Archives for Computer Data
Send events from Google Calendar to friends’ and family members’ cell phones
If you are an avid Google Calendar user, then you probably already know that you can send yourself text messages about upcoming events on your schedule. But, did you know that you also can send text messages about events to friends and family members with cell phones (even very, very low-tech cell phones)? Here’s how –
When you create an event, click on “edit event details”:
Once the event page appears, enter the contact information for your friends’ and family members’ cell phones as guests for the event:
The contact information for your friends’ and family members’ cell phones consists of their 10 digit cell phone number followed by the extension for their specific carrier. For example, if the cell number is (555) 555-1234 and they have Verizon as their cell phone carrier, you would list 5555551234@vtext.com as a guest. If their carrier is AT&T Wireless, you would list 5555551234@txt.att.net as your guest.
When you choose “save” for your event, a pop-up screen will ask if you want to send your messages to your guests. Choose “send” so your guests will receive an initial invitation to the event. Please note that they will not receive an event reminder if you have one set unless you log into Google Calendar and choose to “e-mail guests” on the events page the day of the event.
Here are a few extensions to help you figure out your friends’ and family members’ contact information for their cell phones:
#telephone#@vtext.com
Verizon
#telephone#@txt.att.net
AT&T Wireless
#telphone#@messaging.sprintpcs.com
Sprint
Standard message charges apply for all carriers.
Popularity: 2% [?]
Business cards: Replaceable with Evernote?
We’ve asked online social tools guru Stowe Boyd to help us tackle the subject of business card clutter. Thank you, Stowe, for again sharing your impressive insights with us!
Business cards are essential, but the form factor — and the business practices based on it — are stuck in the 20th century in their form. They take up room, are inherently difficult to organize, and come in all manners of shapes and sizes. At the same time, who has gone to a meeting, a conference, or even a PTA meeting, and not walked away with a dozen or more cards with names, email addresses, phone numbers, titles … information that later on, down the road, you may want or need to use.
If you are like me, you have no time to fool with keying in all this hypothetically useful information, and since I have no assistant just waiting to demonstrate 60 word per minute keyboard skills, the cards simply have been piling up over the past years. [In fact, in my case, I have been amassing cards on both coasts, since I have San Francisco and DC offices.]
I am aware that there may be services that will take this off your hands for a fee, and various applications that theoretically handle scanning and OCR of business cards, automatically putting contacts in your address book. I haven’t tried the former, but if it involves me mailing stuff to India or something, it’s just too much work. I have tried the scanner applications in the past, like Scanr, but I have never gotten anything like the OCR quality that would allow me to rely on them.
Enter The Cell Phone Camera
Not too long ago, I started an experiment. Since I have a five megapixel camera in my cell phone, why couldn’t I simply take pictures of business cards and then throw the cards away? That failed as an experiment, simply because there were still too many intermediate steps:
- Take the pictures.
- Transfer pictures from the cell phone to my Mac.
- Move the business card pictures to an appropriate folder on the Mac, or upload to a web service, like Flickr, and in either case, name the file the name of the person on it.
This is significantly less than the headaches involved with keying in all the data, but still too much work.
Enter Evernote
A few weeks ago, I bumped into a new application called Evernote that is the answer to my business card prayers. Evernote is both a desktop application for the Mac and a hosted website service, where users’ notes and images are synchronized between the two.
Not only does Evernote allow me to organize both text notes and pictures of all sorts of things into folders, it also has very sophisticated OCR capabilities, able to find words on pictures of oddly shaped objects — like pictures of wine bottles. This capability works handily with relatively flat things, like, no surprise, business cards.
I tested it by moving in all the business card images in that I had captured, and found an extremely high capability to find cards based on name, company name, zipcodes, and nearly anything else in the text. There are some glitches, but the success rate is very high.
Here’s my own card, discovered by searching on “stowe”:
The beauty of this approach is its ease. It’s so easy that I actually take pictures of people’s business cards when they hand them to me, and hand them back! After an event — like the recent Web 2.0 conference — I simply move the pictures to my Mac, and then drag any business card images into the Evernote Mac application. If I revert to actually bringing back cards from an event, I can either snap them with my cell phone, or use the Evernote Snapshot tool, which relies on the iSight webcam in my Mac to take pictures. These are not as high quality as I get with my phone, however, and as a result the search capabilities on these images is less reliable. I was recently advised that I could email images from my phone directly to the Evernote application, which I have yet to try.
