Switchers?

If you've recently switched from Windows to Mac, congrats!

Easy as the Mac operating system is, however, there are a few things that can confuse long-time Windows users. Here's a great piece from the Houston Chronicle that covers the top points of confusion. Among other tips, it addresses keyboard shortcuts and menu bars.

Even those of you who have been with your Mac for a little while might find a tip or two.

CD Burning in Windows

I know people who have CD burners in their PC desktop or laptop computers who have never once actually burned a CD - all because it seems intimidating on the surface. Sometimes the CD burning "suites" that come with PCs are in fact overwhelming, with lots of options and modes and so forth. Nero comes to mind. Nero used to be a great CD burning application for Windows, but over time got really bloated and cumbersome. I haven't used Roxio's EZ-CD-Creator or whatever it's now called in a long time, but it was HORRIBLE.

Mac users have the excellent, easy-to-use Toast program. But what are Windows users to do if they want to just burn some simple data CDs - say, backups of their documents, for example?

Fortunately there's an easy answer, and you don't even have to buy anything. You can burn CDs directly in Windows, using nothing but Windows Explorer. Here's how!

To get started, pop in a blank CD (duh!) You might have to wait a few seconds, but eventually two things will happen. First, the icon for your CD drive will change and indicate you’re now working with a recordable CD. It will say “CD-R” on the icon. Second, a window will come up asking what you want to do with this blank CD:



Choose Open Writeable CD folder. (You may see other options there based on whatever burning programs came with your computer) A new folder will open on your desktop, showing the drive letter and icon for your blank CD:



Now, drag the stuff you want to burn to CD into this window. If it’s a lot of data, Windows will take a little time scanning through your source materials. Then Windows will copy the files you've chosen to a temporary holding area, in preparation for the burn. Nothing is on the CD at this point.

When the disk burn utility is done preparing your files, your Window will look like this:



Right-click anywhere in that window and select Write these files to CD when you’re ready.

A window will pop up asking you to name the CD first. You get 16 characters total, which includes spaces. Burn baby burn!

Handy capture utility

If you use the Firefox Web browser on Windows (which I highly recommend), there's a great plug-in for taking browser screen grabs called, what else, ScreenGrab. It lets you take a screen shot of the entire Web page (even if parts of it aren't visible without scrolling), take a snap of just the visible portion of a page, or select the precise area to capture.

ter it's installed and you restart your browser, you'll see a little doo-hickey in the lower right corner of the Firefox window. Just right-click it and capture away!

This beats the default Windows screen capture approach, which is to capture the entire screen.

Note that Mac users can already do a variety of screen grabs without anything extra - it's built into the operating system. Just hit Command-Shift-3 to capture the entire screen or Command-Shift-4 to define an area.

Framing a new threat

Anybody have one of those digital picture frames? I've always thought they were pretty neat. Being one who finds dealing with printing a real chore, I've come close to getting one more than a few times. I wonder if they come with a digital version of the stock photography family that always looks so happy, frolicking in the park under a shady tree, like the "regular" frames have?

Turns out that there is one thing some of these digital photo frames come with that you do NOT want. Viruses! According to this article they're arriving from China with trojans installed that try to gather passwords and install backdoors into your computer for installing MORE trojans and viruses. Yikes.

Now that I think about it, think of the potential for havoc if baddies infiltrated manufacturing plants for other cheap storage devices and put bad stuff on them. Boatloads of flash memory cards, cheap hard drives http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifand portable music players, keychain drives, etc. Most people, myself included before I heard of this, just carve these gadgets out of their ridiculous blister-pack packaging and start using 'em.

Picasa is Pretty Cool

It's been a while since I tried Google's Picasa photo software. Being a Mac guy and advanced amateur, I use Adobe's Lightroom program for developing and printing digital photos. But, I'm helping a friend tomorrow with her digital camera and Picasa (hey Rhonda!), so I thought I should brush-up a bit.

