Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Work
CintaNotes Is A Web-Clip-Friendly Notes Manager
11:30PM Jason Fitzpatrick | Windows only: CintaNotes is lightweight, web-friendly portable manager for your notes and web text clippings. CintaNotes offers basic cataloging of notes by date and tags, but offers convenient supports URL retrieval from Firefox, Opera, Chrome, and Safari. In other words, if you clip a paragraph from a web site that has links, the links will remain active when CintaNotes picks it up. You can also configure CintaNotes to vanish to your system tray and activate from a hot key anywhere you want to call it up. CintaNotes is freeware, Windows only. If CintaNotes doesn’t fit the bill, check out the Hive Five winners for best note-taking tools. CintaNotes [via Freeware Home] More »
Fix
Clippy Brings Copy/Paste To Jailbroken iPhones (Everywhere Except Safari)
11:00PM Kevin Purdy | With one major exception, Clippy, a free download for jailbroken iPhones/iPod touch, makes copying and pasting text across apps easy and convenient. Here’s how it works. More »
Organise
Google Calendar Desktop Gadget Released
9:00PM Kevin Purdy | Windows/Mac/Linux (All platforms): Google Desktop’s gadgets are looking more helpful these days, with the addition of an official Google Calendar gadget that puts your appointments at your fingertips. Like the previously mentioned Gmail gadget, Google’s own Calendar gadget offers quick access to straight-up GCal or Google Apps calendars, and allows for multiple instances if you’re on lots of different schedules. Pull it up with the Shift-Shift tap for Desktop gadgets, and you can view your appointments in day-by-day, monthly calendar/agenda, or agenda-only view. Here’s a full shot of what it looks like—while Google’s blog post shows a map being drawn for location-specific items, it wasn’t drawing on my screen for some reason. More »
Work
3:00PM Angus Kidman | The official Excel blog reminds me of a useful shortcut in Excel: if you want to enter something and have it definitely interpreted as text rather than as a number or formula, then precede it with an apostrophe (the single quote symbol ‘ if you skipped grammar and punctuation in school). I already knew this could be useful if you want to avoid number formatting, or if you want to begin a cell with characters like a hyphen or greater than symbol. What I didn’t realise was that it was also essential if you’re entering numbers with more than 15 digits, since Excel can’t handle these properly and actually changes their value. In the illustration above, the number 1234567812345678 has been entered into both cells, but is preceded by an apostrophe the second time. Notice that not only has Excel used scientific notation in the first cell, but has actually changed the value to 1234567812345670, as you can see in the edit bar. For Excel users, that’s worth watching out for, especially if you’re entering credit card number, (which have 16 digits. (You can’t easily perform calculations on numbers stored as text, but in this case accuracy
is clearly more important.) More »
Use Apostrophes To Accurately Enter Long Numbers In Excel
3:00PM Angus Kidman | The official Excel blog reminds me of a useful shortcut in Excel: if you want to enter something and have it definitely interpreted as text rather than as a number or formula, then precede it with an apostrophe (the single quote symbol ‘ if you skipped grammar and punctuation in school). I already knew this could be useful if you want to avoid number formatting, or if you want to begin a cell with characters like a hyphen or greater than symbol. What I didn’t realise was that it was also essential if you’re entering numbers with more than 15 digits, since Excel can’t handle these properly and actually changes their value. In the illustration above, the number 1234567812345678 has been entered into both cells, but is preceded by an apostrophe the second time. Notice that not only has Excel used scientific notation in the first cell, but has actually changed the value to 1234567812345670, as you can see in the edit bar. For Excel users, that’s worth watching out for, especially if you’re entering credit card number, (which have 16 digits. (You can’t easily perform calculations on numbers stored as text, but in this case accuracy
is clearly more important.) More »
Money
1:37PM Angus Kidman | GiveDo.com offers an interesting twist on fundraising for charities: it creates customised search pages that use Google to deliver results and advertisements, but with income from people clicking on the advertisements goes directly to the charities. This relies on persuading people to change their default search provider, but that’s not a particularly big step for a cause you already support. One potential improvement: for Australian charities, it would be nice for the app to source results from Google Australia (which tends to order results differently), rather than the main Google site. Like previously-mentioned MyPetNeedsLove, the site is a result of the recent StartupCamp Sydney II event.