I have boxes and boxes of business cards stockpiled, and I may never actually work through those. In fact, I recently just tossed several hundred cards that stretch back to the beginning of the Pleistocene. I did fish out a few, and snapped them, but mostly they went into the recycle bin. After all, people change phones and addresses frequently enough that a three-year-old business card is probably at least 50 percent wrong.
Note that I also can use this to take pictures of whatever I find of interest, or of critical importance, on the web. I could use it to take a screenshot of a LinkedIn profile, for example, in lieu of a person’s business card. As another example, today I screenshot a travel itinerary (via Skitch) and dragged it into Evernote, and I brought it back up by searching for ‘oakland’ and ‘friday’. I am also moving my loyalty cards into Evernote — like my Jetblue, KLM, and Expedia Elite cards — so I don’t have to schlep those around with me, either.
Next?
So don’t be too surprised when colleagues begin taking cell snapshots of your business card at the next mixer you attend, and then hand it back to you. They’ve probably gotten wise to Evernote.
Popularity: 5% [?]
How to digitally encode VHS home movies
One of our readers recently contacted us wondering how best to store her collection of VHS home movies. My response to her was simple — Don’t.
Well, at least don’t store the memories as VHS tapes. I recommended that she have the tapes digitally encoded and store the videos on a hard drive. VHS tapes deteriorate over time and are prone to breaking, and preserving the videos in digital format will help ensure that the memories won’t accidentally be destroyed. Additionally, digital data on a hard drive takes up considerably less physical space than a bunch of VHS tapes.
How do you turn VHS tapes into digital data? Well, there are two ways you can do it: you can have someone else do it, or you can do it yourself.
Someone Else
For $20, Costco will transfer two hours of VHS, S-VHS, VHS-C, Hi-8, Digital 8, 8mm videotape, MiniDV, or Betamax tape to DVD. Once you have the DVD in hand, you just save the files to your computer’s hard drive (assuming your computer can read DVDs). Costco also has a service that transfers 200 feet of 8mm, Super 8, 16mm movie reels to DVD for $20 and another that scans 50 slides to create digital photographs for $20.
There are dozens of other companies out there doing the same thing that Costco is doing, but many require you to ship your tapes to them. If you’re okay with putting your tapes in the mail, here are a couple websites to explore: Family Memories to DVD and The Photo Archival Co.. Be sure to give your local camera shop a call, too, because often they offer these services.
Yourself
If you’re going to go the DIY route, you’ll need either a video capture card or an external capture device to allow you to connect your VCR to your computer. We use the Canopus ADVC110, an external capture device, which has some nice features that help accurately maintain synchronization between audio and video. We’ve had poor luck with less-expensive devices in the past, so be careful when choosing a capture device and be sure to read reviews.
Once you’ve plugged in the ADVC110 and connected it between your VCR and your computer, you’ll need to launch either Microsoft Movie Maker if you’re on a Windows PC or iMovie if you’re using a Mac.
The Canopus will export DV footage just like a camcorder, which will allow you to easily import the footage into the editing program. From there, you can edit the video, create titles, or add music.
When you’re done editing your video, you’ll probably want to burn your movie on a DVD. Follow these directions if you’re using a PC. If you’re using a Mac, just launch iDVD from inside iMovie.
Also, after you finish encoding your collection of VHS tapes, you can sell your capture device or let your friends borrow it.
Popularity: 6% [?]
Printing to PDF
Reader Matthew sent us the following suggestion:
When you buy something online and the site says “Print this receipt page for your records” print it to the PDF printer instead of paper. You can print it out later if you must, and you have it as a record of your order number or parcel tracking number.
Matthew’s suggestion is terrific especially since you don’t need to have a full version of Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional to print to PDF.
On a Mac, go to File > Print, and then click on the PDF button in the lower left hand corner of the pop-up window. The PDF print software comes installed.
