Posts by Tamar Weinberg
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Your Best Time-Saving Tips?
6:00AM Tamar Weinberg | Essential time management yields increased success and productivity, according to weblog QuickSprout. By eliminating distractions, getting enough sleep (especially power napping), and maintaining a balanced diet, you can maximize your productivity and get more done in the few hours you have available. One productivity killer is beating around the bush. Tell people what’s on your mind—being honest and to the point is a great way to accomplish things quicker. When you beat around the bush things don’t get accomplished as fast. Just think about boardroom meetings, people are hesitant to say what is on their mind, which causes meetings to drag on forever. In other words, be direct and hope that your boss won’t spend precious meeting time criticizing the feedback. What are your biggest time saving tips, and how do you make time to save time? Share your tips in the comments. 10 Efficient Ways to Save Time So You Can Follow Your Dreams [Quick Sprout] More »
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Notepad 2008 Brings The Office Ribbon to Your Text Editor
1:00AM Tamar Weinberg | Windows only: Experience the popular ribbon user interface from Microsoft Office 2007 in your free, light text editor with Notepad 2008. Notepad 2008 most closely resembles the lightweight WordPad with the ability for users to change font sizes to format their text, but with the added options to customise the display of your text editor with one of three different appearances. The ribbon interface displays all features of Notepad 2008 onscreen so that no menus are needed. Notepad 2008 is a free download for Windows only. Notepad 2008 (direct download) [via Life Rocks 2.0] More »
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cli.gs Brings Short URLs With Detailed Analytics
6:00AM Tamar Weinberg | Webapp cli.gs transforms your long URLs into short URLs with detailed click-through statistics. Unlike previously mentioned dwarfURL, cli.gs gives analytics junkies a rush with interactive AJAX graphs and detailed referrer data in addition to search engine references to the particular URL (or “clig”). cli.gs doesn’t stop there: any time someone mentions your clig in social media, be it a blogger, on Twitter, or via delicious, the source is also calculated and treated as coming from “social media.” Call it TinyURL on steroids. Clig are also supported by LongURL so you can get the details of the destination URL before you actually click. cli.gs More »
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xVideoServiceThief Downloads Video From Over 50 Sites
3:00AM Tamar Weinberg | All platforms: Download your favourite online video clips from YouTube, 5min, Metacafe, and more than 50 other online video sharing sites with free open source application xVideoServiceThief. Enter a URL of nearly any online video and xVideoServiceThief will automatically download the video (unless you specify otherwise). Videos can be downloaded to either FLV or AVI formats. For an alpha build, xVideoServiceThief has a few bugs; not all services were tested error-free. The application does, however, accept anonymous bug reports automatically. Regardless, the interface is pretty slick, with options to pause, cancel, and to delete downloads from the queue. An indicator displays the download status and speeds of each video. xVideoServiceThief’s open source approach should mean that downloading videos from your favourite sites should never be too hard to achieve. xVideoServiceThief is a free open source download for Windows, Mac, and Linux. xVideoServiceThief [via Hehe2.net] More »
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Insure Your Data with Personal Backup
9:00PM Tamar Weinberg | Windows only: Freeware Backup application Personal Backup offers lots of flexibility for backing up important files both locally and over a network using FTP or SFTP protocols. The application itself is a bit daunting and cumbersome at first with numerous menus and features, so novices may want to stick to the easy-to-configure (and super easy to understand) wizard. However, the feature-set makes a lot of sense given the richness of the offerings, including the ability to back up multiple files into a single zip file, encrypting file backups, compressing files, and more. Personal Backup also supports direct copy from source to destination, full backups (ignoring files already stored in the destination folder), incremental backups, and differential backups. Backups can be scheduled at logon, logoff, or weekly at a designated time, but monthly support has not been integrated into the application. Personal Backup is a great alternative to Lifehacker favourite SyncBackSE for $30 less: it’s free. Personal Backup is a free download for Windows only. Personal Backup [via gHacks] More »
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Timelope Tracks Your Browsing History
5:30AM Tamar Weinberg | All platforms with Firefox: Firefox extension Timelope helps you keep track of web sites you’ve visited, when you’ve visited them, and how long you spent on each site. Sign up for an account, install the extension, authorise yourself, and you’re ready to roll. Timelope works in the background and keeps track of the number of pages you visit: as you visit more pages, the number of Timelope “hops” is increased. Additionally, Timelope features a separate but useful social networking function where you can follow friends and see exactly where they’ve been online. By default, your visited web sites are private; you can make your stream public if you are interested in the social features of Timelope. Timelope is free, works wherever Firefox does. Timelope [via Webware] More »
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Patent Search Finds Ideas and Their Owners
5:00AM Tamar Weinberg | Access worldwide patents with Patent Search, a comprehensive and powerful webapp that features over 450 million patents in 15 languages. The unique thing about Patent Search is that the entire text of each individual patent is indexed in addition to offering the PDF application for download. Better yet, if you’re interested in a particular patent, you can contact the owner and check availability for a possible project down the road. Patent Search seems to be miles ahead of Google’s patent search, which searches through a mere 7 million patents and only provides the publicly-accessible PDF. Looking ahead, Patent Search seems like one of the better sites for finding inspiration for your very own project. Patent Search [via Webware] More »
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YouTube File Hack (and Others) Download Clips to Your Desktop
9:00AM Tamar Weinberg | Windows only: Free software YouTube File Hack is a standalone application and Internet Explorer integrated menu item that downloads videos to your desktop from the popular video sharing site. Simply run the application, enter the URL of the YouTube video you want to view offline, and press the Download button. When all is said and done, you’ll have an FLV file for watching offline (we recommend the free VLC player to do so). More »
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Mixin Simplifies Collaborative Scheduling
6:00AM Tamar Weinberg | Webapp Mixin is a social calendar that accepts short messages describing not only what you’re doing but when, and shares that info with your friends. Plan and propose events or enter where you’re going to be when with Mixin’s drop-down box on-site, or wish for things or events (which have no specific time). Alternately use Mixin’s short Twitter-style one-line commands (in the format of what @where when, like “Rock Band @Adam’s at 7″) to enter events via SMS or IM. You can also let your friends know where you are for a possible impromptu meet-up with Mixin. Check out a video demonstration of how Mixin works after the jump. More »
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