Useful

More Fun with Technology

Submitted by Jean E. Gazis on Thu, 2007-06-07 12:09.

This week I've been going to town on cool, new (to me, anyway), online services:

  • "Jott" - a service that lets you call a toll-free number from your cell phone, dictate a message, and have it automatically transcribed and emailed to yourself or others. My other half signed up for this because he's trying to stop schlepping a laptop everywhere. It looks pretty cool. We'll see if I end up really using it - I'm not a big cell-phone user, and I've usually got pen and paper with me. I have to say, speech recognition software sure has come a looong way over the past ten years. They were already working on it when my Dad was at IBM Research in the '60s and '70s, but in the '90s it was still pretty rough except for specialized applications.
  • GTD Inbox - a free task-manager application. I have a feeling I'll end up not doing much with it, because of the need to actually put all my tasks in there in the first place. It was easy to install in my Gmail, but their help site seems to be out of commission. (Update: their site is still down a couple of weeks later, so it looks like Tech Republic steered me wrong on this one. I've mostly deleted it.)
  • Remember the Milk - a nice, simple, online task manager. The more I use it, the better I like it.
  • del.icio.us - I finally checked out del.icio.us after seeing links to it all over the place, and I really like being able to tag bookmarks more than one way, although it took a bit of time to organize my 100+ imported links into a sensible array of tags and tag bundles. (My other half prefers the Google browser synchronization feature, but I don't think that lets you share links.)

I've been looking unsuccessfully for years for some kind of project manager that matches the way I work and the types of projects I manage. I usually end up working from a combination of wall calendar and spreadsheet. How low-tech!

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Useful Links

Some Handy Online Tools & Resources


Book Stuff

I've been using Library Thing to catalog my books online. It's very easy to use and has some fun social features, too.

Library Elf keeps track of your library books, even for multiple cards and libraries. Save time, avoid fines.

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