On a PC, download and install CutePDF Writer. The program is free and allows you to print straight to PDF through the print function.
On a Linux box, you’ll want to set up a CUPS open printer installation. And, as is the beauty of open source, it’s also free.
Thank you, Matthew, for your suggestion of another way to keep paper from cluttering up our offices!
Popularity: 8% [?]
How is that false sense of security working for you?
You finally got your act together. You went out and bought a Time Capsule or an external hard drive for your computer backups. Now you have a sense of relief knowing that you have a system in place creating periodic backups of all your important data.
I’m here to give you a wake-up call. Right now you’re living in a sugar-coated fantasy world. How is your precious Time Capsule going to help you if your house burns to the ground? How are you planning on drying out that external drive if there is a flood?
If you want real peace of mind, you need an offsite backup. If you don’t have a large amount important data, you can probably get by with one of the online storage options we’ve mentioned in the past. Otherwise, your best option is keeping a physical hard drive in a safe-deposit box.
Rather than buying overpriced external hard drives for offsite backup, I prefer to buy comparatively less-expensive internal drives and use a USB to SATA adapter to connect them to my computer. This strategy saves money and leaves me with fewer cables and power adapters in my closet.
Internal drives are easy to organize when you store them in anti-static cases that are available from WiebeTech. They come with nice, large labels, and you can use the labels to indicate when you last swapped your onsite copy with the one in the safe-deposit box.
Popularity: 5% [?]
A simple way to simplify email — From Stowe Boyd
I love reading different methods for organizing email. Last month’s post from Lifehacker’s Gina Trapani started this discussion, and we’ve asked online social tools guru Stowe Boyd to keep the information flowing. Thank you, Stowe, for sharing your insights with us!
Like many other web professionals, I have migrated from desktop email to Gmail, the Google email service. Gmail has many great qualities, like integrated instant messaging, large storage allotment, and integration with Google Calendar and Google Documents. But for reasons that are totally unclear to me, Google has chosen not to provide an integrated task list solution (or ‘to-do’ lists), either in Google Calendar or Gmail.
However, a small Australian start-up has come to our rescue with an intuitive task list application, called Remember The Milk. The application was originally devised as a standalone task list tool, with rich to-do list tools, including sharing tasks with others. But it is the integration with Gmail that I want to focus on today, since email overload is a growing problem for all of us. There is also an integration with Google Calendar that I will discuss in another post.
The Remember The Milk (RTM) integration with Gmail and Google Calendar require the use of the Firefox browser, which is free from Mozilla. For those of you that are not using Firefox yet, this may be the tipping point in that decision. Once you have installed Firefox, you will need to create a Gmail account, and a RTM account, and then install the Firefox plugin that implements the integration of the two accounts in the browser.
The now familiar Gmail interface is below, in this case, for a sample account I created for this article.
gmail, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
Once the plugin is installed, and you have logged into RTM, you will see a new column to the right on your Gmail interface. This is where tasks are displayed.
RTM 3 col, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
At the top right, RTM’s Tasks widget allows you to simply type in a task, like “Review Quarterly Results”. Immediately below that is a ‘task view’ controller, that allows you to see only a subset of tasks at a time, for example, all tasks tagged “hiring” or tasks filed under “Work”. Under the task view, you can see the task area, in this case ordered by due date.
At this point you might ask, “Why is it so helpful to have a task list in Gmail? Just because I have Gmail open on my desktop?” No. The real benefit is in responding to email immediately, and organizing your response to what is in the email.
We all would like to have an empty email inbox, but very commonly we keep email in the inbox because we need to do something — call someone, look something up, check schedules — before we can respond. With a torrent of email streaming by, we can quickly forget the context for an email — what is the action we are supposed to take, when do I need to respond by, what sort of activity is it — and so we find ourselves reading an email all over again, a few days later, and realizing that we missed a deadline or forgot to follow through.
With the RTM integration, I can simply use the Gmail Star feature for email, and automatically create a RTM task linked to the email. I can set a deadline for my response, for example ‘tomorrow’ or ‘9 May 2008′, and I can create a descriptive name for the action: ‘follow through with Jane Yoo on Jones proposal’. As shown in the screen below, there is an envelope icon in the task that links to the email, so when I get around to responding to a pending email task, I only have to click on the envelope and the email opens: no searching for the lost mail.
