• Get enough sleep
• Get some exercise — a 15 minute walk is better than no exercise

Watch CBS News Videos Online

Gretchen has promised me an interview for this site after her up-coming book is released in December.  I’m looking forward to it.

When I read news, I’m a compulsive ctrl-clicker on links that look interesting and that I want to read and write about later.  By the the time I’m finished, I have a very full window of tabs.  In Firefox I would choose to “Bookmark All Tabs”. To save the tabs, my only choice in native Chrome is to bookmark each tab separately.   That still won’t make them available to other browsers or other computers.

Evernote, the very powerful multi-platform free information storage and retrieval app comes to the rescue.  I just open a new note in Evernote and drag the contents of the URL bar from Chrome into the Evernote note.  It becomes a clickable link in Evernote.  When I’m finished, I can reorganize the links and annotate as to why they’re interesting and what I plan to do with them.  When I’m finished I have a  workplan for the day that can be synced via Evernote to other computers or used with any browser.

If would be nice if this also worked for creating links with Firefox, unfortunately when the contents of the URL bar from Firefox is dragged into Evernote, it’s not clickable.

This tip was revealed today on lifehacker.com, thanks guys.

Mother, you didn't peel that banana efficiently!

I use them both every day, but I’ve never been happy about how I get articles I want to save from Google Reader into Evernote.  My solutions have been either pulling up the actual web page from Google reader and then clipping either text or the entire article from the page or trying to highlight text within the reader and clipping it directly to Evernote, both seemed awkward.

The answer is simple.  While in Google Reader you can send articles via email and every Evernote account has it’s own email address that allows Evernote to capture emails that you wish to keep. So I’ve  started happily reading article in Google Reader and then emailing them to my Evernote account. Very simple and very cool.  The command for emailing from Google Reader is letter “e”.

Me? Kind of slow, but eventually I figured it out.

Your Evernote email address found on Settings Tab of Evernote website

Entering “E” while reading articles in Google Reader opens an email form, just enter your Evernote email address and send.

Oh, yeah and if the term “Ubiquitous Capture “  sounds overly pompous, it’s from David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology for the place where you can trust that you can put everything important that needs to get done — it can be a notebook.

Aviary

The new tools are Falcon and Talon – Talon is a Firefox browser plugin for capturing images, and Falcon is the image markup tool that lets you add shapes, lines, arrows and crop, resize and flip images.  If you’re not using Firefox, you can open Talon by either using an image from  your computer or take one from the web.  If you want to capture an entire web page just put aviary.com before the web page’s URL and the entire web page is scraped into Falcon.

Aviary’s claim of being fast was well justified in our testing.  After clipping an image with the Talon extension, it immediately opened in Falcon for editing.  You can also store the image directly on your desktop or host it on their servers.

It’s a very slick tool and can be useful if you want to capture images from the web and then either scale the image or markup it up for clarification.  I normally use and like Snagit, a $49.95 screen capture and manipulation tool, but for simple captures in the future, I expect to be using Falcon.  The plugin for capture is  especially useful if Firefox is one of the browsers you use.

The other tools in the Aviary suite include an image editor, a color editor, an effects editor and a vector editor.

Visit aviary.com to try it out.

Kaley at Work Everyday

I often whine at the noise and distraction of working in a home office in what could easily be called one of the most distracting households in Mountain View, CA — the truth is, I really like having a chance to interact with Sandra, Kaley and Jake every day.

More on TYDTWD at Sandra’s SanSan’s Pups.

Trying to work on the couch Photo credit: Sandra Chow

Late weekend post when I should be cooking dinner.

I’m always a fan-boy of Merlin Mann and his straightforward approach to telling you to just starting to do things.

Here he is in an NPR radio show saying don’t worry how much you’re going to suck when you do something, because doing something is better than nothing, even if you suck.

I think I agree.

The Sound of Young America

Now on to dinner, hope I don’t suck.

Some of AutHotkey’s key features include (their words):

• Automate almost anything by sending keystrokes and mouse clicks. You can write a mouse or keyboard macro by hand or use the macro recorder.
• Create hotkeys for keyboard, joystick, and mouse. Virtually any key, button, or combination can become a hotkey.
• Expand abbreviations as you type them. For example, typing “btw” can automatically produce “by the way”.
• Remap keys and buttons on your keyboard, joystick, and mouse.
• Convert any script into an EXE file that can be run on computers that don’t have AutoHotkey installed.

