link grab bag

Lots of links on the dashboard today. And recently we read that clutter is a sign of procastination. Which is something we really need to get rid of (actually, both procrastination and clutter on that tip).

So let’s start. Psychology Today has an article entitled 10 things to know about procrastination. The first 5 weren’t that interesting… then we got to #6:

Procrastinators tell lies to themselves. Such as, “I’ll feel more like doing this tomorrow.” Or “I work best under pressure.” But in fact they do not get the urge the next day or work best under pressure. In addition, they protect their sense of self by saying “this isn’t important.” Another big lie procrastinators indulge is that time pressure makes them more creative. Unfortunately they do not turn out to be more creative; they only feel that way. They squander their resources.

Sound familiar? Ouch. One link down. See? We are getting to done even faster now.

Now we have a few tools that look interesting:

• Our first tool is a visualizer for your Windows directory. If you run TaskManager a lot as you plug away, this might be a good tool for you: WinDirStat.
• If you need to edit file properties for audio files, AudioShell might be a good tool for you. We didn’t need to fix up a lot of things until we found a set of mp3s that iTunes did not like, which we whittled down to the “Original” tag. If AudioShell can help you change that flag, then there isn’t anything you can’t iPod.
• The DIY Planner is a set of downloads that help you create planners on good old fashioned paper. If you are into that sort of thing.
• The Democracy video player touts itself as a supreme badass in playing videos. That is can download in the background and then play videos seems really promissing. But we aren’t holding our breathes. We still love the VLC player. Edit: BoingBoing explains that the video player for Democracy is the VLC player. Democracy just bundles it with RSS and BitTorrent sharing.
• Here’s an extension that is vitally important to GMail. This Greasemonkey script stops all that “add contact” popup nonsense that google recently added to their email app.
• And lastly in the tool department is an uber-collection, the TTCS OSSWIN open source “CD”. You might recall a few weeks back we talked about the OpenCD, which collects many of our favorite open-source apps, but the TTCS collection also looks promising.

Now that we are seguing into lists of links, we can’t leave without mentioning Yahoo’s “UI Library”, a collection of interactive and other AJAXy UI tools that one can use/mod for website deisgn.

GCast looks like a nice tool for creating podcasts. It might just even trump our other favorite podcasting software, Odeo. What we most especailly like about GCast is that it has a stand-alone player you can embed into your website. We like that. A lot. Plus, they tie in nicely with their (GCast’s) other service, GarageBand. And their connection helps you key into podcasting music. Which we also like.

Lastly today, we have the video eater site, VideoShift, which culls online video from GoogleVideo and YouTube and presents it in a digg-like format. OUr currentl favorite line of videos is the TechTalks at Google. (Oh, and that one about zero-config with Bonjour networking? Don’t believe it for a second.)

There. All done. That wasn’t so bad, was it?