software: background switcher, project alternative

Our friend Big Poppa E has a Mac notebook computer. And mostly, we do not covet it. Except one night, we spied that it changes the background on his desktop every once in a while. We tend to think that things like that are distracting, but still, it would be nice to do.

Enter John’s Background Switcher, which does it for you, for free, on your Windows box. And it can poll from flickr, the web, or elsewhere on your computer. Neat!

—

We cannot load up MS Project on our computer. We don’t know why, but we can’t. We have been using an open source project manager for a while, but it leaves much to be desired. But we found a nice free alternative, Open Workbench, that gives a lot of power and flexibility. Very nice.

—

Bonus link: We work in a slightly-noise-but-not-so-horribly-noisy office. There is a dull background noise that varies just enough as to be noticeable. What’s a taco to do?

Pink Noise. Honestly, we thought pink noise was a joke we heard once on a Kleptone’s album. But it’s not. It’s not quite white noise. There is variance to it. And here comes the pink noise generator. These handly apps create a small section of pink noise that is easily looped. We prefer pink noise #1, which is 2 minutes long. The #3 loop is too long for us at 6 minutes.

myspace: the phone

Holy spit.

Yesterday, we talked about myspace and identity (see the danah boyd link). Then, while checking on something for Ed, we came across some information last night that sorta blows our socks off. There are going to be myspace telephones.

We admire this sort of convergance. In the back of our minds, we always wondered what the other side of a major media conglomerate owning a ppopular social networking site would be. Whoop, there it is. Earthlink and SK Telecom (South Korea) are putting together mobile phones that integrate fully with myspace. One can only assume that they work equally well as cellular phones. Or perhaps they land in our other favorite topic, mobile VOIP.

When we saw the mock-ups on benbarren’s flickr pages, we thought for sure they were just idle sketches. Because they look really neat. But surprise of surprises, that is what they really look like. Check out Helio, the company that is putting out the phones. We’d like ours in black, please.

how to bury your dead

This news piece was so incredibly sad, we waited 9 days to post it. From Reuters, the government is preparing for the upcoming pandemic of avian flu. Are they stockpiling anti-flu vaccines? Are they making the world country cleaner, safer? Well, that’s one way of looking at it. Presenting: How to bury your dead. In your backyard.

“We talk about how people should bury their dead in their backyards, how far from the septic systems,” said Dorothy Teeter, director of the King County public health department in Seattle. “In case you’re wondering, it’s $20 apiece for high-quality body bags.”

But while you are still alive, you might enjoy your music online. Here’s something we’ve been meaning to try out: Picard from MusicBrainz. It promises to help you organize and tag your mp3s. Okay.

Also, while you are still above ground, you might check out MIT’s free open courses. You think “burying your dead 101” is a course? Don’t bet on it.

the watchmaker’s notebook

This is one of those things we would like to keep to ourselves, it’s so wonderful. It’s beautifully wonderful, and we love it. It’s Ron DeCorte’s Notebook, a place where he examines the fine art of the tiny timepieces on our wrists. He takes apart finely made watches and explains what is so wonderful about them, what makes them unique, and points out the fine details that the common observer would most likely miss. And in addition to the individual timepieces he examines, he has a more generalized guide to watches called TimeZone’s Watch School. There, you can learn about the mechanics of watches, their pieces, and how they work.

—

We are amazed with the rise of social networking software. There is so much of it, and it has really taken over as the BigApp of the day. No real big surprise there: humans are made to connect with each other. Even the early BBSes were about connecting with other people and sharing lives. The current category killer is MySpace, which took Friendster by surprise (though for those of us who were on Friendster at the time, not much of a surprise with it’s “who is going to buy it?” and “why the heck is it so slow?” discussions that were rampant). With MySpace, you know who owns it: Fox. It’s already a sell-out.

For millions of teens, that doesn’t matter. They are creating their identity through and with MySpace. Danah Boyd has an interesting article that discusses identity on MySpace.

The First Season of Grey’s Anatomy has a MySpace page. We think it’s disengenuous that it would try to friend us.

—

And speaking of things that aren’t there, lifehacker (*heart*)  had a download of the day recently that was all about Microsoft’s Virtual PC. The Virtual PC allows one to run instances of applications without, theorhetically, messing up one’s own system. Joy.

Some software, of course, you don’t even have to install on your own machine. Richard MacManus just wrote an article of “best of breed” online office apps (that is not to say they are all “free”). We are willing to give writerly the old college try.

—

And then there is productivity. At our company, we go to a lot of meetings. A lot. And they aren’t always wonderful sparkly good ones where information is generated and passed on. Of course not. Not every one is golden. But 43 folders has a nice article about 9 tips for making your meetings for productive. We know we need it. Because we Americans are working more, but getting less done. Ouch.

