I haven't really talked about AirCell or its Gogo inflight Internet access service since it first became available on American Airlines. But Andy Abramson turned me on to a little experiment with the service that he and Laptop Magazine's Joanna Stern did yesterday that is absolutely worthy of mention.

Andy reports that he and Joanna were able to carry on a voice conversation via Aircell Gogo while Joanna was on an American Airlines flight to New York. The service was designed to make voice communication "impossible" at the airlines' requests, but Andy concluded that it would be possible if he used a Flash-based voice application like Phweet and he was right.

Joanna liveblogged the flight. Her post goes through all the different communication services she tried over her five-hour flight, and how they performed.

Kudos to Andy and Joanna for their persistence. They proved once again that "impossible" is a hard claim to make about any aspect of technology. This is proof of the old saying, where there's a will, there's a way.

Andy likes to tell people that he's not an engineer type of person, but he has an encyclopedic knowledge of the wireless services and applications that are available.

I reached out to Andy over this past weekend to ask what he thought the best way to access the Internet was from a moving train along The Northeast Corridor. Before speaking to him, I was lead to believe that I needed a wireless data card for my laptop, a $60 per month service plan, and a two-year contract.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 1:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

My latest Inside iPhone post is called How an iPhone Can Help You Be More Productive When Commuting Via Mass Transit. One of the things I talk about in that post is the power of using location-based contexts within the OmniFocus for iPhone application.

I realized while writing the Inside iPhone piece that setting locations for contexts within OmniFocus for iPhone 1.0.1 is not straightforward. So I thought I would expand upon that issue here in this post.

The Fundimentals of Context Location

Each context within OmniFocus for iPhone can have a location associated with it. The location can be:

• the iPhone's current location,
• a street address,
• an address associated with a contact in the Address Book, or
• a business name retrieved from a search conducted using Google.

The location of contexts is set on a hierarchical basis, so I set the location of my home at the "Home" level of the context tree rather than at each sub-context.

Errands Context: Set locations of the contexts in the
Errands list by tapping "Edit" on this screen.

Establishing a Context Location

I set the location of a context by tapping on the "Contexts" choice on the OmniFocus home screen. OmniFocus presents the top level of my context hierarchy. I descend through the context hierarchy by tapping until I reach the list of contexts containing the context whose location I want to set.

I'm talking about my "Errands" contexts in this article. These are stores and service providers that I do business with often. Most of them have definite physical locations that I go to on a regular basis.

In this article, we're talking about my "Target" context. This is where I put my shopping list of products I buy at a Target Store.

If I want to set the location of the "Target" context, I need to stay on this screen and tap the "Edit" button. Once I tap "Edit", I can tap the "Target" element in the list and go to the screen where I set the location of the Target context.

Continue reading "Assigning Locations to OmniFocus iPhone Contexts" »

Posted by Dave Aiello at 6:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

• Sixty-Six on Daring Fireball: "The idea that Apple now sells two-thirds of retail computers costing $1000 or more is simply stunning. I (along with many others) have long argued that a simplistic “overall PC market share” number has never been a good metric for gauging the Mac’s success because the “overall PC market” includes millions of commodity-level low-end machines that Apple neither tries nor wants to sell."
• Making Your Mark in a Web 2.0 World on Web Worker Daily: This article describes the building of a Social Media Resume, a personal website that includes links to your LinkedIn or Facebook profile page, as well as photos or video from websites like Flickr and Viddler. I relaunched DaveAiello.com about two weeks ago, but didn't realize that creating this kind of site is an emerging trend.
• Mac OS X Services (the menu you never go to) on Random Tech: "There's a whole hidden side of text modification that is stashed away, yet right at your fingertips. If you go to the Application menu (if you're in Safari, click the menu 'Safari') -> Services, a whole list pops down. You've probably disregarded this in the past (if you've ever seen it) because most of the options are grayed out, or unclickable. All you need to do is highlight some text. Go back to the menu and there are so many to choose from!"

Posted by Dave Aiello at 1:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

One of the utilities programs that veteran Mac users swear by is Quicksilver which at first glance appears to be a keyboard-based application launcher.

It turns out that QuickSilver can be used for a great deal more than application launching, but a lot of the productivity that you can gain from it isn't at all obvious.

One of the best tools I've found to understand Quicksilver are two video podcasts from the MacBreak series. The first and longest one is MacBreak Episode 12: Quicksilver, which is available on iTunes, but is also available on Google Video (not YouTube):

In this episode you get to see how Merlin Mann selects something on his Mac by typing its name using Quicksilver, and then selects a command to perform on it. You can think of the the first action (a search) done in Quicksilver as the subject of a sentence, while the section action (selection of a command) is the verb.

Continue reading "MacBreak Video Shows Finer Points of Quicksilver Utility for the Mac" »

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Apple released MacOS X Version 10.5.3 earlier today. I first learned about the release when I was checking out Summize for the first time and saw references to Mac OS X and Leopard on the home page as "trending topics".

MacWorld has a good summary of the important fixes and new features included in the update. However, I performed the update before the Macworld article came out. I made the decision to take the update after I read through the About the Mac OS X 10.5.3 Update article in the Apple Knowledge Base.

Whenever a software developer like Apple releases a major update, I look at the list of fixes to see if any of them are must-haves for me. The fix that caused me to start the update process immediately related to Spaces:

Resolves an issue in which switching to a different space and returning back to the original space may reorder the application windows with a different active window.

This bug was a significant productivity drain for me. I often switch back and forth between the space where I keep Mail.app and the space where I do my blog writing or the space where I do web development. Every time I returned to a space, the active window changed from the one I had last used. I usually had to invoke Exposé to find the window I needed to use.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've been using Twitter for several weeks, because there are things that friends of mine might be interested in hearing about that will never make it into an email or an Operation Gadget post.

Twitterific vs Spaz: These two desktop Twitter
clients that run on the Mac are competing for
space on my desktop. Only one will survive
the week. [ Screenshot by Dave Aiello on Flickr ]

It only took a few minutes of serious Twitter use for me to realize that I wanted a desktop client. It's easy to see which client friends are using, just visit http://twitter.com/daiello and look at one of my latest tweets:

The link to the word "Spaz" indicates that I used the Spaz client to post that tweet.

The two clients that I've tried so far are Twitterific and Spaz. Both run on the Mac, but take pretty different design approaches when you look at them closely.

Twitterific has been around longer, and it's a classic Cocoa application. This means that it runs only on MacOS X. It's closed source and ad supported unless you pay the $14.95 fee that the publisher wants you to pay.

I actually like the ads that are inserted periodically in my twit stream. They come from The DECK, the same ad network that is used on 37signals' network of web sites.

Twitterific is nice if you are a Mac user because of how well it integrates with all the other applications that a Mac geek like me is going to have installed. It integrates seemlessly with Growl, a kind of a notification manager that lots of Mac applications tie into.

Twitterific also configures itself as a Heads Up Display (or HUD). It does this by setting itself to float above the windows in front of it and using CSS opacity to allow windows underneath it to be viewed. That's a cool effect, and is particularly useful when used in conjunction with Leopard features like Spaces. When it's in this mode, it removes its icon from the Dock, which is nice because it makes the Dock a bit more concise.

Spaz is the newcomer. It's an open source Adobe AIR application. It looks nice, but doesn't have some of the MacOS X-specific features that Twitterific has. It's free and has no ads.

Continue reading "Twitterific vs Spaz: The Twitter Client Face-off on My Desktop" »

Posted by Dave Aiello at 12:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

One of the best techniques for using an iPhone with a large iTunes library is to use Smart Playlists to automatically select tracks from your library according to logical rules. I discussed this in Use Smart Playlists for Endless Combinations of Christmas Music. I wanted to provide an update because I see a problem with this technique.

I have some Smart Playlists for rock music that I listen to sometimes when I'm running. However, I picked up some music as part of the Lance Armstrong: Run Longer workout (available from ) that's actually part of the "Alternative" genre that I want to include in these playlists.

