Monday, October 29, 2007
Gmail
11:49PM Gina Trapani | Last week Gmail introduced IMAP access, and now there are reports of more Gmail improvements coming down the pipe, including faster performance and a new contact manager. More »
Preview Trips in 3D with EveryScape
11:30PM Kevin Purdy | Want to check out the South Beach scene and preview the Children’s Museum before you head to Miami? New 3D mapping site EveryScape focuses on attractions and businesses rather than the wide-open street-level tools offered by Google and Microsoft. The site has virtual tours posted in Boston, New York City, Aspen, Colo. and Miami right now, and puts up relevant links to review aggregator Yelp, Wikipedia, Flickr and other sites at each destination. No sign-up is required, and the site uses Flash to display the virtual tours. EveryScape [via CNET News] More »Flashback
10:30PM Tamar Weinberg | One year ago, you stopped wasting precious browser pixels and consolidated Firefox’s chrome with a few choice userchrome.css tweaks. More »
Recover a Borked Flash Drive with Photo Rec
10:00PM Gina Trapani | Blogger Kent Brewster used previously mentioned file recovery utility PhotoRec to rescue an unreadable thumb drive. He writes: PhotoRec ignores the file system in favour of finding lost files, so it works on FAT, NTFS, EXT2/EXT3, HFS, and (with certain caveats) ReiserFS. And since it’s looking for known file headers and using data carving techniques, more than eighty file types—among them DOC, PDF, and PPT—are instantly recoverable. And recover all the files on Kent’s USB drive PhotoRec did; all he had to do was rebuild the directory structure and rename the files. Easy Flash Drive Data Recovery with PhotoRec [kentbrewster.com] More »EveryScape – 3D maps which look inside buildings
3:46PM Sarah Stokely | If you thought Google’s Street View was cool, you’ll want to check out EveryScape – which gives a 3D view of the cityscape – including the insides of buildings. It launches on Monday, and only offers a handful of US cities so far – including New York. Given the privacy complaints Google’s had, I wonder how this service will go. Presumably they’ll need access permission if they want to film inside buildings, so expect black spots.
EveryScape brings 3D map views inside buildings [CNET]
More » Tom Tom GPS for the PDA
3:12PM Sarah Stokely | Here’s something which will be music to the ears of the directionally challenged. While the Tom Tom GPS device is quite popular here in Australia, you can’t buy the software for your PDA over the counter. However the Bleeding Edge blog has discovered that you can buy the software online:
“You can grab a copy of the software itself straight from their website - you just have to buy the maps. To buy the Australian map, click “Maps” on the left of their home page, then “Buy Now”. Select “NAVIGATOR 6″ as your product, then “Map of Australia”, and then go through the usual checkout process. It’ll cost you $150, which is a pretty good deal for such a useful program.”
Sounds like a good solution if you don’t want to buy yet *another* gadget.
Buying Tom Tom in Australia [Bleeding Edge]
More » Results – Conduct a time audit of your week
12:45PM Sarah Stokely | So yesterday I completed my one week ‘time audit’, as announced last Monday. I decided to do the time audit to give myself a clearer idea of how long my regular tasks take me during the week – and where I can make improvements.
The tracker – I used the previously mentioned ActivityTracker gadget for the iGoogle home page. Full marks for ease of use – I just had to punch in and out of each activity as I went about my day. You can set the Tracker to issue a sound alert at a specified interval if you have trouble remembering to log in and out. This has the added benefit of being a regular reminder to get back on track with what you were *supposed* to be doing if you’ve gotten off track.
Having to log my activities was a good motivator to stay focused – watching my ‘break time’ and ‘warcraft time’ add up during the week spurred me back to work several times. It also showed me how much I multi-task each day. It’s quite hard to track your activities when you have several things on the go each once or get pulled into finishing something urgently.
The data – one feature which Activity Tracker lacked which I would have quite liked is a way to save and compare different weeks. It can show you your total hours for the week and break them down into activities, and can even show them in a graph format for you, but I’d really like to be able to compare week on week. I guess I’d need a more sophisticated tracker for that.
