Accessing Gmail via IMAP with Outlook cramping your email style? If you find yourself waiting too long for your Outlook inbox changes to sync back to the mothership, a few settings can speed up the process. By setting Outlook to download message headers only, retrieve new messages less frequently, and work offline, your Gmail in Outlook experience can be smoother and faster. What Gmail/IMAP/Outlook techniques are working for you? Let us know in the comments.
Microsoft Outlook Running Slow with Gmail IMAP ? Speed It Up [Digital Inspiration]Share files over the internet quickly and easily with web site Drop.io. We’ve mentioned a number of similar file sharing services in the past, but what’s great about Drop.io is it’s speed (requires no registration for any party), ease of use (just send a simple link to whoever you want to share the files with after you’ve uploaded them), and clean interface. Basically uploading files creates a web site to organise them. You can password protect the files, and anyone who you share the link with can add to the repository. Drop.io does have a 100mb upload limit—so it’s a bit more suited for sharing documents and images than music and videos—but overall the slickness and minimalism of the site really makes it stand out among its peers. It’s tough to say where they plan to make their money (so who knows if/when the crazy ads will come in), but for the time being it’s a terrific tool.
Drop.ioSick of tossing spoiled fruit, veggies, meat, and other leftovers in the trash because they sat around the fridge too long before you got to them? The Former Fat Guy Blog offers an incredibly detailed guide to freezing all kinds of foods to eat later. The article runs down how long foods will last in the freezer, how to reduce the size of ice crystals that form on them, how to prevent fruits from browning and how to blanch vegetables before you freeze so they retain their taste and freshness. Some serious freezer power tweaks here; a great read especially for folks just learning how to cook and store food.
The Ultimate Guide to Freezing Food [Former Fat Guy Blog]Mac OS X only: Process all of your email from the comfort of your keyboard with free, open source Mail.app plugin Mail Act-On. If you’re new to Mail Act-On, just install the plug-in and then read the documentation for how to create rules for filing emails with your oft-used actions. When all’s said and done, Mail Act-On is similar to the Gmail Macros script but with less focus on navigation and much more potential for creating powerful rules for dealing with email. We’ve mentioned this plug-in once before, but this latest version adds support for Leopard. Mail Act-On is free, Mac OS X only. If you use Mail Act-On, share your favourite actions in the comments.
Mail Act-On for Leopard [Indev]Watch YouTube videos more efficiently with Better YouTube, a brand new Firefox extension that compiles our favourite YouTube Greasemonkey scripts into a single convenient package. Better YouTube smartly enlarges videos for better viewing, hides user comments, declutters the page and disables autoplay (great for vids open in a background tab.) Following in the footsteps of Better Gmail and friends, customise your online video-viewing with Better YouTube.
Mac OS 10.5 only: With VNC built right into Leopard, you can remote control your Mac from any other Mac via iChat or the Screen Sharing client—OR any PC using the right VNC client. Apple doesn’t advertise this, but since Screen Sharing is just regular old VNC (albeit with a much more grokable name), our favourite Windows VNC client, TightVNC, works with it just dandy—with one small catch.
US centric: A new Google Earth layer keeps tabs on political spending by pinpointing where and for what projects U.S. government officials are budgeting funds for across the country: Members of Congress know where the money is going: now citizens can, too. The Sunlight Foundation today released a Google Earth application that plots the locations for almost 1,500 earmarks in the House Defense Appropriations bill. This graphic illustration of defence earmarks gives anyone with an internet connection a bird’s-eye view of exactly where Congress is directing federal spending—and the ability to investigate whether the earmarks address pressing needs, favour political contributors or are simply pure pork.
CNet news reports that the map’s points, attached to the U.S. House of Representatives defence spending bill is heavy on military tech projects like “ubiquitous RFID chem/bio detection” and “semi-autonomous robotic manipulation and sensing.” You’ll need Google Earth running on your desktop to open the freely downloadable map layer file.
Navigate House Defense Earmarks on Google Earth [Sunlight Foundation via CNET News.com]We’ve previously highlighted unnecessary meetings as a workplace practice that should be over, but not all of us call the shots. For those brave enough to point out the cost of unnecessary meetings, or look at the cost of their own time, salary comparison website PayScale offers the free webapp Meeting Miser. The in-browser timer uses actual or estimated salaries of everyone in the room to tally up the cost of a meeting by the second, the minute, or in total. There are lots of personal timers with more functionality out there, but Meeting Miser’s narrow time = money focus makes for a persuasive argument. Meeting Miser is free to use, but requires a PayScale registration to save meetings for later reference.
PayScale Meeting Miser [via TechCrunch]Windows only: Free-for-now to-do list application Tudumo is styled for those aiming at Getting Things Done and geared to keyboard shortcut enthusiasts. All the basic to-do features like tags, due dates, action descriptions are present, but hitting one shortcut (Ctrl-Windows-T) from anywhere to add a quick item is a nice way to keep your list front-and-center. Tudumo also features quick as-you-type search and drag-and-drop tagging. Tudumo is a free download while it’s still in beta for Windows XP, 2000 and Vista and requires the Microsoft .NET 2.0 platform be installed.
Tudumo [via the How-To Geek]Windows Vista Only: All too often, quick downloads and working under deadline leave documents, pictures, and other file types out of the specific folders so helpfully set up at installation. Free Vista sidebar widget The Magic Folder serves as a kind of maid for your file messes, automatically moving files you drop on it to their correct folders based on file extensions. The widget can be modified to move files to your own folder setups (allowing for some Getting-Things-Done-style filing, perhaps), but the neatest aspect is the option to have it watch a folder you choose and do its file-organising magic whenever a new file appears. The Magic Folder is a free download for Windows Vista only.
The Magic Folder [via CyberNet]