RTM tags, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
Since adopting the RTM Gmail integration, I have found my approach to email has changed. I now proceed through email, responding to those that I can immediately, and deferring others by assigning an RTM task. I create a descriptive ‘next action to take’ as the task description, set a deadline for the action, and apply a few descriptive tags, like ‘travel’ or ‘billing’. After wading through new email, I then turn my attention to things that I have to accomplish today, which are (at least in part) listed in the RTM widget. I can pull up a bunch of tasks when it is time to handle them, like a group of planned meetings that need to be scheduled once dates for a trip are set. And as I complete the tasks, I can simply unstar them or click the ‘completed’ box in the task information: in either case, the task is marked done, and leaves the list of pending tasks.
Yes, it is true that I have other locations where I also manage tasks, such as various online collaboration solutions, but the management of the cycle of email communications is significant enough to justify a dedicated solution to handle it, and that is exactly what Remember The Milk provides me.
Popularity: 8% [?]
Unclutterer on Productivity501
Unclutterer recently participated in a group interview for the website Productivty501.com. All of the responses have been collected and were posted over the past two weeks:
The articles are worth reading if you’re interested in productivity issues.
Popularity: 5% [?]
Simple strategies to clear email clutter — From Gina Trapani of Lifehacker
As the final installment in our Unclutterer month of sharing, I am honored to present Gina Trapani, founding editor of Lifehacker.com, a daily blog about software and personal productivity. We are truly honored to have Gina as our keynote guest post author.
Just like physical clutter creates negative psychic weight, so does clutter in the digital spaces we work in every day—like our email inboxes. Email overload is one of the biggest sources of anxiety and overwhelming for anyone who works on a computer every day. When you’re faced with an inbox stuffed with hundreds of messages—and you’re not sure what you meant to do with each of them—it’s too easy to feel like you’re drowning in stuff and you’ll never catch up. Here are a few simple ways you can clean up your email box and get that wonderful feeling of being free and clear of email overload.
The Big Inbox Dump
If you’re starting out with an inbox full of messages dating back months, it’s time to move them out of your sight and start fresh. The reason why all those messages piled up for so long is that you didn’t handle them as they came in, and that’s the first habit you’re going to get into—starting today. Make a new folder called “Backlog,” and move all the messages in your inbox older than a day into that folder. Phew! I bet you feel lighter already. (Don’t worry—we’ll talk about how you’re going to get to those later.)
Make an Empty Inbox a Habit
Starting right here and right now, you’re going to process your email as it comes in, and as you’re done with each message, you’re going to either delete it or file it away in a folder separate from your inbox. This means your inbox will be completely empty—clutter-free!—on a regular basis. From here on in, think of your inbox as a temporary holding pen for stuff you haven’t dealt with yet. (Which, coincidentally, is the definition of “inbox.”) Once you make a decision or take an action on a message, move it out of your inbox. That way, you can see at a glance what email you have to process, and everything else is out of sight (and out of mind.)
The Fewer Folders, The Better
Since we come from the physical, paper world, we tend to have a “filing cabinet” approach to our digital documents. But you don’t have to make as many digital folders as you do physical folders because you can search digital documents like email in ways you can’t search paper. So when you decide on the folders (or Gmail labels) you want to use to organize your email, don’t go overboard. Use as few filing places as possible to keep things simple. Remember, you don’t want to trade inbox clutter for folder clutter.
I recommend using only three folders to organize your email. You can read more about my three-folder “Trusted Trio” system here. (Gmail users, here’s your version.)
Tackle the Backlog
Now that you’ve processed today’s messages and gotten to an empty inbox and a resolution to keep it that way, it’s time to tackle your backlog folder. First, ask yourself: if an email is older than a month, does the sender really still expect a response? Be honest. Most likely, the answer is no. If it was that important, the sender probably contacted you again more recently, or using another method. This may seem scary to some folks, but I recommend taking all the messages older than a month (or even two or three weeks, for the brave!) and simply moving them into your email archive.
