beautyscientist's Blog

General Point about Applications

I only think about the merits or shortcomings of applications while I am either waiting for the damn things to load or my mind is wandering while I wait for the stopwatch or beach ball to disappear.

So if you are developing software for me, make it run fast.  And er, that's about it.

Has anyone worked out Lotus Improv yet?

I had a look at it when it came out and couldn't understand it.  Did anyone persevere and work out what it did?

Re: What is the Recipe for Success?

Although I think your content is great, I think you guys need to work on the audio.  Sometimes a little more investment into quality equipment can be most beneficial.
Why not get advice from some other podcasters about setting up the audio correctly.
Pat

-linx

Maybe my ears aren't as good as yours, but I find the audio quality pretty good pretty much all of the time.   Perhaps I need to upgrade my listening equipment?  But in my opinion content is king.  You listen to a podcast because of what it has to say, not because of how it is said.

Re: Films?

I must go to see Coco Before Chanel.

Re: My Geek Project - Using VirtualBox and Linux as a backup

VirtualBox has a simple import/export function.  You just export a machine on one machine and import it on another.  The difficult bit is that these files are enormous - my current Debian installation is 3.7Gb.  Its only now that you can get cheap big USB drives that what I am proposing is possible. 

Running an operating system off a thumb drive is a bit of a different project.  You would have to boot up from the USB drive, so you couldn't just pop into it for 10 minutes or so like you can with a virtual machine.  The way I am working I arrive and copy the files from my USB and install them into VirtualBox and once they have copied over I can drop into them whenever I like.  It takes a long time to get set up but I can still use my computer while I am waiting.  If the worse comes to the worse I can always kill the time by doing some work.

So far it is working okay but I am already running into the problems of handling really big files.  They seem to be prone to a lot of copying errors, and it is frustrating to have a file that took an hour or so to create, copy and install not working.

I have learnt a lot about Linux and the way memory is handled along the way, so I think it has been worth it.

Re: What Apps do You Have on Your iPhone/iPod Touch?

Has anyone come up with an iphone app that uses the GPS system to monitor how far you have travelled - so it can calculate how many calories you have used and suggest you stop and have some tea and biscuits to replenish your dissapated energy?

Re: Back-Up's

Online back up is such a good idea in principle, but like you I am a bit worried about choosing the right one.  I'll be interested if anyone has any direct experience to share too.

My Geek Project - Using VirtualBox and Linux as a backup

I use a Mac at home and a PC at work.  Obviously, having only two operating systems in my life isn't enough.  Once I had got used to all the short cuts, tips and tricks and so on, I would have to actually have to get some proper work done.  This can't be allowed to happen.

So this is my idea.  I have installed VirtualBox on my home and work computers.  What I need is a distro of Linux that I can work on at home, then export to a memory stick.  When I get to work I can import the file to VirtualBox on the PC on my desk.  Then when I go home... well you get the picture.  The point being that I will have a daily backup of a system that I can install on any computer anywhere.  I also get to play with Linux.

It is working out okay so far.  I have tried and rejected Damn Small Linux.  It had the great advantage of speed and size, but didn't really support any software that I would actually want to use.   I am currently evaluating Ubuntu and Debian, with Puppy being my next trial.

Re: Toodledo

Thanks for adding that Robe.  I don't have an i-phone, but efficient syncing with Toodledo might be the killer reason to get one.  The drawback of computer based systems is that even the most hardened geek sometimes is away from direct internet access, and you really want to capture all your tasks.

I am using Toodledo in a slightly different way now.  I set up all but the most trivial of tasks as a daily task.  When I adress a task I set the timer going while I am working on it.  At the end of the day I have a list of the time I have spent on everything and Toodledo keeps a running total.  I then tick all the tasks off and they all appear on my list for the next day.   There is a calender function built in so I can see how much I have done on various projects.