The problem I ran into is that Alternative and Rock music go together in my mind, but they didn't end up together according to the way I had my rock-related Smart Playlists defined. The rules for my "Rock Favorites" Smart Playlist were:

• Match all of the following rules
• Genre contains Rock
• Rating is greater than ***
• Limit to 25 items selected by most played

If you want to add the Alternative genre, you can't just add a second genres rule in iTunes without changing the selection criteria to "Match any of the following rules", and then you lose the rating criteria.

The only way to choose two or more genres and include rating criteria is to exclude every other genre but the ones you want. This was discussed by Merlin Mann from 43Folders.com in 2006 in an article called "Music Only" for your iTunes playlists.

• Children's Music
• Classical
• Soundtrack
• Vocal
• Country
• Jazz
• Easy Listening
• Holiday
• Folk
• Miscellaneous

You might have to exclude more genres if your iTunes library is more diverse than mine.

I can see why Apple would design iTunes so that there is a simple one level logic to selection criteria for Smart Playlists, but the problem of how to combine music in closely related genres is made more complicated by iTunes' simplicity.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 4:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

• How to Eat Healthily at Top Chain Restaurants on Lifehacker: "The food experts at Health magazine have scoured the menus at popular restaurant chains in search of the healthiest foods on the menu, rounding up several healthy menu options at otherwise unhealthy chains."

  They found reasonably healthy choices at Denny's, Ruby Tuesday, and P.F. Chang's, among others.
• AT&T Providing Free Wi-Fi Access to iPhone Users - Mac Rumors on MacRumors: "A couple of readers have reported that AT&T hotspots are now offering free Wi-Fi access to iPhone users. Barnes and Noble, Starbucks and presumably AT&T's 71,000 other Wi-fi hotspot locations are now offering iPhone users a custom portal to access free Wi-Fi. A special iPhone formatted page asks for your mobile phone number. Once entered, you can access the Wi-Fi access for free."

• The "missing" iPhone ringtone on TUAW: "We've all seen the iPhone ads.... None are identical, but most have something in common. Namely, that peculiar ringtone. We call it peculiar because it isn't actually included with the iPhone. Luckily, most of us have it installed on our computers already."

  The article goes on to explain how to convert the Apple Loop that comes with GarageBand (part of iLife '08) into a ringtone for your iPhone.
• In search of a GTD solution on TUAW: Brett Terpstra's take on different ways you can integrate Mac apps and utilities into a Getting Things Done system. ".... This round of solution-searching began with a post by Dennis Best titled Getting things done (simply) in Leopard. It outlined a system where iCal calendars are your contexts (or areas of responsibility), To-dos are created in Mail, Mail Notes become projects, and Smart Mailboxes were used to interesting ends. It even had a tagging system, allowing for great flexibility. This was highly appealing to me given its close integration with my primary source of tasks and information: email...."
• Interactive GTD Software Comparison Table on Priacta.com: "102 Researched GTD Software Titles and Counting. Software listed here has been verified to support Getting Things Done and related systems...." Solutions on the web, Windows, Mac, handheld, Linux, and Python are documented. I'll have to look at why they breakout Python separately.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 7:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

On our trip to Buffalo this weekend, Kathleen, Jimmy, and I stayed in two Marriott properties that had public WiFi networks. The thing I didn't like about them is that they are wide open networks which means anyone can join and do pretty much anything they want locally.

I have my MacBook Pro setup the way I want to use it when I am on my home office network. This means that I have iPhoto and iTunes sharing enabled, and a public folder available so that my wife can grab files from me or give me files without my intervention. I don't want these services to be advertised an available when I'm on a foreign WiFi network.

I turned off iPhoto and iTunes sharing manually when I went on line at the hotels. This only took a minute or two, but I don't want to have to remember to do it or to think about it. I'm almost positive that I'll forget to turn these services back on in many cases when I get home.

In order to batten down the hatches on my Mac, I need a couple of discrete pieces of software:

• Software to make my Mac "context-aware". The leading choices seem to be Marco Polo and Home Zone. My personal preference is for Marco Polo at the moment.
• Rules to identify when my Mac is at home and when it isn't at home. The easiest way to do this is to detect the MAC address of our Airport Extreme base station.
• Scripts to turn on and off the iTunes, iPhoto, and networking services, based on the context. I probably also want to step up the aggressiveness of the software firewall running on my Mac.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

• How to link Twitter to Facebook - A Twitter Tutorial on AJVayerchuck.com: A concise explanation of how to install the Twitter app within Facebook and allow it to update your Facebook status.
• Clutter War II: Attack of the Giant Baby on 43Folders: "...you might be able to guess where my head is right now. Yep. It’s on clutter, and on what I need to do to get my face back into Peter Walsh’s excellent de-cluttering book as a means for regaining domestic sanity and striding toward the possibility of a life without tripping, piling, or losing what’s left of my sleep-deprived mind."
• Hi-Res YouTube Hacks on O'Reilly Digital Media: A great little article that covers why YouTube rocks for casual video sharing and how to force YouTube playback to the highest resolution possible.
• LCD Scrub cleans those stubborn stains from your screen on TUAW: "While LCD screens aren't nearly as likely to run into image persistence issues as older CRTs, they aren't immune to damage, as developer Daniel Sandler... learned to his dismay a year ago. After his flat-panel got munged by green static overnight, he whipped up a pattern-shifting screensaver to repair the burned-in pixels (based on Apple's recommendation of leaving an all-white image over the affected areas). Whaddaya know, it worked.... "
• Mac 101: Zoom and pan images in Quick Look on TUAW: "Is your laptop not among those that can do Multi-touch? Don't feel badly, you can replicate those great features!" I didn't know you could do zooming and panning in Quick Look.
• Media Center: Roll a Mac Mini Media Center with Leopard on Lifehacker: "We've talked about building a Mac mini media center and other ways to pimp your mini in the past, but blogger Jon Hicks revisits the Mac mini media center with a focus on using it with Leopard and EyeTV (a Mac DVR solution). While Apple TV is doing its best to justify a place in your living room, it still doesn't time-shift television, and many Mac enthusiasts still find that the Mac mini still outdoes Apple's latest media center offering."

Posted by Dave Aiello at 12:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

• Ode To A Burrito -- Chipotle Mexican Grill on Fast Company: "Good food wrapped in a socially responsible message has created legions of Chipotle fans -- and a superhot business. Acquired by McDonald's in 1998 when there were only 14 Chipotles, the company went public in 2006 with 500 stores and watched its stock rise from $22 to $110 in 18 months. The now-independent outfit is enjoying an 80% revenue run-up over three years....

  "Chipotle has achieved these impressive stats by spurning fast-food orthodoxy. Workers make each burrito by hand, which leads to long lines of customers waiting far beyond the four-minute industry standard. Turns out, that's not a problem for many customers." There aren't many Chipotles in Pennsylvania, but one just opened in Warrington, in the same complex with one of our two closest Wegman's. Why can't we eat there more often? [ via 37signals SVN ]
• Forwarding voicemails? on 37signals SVN: "Visual Voicemail on the iPhone is a huge step forward for voicemail, but it still feels a bit last generation. It’s still about the static message that sits in your box. You can’t forward it along, you can’t email it to yourself, you can’t even play it to someone else who’s on the phone with you." Great points.
• 15 Features of the Perfect Work Space on LifeDev: "8. No clutter - Clutter is an aesthetic problem as well as a mental problem. Cluttered work spaces give create cluttered thinking. Your mind will never be as clear as it could be with a messy, unorganized environment. This also includes your desktop clutter as well." My only question about the article is: why is "no clutter" feature number 8 and not higher on the list?
• Household: De-Clutter with a Six-Month "Maybe Box" on Lifehacker: "I can vouch for the power of hidden non-necessities. My garage has served as a de facto "Maybe" space for most of this winter, leading my house toward a serious garage sale this spring."
• The Cost of Working In a Digital World on LifeDev: "A very important article has been written by The New York Times showing the hazards of being a web worker. Without boundaries and carefult attention to our Internet usage, we can quickly find our health declining. Prolific blogger Om Malik, who suffered some life-threatening health problems late last year, shares some insights his doctor gave as to why web workers have health problems."
• #1 Song on This Date in History from Josh Hosler: "What was the #1 song on ... the day you were born? the day you graduated from high school? the day you were married? the day your child was born? the approximate date you were conceived?" Awesome site. [ via Pogue's Posts and Alltop Gadgets ]

Posted by Dave Aiello at 8:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The other day I was looking forward to watching NHL playoff games, and started thinking about how much fun it would be to watch Hockey Night in Canada on the CBC instead of Versus.