Now you’ve got email backlog from the past month to process. Each day, commit to reducing this pile by half. Start at the oldest messages and respond and file using your new folder system. If you’ve got 500 backlogged messages, after the first day you’ll only have 250. After the second, 125. The third, 62, and so on. Within a couple of weeks, using this new system, you’ll be free and clear from email backlog.
Remember: New messages that come in today get priority over backlog. Your new empty inbox habit will be the key to keeping your inbox clutter-free from day to day. Once you’ve read a message, decide what to do with it on the spot. Don’t leave anything in your inbox, and you’ll thank yourself every time you read the words “You have no new messages.”
Gina Trapani’s new book, Upgrade Your Life, is a compilation of Lifehacker.com’s best tips for working smarter. You can download a free sample chapter of Upgrade Your Life at the book’s official web site.
Popularity: 8% [?]
Managing Computer File Clutter Pt. 2: External Storage
A few weeks ago, I wrote about uncluttering your computer’s file system, and several of you left some great comments about how you have incorporated external storage into your setup.
External storage isn’t just for techies with massive drives full of music, movies, and software. It’s essential for backing up files, or for simply getting older files that you need to keep out of the way. For those of you who haven’t used external storage before today, I’ll offer a brief overview to get you started.
First, the cold hard truth. Computer hard drives fail. It’s not a matter of “if,” but “when.” Since they are guaranteed to fail, neglecting to back up your data is one of the quickest routes to an uncluttered computer — but the reality is that it makes about as much sense as uncluttering your home by burning it to the ground. If you’re maintaining an uncluttered file system, you’ve kept files for a reason. Just as we suggest honoring mementos, you should honor the digital files that you don’t delete by keeping them safe.
External storage is also a great way to keep older files from cluttering your search results. I like to archive projects that are over a year old and keep them off of my primary hard drive. This reduces the number of results that come up when I search for files, and also keeps my internal hard drive from becoming full. I also keep all photography and other media files on external storage.
Firewire/USB Drives
These are the simplest of the external storage options. A Firewire/USB drive consists of a normal computer hard drive enclosed in a case that includes Firewire and/or USB connectors. You just plug it in to your computer, and drag-and-drop files to it just like any other folder. Drives like Western Digital’s My Book include one-touch backup to make safeguarding files simple, and smaller USB-powered drives like the Passport let you take lots of files with you without the clutter of extra power cables.
There’s a trade-off for such simplicity, however. External drives, like internal drives, are subject to failure. You should still back up files that you store on an external drive, unless you use the external drive itself only for backup.
Network Attached Storage Devices
Where Firewire/USB drives connect directly to your computer, a network attached storage (NAS) device connects to your home network via a router. Though integrating a NAS into your storage setup adds the complexity of home networking, the additional flexibility can be worth the effort. NAS devices vary from single drives, to multiple drives that offer the benefit of data redundancy; if one drive fails, you can replace it without losing any data.
For my personal storage needs, I invested in a ReadyNAS NV+ loaded with four 750 GB Seagate drives configured in a RAID array. If that seems complicated, it’s much simpler than the half dozen USB drives I’d filled with files, photos and my CDs. If it weren’t for the NAS, I’d have power and USB cables everwhere — talk about clutter!
If you’re comfortable handling hard drives, and don’t need so much storage right away, you can buy your NAS without drives, then get your drives from someplace like NewEgg and install them as you need them. Just keep in mind that you’ll need to install at least two drives to take advantage of drive redundancy.
Online Storage
You’ve got to love the internet. The ubiquity of broadband internet, and declining data storage and bandwidth costs have finally made backing up files online a cost effective alternative to network attached storage. Pricing structures vary among online storage services, but generally a relatively small monthly fee gets you access to enterprise class data centers where your files are protected by the same hardware and geographic redundancy that businesses use to protect their valuable data. The services available are too numerous to list here, but some popular options for you to check out include Mozy, XDrive, Box.net, and Carbonite.
One of my favorite online storage tools is Jungle Disk. Jungle Disk isn’t an online storage service itself, but a program that lets you store and retrieve files on Amazon’s Simple Storage Service just like an external drive on your computer. Jungle Disk is a free download, and you pay Amazon for only the storage space and bandwidth that you use.
