What a to do!

My new favorite To Do list.

So, yesterday I was telling you about the miracle of getting back to getting things done.

The bottom line, of course, is that you have to decide to do things.

But I am a big believer in To Do lists, and I have been on a perpetual quest for the one perfect To Do list software. I’ve used the Task List in my Palm Pilot. I’ve used my Blackberry (forget that one!). I’ve used a word processor. I’ve used a spreadsheet. I’ve used Personal Brain–which is good for organizing information but not so good for a To Do list. I’ve tried Remember the Milk and other online solutions.

Lately, I’ve been using followupthen.com to get emailed reminders, and I like it. It’s a fast way to schedule follow ups, especially on anything that hits your email inbox.

But it’s not a To Do list.

Back when I was working, I made my own project management software using Microsoft Access. It was pretty good. But it wasn’t perfect. Mostly because I didn’t invest the time to make it better.

Now, lo and behold! Efficient To Do List from Efficient Software does almost everything I want a To Do List to do.

I can organize tasks by any hierarchy of categories I want. I can set due dates and reminders. I can sort by task, by category, by due date. I can sort by priority. And I can check off things that are done and watch them disappear from the list.

Downsides are limited documentation and help features. The priority list isn’t flexible enough for me. I’ve invented a way around that. Occasionally, assigning tasks to Groups (categories) is a bit slow.

Also, this is a Windows product. Mac users may be out of luck.

Considering I paid less than $15 for it, I find all of those caveats acceptable.

And I am getting things done!

Maybe you can, too.

The King is dead

Long live the King!

Okay. That is a much-exaggerated headline. (I’ve been watching Edward the Seventh on Netflix so you’ll have to forgive the royalist hyperbole. And, may I say—just as an aside—that I had no idea Queen Victoria was such a shrew!)

Anyway, today’s post is about a Friday Find that pleases me immensely.

Once upon a time, before Blackberrys and iPhones, I had a Palm Pilot. (I still have it. I just don’t use it much. Its battery life is practically non-existent at this point, and I haven’t gotten around to finding a replacement.)

I loved the Palm.

Best calendar, address book and task list I’ve yet seen. Entry by handwriting instead of tiny, thumb-driven keyboard.

A lovely instrument. (I must see about that battery.)

Of particular use to me was the task list. It was so easy to categorize items, to schedule them as single or recurring tasks, to make them provide audible and insistent reminders,and, most importantly, to reschedule without having to enter them anew.

Nothing since the Palm has measured up. (We will not even discuss the Blackberry’s feeble ToDo list.)

Until now.

There’s a free, web-based app that comes very close.

FollowUpThen

It’s totally email based. I can send an email to remind me to write a blog post to tomorrow@followupthen, and I will get a reminder emailed to me tomorrow. I can specify a particular date and/or time. I can choose a specific interval—say, 3 hours or 4 days or 2 weeks. I can create a recurring reminder—every Tuesday, every week, every month. I can create a task which will nag me every 24 hours until I mark it complete.

In addition, I can forward emails I’ve received and get them back at a more appropriate time for follow up. I can blind copy emails I send and be reminded to check with others.

It is the closest I’ve yet found to the—for me—nearly perfect task list functionality of my late, lamented Palm.

The only things it’s missing are the ability to organize upcoming tasks by category, the audible alerts, and an easy way to print the whole list.

The only risks to it seem to be that of any web-based app. The creators could decide to start charging for the base service instead of the premium, or they could suddenly stop supporting it. With software that you purchase or are otherwise allowed to own, you can use it forever—or until your computer dies and you are forced to upgrade to an incompatible operating system. (Anyone knowing where I can get a legal copy of Windows XP against future need will get cake, by the way.)

Meanwhile, registration is easy. Just head over to FollowUpThen and sign up. Then you can email yourself a little reminder to thank me later.

Am I thankful?

I think I am.

But I’m not entirely sure.

I’m talking about virtual experiences.

For example, the internet fireplace.

Purists among you will be recoiling in horror, but I rather like digital fireplaces. I have a DVD with several, and, let me tell you, it was quite a nice accessory a couple of weeks ago when we had a week of wind and rain. The temperature outside was falling into that never-never-land where it is too warm for the heat to come on and too cold for the a/c to kick in. Consequently, the atmosphere indoors was damp and cool and uncomfortable as only a Florida season between the extremes can be.

