This is all Merlin Mann’s Fault – Don’t mix Inbox Zero with Gmail

May 5, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Trying to do the right thing, I was.  Yesterday, I had accumulated about 1200 emails in my Gmail Inbox, with about 1000 of them unread.  Now I knew this amount of mail and unread messages in my inbox was wrong, I knew I was not keeping to the ideals of Merlin Mann‘s Inbox Zero techniques.

Inbox Zero being a discipline  to process email as you go along and not keep tons of unread mail that will hold you a guilty hostage to not Getting Things Done.

Anyway, my heart was in the right place, I was about halfway through the message and then zap.  My Gmail web interface goes away and I get this message:

gmail-screen

It’s all telling me that they’re locking down my Gmail account for up to 24 hours because of “suspicious” activity.  Now maybe they consider my cleaning up my inbox “suspicious activity”.  They give this list of items that might have caused the lockdown, 4 out of 5 I know I haven’t done.

#5 says your browser can be doing it to you.  Well that would be fine and dandy except I’m using Google’s own browser, Chrome.

They let me back into my email after about 6 hours and I get through another hundred or so.  Today the quest starts again and just as I was down to about 100 messages, zap.  I’m being unusual again.

I’m now waiting them out, again.

What have I learned?

The cursed lockdown only seems to affect the Gmail web interface.  If you already have an email client configured for IMAP you can continue to use your account.

As much as I have bored everyone by tireless pushing Gmail as the only true path for email, Google’s lockdown ability proves that Gmail has a troubling hold over your email that always hangs over your head like a pile of excrement.

As far as Merlin Mann?  I guess it wasn’t really his fault, except Inbox Zero does inject a level of guilt in your dealings with email that’s a pretty strong motivator for a Jewish-guy like me.

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Filed Under: email, gmail Tagged With: , , , ,

Got a new PC? Supercharge it fast with 11 free apps

April 23, 2009 By 3 Comments
George Washington's Teeth

George Washington's Teeth

Even in our excremental economy, PCs are cheap.  Microsoft wants to run their entire advertising campaign on that basis, but whatever.  I often use a well-loved MacBook, but in the last year have had occasion to buy two PCs.  Bought a Desktop PC for about $400 and a netbook, mini-laptop for about $300.

After the immediate glow of geek happiness wears off (new PCs always seem fast), the question becomes how to become productive fast.  (I actually had to buy the netbook because we went away for the weekend and I forgot my laptop and needed to do some work).

What I do is connect to Internet and download these 11 apps, and I’m ready to go in about 20 minutes in a productive work environment.

Let me explain.

  • AVG Antivirus – Sure you need anti-virus, the world is weird, but AVG Free does a great job and it’s, well, free.
  • Google Chrome – Sorry, Microsoft Internet Exporer doesn’t work for me.  I can’t be productive with such a slow browser.  I install the new-ish Google Chrome, which isn’t yet full-featured but is extremely fast.
  • Firefox – I also install Firefox, the major open source competitor to IE.  Firefox becomes very full-featured by use of plug-in technology.
  • FreeCommander – You owe yourself something better than Windows Explorer.  FreeCommander has plenty of features for making your file and PC management easier.   The dual-interface alone is worth the download.
  • Evernote – I store all my information in Evernote (and so should you).  Download the PC desktop version to sync to your web based data.
  • Picasa - The best way of managing and editing digital images and videos.
  • Skype – For free phone calls to other PCs, conference calls and video calls to other team members.  I also use it for video calling my family.
  • Foxit Reader – A lightweight PDF reader, to replace the slow and heavy Adobe Reader
  • notepad++ – A hardy open source replacement for Notepad.  Use it for any text editing work that you can get by doing without a word processor.
  • Videolan – An open source video player that plays just about any videos you’ve got.
  • Revo Unistaller – Finally install this utility to uninstall some of the crap that is often pre-installed on new consumer PC’s.  What comes quickly to mind is the trial version of Symantec Internet Security which is probably already installed on your new PC.  If you activate it, you’ll get it free for a couple of months and then will be nagged to death by the program trying to get you to buy the full version — just saying.