If you’ve got a favorite storage or backup solution, please share it with us in the comments!
We hope that everyone has enjoyed Brian’s three-part series on data organization. Brian is one of Unclutterer’s amazing programmers, and we are so happy that he agreed to write this series during our March month of sharing. Thank you, Brian!
Popularity: 10% [?]
Unclutter your computer with a Personal Information Manager
Last week, I offered a few suggestions for uncluttering your computer’s file system and organizing the files that you need to keep using simple folder structures. While that setup works for many types of data, you’re still limited in the way that you can search and use the information you gather. If you write, manage creative projects, or spend time gathering and using research, chances are that such limitations have led you to cobble together your own hybrid system of notebooks, computer files, and physical files.
Enter the personal information manager. A personal information manager takes all of the assorted clippings, bookmarks, images and other files, and stores them in one convenient place. Think of it like a binder without the messy hole punchings. There are several very good PIM tools available that will help you stay organized, but they all have a few simple concepts in common.
One Place
You can’t use information if you don’t remember where you put it. A PIM allows you to gather all of your information in one location. When you need to save a clipping from a website, an image, a PDF, or most other information, you save it into your PIM. Many of the available tools make it incredibly easy to save information with just a few clicks. The important thing is that if you go to save or retrieve information, you’re able to go to one place and be reasonably certain that’s where it is or needs to go.
Convenient Data Input
A data storage system is worthless if it’s too inconvenient to use for storing data. The idea is to save your clippings, images and other files as you encounter them, whether you’re surfing the web, reading e-mail or creating the data yourself. A good personal information manager makes this a snap. Several of the more popular PIMs include “dropboxes” that sit on your desk top waiting for you to drag content into them, add options to dropdown menus, and take advantage of keystrokes. It doesn’t get much easier than that.
Metatagging
Searching is great, but sometimes it’s easier to work with information if you can group it with other similar information. If you do a lot of research, this is especially critical. Personal Information Managers almost universally support the ability to tag information with metadata. For example, if you were to save a copy of this article, you might assign the tags “uncluttering,” “computer software” and “personal information managers.” Then you can easily search for all other content that you’ve saved with the same tags. Most of the available PIMs include the ability to create folders based on your metatags. This allows you to automatically group data together, allowing you to use it easier.
Available PIMs
Here are a few of the more popular Personal Information Managers for Macs and PCs. Most of these programs have trial versions so you can download them and figure out which one works best for you.
Mac:
- DEVONthink - The most full-featured of the Mac PIMs. Also the priciest if you want the advanced features. Somewhat steep learning curve. But, if you’re willing to spend some time with it, it’ll end up saving you lots of time down the road. The “Pro Office” version of DEVONthink integrates very well with our favorite document scanner, the Fujitsu ScanSnap.
- Yojimbo - My personal favorite. Fast and easy to use, with “smart” folders for grouping tagged content. Doesn’t support all file types, but integrates well with other Mac programs.
- SOHO Notes - Handles most file types, and supports aliases. Truly “One Place.” Very convenient input. Lots of useful features, but like DEVONthink, you’ll need to spend some time with it to really take advantage of what it offers.
- Journler - Targeted toward bloggers and writers. Integrates well with iLife, and, like SOHO Notes, supports pretty much any file type. Integrates with various blogging software.
- Bento Personal Database - This newcomer to the Mac PIM scene has more of a project focus. I haven’t dug deep into it yet, but based on what I’ve seen so far, this one has the best shot at replacing Yojimbo in my workflow.
PC:
- One Note - Excels as a repository for digital notes. Supports drawings and handwriting (which is searchable). Integrates well with other MS Office applications, and Internet Explorer. Limited support for tagging.
- Evernote - Very similar to One Note, and offers a free version, as well as a Linux version. Includes text recognition in files, but lacks integration with MS Office. Also doesn’t support PDF files beyond linking.
Web:
- Google Notebook - Great for gathering text data and bookmarks on the web. Works well with Google Documents, and you can make your notebooks public. Doesn’t support organizing other files, but you can access your notes from anywhere that you can get on the internet.
Popularity: 15% [?]
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