The iPhone-toting blogger at Minddriven says that the cameraphone is often within reach when he wants to capture a task to his to-do list—so he snaps a photo of what needs to be done instead of writing it down. If he needs to buy more toothpaste, he snaps a photo of the empty tube and stores it in the to-do album. When he buys new toothpaste? He deletes the photo. Definitely a nice way to track tasks for the more visual folks among us, though I wonder what happens when he thinks of the empty toothpaste tube but isn’t standing in front of it. The fastest ToDo List is a ToDo Album … [Minddriven via Micro Persuasion]
Brazen Careerist blogger Penelope Trunk describes her experiences in finding a mentor whose knowledge and perspective complement and augment her own—but more importantly, how she kept the relationship from dwindling. One of her key successes in maintaining a mentor came from the man himself: The first time I asked Chris, “What should I be asking you now?” I felt silly. After all, it’s a line he fed me. But now I use it with him all the time, and it’s actually an invitation for him to tell me what he thinks I’m missing, which is information I wouldn’t get if I directed the conversation the whole time.
Trunk also advises only contacting your mentors when you know it’s easy for them to talk, and keeping them up to date on your career position. How do you successfully utilise a mentor without seeming like a time drain? Share your story in the comments. How I got my current favourite mentor [Brazen Careerist]
Coder Mike Brittain has put together a super-clean site for iPhone, Blackberry, Opera Mini, and other mobile browsers that lets you quickly click two languages to translate words or phrases between and then do it. The site supports 11 languages at the moment, and you can easily bookmark a language pairing for quick access while travelling. Those without data connections should try Google’s SMS translation service. Mobile Translator [via MakeUseOf.com]
New York Times personal finance columnist Ron Lieber offers a seven-word guide to choosing how you invest your money. Lieber writes: The author Michael Pollan offered an elegant seven-word mantra in his best-selling book “In Defence of Food” that provides clarity amid the bounty of choices on supermarket shelves: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Boiling down investing is a similar exercise: Index (mostly). Save a ton. Reallocate infrequently.
Windows only: If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably got an itchy trigger finger when your cursor is near the window-closing “X” button (or the Alt+F4 combination if you’re more the keyboard type), and spend a good chunk of change heading back to deep-nested folders later on. Free Explorer add-on Folder View adds a toolbar to your Windows Explorer windows that includes a really helpful “History” function, which lets you quickly head back to those folders buried deep in your system, stashed on a network, or are just a pain to type into the address bar again. You can also add commonly-visited locations to Folder View’s bookmark-like toolbar, but the History function alone is what really sells this little app. Folder View is a free download for Windows systems only. Folder View [via gHacks]
The Online Tech Tips blog delves into a little-discussed feature of Windows Vista that can turn your spare blank discs into drag-and-drop bins for extra files. The Live File System mounts writable CDs and DVDs as pseudo-flash drives, letting you add files to them on a continual basis rather than having to initiate one big burn session. You can’t recover space from added files, but if you’ve got blank discs to spare, Live File System can be a handy write-as-you-go backup method. Turn your CDs into flash drives using Vista’s Live File System [Online Tech Tips]
Now that Mozilla’s locked down Firefox 3′s final feature set with Friday’s push of release candidate 1, it’s official: while Firefox 3 boasts some great new features like a smart address bar and better bookmarks manager, the best reason to upgrade will be for the performance improvements. Firefox 3 is noticeably faster and more stable than Firefox 2 to the casual user and Mozilla engineers have numbers that show it will be the fastest browser on the market. Tech site TechWeb reports: Mozilla VP of engineering Mike Schroepfer claims that Firefox 3 is 9.3x faster than Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 and 2.7x faster than Firefox 2 in terms of JavaScript performance. In terms of Gmail message load time, he claims Firefox 3 is 6.8x faster than IE7 and 3.8x faster than Firefox 2. And he says Firefox 3 beats Apple’s Safari, which is also faster than Firefox 2.
Great news for Yahoo Mail users: The big Y has stopped automatically including advertising taglines at the bottom of your email messages. About time! [via]
