Silver Clipboard

Countdown to Important Dates

    Countdown calendar is a widget that tracks how many days are left until a given date. It’s a useful to keep several of these on the dashboard counting down to various important dates to give a useful reminded of how long you have to prepare for something.

I use countdown calendar to track when major reports are due, when holidays are coming up, and by what dates contract decisions have to be made. There are a variety of countdown widgets available, but I use this one for its good looks, functionality, and simplicity.

[Click here for Countdown Calendar widget]

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Header photograph by Fanch The System

Portable Applications on Your USB Drive

Locked-down computers, like those at work or in Internet cafes, are a necessary computer-security evil. While their high security helps prevent them from becoming part of a spam-spewing zombie horde, you can’t do much on them. It’s frustrating to need a program but when you try to install it, you get the ‘Administrator access needed’ window thrown in your face.

PortableApps.com gets around that problem. They make versions of open source programs that don’t need to be installed on a computer to run. Load them onto your USB drive and you can use them anywhere, even if you just have lowly guest access. I particularly rely on their Open Office portable, GIMP portable, VLC portable and Notepad++ portable.

Not sure what you’ll need? Then just grab their suite of nearly everything.

Now if they just had a TrueCrypt portable…

[Click here for portable apps]

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Header photograph by wrestlingentropy

Recreational vs Productive Browsing

Firefox is a great browser. With it you can have tons of tabbed webpages open with ads blocked, weather foretold and page rank indicated. What more could a web surfer ask for? Not getting distracted by the weather, the page rank or the other ten tabs, for starters.

Firefox is a recreational browser. When I need to get things done, I turn to Camino.

Good old Camino — the forgotten open source OS X browser. Camino is pretty, simple and gets the job done. There are no plugins: ads are not blocked and their presence is just enough to annoy me back to work if I begin to stray. When I need information on topic ‘X’ I use Camino for precision, ninja-like strikes on the ‘net. Open Camino — ask Google — receive answer— get working.

Firefox, though it is the darling of the open source world, has turned into one hell of a piece of bloatware. Timing it on my MacBook, Firefox takes forty eight seconds from launch to open. Camino takes six. Waiting a nearly a minute for Firefox to open isn’t a long time, but it’s long enough to start wondering about my email, RSS feeds or website stats. Just long enough to get distracted.

Firefox is now limited to recreational browsing, going on the ‘net with the intent of puttering around. But for solid work, Camino is the only choice.

[click here to download Firefox]

[click here to download Camino]

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Photograph by catwall_elle curotto

Best Timer Ever: The Invisible Clock

For a long time, I searched in vain for the perfect timer. Many moons went by with my desires unfulfilled. Until, lo, I came upon the Invisible Clock and was happy.

The Invisible Clock has all the usual features one would expect of a timer, a basic countdown timer, alarms, stopwatch function, a nifty meeting timer, but the real gold in this clock is its custom timer.

The custom timer allows you to sent some length of time (say an hour) then have the timer go off and predetermined intervals, e.g. when 45 minutes left are left, and then 5 minutes left. The blessing of this little machine is it will infinitely loop the custom timer and signal different alarms for the different predetermined intervals.

I leave mine on constantly set to a thirty five minute timer. My Invisible Clock vibrates quietly once when thirty minutes have past and again when five minutes have past. In this way it keeps me on track working thirty minutes at a time with five minute breaks in between. The timer seems custom made for productivity strategies like Merlin Mann’s (10+2)*5 procrastination hack.

If you are interested in completely checking out all the functions and how they work of the invisible clock the instructions are available for download.

Click here to buy the Invisible Clock

The Greatest Time-saving tool ever: Textexpander

Textexpander is the rare productivity tool that actually saves time and increases output.

For OS X only, textexpander allows you to expand short strings of text into longer strings. For example, when I type ‘wg.net’ textexpander automatically changes it to ‘http://www.WellingtonGrey.net/’. Rather than typing my email address in full, I just type ‘greyat’ and out pops ‘Grey1618@Googlemail.com’. The great thing about textexpander is it works in every application. You don’t have to manually start it or press command keys to explode the text, it doesn’t interrupt your train of thought, so you can keep typing.

It is particularly useful for eliminating typing clumsy formating in markup languages or in programming. For example, I write my journals using LaTeX. While LaTeX is a system well-designed for typesetting books, the syntax is ugly and awkward. With textexpander, instead of reaching for uncomfortable commands like \emph{ } I have simpler snippets in textexpander to create them.

Aside from saving time, textexpander has also helped reduce my RSI.

Textexpander costs $30 and is well worth it for the amount of time you’ll save. Download textexpander here.