All in all, I am very impressed and pleased with Toodledo, and I think that it is flexible enough that it might be useful to lots of people with differing needs.  Thanks to the AGP for putting me onto it.

Re: Toodledo

Thanks for adding that Robe.  I don't have an i-phone, but efficient syncing with Toodledo might be the killer reason to get one.  The drawback of computer based systems is that even the most hardened geek sometimes is away from direct internet access, and you really want to capture all your tasks.

I am using Toodledo in a slightly different way now.  I set up all but the most trivial of tasks as a daily task.  When I adress a task I set the timer going while I am working on it.  At the end of the day I have a list of the time I have spent on everything and Toodledo keeps a running total.  I then tick all the tasks off and they all appear on my list for the next day.   There is a calender function built in so I can see how much I have done on various projects.

All in all, I am very impressed and pleased with Toodledo, and I think that it is flexible enough that it might be useful to lots of people with differing needs.  Thanks to the AGP for putting me onto it.

Re: They're back after nearly 2 months

Good to hear all three musketeers on together again.

Twitter may have a patent problem

A company is suing Twitter for a breach of a patent.  If this article is accurate they may have a problem.

http://www.inquisitr.com/32198/twitter-sued-for-patent-infringement-and-it-doesnt-look-good/

Re: Toodledo

I thought that there was a "printable" option in there somewhere? Maybe the paid version??

-davegray

Dave, you can print out your to do list in goal order, but you can't print out your goals as a separate report.   There is no indication that you can do it in the paid version either, but as I am going to be going over to the paid version I will check.

The print out function for the to do list works pretty well.

There is also an option to print it onto a fold up report you can put in your pocket.  It didn't really appeal to me but some people might like it.

Re: Twitter - Even wierder than you think it is

To be fair I only know "trollop" from the KommunityFK song

-erice51

I was wondering how long it would take someone to come up with that.

Re: Toodledo

Well I have finished my full month of using Toodledo.  My only real worry had been with downtime, but there has only been one episode of this.  The rest of the time it has been up and running a dream.

My conclusions haven't changed.  It is a very good task list manager with some really neat features in the free version.  I now plan to upgrade to the paid version to see if that is better.   The only thing that I really don't like is that you can't print out your goals.  There isn't even a clunky way of doing it without literally editing the orginal HTML files.  

But that aside, it does everything you can reasonably expect an online task manager to do and does nearly everything very well.

Re: Twitter - Even wierder than you think it is

Its obscure in the sense that only a minority of English speakers would be aware of that meaning of trollope, but if they had simply loaded up words from a thesaurus they would pick it up.

Twitter - Even wierder than you think it is

This morning I tweeted a rather lame joke that would only be likely to appeal to people who have similar taste in books to myself and who are used to UK English usage.

It was -

'Just downloading the Barchester Chronicles. I love how it is so easy to find a Trollope on the internet.'

If you don't get it, the Barchester Chronicles are a series of books by the Victorian novelist Trollope, and a trollope is an old fashioned word for an easy woman.

About an hour later I got a reply.

'I recommend seedyinternetpickupservice.com , where you can compare the top 5 online dating services. All include free trial'

Somehow, not quite in keeping with the spirit of my original post.

Re: Toodledo

Thanks Dave, it is good to feel appreciated.

Very quick update - I have been concentrating on actually doing work rather than tweaking my system or investigating Toodledo's features.  The downtime last week hasn't been repeated and the basic features of the programme are robust and working well.  I will definitely upgrade to one of the Pro versions, but I am going to keep going as I am right through July and will give a definitive verdict on the free to use option at the end of the month long trial.

Re: Toodledo

I have just got through my first full week with Toodledo.  Conclusions so far- its basically a very good platform for implementing GTD. If you use the GTD system already I think you will find Toodledo easy to adapt to your needs.  If you are thinking of giving GTD a try Toodledo would be a good framework to use.  If you have some other time management system I would imagine that Toodledo is flexible enough to work with it.

