Patrick’s Musings

A month ago I took a leap into the unknown world of Smartphones and purchased a Blackberry Bold 9000. This is my first 3g internet enabled phone. After 3 happy years with my Motorola L6 and GPRS. Naturally I’m eagre to start using my GtD system on it. Especially as my employer blocks both Evernote & Sugarsync from the office.

I have installed Evernote for Blackberry, Remember the Milk‘s RTM for Blackberry and SugarSync for Blackberry. Three fantastic applications that I use daily. Sugarsync is not strictly GTD, it’s a file synchronisation program that allows me to keep important documents synced between my 3 computers, PDA and now my Blackberry. How can I Get Things Done if I don’t have access to my files?

I also have Google Sync for Blackberry to keep my Calendar & Contacts up to date.

First up, gripes. RtM for Blackberry uses Blackberry categories to sync to RtM lists, not tags. As the Blackberry allows multiple category per todo item and RtM only allows an item to be in one list I think this is a big fail by RtM, who I normally think of as a fantastic and enlightened company. Sugarsync also has a major flaw, when attempting to open a PDF on my Blackberry it gives an error that I don’t have a default viewer installed. Despite the fact the Blackberry Messaging and Browser both open PDF files without an issue.

Now, the system.

• I use Evernote to capture all my notetaking thoughts. Minutes in meetings, pictures I take, audio thoughts etc.
• I rely on the task manager to know what I’m doing. Everytime I get a task I record it in the task manager. Using classic GTD style categories, @work, @home, @computer etc.
• I use the Calendar for fixed date events & the tasks list for due anytime events.
• I ignore emails and SMS when I am in a ‘non phone’ environment, for instance in a meeting.

Because I always have my phone on me, I can review tasks at will. When I’m on the train, waiting for the train, standing in line at the supermarket, I can whip out my Blackberry open the task manager and review my task list quickly and easily. The weekly review was always my GTD failure. I never did it. Now I do a daily or even hourly review. Not stricly what David Allen suggests, but the important thing is, it works for me.

Is it making me hyper productive? Not yet, but I think I’ve improved.

Tips:

• I wired the left hand quick access key to Evernote. Quick access makes a difference.
• I still stick to the ‘if it’s going to take less than 2 minutes and you can do it now, do it now’ rule.
• Buy an extended battery. All this lifehacking really drains the juice. Especially minuting a meeting in Evernote.
• I scan every paper document I get and put it in a Sugarsync managed folder. If someone calls me while I’m in thousands of kilometres from home to talk about an invoice they sent me, I darn well want to be able to find that invoice then and there. If I received it, it will be in Sugarsync.

Yesterday afternoon, after almost a year in EWB I met our benevolent dictator, CEO & Founder of EWB Australia, Daniel Almagor. It was just a quick catch up, and mostly we talked about fatherhood and the growing pains of a young organisation like EWB Australia. I did take some time to show him some of the features of our new website that is coming up, and gave him a brief tour of Basecamp which we use for project management in the NSW chapter.

I had been told that Danny was a real presence in the room, and that’s true. He positively glows with energy and passion which is fantastic, and I’m looking forward to working with him in the future.

If you’re interested in Basecamp come along to Connecting Up 09 where I’ll be doing a 45 minute workshop and presentation on how EWB uses Basecamp and over tools to save time and money.

For a long time I thought Firefox with 20 extensions and 50 greasemonkey scripts was more perfect browser, then Google released Chrome and I instantly fell in love with its speed and features. Sure the beta versions sometimes hang, but overall it was a real pleasure to use. Except for one problem, a website I use daily, often for hours, which Google Chrome can’t manage as well as Firefox can. The site you ask? Google Reader. I receive 200-500 articles a day in Google Reader, and in Firefox I can fly through them using keyboard shortcuts, j/k for down/up, S for sharing, e for email etc. And the most wonderful shortcut of all v to view the article on it’s original website. What’s that you say, all those work in Google Chrome, well yes, they sure do, but Firefox has a setting in about:config that is called browser.tabs.loadDivertedInBackground. This means any link that would normally open in a new tab or window, instead opens in a background tab. So I can fly through the headlines, open the articles I want to read in the background and read them at my leisure later.

