Articles, notes, links, and photos in one place.
When scanning a document, one would assume that what goes in on one end will look the same as what comes out of the other. That does not seem to be the case for Xerox scanners, which are using the JBIG2 compression algorithm, meaning that the document is split up into small patches, and similar ones are grouped together and stored only once.
An interesting way to approach email while on holiday. Instead of just letting it pile up in the inbox while on vacation, save yourself of the guilt and burden of going through each email by simply deleting it.
The [email] interface is designed to put you on a hamster wheel, rarely ever succeeding at letting you reach empty. You feel accomplished when you get to inbox zero. And then you sleep and it’s all back to haunt you. For this reason, I recommend taking an email sabbatical.
It would perhaps be wise to instead of deleting the email, just direct it to a specific holiday folder, or set it to auto-archive instead. That way, you would still get the same peace of mind, but still have the email for the “in case stuff happen” moments.
Stop to think, and you’re dead. When you have the time and energy to actually do something, you should have already thought out what to do, to no lose momentum.
This is a takeout from a lecture with John Cleese, where he describes the process of creativity, and the tools which will help you get to that mental state. I really recommend taking the 13 minutes it takes to watch this presentation. There you will hear things like:
It’s easier to do trivial things that are urgent, than to do important things that are not urgent, like thinking.
and
Don’t decide until you absolutely have to. Give the mind as long as possible to come up with an original idea.
David Allen gives a rare glimpse inside his own office, demonstrating how he processes his paper inbox. You’ll see real examples transforming stuff into clarified actions and reference.
An interesting video where David empties his own physical in-basket using eProductivity for Lotus Notes and Evernote for reference material. It seems he struggles like everyone else with certain gray-zone items, and that he is also using Evernote for reference just like me.
We’re building a message app where no one can listen in, not even us. We would rather close down the service before letting anyone in.
This seems like a noble and well-worth effort, but I can’t help to think that even though the guys at heml.is create a secure messaging application, how do you know that you are downloading the exact version from the AppStore that they created, and not a modified version with a backdoor?
Just when I was speaking of using IFTTT together with Evernote, this pops up in my feed. It seems there is a new iPhone app for IFTTT available which lets you to all the automation you are used to, but tie it together with resources in the iPhone, such as triggers when adding photos, reminders and contacts.
Aaron Francis uses an interesting workflow to having Evernote be the central hub for just about everything, using a Doxie scanner and IFTTT. I especially love the concept of the “My Life” notebook, where anything from invitations and birthday cards to photo IDs go.
A couple of screenshots of the upcoming OmniFocus 2 has been released, and it has been heavily inspired by the iPad app. It looks great, but I really hope that it will be easier to navigate than the iPad version, which can be a bit tedious if you have many projects and folder levels.
The new Forecast moded shows you a summary of your upcoming time-based commitments at a glance in the sidebar. You can leave the forecast collapsed to see the next several days (as in the screenshot), or expand the forecast to see an entire month in your sidebar. From the forecast, you can select any combination of days to see a detailed schedule includes scheduled tasks from OmniFocus integrated with events from your calendar.
I hope that the Forecast view will support adding calendar events in addition to viewing them. That would mean it can be a full replacement for iCal.
We call this new feature the “OmniFocus Mail Drop”. Unlike previous mail-processing features, we wanted a method that wouldn’t require any of your devices to be present in order to add items to OmniFocus, we wanted to add the much-requested better attachment support, and we wanted to reduce the amount of extra work you had to do in order to get your items into OmniFocus as much as possible.
This has the potential to completely change how we deal with the inbox in Omnifocus. There is more information in the official thread, including instructions for signing up for the service.
Looking forward to trying the new navigation on my way home from work. Could this become a competitor to Waze?
A new major version of 1Password for iOS has just been released, and it is a major overhaul of not only the application design, but new features such as a tab for favorites and an improved browser. Get it now for more than 50% off.
This is what printers are used for these days.
An interesting watch nonetheless.
Marco Arment went to a Microsoft Store to try the new Surface. It is quite an interesting read, especially if you have been to an Apple Store.
We just adopted a bengal cat named Ebba, and this is her first weekend in my home and care! I bought her a catnip toy, which she went mad for as you can see in the view below.
I have slowly switched over to Sublime Text, a very comprehensible and extendable editor for most platforms. This link provides some tips and tricks on things in Sublime which are perhaps not inherently understandable. Being able to commit in Mercurial right within the editor is a huge time-saver!
Please quit posting pictures of your debit cards, people.
Mozilla will cease to develop the Thunderbird email suite any further, except for security updates. While most people are probably using web based email, Thunderbird is one of very few email clients to support TLS client certificates when connecting to email servers.