My fireplace DVD was a cozy little addition to the long afternoons spent with my attention divided between books and Netflix and watching the creek rise. It’s amazing how much of an illusion of warmth is conjured by the sight of dancing flames and the sounds of burning wood. The actual heat and the smell of wood smoke seem to be secondary to the illusion. Now, I suspect this is because of years of conditioning to what those sights and sounds accompany. Future generations may not get the same illusion of comfort from a virtual fireplace as I do.

And, if I had a real fireplace, I would prefer it. I think. On the other hand…not to have to chop wood…or clean up soot and ash…or risk burning down the house…. there’s something to be said for that.

We do have a gas fireplace here at Casa Lagarto, but it’s one of those things that was on the verge of disrepair when we got the house and has crossed over. Unlike the a/c, it is low on the list of things to fix.

So, I am thankful today for the digital hearth.

And I am considering experiments with digital oceans and digital aquariums. I’d be interested in digital blasted heaths, mountain streams, stone circles, too.

The thing is, I can sort of justify the energy used to play the fireplace as being less than the carbon footprint of an actual fire. I’m not sure I could say the same for amps for any form of H2O.

So, I guess I’ll just stick to my digital fireplace and be thankful.

The next Star Trek gadget

When can I have it?

We got the sliding doors early. And we’re so used to them now that we tend to walk right into doors marked “Pull.”

We’ve already almost got tricorders. In case you hadn’t noticed, they’ve merged with communicators. That cell phone in your pocket? That’s pretty much it—minus the scanning capability, and there are apps that come close to that.

So, I wonder what’s next? And, if it’s what I hope it is, I’m wondering when can I have it?

See, what I want is the computer’s minute-by-minute log.

I want to be able to say, “Computer. Replay Stardate gobbledygook-of-numbers, time stamp 0700.”

It’s not that I really want to give up the privacy and open the legal can of worms that recordings of every second of our lives would bring. It’s just that I really don’t want to almost be remembering things.

We lost a hubcap a few weeks ago. The MotH,* of course, wanted to replace it.

It’s not the first time we lost a hubcap. I once had four go missing all at once when I was in rehearsal on Staten Island. (You just know they didn’t all fall off on the Verrazano Bridge. And, I’d like to point out that this was Staten Island. Not Harlem or the South Bronx. So, there’s that myth disproved, too.)

Anyway, the last time we needed hubcaps, we went to a used auto parts yard somewhere out in Brooklyn, near the water, and got one. For something like $15 bucks.

The MotH figured we ought to be able to do the same here. Maybe we could. But after much calling around, none of the used auto part yards seem to have hubcaps. Hard to believe, but there it is.

Since he’s planning a trip to NY in the near future, the MotH came hopefully around to ask me if I could find the name of the place in NY that had previously solved this problem.

This was five or six years back! If not more!

And the MotH said, “But you save all that stuff.”

Uh-huh.

I don’t generally save it if you paid cash and didn’t give me a receipt. Even then, it’s buried in all the backup material I am storing in case of an audit. I might have had it noted in my financial software, but since a) I never got a receipt and b) the name did not include the word “hubcap,” that is an avenue of research that yielded no results.

But…just think…if I were stationed on the Starship Enterprise, I could have announced to the air, “Computer, stardate gobbledygook-of-numbers to stardate gobbledygook-of-numbers-part-2, replay.”

And I could have watched and listened to us discussing hubcaps and coming and going with hubcaps until I found—ta da!—the source of the hubcaps.

As it is, I had to Google.

For a new source online and a higher price.

When can I have that computer log?

Sure it’s kind of Big Brother-y. But it could save me so much aggravation!

* MotH = Man of the House

Say it with flowers

The easy way

Today’s find isn’t one of the incredibly useful publications I sometimes tout. Nor is it a fabulous musicion or a crackerjack piece of software.

It’s just a bit of fun.

Courtesy of a German web services company. I think they are German, anyway. Their main web page pops up in German. And their contact address includes the word Zugerstrasse. I remember just enough of my high school German to be reliably certain that “strasse” means “street.”

On the other hand, the company might not be in Germany so much as any German-speaking country.