I went over to CBC.ca and watched the HNIC Playoff Preview Show on the CBC Sports Video Player. The player is a Flash-based application that sits in your browser of choice. After a brief video introduction, the Hockey Night in Canada Opening was shown. This is a series of highlights playing over the Hockey Night in Canada Theme Song. The opening sequence lasted about 45 seconds.

Occasionally I hear people talking about trying to buy the Hockey Night in Canada theme as their ringtone for their mobile phone. Nobody I know has it as their ringtone on their iPhone. I decided to try to use Mac software to create an iPhone ringtone of the actual Hockey Night in Canada Theme as broadcast by the CBC. I had no idea how easy this would turn out to be.

Before I describe this technique, I want to warn you that distributing copyrighted material such as the Hockey Night in Canada Theme Song is probably illegal where you live. However, no one can stop you from making an iPhone ringtone for your own personal use using the following technique.

The software I used to make this ringtone was Audio Hijack Pro from Rogue Amoeba Software ($32 direct from the developer) and GarageBand '08 which is part of the iLife '08 software suite from Apple.

Audio Hijack Pro allows you to intercept (or hijack) the audio output of any application running on your Mac, and save it as an MP3 file. I hijacked the audio output of Safari and captured the Hockey Night in Canada Theme Song in about as much time as it took to locate the Opening in the program and then watch and listen to that opening.

Once I had the MP3 file, I brought it into GarageBand '08 and did the following:

1. I positioned the MP3 on the timeline so that the beginning of the song was at time 0:00.
2. I clicked the button called "Cycle Region" in the second set of controls below the timelines. That button needs to be clicked to "on" before a ringtone can be created.
3. I clicked and dragged the region of the time bar representing the music I wanted as part of my ringtone. I learned from Googling around that the sound had to be 40 seconds or less in duration, so I made sure that I only selected that amount of time in the time bar.
4. I chose "Send Ringtone to iTunes" from the "Share" menu.

This last step automatically exported the music clip as a ringtone and caused iTunes to import it. The next time I synced my iPhone, the custom ringtone was automatically transferred to it.

Once that was done, I could designate my Hockey Night in Canada ringtone as my default ringtone. Better yet, I decided to make it a ringtone unique to some of my friends from hockey and hockey officiating.

The true power of this technique is that you can capture and convert into a ringtone any sound that your Mac can play for you. This means the entire repertoire of YouTube is at your disposal, as well as things like Hulu, current programming from all of the major networks, and things like CBS Classic TV episodes.

I'm thinking of making a ringtone of the Hawaii Five-O Theme Song or the Love that Good n' Plenty Jingle from the 1960s next. [ Hat tip to The Mac Observer for their article Making Custom Ringtones with GarageBand ]

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I had an iPhone experience tonight like the ones that make users of other mobile phones jealous. Kathleen, Jimmy, and I decided to go to Friendly's for ice cream after dinner. We showed up at the Langhorne location only to find a standing-room-only crowd waiting for tables. We were quoted a 20-minute wait.

We're already out, so where do we go for a similar ice cream parlor experience? I get out my iPhone and tell the Maps application, "Friendly's, Langhorne, PA". I find that there is a Friendly's in Morrisville, only seven miles away. I get directions because I am not familiar with the address. We decide to go there instead, figuring we can be seated, order, and be served faster if the other Friendly's is less crowded.

The other Friendly's was a lot less crowded, the ice cream was just as good, and our waitress was very nice. She gave Jimmy a balloon and a small stuffed animal at no extra cost to us.

The total additional cost of going to the other Friendly's was 12 minutes travel time between the two locations.

The reason I'm telling this story is because my wife was completely happy with the outcome of this trip, and my 22-month old son came home happy and went off to bed quickly and quietly.

If we had stood in the vestibule of the first Friendly's for 20 minutes, then ordered ice cream in a very full restaurant, I'm sure that Jimmy would have been bouncing off the walls and would have needed time to wind down when we got home.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Earlier today, I needed to come up to speed quickly on IBM WebSphere MQ, a complex piece of enterprise software so I could discuss it with a senior manager at a potential consulting client. The easiest way to do this was to read an introductory whitepaper on Websphere MQ that would provide me with a very high level understanding of the software and some applications of it.

The problem was that I didn't have time to read the whitepaper because it's a 32 pages document and I needed to be at the client's office in less than two hours. I decided to take a few minutes and try to use my Mac to convert the text of the document to an audio file that I could listen to on my iPhone while driving.

I based my solution on the idea published by Ben Waldie in Automator Power: Variables and Looping that was published in the February issue of Macworld. Ben's solution has two limitations:

1. It's Mac-only, which is not a problem for me.
2. It's intended to handle articles from RSS and Atom feeds, and what I needed was to read the text contained in a PDF file.

My adaptation neatly extracts the text out of the PDF file and uses the same suggested MacOS services to create the audio file. Here's how I did it:

Before I began writing my Automator workflow, I needed to install PDFtoText, a shell program that converts PDF documents into plain text. Carsten Blüm built a DMG installer for this open source utility.

My Automator workflow is as follows:

1. Internet: Get Specified URLs to retrieve ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/software/integration/wmq/WS_MQ_Messaging_Backbone_for_SOA.pdf.
2. Internet:Download URLs to the Downloads directory.

3. Utilities:Run Shell Script on the following script using the "/bin/bash" shell:

   /usr/local/bin/pdftotext
   /Users/.../WS_MQ_Messaging_Backbone_for_SOA.pdf
   /Users/.../WS_MQ_Messaging_Backbone_for_SOA.text

   This invokes the utility to read the PDFtoText converter and extract the text from the PDF file. The text above is one continuous command statement separated by spaces. Substitute your home directory and "/Downloads" for the ellipsis in the previous two lines.
4. Files & Folders: Open Finder Items to open the text file created above.
5. Text: Get Contents of TextEdit Document extracts the text out of the file.
6. Text: Text to Audio File reads the extracted text into an AIFF file. I store it that file in the Downloads directory to be consistent.
7. Music: Import Audio Files brings the file into iTunes. I use the AAC Encoder and delete the source AIFF file after I've encoded it.
8. Music: Add Songs to Playlist to add the new audio file to a playlist I call "Technology Reading".

This workflow worked incredibly well for me. It should work well for you too, assuming you can fast forward through things that aren't meant to be read like tables of contents, page numbers, and the text that is contained in tables and charts.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 2:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I started using Spaces the other day for the first time. This is an application for Mac OS X Leopard that allows you to set up four or more virtual screens, known as spaces. You can also dedicate the windows from specific applications to a specific spaces.

So far Spaces has worked wonderfully for me. I have one space for productivity apps like Mail.app, iCal, the Address Book, and Adium, my instant messaging client. My second space is for blogging and includes MarsEdit and a bunch of browser windows. My third space is for software development and includes things like Zend Studio, Colloquy (an IRC client), and more browser windows. I may use my fourth space for image editing. I opened Pixelmator in it to write this article.

It was easy to dedicate most applications to their appropriate space. Clicking the "+" button below the "Application Assignments" scrollable area brought up a file selection dialog. I simply located the application I wanted to work with in my "Applications" folder and clicked the "Add" button.

The big question I had when setting this up was, how do I make my Finder windows appear in more than one space? This is because the Finder is not in my Applications folder and I didn't know where to find it.

After Googling around for a little while, I found an article called Nice Leopard Finder/Spaces tip on the Undulattice blog that answered my question. It turns out that the Finder is located in the "System" directory tree under "Library" and then under "Core Services".