The basic idea is you create text file scripts with small coded fragments that can replace text as you write, perform simple actions or perform more complicated actions.  The script needs to run once to be put into memory and then each time you need it, it’ll be there.

Let’s look at a couple of simple AutoHotkey cases:

Hotkeys

#m::Run http://www.google.com/mail

This is a simple example of a hotkey, when I type the Windows Key + m,  AutoHotkey opens my Gmail.

The # means use the Windows Key and the double colon :: is a delimiter.

Hotstrings and Autoreplace

::w4l::Win4Lin

My company has a product called Win4Lin, good product and brand, but a pain to type.  With this, every time I type w4l, AutoHotkey replace it with Win4Lin, as I type.  Very useful.

The string to be replaced is delimited by the double colons, followed by the repacement string.

Longer text autoreplace

::tx::
(
Thanks,
Dan
)

Here’s how I often sign my email messages (when I’m being polite).  Now when I type tx,  AutoHotkey replaces it with my multi-line  salutation.

Thanks,

Dan

When using multiple line output, enclose the actions in parenthesis.

Remapping keyboard keys

RCtrl::^+p

Finally, this little fragment remaps the right CtrlKey (I know, who knew the two Ctrl keys can be different?) to be Ctl Shift-P which is an awkward hotkey required by a screen clipping program that I use.

Let’s get going

As you can imagine, my examples are on the preschool to kindergarten level, so much more can be done with AutoHotkey.

There is a useful tutorial for AutoHotkey here.  The website also has plenty of good resources for using and developing scripts. Download AutoHotkey and install from www.autohotkey.com.

Another tip, if you Google-around, you’ll find useful text files of AutoHotkey scripts that you can download and use.

As I started to write more, I did eventually learn to hunt and peck on a manual portable typewriter seeing myself as an apprentice Hemingway.  Then something happened.  Sometime soon after 1981 when IBM introduced the PC, suddenly being able to type became a masterskill.   After a PC landed on my desk I realized I better learn to touch type.  I swung with Mavis Beacon, commercial typing tutor software that been available since 1987, and somewhat learned to use the full keyboard.

Now, TypingWeb allows you to learn typing and practice your typing skills,  online, and for free.   After free registration, you can begin your typing skill-building with exercises and visual cues.

The exercises are monitored and statistics are shown after each lesson.  Here’s mine, I still suck at accuracy.

Might as well start improving your typing to make yourself more productive today.  Look at how much time I could save if I really practiced typing.

Try it at typingweb [via ghacks]

Oh yeah, it’s also a good time to give them a try if you haven’t yet.

Gmail – Our always favorite web mail has made it easier to perform Google searches while you’re reading your email.  Through the Labs technology, you can place a Web Search widget into your sidebar that when searched, does not disrupt emails you might be reading or writing.  Also, new today, Google has made it much easier to import email from older web email services (read Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL).  Now you have no excuse not to move to Google, Jim.

Google Calendar – The Google To-do list function called Tasks which had previously been integrated into Gmail is now also available in Google Calendar.  It’s a good way to create tasks with due dates and be able to see the To-Do items created in Gmail in your calendar.

Zoho – The Zoho office suite continues to develop and evolve, some of the more recent updates include being able to gadgetize (a word?) your Zoho documents and apps and put them in blogs, websites and Facebook.  Zoho is an excellent alternative to Google Docs for a free web office suite plus extras.  It is now spiffily accessible from mobile devices such as the iPhone.

Evernote – The best note-taking, information sharing uber-app around continues to update their product.  Recently they’ve added support for Blackberry mobile devices, the ability to direct your Twitter messages to Evernote account and localization into Russian.  We’re still waiting for Evernote for the Android G1.

MindMeister – This web-based mind mapping tool continues to be spruced up and enhanced.  What’s new includes localizations for German and Japanese, inline images, new formatting and a new widget for embedding your mind maps externally.  Since mind mapping is not a skill that’s in everyone’s repertoire,  playing with Mindmeister is well worth the time.  If you are of us who find it easier to visualize your world rather than just see it as lists, you’ll be surprised to find how intuitive it can be to create a mind map of exactly what’s on your mind.

VLC – While not a web app, VLC, the open source video do-everything is approaching their production 1.0 release with a release candidate.  The RC sports a spiffy new user interface and, as always, VLC is the best and easiest way to view your digital videos.