And none of that matters, because the web page I’m going to show you does not care what language you speak.

That’s because, in one sense, it speaks the language of flowers.

What it actually does is let you draw or write with flowers. You can change the color, you can change the size, you can change the number of petals, but if you hold your mouse button and drag the mouse across the screen, you’ll get something like this:

(It looks better on a big screen.)

Anyway, try it. You’ll like it.

Just click here.

Singing horses

Could there be anything sillier?

Honestly.

This is one of those internet sillinesses that has been around for a while. It’s always fun, however.

So, check it out. Or revisit it.

Turn your sound on.

Click a horse or four.

And have fun.

Singing Horses — who’d have thought?

The epitome of silliness

And I’m still mad about it.

This is a bit of silliness that is not fun at all—or, probably, even of much interest to most of you—so, please forgive me if you were looking forward to an ordinary Silly Saturday. This nonsense happened a couple of weeks ago, and I’m still steamed about it.

A little background: I was working on adapting a little open source Javascript program for an online event on which I help out. We had a little game that involved pictures. We wanted it to change to a different set of pictures each day of the event.

I’m kind of a Javascript newbie, but I had managed to create some code that would change picture sets depending on the date. It wasn’t elegant code (since I am a Javascript newbie) and was somewhat constricted to the actual dates of the event.

This meant that prior to the event, no pictures would display. This made it kind of hard to test, and it also made it impossible to demonstrate it to the rest of the committee.

So, I had to figure out a way to change its behavior prior to the start date of the event. And I thought I did. I entered some code that said, basically, if today’s date is before the start date, do these things, and if today’s date is after the start date, do these other things.

I proceeded to test this new code by manually changing the system date on my PC to each day up to and including the start date to see what would happen.

Everything went fine until I hit the start date. At that point, the set of things the program did continued to be the original set of things and not the new set of things that were supposed to start with the event.

I double-checked all my code. Commas, parentheses, brackets, etc. I double-checked my system date. I went back to the Javascript tutorials and references online. I re-thought my logic.

Nothing!

Hours of frustration!

Eventually (shamefully late, actually), I figured out a way for the program to display what it thought the start date I had entered was.

Suddenly, I see that it thought the date entered as (2013, 2, 2) was March 2nd!

March!

Now, I ask you! In all the entirety of the Western World, is there a person alive who would read month 2 as March? Maybe, in those countries where they follow a lunar calendar, and sometimes have thirteen months, someone might have thought of this. Maybe.

But, in my entire life, in every classroom in which I’ve ever sat, January is month 1 and we proceed to count February, March, April, etc. as months 2, 3, 4 and so on.

But not in Javascript.

No!

In Javascript, for no good reason that I have been able to discover, you count months starting from 0. January is month 0 and December is month 11.

If that isn’t the epitome of silliness, I don’t know what is! And, what, I want to know, prevented any of the tutorials I was studying from mentioning that little fact somewhere in the vicinity of their explanations for how to use dates in Javascript?

This whole thing was not only silly, it was damn silly!

On the other hand, I’ll probably never make that mistake again, so I guess there’s that.

Safer surfing

Don’t click before you look.

Most of you know that it’s not a good idea to click on a link in an email from somebody you don’t know.

Many of you know that it can also be a mistake to click on a link in an email from somebody you do know. Hackers sometimes manage to break into your friends’ and colleagues’ email addresses and send spam out to everybody in their list of contacts.

In some email software, just hovering over the text of a link will cause the URL to which it is actually going to send you (not always the same thing as the text) to pop up at the bottom of your screen. That’s one way to tell if the email that looks like it’s from Microsoft offering you an urgent security patch is really sending you to Microsoft (unlikely) or to SomeFakeSpammySite.com

However, there’s one kind of link where that won’t help you—and, you guessed it!—the spammers have figured this out.

There are sites out there which will take a long link and shorten it into something that will fit on Twitter or display better in an email. This is a very useful thing when used for legitimate purposes, but it can mask the identity of a site you don’t want to visit.

It turns out, however, that these URL-shortening sites have got you covered.

This excellent information is brought to you courtesy of Hmm…, the owner of which has given me permission to link to this page, http://www.hmmm.ip3.co.uk/twitter/short-url-check-they-are-safe.shtml.

