Reader pr0vid3nc3 didn’t feel like spending $50 on a dock for his iPod touch, so he converted his iPod touch box into a DIY dock, Moleskine stand, and headphone holder. There’s not much to the setup apart from affixing the parts together with some sort of adhesive, and—though you may not be able to tell from the photo—a lot of thought went into this portable GTD station. Now everything I take with me every day is in place: iPod touch, Moleskine for offline GTD, Shure in-ears (in the black case), and plug power adaptor from my MacBook Pro.
If you’re looking for a more traditional setup for a DIY using the same materials, check out our previously posted DIY iPod touch dock. Naturally, either should work for iPhones, too. 0€ DIY iPod Touch Dock and Moleskine Stand [Flickr]
Windows only: Free application Totally Free Burner burns audio, video, data, and ISO CDs and DVDs in just a few clicks. The app covers almost all of your potential CD and DVD burning needs, and it does so through a slick and simple interface. As FreewareGenius points out, drag and drop support for adding files to a project would make this a truly great app, but even without that functionality it’s an impressive piece of freeware. Chances are by this point you’ve found a reliable burning tool, but if not, the freeware, Windows only Totally Free Burner isn’t a bad offering.
Totally Free Burner [via FreewareGenius]Productivity blogger Merlin Mann says he wasn’t nearly as ruffled by yesterday’s Gmail outage as many folks were because he organizes his tasks using GTD-style contexts. Any given project he is working on has next actions in a multitude of contexts, like “@phonecalls,” “@web,” and “@email.” Mann writes: So if you forgot your phone, skip “@calls,” and move to anything else. Boss out to lunch? Skip “@Boss,” and move to anything else. Internet went down? Skip @web, and move to anything else. Gmail is down? Yes! You’ve already guessed it! Skip “@email” and move to anything else. Anything else. Anything. Else.
With tasks put in the right contexts (instead of piled up in your email inbox), you won’t be left flailing helplessly if utility workers accidentally sever your broadband link. Gmail Outage or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love GTD Contexts [43Folders]
While web-based applications promise gigabytes of storage, anywhere-access, easy backup, and no software requirements beyond your browser to use them, becoming dependent on webapps can leave you high and dry when those services go out. Whether or not you were one of the countless Gmail users unable to access your email yesterday, an individual Google user locked out of your account for no discernible reason, a MobileMe customer whose me isn’t very mobile, or an Amazon S3 customer whose data’s trapped on a big old inaccessible disk in the sky—you know that using online services comes with its risks.
Tech blogger Andy Baio reports that plenty of high-quality Olympic footage is (illegitimately) available for download via BitTorrent and Usenet. Baio compares sample footage from the 2004 Olympics he found on Usenet to a clip from this year’s NBCOlympics.com stream, to a high-quality HDTV rip he found on Usenet this year. Unsurprisingly, the pirated download is much higher quality than the stream. Are you streaming, pirating, or just DVR’ing your Olympics fix this year? Let us know in the comments. Pirating the Olympics, Then and Now [Waxy.org]
Firefox only (Windows/Mac/Linux): The FEBE Firefox extension backs up all of your existing Firefox extensions with the click of a button. We’ve featured FEBE before, but it’s improved significantly since then, and the latest update has added support for automatically uploading your extension backups to file-sharing web site Box.net. FEBE can schedule automatic backups, and in addition to your extensions, FEBE can also back up and restore themes, bookmarks, preferences, passwords, and virtually anything else in your Firefox profile. In fact, if I didn’t know any better I’d say FEBE is venturing toward full Firefox profile syncing (we can only hope). FEBE is free, works wherever Firefox does. FEBE [Firefox Add-ons via Jeet Blog]
For a cool $1000 or so, you can buy the Sonos Bundle 150 and wirelessly play music from a single remote control in two separate rooms in your house. On the other hand, for a whole bunch less if you’ve already got the right equipment, you can get the same functionality from your iPhone or iPod touch. Let’s take a closer look at how to use the iTunes Remote application for the iPhone 2.0 with inexpensive equipment you may already have to remote control music playback wirelessly in any room in your home.
When you’ve accumulated shelves full of DVDs and you want to track what’s what—and which one you’ve loaned out to your pals and how long ago—a media collection manager is just the ticket. There are dozens of free to commercial desktop solutions for cataloging your DVD collection, and we’ve touched on just a few in the last few months on these pages. Which one have you chosen to track your beloved shelf of DVDs? After the jump, vote for your favourite media collection manager software. Photo by clipeuh94.
Dennis Reilly at CNET’s Workers’ Edge blog notes that when you’ve got a whole bunch of text you want people to get through, a two-column layout, with or without titled headers, makes the reading go much smoother than with a page-spanning blog. He posts up plain-English instructions on how to create a dummy template to post your text into, and how to make it easily accessible for every report. Newb-ish? Sure. Helpful for non-ninja-level Word users? Definitely. Create a two-column document template in Microsoft Word [Workers' Edge | CNET]
Google’s added a direct form-creation tool to its Docs suite, making it easier to solicit direct input into a separate spreadsheet. If you don’t like the way Google’s forms wizard rolls, you can still embed the form yourself. [via]