What Toodledo isn't is a solution itself.  If you feel the need to get organised but don't really know where to begin, don't think this software will help. Because it is so flexible it will simply recreate whatever confusion you are already suffering from in Toodledo format.

The only other issue is down time. It is a purely web based service and I haven't found a way of working off line with it yet.  If you don't have ready access to the internet it isn't for you.  And I have been a bit spooked by a prolonged period when the site wasn't available.

Re: TimeSvr

With a fee that low you could even end up saving money as well as time. I am thinking of getting you bookings in at the cheapest time and avoiding having to rush things by express delivery and so on.

Looking forward to the feedback.

Re: Toodledo

Toodledo is down again.  I am really liking it when it is available but if it is not reliable I don't want to risk losing all my data.  I will keep the trial going for the whole of July but it is looking like the hardware might let down the software.

Re: Toodledo

They are back up now.  Maybe 2 hours down time.

Re: Toodledo

Just experienced my first down time with Toodledo since I started using it at the beginning of the month.  It means that my time management system is working on manual back up at the moment. 

I will be monitoring the level of downtime carefully.  The problem with online services like this is they are totally useless if they are unreliable - in particular you can never be 100% sure that they are going to be around indefinitely so you need to have back ups for all your data. 

I hope to continue my evaluation when they come back.

Re: Toodledo

Importing/Exporting/Sync

Toodledo offers a whole page of various options to work with other programmes.  The one that on the face of it is most impressive and most appealing is to live sync with Google Calendar.  Well I spent some time fiddling about but completely failed to get this to work.  What is straightforward is exporting an iCal file from Toodledo and importing it into Google Calendar.  This was satisfying simple, but after a bit of trial and error and some thought I decided that this too was a waste of time.  Google Calendar doesn't have all the functions of Toodledo so you can't really work on your data in Google Calendar.  And you have access to Toodeldo all the time you have live access to Google Calendar.  I am going to use this option simply to keep a back up of my tasks data in case Toodledo ever shuts up shop.

I also successfully exported my data to my Palm.  Once again, this is really only useful as a back up facility.

What would be really neat would be a facility to add completed tasks to your Google Calendar so you could build up a diary of what you had worked on.  I find myself doing this by hand as I go along.

In conclusion, Toodledo has an impressive range of sync options, but probably only useful for back up rather than working on elsewhere.

Re: Toodledo

Toodledo's Task List

The task list is the heart of Toodledo, with the rest of the system built around it.  This approach makes it very easy to get started and is quite flexible.  You can put a task on the system without any context and with no further information.  This works well if you just want to get something off your mind and into your system to work on later.  You can assign a task to a folder and a context.  The way I use these is to use folders to designate projects and the context to keep seperate lists for the different places I work. My current contexts are work desk, work lab, home PC and home lab.  I will probably be adding a couple of contexts to that.  Adding and adjusting contexts and folders is easy.  There is a standard set of priorities - I tend not to use priorities very much.  Something is either worth doing or not in most cases.  But they can be helpful sometimes when you have a lot of things to do and not much time to do them in.

There are a whole set of ways you can look at your job list.  The only thing it doesn't do easily is simply arrange a list in an order you might chose.  The work around is to number them and sort them alphabetically which is a bit of a fag.  But other than that everything you might want to do with your lists is quickly and easily achievable.

The feature I really like is that you can relate your tasks to your goals at any level.  This is where a lot of time management systems, software based and otherwise, fall over.   It isn't difficult to come up with lists of things to do and taxonomically satisfying classifications for your projects and errands.  But if you can't work out why you are doing something it will be difficult to stay motivated to keep to your system.

The other thing I really like is that you can put live links in your task notes.  This means you can have a direct link to things like Google Docs and Zoho.  Very handy for people like me who have a lot of writing projects on at any one time.

All in all, if you are looking for a web based to do list, you should really seriously consider Toodledo.