Not so in Google Chrome. The links open in the foreground, interupting my browsing and forcing me to ctrl-tab to the next window. This is inefficient and makes browsing annoying. Back to firefox for me until Google gets this one sorted out. I’m not the only disgruntled Google Chrome user switching back. Sure I’ll miss some features. But I’m sure someone will create a Firefox extension to implement them soon. Stephen Shankland over at Cnet lists a couple of the features that Firefox needs to match Chrome.

I’ve just found another feature that Google Chrome doesn’t have that drives me bonkers, in WordPress when I highlight a word and press the link shortcut a popup alert box asks me for the URL I want to insert, in Firefox the text field is already active and I can press ctrl-v and enter to create the link, Chrome doesn’t even activate the window, so I have to click my mouse on the window first to be able to enter the URL. Gah!

Happy happy, joy joy. Yesterday I received my new iPAQ 212, a glorious PDA with a 4″ VGA screen. Replacing my broken but not forgotten Dell Axim X51v.

After installing all my favourite apps, well ok, after install Mobipocket Reader & Remember the Milk Sync, I was recommended to Touch Commander. A quick download of the demo & I am in love. Touch Commander brings finger gesture commands to Windows Mobile, in a similar fasion to the iPhone.

Oh the love, it works just like it says on the tin. I can open applications and browse my music and photos with ease.

I can’t be bothered writing a full article at this time, but had a read of Scott Yang’s blog to get a similar view.

Issues:

1: DVD turn around is slow.
2: TV Series DVDs sent out of order (what, do they want me to copy them so I can watch them in the correct order later?).
3: Very very poor customer service. Have had my account put on hold several times because Quickflix had a problem with the billing, not because my credit card was bad. Called up, basically told deal with it, we’ll reinstate your account now and you might get some more dvds in the mail next week.
4: Did I mention they are slow?

I pay $46.95 per month to have 4 DVDs out at a time. I receive the DVD I watch the DVD I post it back. It’s not unusual for me to watch 3 or 4 a day as I have a long commute and don’t sleep much. I would expect that in any given week I’d receive between 10 and 12 dvds, instead I average at 8.

Blockbuster and Civic have better deals that get me more DVDs and in the order I want. I’d rather have the inconvenience of going to the store than the inconvenience of not having any DVDs that I’ve payed $46 for and still having to go the local video store to get a movie.

I’ve often quested for the best way for me to keep track of my ToDo list. To date this has involved a paper diary, a notepad, a PDA, gmail, gcal, outlook and not enough time. Most of my list items do not have Due by dates, they just have to be done. Often the things I want to do I think of while I am away from my computer, pda, notepad or have lost my pen. But what do I always have on me? My mobile phone of course. Can you imagine leaving the home without it? I could just save notes on it, I do have a java notepad installed, but it isn’t conducive to me being reminded of the list. Finally I have found myself a nice solution that is more or less automatic.

1. Sign up for Jaiku or Twitter or a similar service. I use Jaiku because Twitter never received my SMS confirmation. (Apparently a known issue for Australians).
2. Add Jaiku/Twitter to your address book on your phone. I called the entry ” Jaiku” the leading space ensures it is the very first entry in my phonebook.
3. Configure your Jaiku account to be private if you don’t want this information to be published.
4. Get the (private) RSS feed for your Jaiku account. If you do want it to be private to get the private feed url, click on the “overview” tab and use the RSS feed from that page, not the “Your Jaiku’s” tab.
5. Forward that feed to your email. I found the easiest way for me was to use RSS2Email as I have my own Unix server with a 24/7 network connection. If you don’t you could use RSSFwd or a similar service, though I found them to be not as responsive. If you are using Gmail, forward them to a custom address ie username+rssnotes@gmail.com.
6. There is no step 6.
7. username+rssnotes@gmail.com (or all emails from jaiku or something similar) as **To Do** use the asterisks to put the To Do label at the top of your labels list. ( I also have it set to skip the inbox and forward a copy to my work email address to get the reminder into outlook as well).
8. When inspiration strikes and you are alone in the world with no convenient pen, wifi, pda or similar, SMS your stroke of genius to Jaiku (or Twitter) and voila a few minutes later depending on your rss 2 email setup the message is in gmail and looking prominent at the top of your label box.
9. Once I have completed a task I mark the email as read. Because a Jaiku or Twitter message is quite small by default normally the subject of the email will be the whole reminder. “Buy milk”, “Pickup Son from daycare” etc.