Posted by Dave Aiello at 5:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

• Stuff We Like: The Dave Laptop Stand on Lifehacker: "The Dave (oh Ikea, you and your names!) features adjustable height and angle, and can double as a TV tray or simple end table when you're not computing. If you've been looking for a better way to surf the internet from the comfort of your couch, the $25 Dave might be just the ticket."
• Optimizing File Sharing on Your Home Wi-Fi Network on Web Worker Daily: "A lot of people who have successfully put in a Wi-Fi network neglect to optimize the way files are shared between computers in a home or workgroup. You can choose ways to organize shared files, and ensure that files are shared securely or not visible to other users on your Wi-Fi network very easily...." Good instructions on how to do this whether you have Windows or Macs
• StrechCordz Short Resistance Training Belt on Cool Tools: "The StrechCordz resistance training belt makes expensive, complex, "endless" pools obsolete. At one end of a 4-foot, black rubber tube is a nylon belt with a simple plastic snap-clip that slips around my waist. On the other end is a loop I attach to the deep-end ladder of our modest home pool. That's it... just tether up and start swimming. Swim as hard and fast as you like yet stay in place."
• Cycling Photography Tips: Shooting Head On on Spare Cycles: "Shooting head on is both difficult and easy: difficult in that the rider is moving at you very fast so your margin for error is very little, but easy in that you don't have to move your camera very much at all."
• Easter's early this year. Deal with it. on God Plays Dice: "...the cycle of Easter dates repeat themselves every 5,700,000 years. The cycle of epacts (which encode the date of the full moon) in the Julian calendar repeat every nineteen years. There are two corrections made to the epact, each of which depend only on the century; one repeats (modulo 30, which is what matters) every 120 centuries, the other every 375 centuries, so the air of them repeat every 300,000 years. The days of the week are on a 400-year cycle, which doesn't matter because that's a factor of 300,000. So the Easter cycle has length the least common multiple of 19 and 300,000, which is 5,700,000." [ via Slashdot ]

Posted by Dave Aiello at 8:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Scott Bourne, the host of The Apple Phone Show, saved $5750 on a new car that he just purchased by using his iPhone during the negotiation. It looks like the most productive uses of the iPhone were recalling email correspondence that had occurred between him and the dealership, and verifying the information that the dealer's salesperson offered during the actual negotiation.

Kathleen and I bought our Honda Accord in December 2006 when we both had Treo 650s. At that time, we could recall our emails with the dealership as Scott Bourne did. However I'm guessing that we had less useful information in our emails than he did.

The web capability of the Treo 650 was primitive compared to my iPhone. If the dealer had open WiFi for use by its service customers (likely at least in California), the iPhone would be that much more useful.

Scott doesn't say what kind of car he bought. I assume that in order to get a $5750 discount on the price, he had to purchase a luxury car in the range of a Mercedes or a BMW.

I think what I learned from reading this article was that I should do some introductory email correspondence with dealers before ever going on a lot. If I had corresponded with dealers prior to going to any showroom, I bet I could have gotten the ask price to move in a favorable direction.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

• Holy Saturday on Wikipedia: Lots of names exist for the day before Easter. I had no idea that so much thought had been put into this day over the years. Sorry if you consider this a sacrilege.
• Sk*rt: "Digg for Chicks" on How to Change the World (blog.GuyKawasaki.com): "I love Sk*rt. You can think of it as "Digg for chicks" (in the words of QueenofSpain), and it features the user-selected stories in topic such as Arts & Entertainment, Design & Crafts, Family & Parenting, and Food & Home."
• View higher quality videos on YouTube on MacOSXhints: "Many people are using a trick to view any YouTube video in high-quality -- simply append &fmt=18 to the end of the URL. This is a job for AppleScript! Here are two simple versions; the first, for for OmniWeb... and the second, for Safari...."
• Lemnis Pharox LED Bulb on CoolTools: "I have been dutifully buying the various LED bulbs being marketed as home incandescent replacements for a year or two. Up until now, all have had that weird, blue flickery LED light, and all have been expensive. The Lemnis Pharox is the first one that actually delivers as a home bulb replacement. It sips electricity pulling down a mere 4 watts, will last for 35 years, and replaces the light of a 40 watt incandescent."
• Adventures in Rechargeable Batteries on CodingHorror: "I've been a rechargeable battery user for years. It seems the frugal thing to do in the long run, and it's also healthier for the planet when we aren't discarding mountains of single-use batteries into landfills." Author Jeff Atwood provides a lot of tips on getting the most out of modern rechargeable batteries. [ via LifeHacker ]
• PimpMySafari.com, recommended by Merlin Mann on MacBreak Weekly. This is the reference site for all plugins and bookmarklets for the Safari web browser.
• First Look: Safari 3.1 adds speed and HTML 5 features on Computerworld: "With the 3.1 release, Safari has become the fastest browser you can use. If that isn't enough reason to make a switch, its strong adherence to Web standards and rapid adoption of new technologies might make you think again."

Posted by Dave Aiello at 7:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It took me about half a day to convince myself that MarsEdit is a must have for blogging on Operation Gadget. Here's why.

Operation Gadget talks a lot about electronic gadgets, computers, and software. I often provide links to these products that point to a place where you can buy them, such as Amazon.com. Links like this tend to make the blog a few dollars which pays for hosting and what not.

Building these links takes time. In the half day since I downloaded MarsEdit, I figured out how to adapt an AppleScript that came with MarsEdit to lookup on Amazon.com the selected text in a post I'm writing. I select the text of a product name in the post I'm writing, invoke the AppleScript, and quickly find a page referring to that product on Amazon.

From there I find the Amazon Standard Identifier (ASIN) which is the way to uniquely identify a product in the Amazon catalog. The ASIN is always in the URL of the product's page on Amazon.com. Once I have the ASIN, I can build a link using a MarsEdit markup macro that I wrote for myself.

I haven't had a chance yet to benchmark the actual time difference between writing an Operation Gadget post in the Movable Type web interface and locally on my Mac in MarsEdit, but I'm guessing that I cut my editing time down by two minutes per story using the AppleScript and the macro that I described above. That's well worth the $29.95 licensing cost of MarsEdit, so I'll be paying for my license this weekend.

I can see other opportunities to develop AppleScripts and MarsEdit macros for similar productivity improvements on the RinkAtlas Blog. I'm sure I'll think of other uses for this technology as well.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm trying out MarsEdit, a MacOS X blogging client, for a few posts to see if it improves my productivity. It's been recommended by higher beings in the blogosphere like Andy Abramson and John Gruber-- two people whose blogs I read every day.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 1:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Guy Kawaski, Will Mayall, and the rest of the folks at Nononina have built a new topic-based RSS aggregator called Alltop. There idea is to display the latest five stories from thirty or more blogs in each topic area. You can drill down to the topic areas that you are most interested in by using the appropriate subdomain URL. My favorites are:

• Sports
• Gadgets
• Mac

I'm also pretty interested in the Linux topic. I think there could be a market for a Web Development or PHP topic. There's already a Politics topic that probably would be a quick way to catch up on what's going on in the latest news cycle.

I think Alltop is an excellent idea and could be a mobile competitor to Google Reader if they create an iPhone version.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

• An Enduring Measure of Fitness: The Simple Push-Up on NYTimes.com: "The push-up is the ultimate barometer of fitness. It tests the whole body, engaging muscle groups in the arms, chest, abdomen, hips and legs. It requires the body to be taut like a plank with toes and palms on the floor. The act of lifting and lowering one’s entire weight is taxing even for the very fit." Doing push-ups is a habit I've been trying to get into. This article is a good reminder of why.
• Your Story: Throwing new tools at a communication problem? on 43Folders.com: "...The anecdotes I hear from worker bees often focus on the frustration they felt when a wiki, a new CMS, a mailing list, or some other tool was introduced into an ecosystem that was suffering from a more fundamental communication problem. A lot of people tell me that this makes matters much worse all around, often amplifying the complexity of the original problem, in addition to piling on burnt cycles that were committed on getting everyone up to speed on the new 'silver bullet....'" Oh the stories I could tell about a Wiki I once used....
• ExpanDrive on Daring Fireball: "ExpanDrive 1.01 is a new $29 file system extension for Mac OS X, based in part on MacFUSE, that lets you mount SFTP servers as volumes in the Finder. I’ve been using ExpanDrive for a week and it is extremely impressive. I’ve never seen anything like it for the Mac. Magnetk, the company behind ExpanDrive, has a similar product for Windows called SftpDrive that’s been around for a while."