GiveDo.com
More »
GiveDo.com Supports Charities Via Sponsored Searches
1:37PM Angus Kidman | GiveDo.com offers an interesting twist on fundraising for charities: it creates customised search pages that use Google to deliver results and advertisements, but with income from people clicking on the advertisements goes directly to the charities. This relies on persuading people to change their default search provider, but that’s not a particularly big step for a cause you already support. One potential improvement: for Australian charities, it would be nice for the app to source results from Google Australia (which tends to order results differently), rather than the main Google site. Like previously-mentioned MyPetNeedsLove, the site is a result of the recent StartupCamp Sydney II event.
GiveDo.com
More »
Money
12:00PM Angus Kidman | Auction site eBay is rolling through a bunch of changes, largely relating to postage and delivery policies, in March. While massive change at eBay often breeds suspicion, in this case the changes all seem pretty reasonable, and eBay’s argument that the changes are being made simultaneously to minimise the amount of work needed by high-volume listers seems to have some merit. In a nutshell, the changes include ensuring that recent postage price limits set for some categories are reflected in listings, offering an estimate of how long items will take to package and post and whether returns are accepted, and clarifying the rules relating to listing items which the seller doesn’t yet have (such as DVDs which will go on general release on a specified date).
eBay General Announcements
More »
eBay Changing Postage And Return Policies
12:00PM Angus Kidman | Auction site eBay is rolling through a bunch of changes, largely relating to postage and delivery policies, in March. While massive change at eBay often breeds suspicion, in this case the changes all seem pretty reasonable, and eBay’s argument that the changes are being made simultaneously to minimise the amount of work needed by high-volume listers seems to have some merit. In a nutshell, the changes include ensuring that recent postage price limits set for some categories are reflected in listings, offering an estimate of how long items will take to package and post and whether returns are accepted, and clarifying the rules relating to listing items which the seller doesn’t yet have (such as DVDs which will go on general release on a specified date).
eBay General Announcements
More »
Communicate
Run Skype From Your Thumb Drive
10:40AM Adam Pash | Popular VoIP application Skype provides a cheap way to stay in contact with your friends and family, but it’s not portable, so you can’t carry it with you. Not unless you know how, that is. Weblog MakeUseOf details how to set up Skype to run from a USB flash drive so that no matter where you are, you can quickly and easily contact any of your Skype contacts. Skype doesn’t officially offer a portable version of their app, but by moving the application to your thumb drive and creating a data folder for Skype on that drive with a few simple tweaks, Skype runs smoothly and in portable style. Granted, if you wanted to start a voice or video chat via Skype, you’d still need to have a working headset or webcam; still, it’s better than nothing. If you’ve used this method before, let’s hear how it worked for you in the comments. How To Make Skype Work On A Portable USB Stick [MakeUseOf] More »
Communicate
10:30AM Angus Kidman | The Aussie-developed EpicTweet aims to highlight the most notable posts on Twitter without, as the creators put it, “following 10,000 people and reading hundreds of tweets”. Tracking is by a mixture of obvious selections (Obama, the Hudson River plane crash) and audience voting on tweets (many of which have been tagged with #epictweet in a pre-emptive bid for glory). The voting option means it can potentially be a time sink, but it is a fun way of catching key Twitter moments. For a more news-centric approach to Twitter aggregation, check out previously-mentioned TweetNews. More »
EpicTweet Tracks Noteworthy Twitter Comments
10:30AM Angus Kidman | The Aussie-developed EpicTweet aims to highlight the most notable posts on Twitter without, as the creators put it, “following 10,000 people and reading hundreds of tweets”. Tracking is by a mixture of obvious selections (Obama, the Hudson River plane crash) and audience voting on tweets (many of which have been tagged with #epictweet in a pre-emptive bid for glory). The voting option means it can potentially be a time sink, but it is a fun way of catching key Twitter moments. For a more news-centric approach to Twitter aggregation, check out previously-mentioned TweetNews. More »
Fix
Make Gift Boxes From Old Greeting Cards
10:15AM Lifehacker US Edition | If you have an old box of greeting cards laying around that you’ll never use, tutorial site wikiHow runs down the steps for turning a card into an attractive gift box with a message inside. Don’t have any greeting cards? Use a cereal box instead. More »
Work