The results – Looking at my results for the week I have two goals – to reduce my breaktime during work hours, and to work at reducing how long it takes me to complete regular tasks.
So did you complete a time audit last week, or have you done one in the past? What did you learn from it? Answers in comments please!
More » Avoid Leopard teething issues
12:18PM Sarah Stokely | Mac users who picked up a copy of the new OS, Leopard, over the weekend may want to appraise themselves of some teething issues reported by early installers. It was also brought to my attention over the weekend that Apple’s own FileMaker won’t run on Leopard – more on that below.
Apple’s put up a support page for Leopard installation issues and so far the top support topic is how to deal with the “blue screen of death” phenomenon reported by CNET.
Hopefully FileMaker users are already aware that it won’t run on the new Mac OSX, Leopard.
According to the Australian FileMaker site, FileMaker Pro 9 and FileMaker Pro 9 Advanced generally will not run on Leopard in a number of countries outside the US, including Australia. They haven’t confirmed when there will be a fix for this, but the site says they are aiming to have a downloadable update available on November 19. But that’s just for the latest versions of FileMaker – they won’t be updating older versions:
“We have not tested earlier (pre-FileMaker 9) versions of FileMaker software on Mac OS X Leopard and do not intend to release updates for earlier versions of FileMaker.”
I haven’t gotten to check out Leopard yet, but if you’ve installed it successfully (or not!) let us know your thoughts in comments.
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Avoid the last minute rush by planning a day ahead
11:41AM Sarah Stokely | There’s nothing worse than realising five minutes before you have to walk out the door that you’ve forgotten something. Often you *know* you need to prepare things beforehand - like printing out the directions for where you’re going -but you don’t actually get around to doing it.
In these situations, a calendar or to-do list doesn’t quite cut it – unless it reminds you *ahead of time* of the tasks you need to do to be ready for the next day. Certainly programs like Remember the Milk or Google Calendar can send you reminders, and you could schedule a reminder for 24 hours before. But to ensure that even on days when I don’t check my calendar or set reminders, I still get ready for the next day, I set up a small, specific list of “things to do for tomorrow”.
I decided to use the ToDo gadget on the Google Homepage so that every morning when I fire up my browser, the list will be right there in front of me, letting me know the tasks I need to complete today in order to be ready for the next day. This will allow me to end each day with an empty to do list on my home page – a nice feeling!
Why a separate list of things to do for tomorrow?
It gets you thinking through what you’ll need to do the next day, giving your brain a chance to go ‘hang on, you’ll need to print out a map’ or ‘I should call Doug and see if he wants to share a cab to that event’, and importantly, gives you time to set these things up ready for the next day.
It gives you peace of mind. You wake up knowing everything is in place for whatever your day has in store. When I have to catch an early flight, I sleep easy knowing that my clothes are laid out for the next day, my bags are packed, my ride to the airport is booked, and I have all my flight details printed out and stowed in the back pocket of my diary.
I chose to use the iGoogle To Do gadget because it’s simple, easy to use and sitting there on my home page so I can’t avoid seeing it. But avid To Do list fans may have a more elegant solution. So if you have a suggestion for an automated or manual way to remind yourself of tasks you need to complete for tomorrow, please leave them in comments.
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GMail improvements announced
10:27AM Sarah Stokely | Not content with rolling out IMAP for Gmail, Google has also revealed a few other improvements that are on the way for its email app, including a speed increase. The Google Operating System blog writes that Google told analysts that in the new version of Gmail (to be released “soon”) we’ll see a speed increase achieved by “pre-fetching” of messages and a new contact manager that will share your contacts with other Google apps. They’ll also integrate features from other Google products – for example, you’ll be given the option to open a Word doc attachment as a Google document.
I noticed this morning that my Gmail account has been IMAP enabled. Yay. :)
The Next Version of Gmail Will be Faster [Google Operating System]
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