The rest of the apps I use:

Okay, you’re ready to work.

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Filed Under: Desktop applications, freeware, Productivity, Windows, Windows Vista Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Big Boy Competition for Google Docs and Zoho Office Coming from Microsoft

October 28, 2008 By 3 Comments

mslive-logo Microsoft announced today that the next release of Microsoft Office will include online versions of the main components of Microsoft Office – Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote.  The online versions will be “lightweight versions”, that is, not contain all of the features of the desktop products.

Good for consumers, Microsoft is going to support the Firefox and Safari browsers in addition to Microsoft’s own Internet Explorer.

The online applications will be available to end-users through the Microsoft Office Live service which has ad-funded and subscription options.

While a survey done on ReadWriteWeb earlier this year showed that the majority of that site’s visitors still used the Microsoft Office desktop application for their word processing and spreadsheet needs, there has been growing online competition to the behemoth office suite from the free online suites by Google and Zoho.

We’ve written about the Google and Zoho offerings repeatedly.  It will be interesting to see whether Microsoft will be able to compete online, in the arena they have owned for so long, with the more nimble Zoho and Google.

via ReadWriteWeb

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Filed Under: News, Office Suites, Web 2.0 Tagged With: , , ,

New Picasa beta now available for Linux [Update]

October 6, 2008 By Leave a Comment

picasa.jpg

We probably don’t provide enough help for those brave souls that have decided to use Linux as their desktop – these pioneers don’t use the Mac and certainly not Windows.

Unfortunately for these trend setters they’re also often forgotten by publishers of consumer-oriented software.  Today we’re glad to report that the Google team has made the new Picasa 3 available to Linux users. 

Our previous story on Picasa 3 beta.

The update provides much of what is available to the Windows crowd but does not include the rather cool slideshow movie format. 

Limitations in the Linux version come mostly from the rather quirky Wine technology that Picasa used to port Picasa to Linux.

Download Picasa for Linux [via webmonkey]

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Filed Under: Digital Pictures, freeware, Linux Tagged With: , , ,

Does Beta really mean Beta? Maybe not at Google

September 25, 2008 By 4 Comments

gmail-logo

Coming from a software background, to me, the definitions of the development stages of pre-release software are significant and not to be trifled with. To me, alpha tests mean really beware – bleeding edge software – we guarantee it’s going to break on you. Beta software means – still buggy watch out – we’re going to let our users find our bugs for us.

Here at the old Enquiring Mimes factory we tend to look at plenty of software that is described as beta, and we frequently recommend software and sites that are still theoretically in beta – but always with the caveat reminding you to be careful of possible glitches.

What we’re finding more often is that software and web sites never leave the beta stage and the publishers even in many cases may start charging for use during beta.  This leads us to believe maybe a new definition of beta has arrived.

As I’ve mentioned before one of the most puzzling still-in-beta sites is Google’s Gmail which was launched in 2004 and has been used extensively by (me included) zillions of users who seldom encounter any semblance of a bug (spam yes, bug no).

This mystery is explained, at least a bit, in an article on NetworkWorld’s Buzzblog where a Google spokesman explains why a recent study by Pingdom finds that 45% of Google’s products still wear the beta tag.  They tell it like this

“We have very high internal metrics our consumer products have to meet before coming out of beta. Our teams continue to work to improve these products and provide users with an even better experience.  We believe beta has a different meaning when applied to applications on the Web, where people expect continual improvements in a product.  On the Web, you don’t have to wait for the next version to be on the shelf or an update to become available.  Improvements are rolled out as they’re developed.  Rather than the packaged, stagnant software of decades past, we’re moving to a world of regular updates and constant feature refinement where applications live in the cloud.”

If you break it down, ths seems to mean that the new definition of beta means more changes/features are coming.

Microsoft adds new features to Outlook every couple of years in a new release.  Google can add new features and adapt to changing market conditions — daily or monthly by adding or changing Gmail.  If that’s true maybe beta is a good thing.

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