August 15th, 2007
I received a tip from one of our readers about a new RSS feed reader that looks interesting. It’s called FeedGhost. The product’s focus is on making it easy to prioritize your reading, both by automatically watching your reading habits and adjusting itself accordingly as well as by your purposeful tuning. I haven’t had time to do full review, but I wanted to be sure to pass along a discount code for the pro version before it expires.
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August 13th, 2007
A modern PC with Vista Home Edition takes about one and a half minutes to boot. An older machine with XP is about the same. That’s 30 seconds for the PC itself (the BIOS) to boot up, plus a minute for the Windows operating system to boot. Sometimes, you need to reboot Windows (e.g. when installing new software), but there is no need to restart BIOS, too. However, the default is to reboot both. (That’s called doing a “cold boot,” rather than a “warm boot.”) There’s a trick that works on both XP and Vista to get it to do a warm boot instead, thus saving you 30 seconds per cycle.
Update: Well, this tip is in error. It used to work in Windows 95/98, but it doesn’t work anymore. I thought it did, but I was mistaken. So the CodeJacked score on Windows tips currently stands at 103 valid tips and 1 invalid one. Sorry about that, folks. For the full story on what happened, see Accidental Hoax Revealed; CodeJacked Tipster Chagrined.
Update #2: Amazingly, people keep posting comments and pingbacks to this tip even though it’s been retracted. Commenting on this post is now closed, but feel free to comment on the follow-up post.
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August 6th, 2007
Merlin Mann, of 43folders.com fame, has a thread on his site about a particularly nasty productivity drain, the e-mail inbox, and things we can do to plug that hole. If you “live in your inbox,” then this topic is for you. In a nutshell, the idea is to always have an empty inbox — to delete, archive, defer, or otherwise “process” your e-mail immediately upon opening it. I’m grossly oversimplifying here, of course. Are you thinking, “that’s crazy talk?” That maintaining an empty inbox is yet more work, not less? Well, then, perhaps this is especially something you should look into. Google found the idea so intriguing that they invited Merlin to speak about it at one of their in-house “TechTalks.” The video of that TechTalk is available here:
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August 1st, 2007
TrueCrypt is an easy, convenient, highly reliable way for Windows and Linux users to encrypt their data on-the-fly. TrueCrypt is perfect for:
- Road warriors who worry about what would happen if their laptop gets lost or stolen.
- Anyone who works with sensitive data of any nature (proprietary business data, trade secrets, medical information) in an open office environment where the workstations are not behind locked doors.
- Anyone who uses Quicken, or similar software, to keep track of personal financial information, especially if others have access to the same computer.
- Anyone he carries sensitive information around on a external storage device (USB drive).
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