Posted by Dave Aiello at 4:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

• Topeak Mini 6 on CoolTools: "This incredibly compact, bike-oriented multi-tool has five different sizes of Allen wrench plus a Phillips screwdriver head, all of which folds up into a little pod about the size of a walnut. Sometimes I'll carry it in my pocket or toss it in shoulder bag; mostly I keep it in the under-seat pouch of my bike. It really comes in handy for quick adjustments...."
• Tapping Your TiVo's Hidden Talents on The Mossberg Solution in the WSJ: "... like any old friend -- or spouse -- who has been around for a while, TiVo has a few tricks up its sleeve that might surprise longtime users and new owners alike. This column includes just a handful of those tricks and highlights some features that may make TiVo more useful. These tips are for everyday users, not serious hackers, and many others exist."
• 1Password. It’s All I Need…And This Remote. on Apple Phone Show: "If there is anything I love more than software that works, it’s software that helps me save time and having to type on my iPhone’s keyboard. This is especially significant when having to type my uber-strong passwords into a login password field. I’ve been using 1Password since Macworld, and I really find it helpful...."

• iPhone SDK, Apple's Touch Platform, and The Next Two Decades on 37signals Signal versus Noise: "What we saw today {at the iPhone Software Roadmap Event} was the spark. The explosion will continue for twenty years. We will all feel the warmth."

  "What we saw today was the beginning of two-decades of mobile domination by Apple. What Microsoft and Windows was to the desktop, Apple and Touch will be to mobile...."



• Behind the scenes of the old school HBO intro, a video on YouTube noted on 37signals Signal versus Noise: If you have time to watch any of this 11-minute video produced by HBO about the filming of an introductory film clip that HBO used as a lead in to a feature film presentation, you will be amazed at the amount of time put into building scale models of a city, town, and countryside. Yes this was state-of-the art technology in 1982. But think of how differently it would be done today.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 5:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The first book I bought to try to get new ideas on how I could better leverage my iPhone as a multimedia Swiss Army Knife was iPhone Fully Loaded by Andy Ihnatko. I have been really impressed by this book because it has some really excellent tips and techniques that go beyond many of the ideas I've seen discussed on iPhone-related blogs and websites.

Andy Ihnatko is a freelance journalist who writes a technology column in The Chicago Sun Times and appears regularly on The Early Show on CBS. He hit my radar screen through his regular gigs on The Apple Phone Show and MacBreak Weekly podcasts. Some of the concepts he discussed on those programs, such as using Smart Playlists to fill your iPhone with a constant amount of music that you like but haven't listened to recently (mentioned previously on Operation Gadget), and using Handbrake to convert chapters of DVDs that you own to clips that are playable on your iPhone, are prominently featured in this book. However, there are a lot more ideas that go far deeper into Mac and PC technology to pull together content that you have access to, package it in a form that's storable on your iPhone or iPod touch, and get it transferred on to your device.

There are also ideas that didn't appeal to me personally, but were interesting to read about from a general knowledge perspective. Andy is a big fan of comic books, so he includes an entire chapter on finding comics on the Internet and transmogrifying for your iPhone. He also talks about extensively about electronics and software that can be used to record radio programs for later playback on your iPhone. I used to listen to a great deal of radio myself, so this is interesting to me, but podcasts have largely replaced my radio listening habit since I got my iPhone, and I can barely keep up with the podcasts that I'm subscribed to now.

There are a number of other good iPhone-related books, such as The iPhone Pocket Guide by Chris Breen of MacWorld Magazine, but few are as jam-packed with ideas for filling your iPhone with content as iPhone Fully Loaded. This book always seems to be sitting near my MacBook Pro, and I think it will stay there for some time.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 5:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I ordered my MacBook Pro on Sunday night. It's a build-to-order machine with a 160-Gigabyte hard drive that's based on the 2.2-GigaHertz Core 2 Duo, Santa Rosa-based MacBook Pro. If I get the machine that's currently on the market, it will be 194-percent faster than my current Dell Latitude C810, the design for which is now six years old.

I think I will be picking myself up off of the floor when I open the box and turn it on. This says nothing about the switch from Windows 2000 to MacOS X Leopard.

There are so many places where I can't really go on the web right now, just because of CPU constraints. YouTube and a lot of the Flash-based video sites are typically terrible. A lot of frames are missing when I play clips. As a result, I find myself grabbing my iPhone and using the WiFi capability to watch video. I think that's going to make a huge difference in my web experience.

I'm hoping that the web development IDEs that I use, Zend Studio 5.5 and Zend Studio for Eclipse, are leaps and bounds better on OS X than on an old, slow Windows machine. I'm also hoping that a personal organization tool such as OmniFocus or Things make me way more effective. We'll see.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 12:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

• Apple Releases a New "Get a Mac" Ad Co-starring a Football Referee on Apple.com: Pretty good attention to detail. The referee is wearing a white hat and a uniform that is very close to that worn in many college football leagues. What I would add to this is the referee turning on his microphone and speaking over the public address system. [ Seen on TV over the weekend. ]

• Andrea Jung Joins Apple Board of Directors on MacRumors.com: "Apple has announced that Andrea Jung has been elected to Apple's board. Andrea also serves as Chairman and CEO of Avon Products, board member of General Electric, and member of the New York Presbyterian Hospital board of trustees and the Catalyst board of directors."

  Why the CEO of Avon and why now? Speculation is that her board seat at GE will make her helpful in brokering an agreement with NBC Universal to bring them back into the iTunes fold.



• Break a Soda Habit with Better Water on Lifehacker: "Have a serious soda habit? Part of the lure of the stuff is the convenience and fizzy texture, not just the sugar content you can get from lots of other places. How-to blog TipNut details one writer's cheap, simple fix—giving water more appeal." My habit is Caffeine Free Diet Coke, so I don't have the caffeine or the sugar but I still have the soda fix. I just drink way too much of it.


• Chalet Doll House on BabyGadget.com: "...this Chalet Doll House from Plan Toys is like a breath of fresh air with its openness and lack of minuscule plastic parts. With movable staircases and skylights, this doll house comes completely furnished - sans family...." Nice looking, substantial, and modern.


• Philips Blu-ray Player BDP7200 on Ubergizmo: "The BDP7200 is Philips’ first Full Profile 1 compliant BD player that features Dolby® TrueHD and DTS® HD High Resolution Audio, multi-channel audio decoding and digital audio optical outputs. The BDP7200 supports 1080p at native 24 frames per second...." On display at CES.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 8:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A couple of friends of mine asked me to what I thought of the Amazon Kindle at lunch before Thanksgiving. I said that I was aware of it, that reviews and comments from blogs that I read had been more negative than positive, but I would keep my eye out for interesting articles and blog postings. Here are a few of the things I've found:

• Kindle can light up your life by Andy Ihnatko in The Chicago Sun Times: Andy points out that the secret sauce of the Kindle is that EVDO access via Sprint is free and the Kindle has a serviceable web browser. As such he thinks it's worth the $400 cost without regard for its usability as an e-book reader.
• Amazon Kindle: the Web makes Amazon go bad crazy by Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing: Cory Doctorow hates Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology. Keep that in mind when you read his comments: "Mark Pilgrim has a great, incisive post about the Amazon Kindle e-reader that sums up almost all of the reasons I won't be buying it -- it spies on you, it has DRM (which means that it has to be designed to prevent you from modding it, lest you mod it to remove the DRM), it prevents you from selling or lending your books, and the terms of service are nearly as abusive as the Amazon Unbox terms (and worse than the thoroughly dumb-ass Amazon MP3 terms)...."

