Tools for Thought

Freeware Windows app Free Music Zilla was designed to catch music streaming through sites like Last.fm and Pandora in your Downloads folder. Though unpublicized, the function works equally well for Flash videos like those found on YouTube. Launch Free Music Zilla prior to playing the video you want to save. By default, FMZ will show [...]

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One of the occasionally unnerving aspects of working at home is the constant silence that becomes your frequent companion. The option of playing music can get tricky. Songs with vocals tend to steal attention from work. I have plenty of instrumental music, from classical to electronic avant-garde, but I find that there’s only so often [...]

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Like work, information has its own Parkinson’s Law. As one example, Google Reader will fill whatever time we have available. Without a strategic approach to processing RSS feeds, the tendency is to keep adding new feeds until we stop just short of overwhelm. This “Thanksgiving dinner” method of managing information intake is not sustaintable. Notice [...]

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As I mentioned in my last post, The Zen of Q10, I just scored a cheap AlphaSmart 3000 word processor on eBay. It came Saturday afternoon, and due to a tight schedule I hadn’t planned to use it much. I had “real” writing to do, and didn’t think I could take on the learning curve [...]

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Constraints are more reliable than discipline. Rather than count on exemplary self-control, I try to structure my environment to make unproductive activities inconvenient to do. As part of my experiment with more filtered approaches to writing, a couple of days ago, I snagged an AlphaSmart 3000 word processor on the cheap from eBay. The 3000 [...]

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Cell phones can make more elegant information appliances than laptops. Their diminutive interfaces force them, and their owners, to filter out noncritical data. Here are six degrees of information to make your cell phone’s information bottleneck work in your favor. Your email client Escape the inbox without worrying about missing that critical email from the [...]

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Keyword bookmarks are old news to Firefox power users, but never fail to be a revelation to the rest of the browsing population. Calling up websites with keywords, especially when they’re kept short, is much faster than use the mousing to bookmarks on the Bookmarks Toolbar or the Bookmarks menu. Using keyword bookmarks exclusively also [...]

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Despite being organized in other aspects of my workflow, my filing system for electronic documents was haphazard. This became increasingly irritating as I moved into freelance writing, where my articles sometimes wound up on my desktop, sometimes in My Documents, other times in a nonce project folder. Since I sent the articles as Word attachments [...]

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