One of my favorite websites is zenhabits.net. It’s an inspiring place to be sure from author Leo Babauta where he almost daily posts about personal productivity, minimizing, and ultimately simplifying your life. Considering Gmail is essential to my daily communications, I was amazed at just how much you can pare down the already fairly minimalist Gmail interface. If you’re tired of distractions when trying to get work done in your inbox, head on over and check out his post about how to streamline everyone’s favorite webmail.
Category Archives: Productivity
Need to go shopping?
Is your closet looking drab? Need an effortless, cheap solution to your so-five-years-ago wardrobe? Then go no further than shirt.woot.com!
Like most of you, when Josh and I start our internets up we rapid fire a bunch of tabs. For me, it is Facebook, Gmail, Twitter, my OSU email, Geekspodcast, the Weather Channel, Carmen (OSU’s dropbox for assignments), and shirt.woot. Every day they offer a new shirt designed by a user for the insanely great price of $10 a shirt. They come in lots of different sizes, and ladies, no worries – the smalls are actually small. Plus they’re extremely soft! You can always tell when you’re wearing a shirt.woot t-shirt!
Sometimes they’ll also have a random shirt day where they will clear out their inventory and you can buy up to three mystery shirts! All you do is specify your size and how many you want.
They also sell other goodies, like kids toys, other appliances, electronics, etc. (Kids.woot, .woot, sellout.woot), and all of these items are marked down unusually cheap! This is actually where Josh and I picked up our roomba.
Just a quick post to share with you guys what we’re up to when we are starting our morning routines! Enjoy!
Help us With Our Office
Yeah, that’s terribly lame I know, but if you let me finish I’ll tell you a secret- I’ve got a special place in my heart for pictures of clean, minimalist office setups. I came across this one at Lifehacker the other day and immediately dug the color scheme. If any of you have watched the videos we’ve posted, you know that our office/studio/place we pretend to work is kind of sparse right now. It’s plain white everywhere and two corner desks for Nicole and I. How should we spice up our workspace so it isn’t so drab? Paint the walls pink? Get a potted plant? Build a paper mache monkey warrior that we might summon through dark rituals to do our bidding? Whatever your idea is, we’d like to hear it because we’re too lazy to Google anything and from what comments we’ve gathered you’re a pretty creative bunch.
Our First Video Post…
is below. I’d say more but that completely defeats the purpose of our making a video. Enjoy!
Keeping it Synced Part 3: Simplify Media
Previously I’d talked a little about how to keep your notes synchronized with Evernote and also how to keep files updated across multiple computers using Dropbox. While I might do more parts in this series later on, today I’m just going to write a bit about Simpilify Media, and why if you float around to multiple computers throughout your day how it’s great at keeping your mountain of MP3s following you wherever you go. Not to mention with a lightweight installation and full support for the iPod Touch and iPhone, Simplify Media makes a strong addition to our series on how to keep your digital life in sync.
Continue reading
Keeping it Synced Part 2: DropBox
In my last post of this series I talked about using Evernote to keep all of your notes synced up across your various devices. That’s all well and good, but how about keeping larger files synced up and accessible? That’s where Dropbox comes in. Dropbox is an online service with a small installer for Mac, Linux, and Windows that gives you the ability to drag and drop your files to a shared folder that in turn is updated through a web interface. Read on to see how you can get set up with Dropbox and decide if it’s right for keeping your files accessible from anywhere.
Keeping it Synced Part 1: Evernote
If you’re anything like me, odds are that you don’t just have one computer or device on which you capture those important notes or eureka moments throughout your day. Between smartphones and work and home computers, it can be a pain trying to track down important notes you’ve jotted down at one point or another. Thankfully, I recently ran across Evernote, a fantastic application that not only allows you to capture voice, text, and picture notes, but also keeps them all synchronized through a streamlined web interface.
Geeky Things to do during the Summer
I’m sure like many other college students across the globe, I have been sleep and fun deprived for the last week (minus Josh’s birthday) because I have been studying for finals. After almost missing both of my final times (one because I mixed up the times, the second because I didn’t wake up), today was my first day of complete relaxation. What did I do? Slept in, got creative on Garage Band, enjoyed lunch at Mongolian Barbecue, bought a bunch of Chuck Palahniuk books, paid a visit to the Apple store, and now I am working on my website. Needless to say, it is time, fellow college kids and everyone else for that matter, to enjoy summer and nerd out. These two concepts, typically not paired together, are fully capable of functioning in a manner attractive to geeks of all kind. Continue reading
Excellent Mac Mind Map Software: MindNode
So I was going to do a follow-up post about Nintendo and Sony’s presentations, but after careful consideration (and not having enough Red Bull), Nicole and I decided it would be better to devote our next podcast to it entirely. So, while you’re holding off for that this Friday, I thought I’d share with you a great mind mapping application I found today for the Mac called MindNode.
It’s a simple, no-frills package that is free unless you wish to upgrade to the pro version which comes with some more advanced features. However, if you’re just looking for something clean and simple to use to organize your thoughts or a project on your Mac, this is definitely worth checking out. Here’s a quick screenshot of it in action-
You can check it out for yourself at http://www.mindnode.com.
Bored? Here’s 25 Geeky Things to Fill Your Time
So I was sitting around the house trying to think of what to post today and it occurred to me it might not be a bad idea to talk about some of things I do (or want to do) when I’m bored. Anyways,I looked around for a while and came up with a list of 25 geekish things to do when you’ve got nothing to do! I tried to compile a pretty decent array of activities but If I missed anything, be sure to let me know, will ya?
- Install Ubuntu on your PS3
- Watch Pirates of Silicon Valley
- Install custom firmware, DD-WRT on your wireless router
- Check out Slashdot
- Automate your home with X10
- Jailbreak your iPhone
- Go geocaching
- Make your Xbox 360 sentient
- Read through Marvel’s archives
- Listen to MC Frontalot
- Re-organize your widgets
- Bake a Portal cake
- Learn to make your own CAT5 Ethernet cables
- Edit Wikipedia
- Check out The Best Page in the Universe
- Make your houseplants tweet
- Create a backup strategy
- Read Penny Arcade
- Install Synergy to control multiple computers from the same keyboard and mouse
- Check your realm’s status on WoW
- Try out a text only browser
- See how much better the news is when it is, in fact, auto-tuned:
- Check out a bunch of computer setups way sexier than yours
- Visit the minus world
- Finally, check out a far better guide to fighting boredom