These comments are pretty much polar opposites of each other, with every other review falling somewhere in between.

My friends also suggested that I discuss another e-book reader called the Iliad from iRex Technologies. More on that product later.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Signal vs. Noise pointed out a terrific comparison of cost of various methods of do-it-yourself electronic tax preparation. This article is excellent because it attempts to compare the so-called out the door price of doing your state and federal taxes. Out the door pricing is defined as the total cost of tax preparation and electronic filing of both a Federal and a single-state tax return.

There are a number of electronic tax preparation options that I was unaware of before reading this article. The major tax preparation brands TurboTax and TaxCut have both packaged software and on-line tax preparation and filing services. These are delivered in several different bundles, each at different prices. In addition there are several smaller competitors included in the review.

My brother Scott has been touting the benefits of on-line tax preparation and filing for several years. This comparison proves that this option is worth trying, because the on-line versions of the major tax preparation and filing services are sometimes noticeably cheaper than their packaged software equivalents.

With two and a half weeks left until the personal tax filing deadline, a lot of people still have to buckle down and do the work. I hope that they can benefit from this handy comparison.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Am I the last blogger to make the switch to Google Reader from Bloglines? Here are the three key features that Google has implemented that made me switch:

• Google Reader handles read/unread entries much better. I can look at the latest entries on a blog with a lot of posts and only mark as read the entries that I've actually seen. How many times have you looked at the Lifehacker feed in Bloglines, only gotten through five entries, and lost the "newness" of the remaining unread entries? That's happened to me quite often.
• Google Reader's "star system" helps keep track of things that I need to act on. Whether it's a blog post I want to write, an email I want to send a friend, or a job I want to apply for, stars in Google Reader become a sort of a feed entry to do list for me.
• Google Reader's home page calls my attention to things I might have missed. I'm not sure if it tracks change in entry-creation velocity on my feeds, or if it watches what I have clicked on previously, but the home page surprises me at least once a day.

I hope my change over benefits Operation Gadget readers in terms of stronger, more relevant, and timely articles.

If you are still using Bloglines or any other feed reader, you owe it to youself to give Google Reader a try for a few days. You may find it to be as much of an improvement as I did.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 5:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I want to recommend that Operation Gadget readers check out Lifehacker's Firefox user interface customization tips. The article is a tutorial that shows you how to eliminate one of the three default toolbars from each of your Firefox windows.

I gave this a try earlier this afternoon, and I'm pleased with the results. I think these chrome tweaks are particularly important for laptop users. Vertical space on a laptop screen is always at a premium, so anything that you can do to increase the amount of each webpage that you can display is probably worth it from a productivity perspective.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 4:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Some Operation Gadget readers know that I do a lot of consulting work on other people's weblogs through my Weblog Improvement business. In order to succeed in this line of work, I need to keep lots of small projects organized and on-track.

The best tool I've found for this purpose so far has been Basecamp from 37Signals. It lets me break down projects to milestones and to do list tasks, and share work with my clients when appropriate. Since I am a heavy Basecamp user, I depend upon their time tracking feature for which 37Signals charges a small premium.

What Basecamp has been missing up to now is a lightweight timer widget that knows about the projects that I'm working on. That feature still doesn't exist in Basecamp, but I found a third party web application that will do the job nicely for the time being.

SlimTimer is a free timer widget that handles multiple tasks. It also allows me to run reports from its website that I can give to clients as backup for my billings. I can also export the data to Excel. Hopefully, I will be able to import that data into Basecamp at some point.

If you're a heavy Basecamp user, I think SlimTimer is a must-have accessory. I wonder if 37signals is aware of this site yet. If I were them, I'd be doing a make or buy analysis right now. [ via LifeDev ]

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Over the past couple of months I've noticed that my Treo 650 has more and more trouble opening the IMAP Inbox for my main email account. The reason for this is obvious: I'm an email pack rat.

At the height of my madness, I had over 25,000 messages in my main email account's Inbox. I was about as anti-Inbox Zero as you could get.

For the last year, I've read article after article touting the benefits of managing your Inbox and not letting it become a repository of last resort. Sites like 43 Folders and Lifehacker seem to do an article a week (or more) on the subject. But it wasn't until I hit the practical limit of my Treo's ability to manage my Inbox wirelessly that I gave in and started filing and purging.

Before you email me and ask, "What do you mean when you say your Treo had trouble opening your Inbox?", I'll describe the situation. I use Chatter Email, an alternative email client for the PalmOS that excels at managing IMAP accounts. As an IMAP mailbox grows, the mail server takes more time to respond to the initial connection request after you login. Whether you are using wireless access or not, you can tell that the mail client has to sync itself with the mailbox.

As my Inbox approached and surpassed 20,000 messages, the Treo began taking longer and longer to display the most recent messages after Chatter Email was launched. Sometimes it would take 45 minutes or more, which meant that I would leave the office to run some errands and my Treo would still not be in sync with my primary email account when I got back. That's unacceptable-- particularly when most of your friends and family know that you carry a wireless email device.

Little by little I'm reducing the size of my Inbox when I'm at a PC-based email client. I began by creating folders in my IMAP account for messages of lasting value. Folders seem to have a positive effect on Chatter Mail's responsiveness, since its sync time is impacted by the size of the Inbox folder. After that, I started at the oldest messages and started filing or deleting.

My goal is to whittle my Inbox down by about 1,000 messages a week. This is pretty achieveable, since a lot of email I receive is related to the status of things I manage that are connected to the Internet. This includes Linux servers in colocation which often kick out messages to me with the output of cron jobs, but also extends to things like Google Alerts.

Having said that, I've gotten rid of a lot of my Google Alerts for the moment. In the past I've used Google Alerts to monitor news sites for ideas for Operation Gadget articles. As you know, my posting frequency has fallen a lot since my son Jimmy was born in May. If I'm not posting much, I don't need the alerts cluttering my Inbox.

Some people in the Inbox Zero crowd (a philosophy that stresses empty inboxes the way some personal organization consultants stress a clean desk) apply a much more aggressive standard when they make file-versus-delete decisions on old email. I try to keep enough old emails around so I can remember the context of conversations that are important. In other words, I keep most emails I exchange with my family for continuity purposes, even if it means that some of the filed messages are no more than "Hi, how are you?" messages going back and forth. I've got so many other messages that I can delete because they are no longer relevant, the savings will still be huge.

If you administer Linux servers on the Internet as I do, Time Management for System Administrators by Tom Limoncelli has some great recommendations in terms of improving personal productivity. There are a lot of tips about how to manage an email account that I thought was interesting when I first read the book. Now I'm going back and implementing a lot of those ideas.

Hopefully I'll be down to less than 1,000 emails in my Inbox before too long. Then the performance of my Treo should be really snappy again. I hope that I can maintain Inbox management discipline when I get to that point.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 5:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The other day, my brother Scott Aiello tipped me off to a device that can be used as a convenient one-stop place to charge all of your handheld devices. It's called the Personal Electronics Power Station and it's available from several vendors on Amazon.com.

The Personal Electronics Power Station is an outlet strip with a special housing that allows you to clamp your handheld devices to its body using adjustible dividers. The body has an internal space where the plug ends of your handhelds' charging cables go. When not in use, the Personal Electronics Powerstation sits on top of a table or a bookshelf with your charging cables neatly organized.

Some of the comments I've read about this unit say that the internal plugs for the charging cables are two-pronged only and that adapters won't fit inside. That's a fair point, so watch out for that. Another common complaint is that the Personal Electronics Power Station doesn't support USB. How many of your handhelds charge only through USB connections? I can't think of any of my devices that have this problem.

Technorati Tags: Personal Electronics Power Station, electronic gadgets.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Brad Feld's Treadputer: Venture capitalist
Brad Feld added a 3.2-GHz IBM ThinkCentre
to his Vision Fitness T9450HRT Treadmill.
This lets him get his runs in while he's on
conference calls. [ Photo: Brad Feld ].

Brad Feld is a managing director at Mobius Venture Capital based in Boulder, Colorado. He challenges himself by running marathons, and has set a goal of running a marathon in every state in the nation within the next 10 years.