Leave it to Google to provide lots of awesomeness, for free. Picasa is speedy, intuitive, and full of useful features that should satisfy most people simply interested in getting their digital camera photos onto their computers, and sharing with friends. Some highlights:

• It appears, though I'm not certain yet, that it lets you make some basic edits to your photos in a non-destructive manner, meaning that it saves a list of edits you've selected and shows you those edits applied to your photo, but doesn't actually change the pixels in the photo file itself. This is key - you can always go back to your original.
• If you have a Google account, you can upload your files and share them on the Web at Picasa's Web albums sites. Again, free. The Web galleries are simple, clean, and quite nice actually. Once I gave Picasa my Google account info, I selected a handful of photos from my Middle Creek Collection and clicked Web Album, and it did the rest. Here's the Picasa gallery it generated. You control who can see your album and obtain the link by signing into your Google account on the Web.
• You can have Picasa automatically "watch" folders. I tried this and it seemed to work very well. I created a new folder on my desktop called "photo test." I dragged a handful of photos into that folder, and Picasa nearly instantly populated my photo library with thumbnails.
• You can send your photos directly to your Blogspot page, if you keep one.
• The collage feature is cool. You can make a picture grid, picture pile, or standard contact sheet.
• It has a handy "locate this picture on disk" function so you can figure out where the actual files are located which correspond with your library images.
• It's got a nice backup feature that helps you burn your images to CD.
• It's free
• It also has the other standard photo library software functions you'd expect such as a slideshow and screensaver generator, and integrated "order prints" feature
  

Maybe I'm not really telling you Windows users anything you didn't already know. If so, sorry! Fellow Mac users, don't be so smug about iPhoto. In a lot of ways, I'm liking this better. It sure seems more responsive and intuitive, and being able to link-up with major services like the ones Google offers - for free - beats iPhoto's "iLife" integration that requires a for-pay .Mac account to truly leverage. Oh, and it has a Mac-based, stand alone uploader program you can use to send photos to your Picasa web page, as well as an iPhoto plug-in.

I haven't tried printing or anything yet, and I didn't see much there in terms of working with image metadata - which is important if you have a large photo library. It might be there and I just haven't looked hard enough yet.

A Dirty Job

One thing I see a LOT when helping people with their Macs or PCs is DUST. That’s because while a lot of people might keep the outside of their systems relatively clean, they probably don’t think much about what might be going on inside. Why would it be dirty in there?

Fact is, any tower-based system is a dust collection bin. The fan in the back that blows out warm air…where do you suppose that air comes from originally? That’s right – there are intake vents in your PC, maybe several. The intakes, usually in the front, are there to keep the inside from getting too hot: fans in the back pull air over all the components.

A couple of things can happen if you don’t check for and deal with dust build-up. First, when everything inside gets coated with a layer of fine dust, everything runs hotter. This can cause components to wear and fail more quickly.

More importantly, what often happens is this: big, gross balls of dust, carpet fiber, and pet hair accumulate over the intake vents and inside fan propellors. This reduces or totally stops air flow, and then – combined with the finer dust covering interior components – everything REALLY gets hot. And, your fans will live a much shorter life as well, because they’re working very hard at removing air that isn’t there. Kind of like if you run a pump dry.

I snapped a few photos of a recently retired PC - this is what I typically find:



On the left, you can see dust clogging-up the openings where air should be flowing freely. On the right, dust has collected on top of the video card.

I’ve seen dustballs the size of my fist, and that’s not an exaggeration. When I’m working on somebody’s machine in my basement “lab” and see this sort of trouble brewing, I usually put on an allergy mask, take it outside, and blow out the large bits with a can of compressed air. Then I vacuum out as much dust as I can using a crack/crevice attachment and a soft brush attachment.

You can do the same, and help your machine run better. After all, your computer runs on software – but at heart it’s still a machine with moving parts, little motors, and circuit boards. There are even ball bearings in there somewhere!

You can probably find the instructions on how to open your case from your manufacturer’s web site, and some systems are so easy to open you might not even need them. When the side and/or top cover and face covers are off, you’ll probably get a better view of where the intake vents are.

Now, you do want to be very careful about vacuuming – avoid wires and such and don’t press or drag a plastic vacuum hose or tool directly onto any surfaces other than solid metal or plastic casing areas. If you’re not sure about vacuuming, just don’t do it . Just blowing it out and maybe clearing the intake vents and fan motors of gunk and getting rid of the big stuff will have you breathing a sigh of relief.

Do I have to mention that you should NOT try to clean anything inside with any sort of liquid? Well, you never know…

Also, this kind of dust collection is not usually a concern for laptops or iMacs; those types of systems are sealed-up pretty well.

If you have questions about cleaning out your system, feel free to ask!

iPod Touch observations

Friends and family are always asking me what I think about Apple’s latest and greatest products, usually within a few days of them being released – as if Steve Jobs send me samples in advance of the general public. Don’t I wish.

I got more questions about the newest iPod touch models than probably anything else, but the Macbook Air is closing in. Anyway, I don’t own an iPod touch, but I do own an iPhone and its iPod functionality is pretty much the same as the iPod Touch’s. And I don’t care for it much. I didn’t get the iPhone for its music capabilities; I always viewed it as a nice “extra.” If I was stuck somewhere (waiting at the Ford garage, for example) and didn’t have my iPod, I could always use the phone to chill out with some Ryan Adams.

