Tools for Thought

In migrating virtually all of my computing into the cloud, I decided to try my hand at using a netbook. Depending on your semantics, I was using a netbook before they were netbooks, as a beta tester for the ill-fated Palm Foleo that arguably pioneered the genre. Of the models I surveyed, the HP Mini [...]

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In compliance with Pantech’s guidelines, I had to wait until today, April 19, to unveil the winner of the challenge I issued in my last post. For those of you have better things to do than follow links, the challenge was thus: I want you or anyone to post in the comments or email me [...]

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This isn’t the usual T4T post, for a couple of reasons. First, instead of giving advice in my usual presumptuous fashion, I’m asking for it. I’m radically redesigning my workflow and need a few intrepid readers to share some successful or dramatic examples of how they’re using the cloud. Second, I’m “selling out” by aligning [...]

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Last year, virtual outsourcing made it on my list of 10 Technologies I Resist. Adding a virtual administrative assistant to my workflow seemed like a solution looking for a problem. There wasn’t much that I could imagine a virtual office assistant doing that I couldn’t do personally in much less time and with less management [...]

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Jeff Atwood recently had an interesting post questioning the value of email as a medium, echoing similar sentiments by Merlin Mann and Tantek Çelik. All of them, not to mention other A-list bloggers, seem to share the belief that an email client’s ability to collect messages indefinitely outstrips the user’s ability to attend to them. [...]

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Online notebook applications are fast becoming a dime a dozen. With solutions like Zoho Notebook and Evernote, does the world need another notebook? Perhaps not, in terms of functionality, but for polish and accessibility, Springpad is unique. As with other notebook apps, Springpad lets you collect notes and information related to a topic into “notebooks” [...]

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By default, Google’s PageRank algorithm can be frustrating for finding recent information. The simplified explanation of PageRank is this: results are prioritized by the number of incoming links to a page with the searched keyword. Each link is a “vote” for that page’s relevance. Like larger states in the U.S. Electoral College during an election, [...]

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Video can make learning more efficient than written instruction, but sometimes even video is a but much. Many of the lectures and interviews I come across are recorded on video for no apparent reason — visual aides are minimal or nonexistent. It would be more convenient to have them in a portable audio format to [...]

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It’s been said that in theory, there’s no difference between theory and practice, but in practice, there is. So I always like to personally test out different ways of working rather than assume that something will or won’t work, especially if I think it won’t. One of my last experiments was switching from the Palm [...]

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I like change. More specifically, I like positive change. Sometimes that involves adopting new technology, sometimes it involves renunciation. Ubiquity was one I adopted, the iPhone is one I’ve renounced. In reply to  my last post, 10 Technologies I Resist, reader steenbok68 was skeptical of my skepticism. Honestly I do not see the point in [...]

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