I’ve been thinking about migrating to the Mac for about 3 years now. OS X really won me over when it came out and I’ve been playing with it off-and-on since 10.2 when I switched Holly over, but using an old Bondai blue iMac isn’t the best of environments. So I stuck with what I knew — Windows — waiting for the time when I could make the leap. Well, today is the day. What started the switch was the fact that the new Intel based Macs allow you to run Windows via BootCamp. This free boot loader allows you to install Windows in a separate partition and thus dual boot your machine. So when it starts, you can either load OS X or Windows XP. The rub is that you have to reboot if you want to switch the OS. Then came Parallels Desktop For Mac, which allows you to run Windows within Mac OS. With this product, you no longer have to reboot, you simply launch Windows from within OS X. The bottom line is that you can run Windows in a variety of ways on a Mac. 🙂 Continue Reading
Category / technology
Nashville Is Talking Meetup
Last week, on Thursday night, I went with Kerry Woo to an event WKRN News 2 was throwing for Nashville Is Talking. I wrote a little bit about it before hand, but I didn’t write much because I didn’t really didn’t know what to expect.
Kerry picked me up at the house and we drove to Wolfy’s Den together, arriving at the perfect time, 15 minutes after the start of the party. As we arrived on the 3rd floor, I scanned the room and confirmed my expectations — I didn’t know a single person there. Of course that didn’t stop me. 😛 I made my way to the bar, ordered up a Yazoo Hefeweizen and started making the rounds.
As I introduced myself, I found that there was a pretty diverse group there. It wasn’t just “geeks”, but professional writers, WKRN video journalists, mobile content distributors, and bloggers of every type. Kerry was a huge help, because if I found myself in a lull, I could make my way to where Kerry was standing and he’d make an introduction to get me jump started again.
“Nashville Is Talking” Shindig At Wolfy’s Tonight
Tonight I’ll be heading downtown to Wolfy’s for a shindig that WRKN’s “Nashville Is Talking” is putting together. I’ll be going with Kerry Woo, so I know I’ll have a good time because he and I never have a shortage of things to talk about.
DeepQuote Is Deeply Cool
Every now and then I come across a little utility application or web site that blows me away and makes me wonder how I lived without this new handy tool. The latest of these little gems is the web site DeepQuote and oh me oh my, does it rock.
Often times when I send links to people via e-mail, or when I include them in an article such as this, all I can do is take the person to the page. Beyond that, it’s up to the individual to find the information that is included in the page. Links to a product page are pretty simple and easy, but sometimes the information that you what your recipient to read may be buried in copy and hard to find. I found it frustrating to send those types of links to people, but it never dawned on me that there could be a better way — enter DeepQuote.
DeepQuote allows you to build a unique URL or link that includes not only the link to the page that you want, but also highlighted text on the specific information you wanted to convey with the link. Here’s how it works.
Turbo Charging My E-mail With GTD
Yesterday I wrote about the process I went through to migrate from multiple e-mail accounts to just one übur inbox. The new system is definitely an improvement, but there were a few snags that kept me from reaching a true state of e-mail bliss. The chief snag has been my archive and after attending GTD|The RoadMap seminar, I got fired up to do something about it.
The Problem
Part of migrating all of my accounts to one account was also migrating my archives as well. Being a big fan of hierarchies, I continued my old habit of nesting folders within folders. It’s just the way my brain works and it just makes sense to keep all of my NPUG e-mail in one folder and all of my Clients e-mail in another.
Of course sub folders have problems too. Thunderbird doesn’t allow you to search globally across all folders and it also makes it tedious to archive mail, as you can see in this image (opens into a new window). In addition, I read the 43Folders series Inbox Zero. Those series of articles, as well as my own frustration, led me to believe that there had to be a better way.
Approaching E-mail Nirvana
Back in April, I wrote about how I was going to migrate to one über inbox. Instead of having multiple IMAP inboxes, I would consolidate to just one. One inbox, one e-mail archive, one set of filters. Well, in the space of about a week, I successfully completed the project and this is an update of how I did it and what it’s been like since.
Step 1: Setup E-Mail Forwarding
The first step in my journey was to setup all of my accounts to forward to one primary account. This is a fairly straightforward step, but it did force me to clean up the number of e-mail accounts I had. Over the years, I had built up a number of addresses I no longer needed. I had accounts for one-time use, and many more that were simply no longer being used.
So I deleted the ones I no longer needed and then I set the ones that I wanted to keep to forward to the über inbox. For example, michael@npug.org forwards to my main account michael@ashbygroup.com.
Step 2: Setup Filters
Now that I had all my e-mail forwarding to one account, I next set about creating filters for all the e-mail that was coming in. The first set of filters that I created were contextual, all e-mail from me@mashby.com label as personal for example. Next, I created filters to file certain e-mails to particular folders. E-mails from mailing lists would go to their respective folders, etc.
Death To Hotlinking!
Recently, I’ve been working off-and-on redesigning this weblog. I’m tired of the look and it’s time for something new. While I’ve been thinking on how the site should look, I’ve also been thinking about how to make it function better. MovableType has evolved since I started this blog and my knowledge of how it all works has expanded as well. Additionally, there are a few pet peeves and tweaks that I’ve been wanting to enable or change as well. The first of these I enabled today – not more hotlinking. 🙂
Hotlinking is where someone uses images hosted on your web server on their own pages. Most people do this without knowing that they’re doing anything wrong per se, but as more and more people embed my images in their forum profiles and what not, I’m noticing my bandwidth increasing more-and-more. The rub I have with hotlinking is the fact that although my traffic has increased, no one is truly visiting this web site.
Send Text Messages To A Landline
According to PhoneScoop, Sprint announced on Tuesday a new service that would allow it’s users to send text messages to landline phones.
Customers do not need to sign up for any additional service or do anything different. They simply send a text messages as they normally would, and if it is sent to a landline number the recipients phone will ring and text is read as voice message. Landline recipients can then choose to respond with pre-defined text messages or a voice message.
Although I think this is a step in the right direction and I think it’s cool, albeit somewhat of a novelty, I was also surprised by this announcement. For starters, Sprint isn’t known for being very SMS/Text Messaging friendly. They’ve gotten better over the years, but Sprint hasn’t had the easiest to use SMS system, so to learn that they are the first to add this type of feature was a bit of a shocker.
Migrating To A Master Inbox
I’ve been a fan of IMAP e-mail for several years now. I can’t laud the benefits enough of having a centrally accessible e-mail server that I can manage from any number of computers, or devices. Alas, as nice as IMAP is, it’s not the panacea to all my e-mail woes. There are still issues that I deal with each and every day.
I still find myself under a daily deluge of mail and it’s a constant battle to keep my head above water. So it was with great eagerness that I read the series Inbox Zero over at 43 folders. The series had a ton of tips and I’m still digesting everything to see what fits me the best, but one idea seems to be taking shape – I have too many inboxes.
NPUG April Meeting Cancelled
Given the tornado damage today, it looks as if we have no choice but to cancel this month’s meeting. It’s hard to say what condition the Goodlettsville Branch Library is in, but given the extent of the damage in Goodlettsville and Gallatin, it doesn’t look good.