I have came to a conclusion that I do have too much stuff in my life.
Too much and too little and the same time.
Too much information. Too many interruptions and distractions. Too little time to think.
Too much consumption of information and not enough time to process it and do anything meaningful with it - learn from it or create something new.
The only way how to get out of the self-digged hole is to start cutting.
As regular listener to multiple TWIT Network podcasts (This Week In tech, Macbreak Weekly, This Week in Google, Free Libre Opensource Software, Security Now, Windows Weekly) I am very much aware of all the advertisers that keep Leo and the gang in business and make the podcast's stream going. I have even acted upon several of the ads: we are customer of SquareSpace.com (the corporate blog runs on that platform), GoToMeeting is regular part of day-to-day business - we have several accounts and use it regularly for meetings. I would use GoToMyPC if I had any need to go to a PC :-). I bought Spinrite, although I used it only once over last 3 years.
I stumbled upon this pretty nice little application or service - depends how you see it. It is called reQall (obviously would have been recall, but recall.com as every good domain is taken.
What it does is that allows you to set a reminder in the future to do something - at given time and date: buy X, call Y, do Z. Nothing to earth-shattering about that.
What is neat is the way how you do it. Actually, many ways:
The double backup word in the title is not an oversight. If I would be talking about "almost perfect backup solution", it would be Time Machine - which has proven, despite it's minor annoyances (see this) to be very unobtrusive and functional. As long as you have Mac and Leopard, of course.
What I am talking about here is second level - an offsite backup, that you may need in case you house burns down, gets flooded or your computer with time machine disk gets stolen. I do not live in tornado valley, earthquake zone and crime rate around Westboro is fairly low even compared to low Canadian levels, but anyway.
Since few months I have slowly switched all my online notebooks to Evernote. In case you are not familiar with it, it is a great service. You can clip pieces of Web pages, type in notes, attach documents and multimedia files (pictures, sounds) and store them online to be always available through nicely done Ajaxian Web interface. The notes can be tagged, organized into notebooks and full text searched. One of the killer features is that for uploaded pictures, Evernote will do OCR and include the photographed tex into full text search
I started to have this error about week ago, out of the blue. I was not aware of making any changes, but suddenly could not reply to an email, send new email or even forward existing email in the iPhone default Mail application. I am using GMail account and because other clients on different platforms worked OK, I suspected either Rogers or Apple. I was trying several possible fixes (and used Safari and Gmail web access - which is not much fun).
If you want to watch YouTube video on the plane (and Google TechChannel has some amazing collection of videos), here is how to save it to disk, without any tools or third party program, using just your Mac and Safari out of the box.
Go to YouTube page and select video you are interested in in Safari. While playing, press Option-Command-A which opens Activity window. Locate the video stream - it will be the largest item in the list. Double click it, which causes Safari to download it.
Finally - the new version of Things on iPhone can synchronize with Things on Mac desktop.
It actually works - no strings attached. Assumed that:
1) the WiFi on iPhone is on
2) iPhone and Mac are on same network (so that Bonjour magic can work)
3) the Mac Things is running when you start Things on iPhone
the synchronization happens automatically and is VERY fast (few seconds max).
Finally a portable GTD application that works for me :-).
It happened on Wednesday afternoon. I knew something is wrong with my MacBook Pro immediately - when I saw semi-dark screen, unresponsive machine - even mouse cursor was frozen - and heard fans blowing full speed, making the strange, clicking noise coming from inside almost disappear ...
OS-X does not freeze too often, but it can happen and as a matter of fact, I have seen it happen before during my almost two years with Mac, so I did not panic. As expected, the Alt-Option trick did not work, so all I could do was to force power off.
What does really big mean ? In my case few hundred megabytes, up to 1 GB. Clearly, too much for email attachments - most providers caps them at around 5-15 MB.
Since we started doing screencasts, I need quite often to transfer work in progress - screen recordings, rendered MOV files between me and my co-host of the screencasts. I tried to upload the file to the company servers using VPN, but the speed of the secure uploads is nowhere close to being practical.