Note: Once this is setup, you only have to do steps 8 and 9 on a regular basis you’ll never have to setup the rest again.

This morning I had to mount a hidden share on my OS X laptop. Imagine my surprise when it didn’t work. I opened up the finder and connected to the server, authenticated fine and then got “error -50″. Well, no error was going to stop me, off to Google I went and searched for the error. According to Apple this error means:

-50 paramErr Error in user parameter list

But what the heck does that mean? A bit more searching and I find it is an error generated when connecting to a Windows server that only has hidden shares. Apple in all their wisdom don’t have an easy way to connect to hidden shares. Back to Google and I search for such terms as “OS X connecting to hidden shares”, “OS X ‘error -50′ hidden shares” & “connecting to hidden SMB shares from OS X” to no avail. I finally tracked down this article at Lifehacker that included a neat little applescript for automating mounting of shares. Well that same script works for hidden shares too, so hear it is, the easy apple script to connect (and authenticate) to a hidden CIFS share on a Windows server.

tell Application "Finder"
Mount volume "smb://DOMAIN,USERNAME:PASSWORD@MACHINE/SHARE"
end tell

Obviously replace all the names in capital letters with your information, if you aren’t on a DOMAIN replace that with WORKGROUP. Enjoy!

I was reading Mark Lewis’ blog, the blog of the Executive Vice President and Chief Development Officer of my employer EMC & whilst I don’t have time to write up a big post about this now but I wonder if Australian law would allow a company to store a users video files off site and allow them on access demand to them over the Internet. It would save millions (perhaps billions) of dollars in hardware costs, as only one copy of a file would need to be stored no matter how many users ‘owned’ the right to watch it.

If only Australia had some sort of high speed fibre broadband network to 98% of the population to carry all that data. I don’t think Telstra’s 256k broadband will quite cut it.

I was glancing through one of the thousands of rss feeds I get every day at Google Reader when this postby Mitch Joel caught my attention. I have a passing interest in the democamp idea, but it was the footnote of his blog that I was most caught by, Mitch asks:

How are we going to manage all of this content and conversation? Clearly it won’t just be Google Reader (I’m currently staring at 7002 unread Blog postings) or iTunes (I have over thirty Podcasts that have not been listened to). Is it a question about the amount of content and not how we manage it?

I myself have often asked this, asides from the 4-6 podcasts a week I listen to for university, there are dozens that I’d like to listen to, if only I had the time. RSS feeds are the same, I subscribe to 20-30 blogs, a dozen news outlets, the press release feeds of most Australian political parties & several action groups. To top this off, and what brought me to Mitch’s blog, I subscribe to another dozen feeds of Google Blog Search. For those who don’t know, Google Blog Search feeds dutifully search blogs for your selected keywords, and then provide you with the RSS feed. Neat isn’t it!

I tend to spend about an hour a day looking at Google Reader, that isn’t even a tenth of the time it would take for me to read all the posts, I search the page as best as I can considering Google Blog Search has NO search function. I browse through the page as fast as my mousewheel can take me, and pick out keywords. (That’s how I found Mitch’s blog). I also sort my personal “must read” blogs, like Oz Politics Blog into their own category so I will read every entry in those blogs, this is a much more manageable 150 odd posts a day.

I throw down the gauntlet to people who can program better than I, build me a better mousetrap, erm, feed reader. Google reader would be great, if it had a search function, could learn what I like based on stars and highlight things that might be of interest to me & keep track of feeds better. I often see the same entry from Digg multiple times because it was exported under multiple categories.

*edit* It appears I’m not the only person who gets multiple posts of the same feed, Michael Gray recently ranted about it too.