Here’s what I don’t like about it: First, the cost: You pay a premium for the admittedly sexy iPod touch interface. When you compare prices with the iPod Classic, the cost per megabyte is through the roof. If you don’t have much music to tote around, maybe it’s not an issue. But I do, and I like choices. I never know when I’ll be in the mood for Metallica or Marley. I don’t want to have to constantly manage my music player's content and make space. My main iPod is a last-generation iPod 80 gig – only half the size of the newer iPod Classics – yet I rarely have to plug it to iTunes. 80 gigs of music is enough to keep me happy, and I only plug-in to add new albums. Second, the useability. Grrr.

Here are some things that you can’t do with an iPod touch:

• See the screen very well in even moderately bright light, especially if you’ve got it greased up a good bit.
• Work it with gloves, even thin gloves
• Work the touch screens if your hands are the slightest bit damp.
• Control the volume or skip tracks without looking at it. This is huge. I don't want to whip that bad boy out each and every time I want to adjust the volume or skip a track.

The thing that makes it supercool-looking – the glass and the touch interface – make it lousy to control if you actually use your iPod while on the go. I took a walk at lunch today with my iPhone, and found the whole experience pretty frustrating. Maybe if I was sitting on the couch, or using it at my desk, it wouldn’t be so bothersome. I can't even imagine what a nightmare this thing would be to use in a vehicle.

I also don’t care for the software interface itself. White type on a black screen, and way too much emphasis on Cover Art. I mean, really. I don't understand some people's obsessions with cover art or "Cover Flow." You can’t see the covers all that well, no matter what kind of iPod you own. And, once you’ve seen it the cover of Lenny Kravitz's new album – well, who cares after that? I’m a music fan, not a cover art fan. I'll buy a poster if I need to look at Lenny that often. Bottom line, I just don't feel compelled to walk around looking at my iPod screen. I'm in enough danger of getting hit by a bus because of the loud heavy metal blaring through the headphones, without also not paying attention because I'm looking at the cover of my favorite Ozzy album.

Finally, I find the “feature” where the screen rotates depending on how you’re holding the iPod touch/iPhone very, very irritating. Every time I pulled it out of my jacket, I had to wait for the screen to reorient itself back to vertical. That’s because when it sits in my jacket pocket, it tends to lay horizontally.

Yeah, I know I've glossed over a lot, and not included the kind of detail found in a good review such as one you might get at ars.technica. These are just my impressions, and the dealbreakers for me cancel out any of the other cool stuff like WiFi or games or video. I'm only interested in the music player aspect of my iPods. Well, there you have it.

Do you have an iPod touch, or use the iPod features of your iPhone? If so, I'm curious to hear your opinions!

GTD tip - voice recorder

Did you check out any of the GTD stuff I linked to in my post about Nozbe and the Getting Things Done system?

No? That’s OK, I’m sure you’ll get to it eventually. You’ve made a mental note to check it out sometime, right? Hardy har.

Well, if you have started looking into it, you’ve probably discovered that one of the first steps of implementing a good GTD system and increasing your productivity is learning how to collect all the informational "stuff" that flies at you all day long.

When you’re at your computer or you have your trusty notebook or stack of index cards handy, it’s easy to capture all the tasks your brain realizes you must finish to move your projects forward.

I don’t know about you, but I find that my brain turns to my work a good bit when I’m driving. Then what?

Simple. Buy an inexpensive micro voice recorder, and keep it in your briefcase or purse on the seat or in your coin tray at all times. If your brain reminds you of something you need to add to that big proposal you’re working on, hit record and speak your notes. When you’re back in a “normal” office environment, just hit play and get your notes into shape. It’s all part of the belief that your brain isn’t always the best place to store bunches of mental sticky notes. Have the thought, record it somehow to a location where you know you’ll see/hear it again, and move on. Make room for more ideas.

This has worked great for me. I have an Olympus tapeless recorder, takes a single AAA battery, and it wasn’t really that expensive. Picked it up at Staples, I believe. It even plugs into my computer via USB and I can download the recordings onto my hard drive, although honestly I haven’t needed to do that.

You can have fun with this, too. When you’re waiting at an especially long traffic light, glance over at the car next to you. Look the vehicle up-and-down like you’re seeing something really interesting. If you catch the driver’s eye, lift the recorder to your face and begin speaking into it, all the while maintaining visual contact. Heck, it doesn’t even have to be on. Shake your head side to side as if to say “tsk tsk,” smile, and put the recorder down right before the light turns green.