Around the beginning of the year he and his coworkers built a "treadputer", a fitness club-quality treadmill with a big, fast Windows PC, and three 19-inch LCD displays.

The amazing aspect of Brad's story is that he finds he can use his PC while walking and running on this treadmill. According to the article:

It turns out that the Treadputer is highly functional when I’m running, which enables me to do some of my longer runs during the day while I’m on a call rather than having to get up at 5am to get them in before the day starts....

When we first assembled the Treadputer, {a co-worker} was skeptical that I would be able to read the screen while walking and assumed that reading while running would be impossible. While the three monitor setup helps a lot, it was surprisingly easy to read while walking or running. We’re running all three monitors at their standard 1280x1024 resolution and haven’t juiced up the font sizes.

Brad's article includes more details about his treadputer's configuration, and what he's learned about typing and mouse / trackball use. I found it quite interesting.

At least one other person bent on improving his life has built a treadputer. Walking Guy has begun a blog discussing his experiences building and using his treadputer. He says he began this quest because he needed to take off at least 40 pounds but was stuck in front of a computer 80 to 100 hours a week. He has his treadputer setup and has already gotten himself mentioned in the Lifehacker Coolest Workspace Contest.

I wonder how many more treadputer setups already exist, and how many will be built now that these articles have appeared on the Internet? I'll have to start looking for "bikeputer" articles as well.

Technorati Tags: fitness gadgets, treadputer.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Lifehacker pointed out a great article on NewsForge.com that gives tips on how to get the most out of Mozilla Thunderbird. Thunderbird is the email client I use everyday.

I've already taken the suggestion of creating a Smart Folder to filter server status messages out of my main IMAP mailbox. This saves me some time because I don't have to type the search criteria into the QuickSearch box once or twice a day. It also provides me with a handy way to delete these messages en masse after I've reviewed them.

I'm looking forward to trying out Thunderbird extensions that the author recommends. I just heard about the Contacts Sidebar for the first time today when I was researching syncing the email addresses in Thunderbird with those in my Treo via Palm Desktop.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 4:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Martin O'Donnell is the proud owner of a new MacBook Pro. He reports that Apple Mail, part of Mac OS X Tiger is a significant improvement over Eudora 6, the latest version available for the Mac. Martin writes:

I've been using Apple Mail 2.0.8 for about 10 days now, and I've been pleasantly surprised at how good it is. Overall, I find it far superior to Eudora 6 on either OS X or Windows, mostly because of performance: when I do some operation that hits the {IMAP} server, like moving many mails, I see a symbol showing me that work is going on, but it doesn't block me from moving on to some other task. My Eudora experience was the opposite, I hesitated to do something like open an enormous spam mailbox, lest it bog down the client for 10 minutes and prevent me from getting any work done.

Part of the performance is undoubtedly the raw power of a native Intel application running on a (powerful) Core Duo chip, but I suspect most of what I'm feeling is the asynchrony that Apple Mail allows.

There are a few Eudora features that I miss that I haven't figured out in Mail, but I can't imagine going back to Eudora.

Technorati Tags: MacBook Pro, Apple Mail, Mac OS X, Eudora 6.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 6:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Download.com recently published Optimizing Firefox, a special section loaded with tips on how to improve the performance of Firefox. I found a lot of information about Firefox in it that I didn't know. For instance:

• Download performance can be improved by deleting the record of old downloads from the Download Manager.
• Overall browser performance on slow machines can be enhanced using the FireTune plugin.
• Memory usage can be decreased by changing the "Back-Forward cache" value, particularly if your computer has more than 512 Megabytes of RAM.

I'm definitely going to set some time aside to play with my Firefox configuration according to these guidelines. [ via Random Thoughts ]

Posted by Dave Aiello at 8:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

I started using Bloglines at the end of 2004 to keep up with the blogs that were emerging to cover the industries in which I'm interested. Back then I raved about how productive it made me (see Bloglines is Changing My Life). Unfortunately I kept subscribing to feeds and rarely pruned my subscriptions.

By January 1 of this year, the number of feeds on my list was between 200 and 300. I kept a number of my feed categories collapsed because I couldn't see the feeds that I wanted to monitor on a daily basis. As a result, some marginal blogs that happened to be in categories with the blogs that are important to me got read, while better blogs in other categories were ignored.

Something had to change.

On Thursday I had an hour to spare, so I started pruning. Before I knew it, I was down to 62 feeds, less than 25 percent of my previous record. I pulled the top 10 feeds out of their categories and now they sit right below the Operation Gadget feed. This means I can quickly scan the most important feeds to make sure I don't miss anything truly important, and I can leave the other 50 for when I reach a period of browsing time that I've built into my schedule.

This morning, I found a good article by Jeremy Zawodny called Aggregated Diminishing Returns and a Feed Diet on this subject. Zawodny says:

For the next two weeks I'm allocating 30 minutes per day to this {feed} reading, trolling, and mining effort. There's no pre-set limit on how much time I'll spend writing. The returns associated with writing appear to be quite different....

Someday someone will pull all this ranking, customization, personalization, recommendation, and other magic technology together and give me a great reason to throw out my RSS Aggregator once at for all. Until then, I'm going on a Feed Diet.

I need to be on an RSS feed diet more than I need to watch what I eat these days.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

After two days of trying, I finally figured out how to run the Treo 650 1.17 Update for Cingular Wireless on my Treo 650. I still have to repeat the process on Kathleen's Treo 650 before my upgrading is done. Here are a couple of things that would have really helped me streamline this process:

1. You need to have your IMEI and Serial Number recorded before you can download SplashShopper from Palm's website. I think it's best to shut your Treo 650 off, remove the battery, and write these numbers down at the beginning of the update process rather than the end.
2. Use the "hard reset" upgrade method from previous Treo updates. I tried to follow the instructions provided by Palm to update my Treo and this failed repeatedly. In retrospect, I probably had too little free memory or too many third party applications installed during the upgrade. The easiest way to do the upgrade is to:
   1. Hotsync your Treo in its normal configuration to your regular user profile.
   2. Perform a hard reset and re-hotsync the Treo in a new, blank user profile as suggested in the Treo 650 Updater 1.13 instructions.
   3. Run the appropriate Treo 650 Updater for your Cingular software version, following the included instructions.
   4. Once the update is successfully completed, perform another hard reset and re-hotsync the Treo to your original user profile.
3. The URL for downloading SplashShopper is only displayed at the end of the installation process. You won't want to repeat the installation even if you can get it to run through to conclusion twice. For the record, the URL is http://web.palm.com/support/cingular_treo650.

The Cingular 1.17 is out! thread on TreoCentral was very helpful in crafting this strategy, although I had to wade through a lot of meaningless posts.

Hopefully some Treo 650 users haven't done this update yet and will benefit from my experience.

Technorati Tags: Treo 650, Cingular, Treo 650 firmware updates

Posted by Dave Aiello at 1:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

I missed this in the run up to Thanksgiving, but Palm released Treo 650 Updater 1.17 for Cingular Wireless customers on November 21. This update supercedes the one that was released in July and adds the following improvements:

• Includes Versamail 3.1c,
• Gmail attachment downloads,
• Optimizes Bluetooth performance for some Motorola headsets and other car kits. I have a Motorola HS850, so I'm hoping that this will help me.
• Voice quality enhancements,
• Optimizes memory handling,
• Correctly saves Auto-off power setting,
• Adds an audible beep when the phone can't initiate a call properly,
• Improves battery life by turning off the screen 30 seconds into a call. This was part of the previous update as well.

I will have more comments on the Treo 650 update after I have time to apply it to my Treo.