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?

php nuke themes: finding themes online

Here is a drive-by post to capture some info on php nuke themes. These, right now, are for us the most difficult thing to conquor. CreatingOnline has some free (and paid) themes to download and mess with. The official php nuke site, of course, has its whole themes section, but we haven’t found much good to work with yet. We tried Spidean’s AutoTheme, which we had greats hopes for. It allows you to plug in their theme and tweak it as you go, but the downside is that their interface is very kunky. But then, when its free you get what you pay for, eh? And we have liked what we have found at Designs4Nuke, regarding their downloadable themes. Lastly, there was some stuff on Portal Themes that looked interesting too.

font it up!

Friday afternoon, quarter to 5. Cool Staff Account swings around asking if I can make a chart for him. He’s got a mock up on a piece of paper, and he assures me that yes, there are 2 x-axes on this chart and that yes, there is a line with the same name as one of the axes. “It’s not mine, really,” he says. “It for someone else.”
So it’s a drawing of what a chart would look like if charts could look like that. Like in another reality. But ours is not to question why, right? As I drew boxes and lines in pretty colors and shapes for CSA, he said pointing a label, “Could you font that up?”

Why yes, yes I can.

hey mr. tambourine man…

If there is darkness in your heart, buy a tambourine and make yourself a promise that you will sing unto God, and you will.

— Rebbetzin Esther Jungreis

gettin’ paid

Oh, children, do not be mistaken! The life of the writer is not the glamourous one they trot out in front of you at school assemblies and job fairs. Contrary to what “they” would have you believe, it is not a life of loafers on the desk while you puff away on cigarettes in your tweed jacket with the elbow patches. You will not be the office “wit”. You will not have a regularly meeting group of friends and compatriots at the local hotel bar where you shuffle around manuscripts. You will not run across town, hair waving in the wind of your own currents in the big city, just to meet a deadline. Michael J. Fox will not play you in the movie.

The wrtier’s life is one of isolation, mostly. And being a corporate writer, even more so. In the absence of real human contact regarding your job, you will turn to that most loathesome of formats to find out if your salary meets your work: the survey poll. And you will find that it does not. You think a Michael J. Fox character could survive on that? Come on! He’ll spend that much just on Ray-Bans.

Writers UA publishes articles and surveys like the one mentioned above for corporate writers in the user assistance field.  We particularly liked this article on errors and how to reduce them which heavily cites one of our gurus, Don Norman.

thumb(driving) our way

Over the weekend, we got one of those portable USB Flash Drives that the cool kids have. And sure, we love the idea of quick portable media, but we got to wondering what else could one do with it?

The big dream of the thumbdrive world is booting from it. Of the installs we’ve driven by, Damn Small Linux looks the most promising. (On a sidenote, a few weeks ago, we tried downloading Knoppix on the promise that one could boot from CD, but it took up so much media — at least 3 CDs — that we feared our ability to boot easily from the disc.) Granted, we don’t know much about Linux, so we would rather screw up a tiny portable drive than our home drive.

2 “must have” apps are portable OpenOffice and portable Firefox. We once had OO exclusively on our home machine, but we admit we installed MSOffice once when a Word doc absolutely had to look a specific way when we translated it to PDF. That was with an earlier version of OO, and if they have gotten better at exporting, then we would be more than happy to return to the fold. As for FF, we might be one of the few people who like being able to differentiate between our home and work browsing.

There are some other apps we are looking forward to using: ReNamer — we seem to always need to do mass renaming of files at some point. We remember having some app at some work computer once that did this very cleanly and neatly…. But it would be nice to be able to carry this app around, to have it when we need it. WinMerge — another thing we need to do a lot of is comparing files, to see what is different in them across versions. Sure, we know Unix has some great tool we saw someone use once that made us green with envy, but we are not Unix wonks. So a small app like this we can easily use is key. Rainmeter — We mentioned before how we once tried Norton Systemworks. One of the nice things about it was its little meters reporting on how things are going. Rainmeter does all that and more without the Symantec overhead. NeoMem — this looked to be the best of the information management systems (and believe us, there are a lot, even for thumbdrives). It claims to be a cross between a word processor and a database, which sounds promising for storing lists, book titles, and phone numbers.

Then there are a few “nice to try” apps we are not sure we need, but they might be nice. DM2 — this one promises nice Windows enhancements, including floating icons and WinRoll’s great feature, roll up to titlebar. Imagenomic says it will clean up noise on pictures. And WhyReboot tells you what will happen when you reboot a system.

There are plenty more apps out there for thumbdrives. AskMetafilter has a great list of them and where to get them. And, as always, Lifehacker has a great collection of anythng you need to find.