OK, don't really do that. Unless it's somebody you know. And maybe not even then. But it was fun to imagine, eh?

Nozbe and the Art of Getting Things Done

If you’ve known me for any length of time, you know that I’m somebody who keeps a lot of irons in the fire. I’m not bragging – I don’t always know if it’s a good thing or not.

But one thing I do know is that if it weren’t for David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) book and productivity system, I’d be struggling to keep up with everything. Allen’s two books, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress Free Productivity and Ready For Anything have really changed how I look at work and life in general.

I started this post as a quick review of Nozbe, an online application that helps you “do” GTD. But it’s kind of hard to talk about GTD services or software without an overview of GTD itself.

This is a long summary, but I really couldn’t decide what could be cut-out. If you’re interested in the GTD concept at all, however, I don’t think you’ll find it a long read.

GTD is a system of productivity and task management that’s based on a few key principles and ideas:

• Your mind is a terrible place to store and organize tasks – it doesn’t have a lot of RAM so to speak. Don’t rely on it; it will eventually let you down. You know this to be true.
• The minute you accept responsibility for a task, your brain – whether actively or on a subconscious level – thinks it should be doing it. All the time. And it’ll remind you about it at the worst possible times.
• A bunch of loose-ends and “stuff” – such as to-do lists to review, mail to go through, phone calls to return, shopping to pick up, emails to pick through, books to read, research to conduct, and other agreements you’ve made with yourself – end up as tasks colliding in your mind. This produces mental stress and inhibits creativity.
  
• Think about the modern information worker today – we’re constantly “connected,” checking in at the office from vacations, working extra long hours, reading and researching voraciously, and yet our list of things to do never seems to get any shorter. Is it because there’s so much more work to do – or is it because we haven’t adapted the way we look at work to the realities of the information age?
• A key to freeing up your mental energy is a regular review of your “stuff,” whereby you decide first “What is this?” and then, “What do I do with it?” Things that can be done right away, do right away. Things that belong to somebody else to do, delegate. Things that need no action should either be filed away or thrown out. What you end up with are distinct, “do-able” projects, each organized into tasks – and each with a “next action” required to move the project along. If you have 5 projects, each with 10 tasks, you don’t stare at a list of 50 things to do. You review a list of 5 next actions required to move those projects forward.
• A task is the smallest unit of measurement when it comes to getting things done. “Build Web Site for Acme Company” is not a task, it’s a project. What is the very first physical, do-able thing you’d have to do move towards having Acme Company’s Web site done? That’s your next action. What other discrete actions will have to happen? Design the navigation menu; remind the client to email the Word documents containing the content; review those Word documents; call the client’s printer for the most recent logo file; register the domain name; and so forth.
• A key to getting those projects done is looking at the contexts in which their tasks can be completed. There’s no point looking at tasks classified as “At computer” while you’re riding the bus to work.
• The specifics of the “trusted system” for storing your projects, tasks, and context info is less important than sticking with the GTD principles, even though at first it might seem counterproductive. If software helps you to be more organized and let the ball drop much less often, so be it. By the same token, many practitioners of GTD use a stack of index cards and a pencil.
  

When you start to get good at GTD, you really do find that the mental energy you recover can help boost your productivity because you’re doing just the right things at the right times, in the right places, to get projects completed. You’re not worrying about things that aren’t yours to worry about, and there’s no nagging feeling that you’re letting something important slip through the cracks.

Anyway, I could go on about GTD forever, but again the point of this post was to mention Nozbe, the Web-based subscription service for implementing GTD. (Note that I don't have screen shots here because, well, I don't necessarily want to share my live project data with the world. But the Nozbe site has plenty of screen grabs and you can sign up for a demo as well).

Nozbe sticks pretty faithfully to Allen’s principles, offering you three main views of your working life after you sign-in: Next Actions, Projects, and Contexts. It’s simple and straightforward. There are probably a dozen other features that could be added to Nozbe, but the goal for Nozbe is to be your “trusted place” for your project and task info, with no complicated interface elements getting in the way of that. To the uninitiated, it may even seem overly simplistic; to them I respond: “It’s exactly as complicated as it needs to be, and not a bit more.”

I’ve tried several dedicated software programs for implementing my GTD system, including GhostAction, iGTD, and OmniFocus. They’ve all got great features and would probably work well for many people. Personally, though, I need “always-on” access to my GTD info, whether I’m at the office, at home, or on-site with a customer...or even in my vehicle. Being Web-based, Nozbe is great for me because it’s a simple log-in to my account, and all my info is there. With the others, you’ve got to use a .Mac account to sync between computers – and I like keeping my .Mac stuff nice and simple, using it only for calendars and contacts. I’ve found that getting too fancy with it ends up causing sync problems. Yes, .Mac is far, far from perfect.

