpages
Submitted on May 8th, 2007 by admin
Filed under Productivity and Browsers and Software
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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]
Sync notes, photos, and more w/ Conduit
Submitted on May 7th, 2007 by admin
Filed under Storage and Productivity and Software and Linux
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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.
10 great tools to help you Twitter better
Submitted on May 7th, 2007 by admin
Filed under Social Networks and Productivity and Resources and Services and Blogging
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So you’re completely obsessed with Twitter and want to get the most you can out of your experience? How about trying some of these tools to enhance your experience!?
Share your life w/ Jaiku
Submitted on May 7th, 2007 by admin
Filed under Social Networks and Productivity and Services and Blogging
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Over the last few months, not only have I not had much time to update TipMonkies, but I also haven’t followed web 2.0 applications much at, more than likely due to the former reason, so I was very excited to get back into “the scene” and learn about a somewhat new service called Jaiku which aims to bring everything from your real life and your web life into one place. For those of you who have been using Twitter (yes, a review of Twitter is forecoming), you may find many of the same features in Jaiku, but if you’ve never used the service here’s what you should expect.
Social activity sites are on the up and up
Submitted on October 30th, 2006 by admin
Filed under Productivity and Resources and Services
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With social bookmarking and sharing being all the rage nowadays, it was only a matter of time before event sharing sites began cropping up. We’ve covered a few like ZVents and a few others before, but many more have started up since. Minger.net has a good article which takes a look at 19 different social activity services and offers a nice and quick overview of each.
Toufee helps you build presentations in a flash
Submitted on October 29th, 2006 by admin
Filed under Productivity and Resources and Services and Video
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Since you can now create your own animated GIFs, maybe you’ll also want to create custom Flash banners or multimedia presentations, right? Why not give Toufee a try. Toufee allows you to create movies, banners, e-cards, and presentations with an intuitive point and click editor powered by Flash. You can even import images from Flickr or videos from YouTube if you wish and the final product is no more than a few hundred Kb of data so even users on a dialup connection can take advantage of what you’ve created. Want to add speech to your presentation? No problem! Toufee has a built-in text-to-speech engine so you don’t have to waste time uploading audio. When you’re done, you’ll receive a link which you can use to share your work with a friend via e-mail, or you can get code to embed it onto your blog or MySpace page.