Technorati Tags: Treo 650, Cingular, Bluetooth, Motorola HS850, Versamail, Gmail

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There was a really interesting article in New York Times Magazine yesterday called Meet the Life Hackers. Clive Thompson interviewed a number of personal productivity researchers in academia and the technology industry, and discussed their findings. Among other things:

• Interruptions that cause concentration breaks hurt productivity, resulting in as much as a 25-minute delay before return to the original task
• Very large displays or multiple monitors help productivity
• Low tech solutions such as the Hipster PDA are successfully employed by a number of the most productive technology workers
• Techniques discussed in Getting Things Done often cited by productive people in technology-oriented businesses
• Apple Macintosh computers are disproportionately favored, despite the apparently significant investment in interruption research and productivity made by Microsoft

It surprised me that Clive Thompson didn't understand why Macintosh computers were favored over Windows PCs by GTD adherents. These people have a maniacal focus on fitting tools to the tasks at hand. As a result, they gravitate toward the most user-friendly and customizable computing environment. Apple has done a better job of putting customization tools in the hands of their users than has Microsoft.

When Thompson says "...even the geekiest life hackers find they need to trick out their Apples with duct-tape-like solutions; and even that sometimes isn't enough," he fails to realize that the tools in Apple's Tiger OS make the crafting of duct-tape-like solutions possible for people with minimal programming skill. Microsoft's solutions, such as Visual Basic for Applications, are much more complicated.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Amazon.com has started taking orders for Treo Essentials: Get the Most from Your Treo 650 by Michael Morrison and published by Que.

This is the first book I've seen that has come out with Treo 650-specific advice. Previous books like Now You Know Treo and to a lesser extent the Treo Fan Book were written for the Treo 600 with selected updates for new features of the Treo 650.

I'm hoping to get a copy of Treo Essentials soon to see how many useful tips it has about productive use of the Treo 650. [ via Palm Addict ]

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

E-Health Insider reports that a study published in a journal called BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making indicates that handheld communicators helped surgeons at a London hospital respond to calls more quickly than they did with pagers. The study also indicated that communication between clinicians was improved. According to the article:

A team of surgeons at St Mary's Hospital, Paddington, had their pagers replaced with Palm Tungsten W PDAs, with GPRS on the Vodafone network, for three alternate weeks out of six. Several reference textbooks were also loaded onto the devices, including the British National Formulary, as well as medical calculators.

If they were more productive with the Tungsten W, imagine what the surgeons would have accomplished with a more modern handheld like the Palm Treo 650.

My wife (Dr. Kathleen Aiello) has been using a Treo 650 since March and loves it. She uses it as a mobile phone, an IMAP email client, and a reference tool by running Palm medical software like Epocrates.

Since we got our his and hers Treos, Kathleen and I have wondered whether devices like her Treo would have as profound an effect on her fellow doctors as hers did on her. This study suggests that they certainly might. [ via PalmAddict ]

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Andrew Carton of Treonauts published a good summary of RSS reader options for Treo 650 users. The headline readers include PalmOS applications that have paid licenses, browser-based RSS readers that are free, as well as email and Java-based offerings.

Of the RSS readers I've tried so far, Bloglines Mobile (part of Bloglines.com) is my favorite. However, if I was more into podcasting, I'd probably be using QuickNews. QuickNews has robust RSS attachment support, which means it can do things like download podcasts directly to an SD card installed in your Treo and play them in Pocket Tunes.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 6:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

del.icio.us direc.tor: I'm trying to use a
new AJAX application called del.icio.us
direc.tor to manage my web bookmarks.

Last week I said that leaving a browser window open to an interesting web page can be a productivity killer. Since then I've been looking for ways to better manage and track all of the interesting stuff I find on the web that I'd eventually like to mention on Operation Gadget or I want to refer to later.

The easiest thing for me to do would be to bookmark all of the pages that I want to remember for later, then close each browser window. However, dropping bookmarks on the desktop or into a toolbar isn't really an answer for much of the work I do.

I think the desktop metaphor works for pages that I need to work with all the time such as Paypal, my bank's on-line banking application, and e-commerce sites such as Amazon.com. The metaphor definitely breaks down for pages to which I will make infrequent reference.

Bookmark management sites like del.icio.us are designed to keep track of those infrequently used but still useful or interesting web pages. I've never gotten into using del.icio.us, however, because I couldn't comprehend the home page and didn't see the personal organizational benefits.

I don't honestly remember where I stumbled across del.icio.us direc.tor, but John Udell wrote the kind of description of it that caused me to give del.icio.us direc.tor a try:

The top item today in my experimental del.icio.us affinity feed is del.icio.us director, an alternate interface to del.icio.us from the the guy who created the Gmail agent API last summer, Johnvey Hwang.... It loads your del.icio.us bookmarklets into the browser and creates powerful new modes of navigation and search.

I saw the potential power of bookmark tagging in a screenshot like the one I've included in this story, so I created a del.icio.us account for myself and started migrating the bookmarks out of my browser and into it.

Probably the most confusing aspect of del.icio.us direc.tor is the fact that you have to be on a del.icio.us page before you can invoke it. This has to do with del.icio.us director's nature as a client-side web service broker. I understand that it capitalizes on a del.icio.us API and creates an alternative AJAX-based interface between your browser (Firefox or IE) and del.icio.us. Beyond that, it's easier for me to focus on what del.icio.us direc.tor does rather than how it does it.

When I'm done migrating my bookmarks over to del.icio.us, I'll only have links to frequently-used web applications left in my Firefox bookmark toolbar. I will have a separate place where I can keep bookmarks that can be retrieved by searching for them according to keywords.

I've come to the conclusion I am more productive when I find a definite place to keep things that I need to use or refer to again in the future. This type of organizational system can work in the physical world (clean desk) and in the electronic world (clean desktop). For the moment del.icio.us and del.icio.us director are part of my organizational system. I will try to report back in a couple of weeks on how well they are working as a personal bookmark management solution.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 5:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Marc Orchant published a great list of add-on software for his Treo 650 over on The Office Weblog a couple of days ago. He's suggested two or three Palm applications I'm trying out now:

• SplashID, part of Splash Wallet: I mentioned that I'm trying this out a little while ago here on Operation Gadget.
• Note Studio: a PalmOS-based wiki with a conduit and a desktop app for both Mac and PC. Definitely worth trying.
• Card Backup: a Palm app that backs up your PDAs main memory to a memory card. I bought an MMC card for this purpose before my trip to Chicago in April, but never used it to store a backup. I think there is a freeware and a more fully featured version of this.

These applications and the others mentioned in Marc's article are great ideas for Treo 650 users who are looking to improve their personal productivity.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 2:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Somewhere in the transition to my Treo 650 back in March, I lost a memo entry that contained a big list of passwords for websites and other applications. It was a bad idea to store that information in that manner in the first place, so I resolved to find a Palm application that did a better job.

I found one and so I've downloaded a trial version of SplashID from SplashData. According to the website:

SplashID safely and securely stores all of your personal identification information including user names, passwords, credit cards, calling cards, bank accounts, PINs, and more. Information is stored in a secure, encrypted format and is quickly accessible on a Palm OS handheld or Desktop computer with the included desktop software.

I'll load some of my passwords into SplashID and see how I like it. When I have some thoughts on its usefulness, I'll post them here on Operation Gadget.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 2:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A couple of years ago I got into the habit of leaving a browser window open to contain an interesting or useful web page that I'd just found. I usually intended to come back and mention the page here on Operation Gadget or on CTDATA.com back when I used it as a blog.

This was one of the worst productivity and organizational mistakes I'd ever made. Now I'm bound and determined to put an end to it.

I have two 17-inch flat panel displays on my Blogging Workstation. At one point I thought this configuration would make feasible the habit of keeping a dozen or more web pages open simultaneously. It didn't. I spend a minute or two several times a day looking for a page I've left open for myself on one of my six virtual desktop screens which are usually chock-full-of-information.

These extra windows that I keep open have become a significant distraction. In the course of searching for a piece of information amid the open windows on my desktop, I often take another look at several of my open windows and say to myself, "You know, that's interesting...." Yea right. That's why I left it open in the first place.

I don't yet have an effective solution for this problem. It may come down to a combination of a bookmark manager such as del.icio.us plus handwritten notes and/or a wiki, but I'm guessing.

I just wanted to point out that I see this as an issue that effects my productivity. If it hurts you in the same way then admit it, try to find a solution that works for you, and let me know what it is.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 12:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)