Even better, Nozbe has an iPhone version of its web page that works GREAT. You can even pick an alternate iPhone-friendly login with a short name and simple PIN number, making it easier to log-in from the iPhone’s touch screen.

Of course, a downside could be that if you can’t get online, you can’t get to your GTD info. Well, most of what I do involves having to be online in one form or another. If my Internet connection at home or work goes down, I can’t do 95% of my stuff anyway. And, because GTD requires periodic review of your projects and tasks, it’s not like I can’t remember anything stored in my trusted system.

Nozbe is subscription-based; I’ve got two – a Nozbe account for my personal endeavors, and one for my full-time job. They offer a free version with a limited number of projects and contexts, a basic plan that costs $5 per month (or less if you prepay for a year), and more advanced accounts offering online storage, enhanced security, etc. I use the basic plan, prepaid for 2 years, which ends up costing under $6 per month for two Nozbe accounts. That’s about four cups of coffee – well worth the boost in productivity and satisfaction I derive from, well, getting things done.

In fact, when you learn the GTD system in both theory and practice, you’ll wonder how you ever managed before. It’s a great thing to do a GTD project review on a Friday afternoon, know exactly what you need to do on Monday morning and the rest of next week. And then, completely forget about it - in a good way: Instead of feeling like I got nowhere all week at work, and wondering if I should come in Saturday to catch-up, and generally spinning my wheels, I’m thinking about how much fun I’m going to have grabbing my camera bag and a few lenses and heading out to the countryside to try out some new photography techniques. My work will be waiting for me on Monday, and I’ll know exactly what to do next.

If you want to give it a try, click the link below and sign up for your free Nozbe account. However, I recommend you read the Allen books first, maybe read them twice, before buying any software or service. They're available at Amazon and other retailers as well as at your local library.



I should let you know in the interest of journalistic integrity, that if you decide that you like Nozbe and convert to a paid account, I get a referral free. However, that wasn't the motive for this post, and I didn't realize they had this program until after I'd invested the time on this entry.

Have you read the David Allen books or tried GTD yet? What are your experiences? Feel free to share by posting a comment here!

GoDaddy vs. Register.com

I've been moving domain names as they come up for renewal, away from Register.com to GoDaddy.

I hate GoDaddy's name and dislike its cheesy advertising, but I gotta say this - they are a TON cheaper, and those dislikes are not strong enough for me to hurt my own bottom line.

Fact is, for somebody like me who doesn't need Web or email hosting (sure is nice having my own server!), there is literally no difference between register.com and GoDaddy - except that register.com charges $35 for a year, and GoDaddy $7-$15 depending on active promotions.

A domain name is something that, once you purchase it and set it up for your web site, is largely invisible. Why pay extra for it?

There was a time when GoDaddy had a bad reputation for customer support and glitches, but those times appear to be in the past, and I find their support people much more personable and knowledgeable than those of Register.com. I will say that you have to be careful when registering domains at GoDaddy, because they throw all kinds of "extras" and special deals at you. Just keep looking for the "no thanks" buttons, ha ha..

If you want to move a name away from your current registrar to GoDaddy, be aware that you want to start the process at least several weeks before the name comes up for renewal. It takes both registrars time to update their databases. Also, before you start the process, make sure you check the contact info for your domain name and make sure it's up-to-date with your current email address. Otherwise, you won't be able to receive the "do you approve?" messages both registrars will send to the domain holder.

The other things that have to be done:

• Turn off domain locking at register.com
• Call register.com to obtain an Authorization Code, which is needed when moving domain names from one registrar to the other
• Go to GoDaddy and under Domains, select Transfer a Domain, and set up your new account.
• When you kick-off the transfer at GoDaddy, you'll get an email from GoDaddy with two special codes. You'll use these codes and the veeeeryyy long authorization code from Register.com to proceed and validate the transfer.

It seems complicated, but it's not as bad as it looks. I do understand that these registrars need to make it complex enough to prevent fraud and abuse.

Anyway, it's worth it. It took me half an hour to move a domain name, but over the course of five years I'll save about $75.

Now, multiply this by dozens and dozens of domain names, and you too will understand why the Register.com agent who asks "May I ask why you are transfering away from Register.com?" seems, sadly, to already know the answer.

What's your favorite domain name registrar? What are your experiences? Feel free to share your experiences and post a comment here.