I encourage you to go to that link to read more and to see the examples. Meanwhile, a brief summary appears below:

You can add a + sign to the end of a URL that begins with bit.ly to go to a page which displays the real URL and some statistics on page visits, etc.

You can stick “preview.” in front of a URL that begins with tinyurl.com. So it would read preview.tinyurl.com/WhateverTheShortCodeIs, and you will go to a page which displays the real URL.

Google’s URL shortener lets you add “.info” to the end of the link to get to a page showing the real URL. You recognize those shortened URLs because they start with goo.gl.

(When I say the URL starts with these text strings, I mean after the “http://” part.)

It’s a really good idea to use these tips any time you encounter a shortened URL.

And many thanks to Hmmm… for helping us all stay safer on the Internet!

Lifelong learning

Or, you know, for however long you want.

One of the things we forget when we’re using our computers and phones to tweet and facebook and skype and look at lolcats and YouTube videos is what an incredible educational resource we have now.

Just last week, somebody shared a link to 650 Free Online Courses, and I got a little ambitious.

Right now, I’m taking a course in Computer Science and Programming from MIT, Astronomy from Penn State, Shakespeare from UC Berkeley, Real Estate Finance from Columbia, Marketing from Texas A&M and Chinese from Cambridge—and I don’t have to leave my living room. I don’t even have to leave my pajamas.

Granted, I’m not going to get course credit or a diploma from any of this, but I’m going to learn some things. There’s another 600 plus courses to go when I finish these. And that’s not even counting the online resources of software tutorials, websites on how to crochet or knit or play guitar or lay brick. Plus, you can find DIY info on almost anything you need. (I once saved $150 bucks by repairing a DVD recorder myself with the help of an online forum, a $15 soldering iron, and $5 worth of capacitors. I was amazed the thing didn’t blow up! But it worked for another five years, and I’m going to try to repair it again as soon as I figure out which capacitors have blown this time.)

My point here is that there’s a miracle here. Maybe not quite the full sum of human knowledge, but an awful lot of it is available 24 hours a day. A little initiative, a little discipline, and you could design yourself the most amazing Independent Studies curriculum in all of history.

We are rapidly approaching the point, if we haven’t already passed it, when we have absolutely no excuses for not stretching our brains and our skills. Our worlds are bigger than they have ever been.

Have a ball!

Unintended Consequences

In which I am a little too law-abiding.

The Law of Unintended Consequences bit me a few weeks ago.

Some of you who friend me on Facebook already know about this – the day I lost all my writing. All my plays, all my short stories, all the children’s stories, my not-so-good and never-to-be-seen-again novel. The whole folder. Gone.

The reason I am still here and haven’t jumped off a bridge is because of the miracle of redundancy.

But for a little while there, it didn’t look like redundancy was going to help me. In fact, for a little while there, it seemed like redundancy was the cause of all my problems.

I try very hard to follow good computing practices. I have an anti-virus program. I have a malware program. I don’t click on links in emails.

And I make backups. In the plural.

One backup can fail. Two is good. Three is better, and four was the miracle.

Because I use a very useful program called Second Copy to make three of my backups. It has the ability to synchronize data, so I can delete a file in one place, and the next time I run my backup, the file will be deleted from the backup set. This is a feature which has worked well for me for a long time—because who wants to waste disk space on backing up files you’re actually throwing away? I figured if I deleted a file by accident, I would realize it before I ran the next synchronization, and I could get it off the backup.

But that was before my hard drives booted up in a different order and Second Copy thought I had deleted my writing folder. And before I then synchronized my other backups with the one where the folder was deleted.

There I was, thinking I had three good copies onsite, and I had none. Miraculously, I have Carbonite, and my offsite backup was fine. Twenty minutes, and everything was restored.

So, my Tuesday Tip is four-fold:

Don’t let your Second Copy backups run without checking the box to let you preview it first.
Don’t run Second Copy without checking that your drive letters are the same as they were when you set it up.
Do consider unchecking the Second Copy option to synchronize deletions on at least one of your backups
Do use Carbonite or some other offsite backup service.

And, always, always, always remember the Law of Unintended Consequences.

Elaine Smith Writes

Anything She Wants

Category Archives: Computers