You may recall my story last month of crossing the bow of the QE2 during our mid-week twilight race. Instead of recounting a similar experience from last night, I need to tell you about my dog Nitro!
Sitting on the (upstairs) deck for a Good Friday early morning coffee, Nitro starts barking at some birds. Now unfortunately, and much to my intense frustration, he has just recently worked out that if I yell at him from the deck - and he ignores me - well, I’m too far away to do anything. So he ignores me!
My frustration becomes too intense, and I race downstairs to … explain it to him! Too fast. Half way down, the stairs and I part ways, I don’t ever get to Nitro, and spend the balance of the day at Casualty.
Nitro - one : Dog rage - zero! Nothing broken, but an “acute ankle sprain” has given me less time for sailing, and more time to trawl the Net for useful business tools.
Enjoy this months Tips and Tricks!
If you only use a few programs you don’t need a program launcher as you can get by perfectly well with the Windows Start Menu or by using Desktop Shortcuts. Now let’s get real! We are busy, with multiple tasks on the go, and for the trusty PC to really shine as a productivity booster, we need what we want next … fast!
There are many approaches for program launchers. An effective one is to use a keyword based approach where you launch a program by typing in the name (or part of the name) of a program. Launchy is the best known freeware example of this approach, and Keybreeze is free for non-commercial use.
Keybreeze is very fast and provides many configurable options to change how it functions and appears. The list of supported features is impressive, including automatically opening typed websites in a preferred browser as well as quick searches, user defined macros, looking up movie times, notes, reminders, and inserting commonly typed text into programs. It has a smaller memory footprint than Launchy, which is more attractive to the eye and has better indexing of files and folders.
A mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks or other items linked to and arranged radially around a central key word or idea. It is used to generate, visualize, structure and classify ideas, and as an aid in study, organization, problem solving, and decision making. Wise Mapping is the free web mind mapping tool that leverages the power of Mind Maps using the latest web technologies with no plugin required. Read more
Some commercial programs are real gems, and often preferred in the business world because of the perception of greater longevity and support. In reality an open source advocate can often replace those gems with equally shiny objects from the open source repertoire, usually backed by a massive user base that dwarfs their proprietary counterpart.
Here is a random selection to illustrate the point. Read more
Anyone who has tried to schedule a meeting at a time convenient to all the participants knows what a hassle this can be. TimeBridge is a free web service that does the work for you. All you do is type in the participant’s email addresses and a set of possible times, and TimeBridge does all the rest. To make things even easier, it integrates with your Outlook Contacts and Calendar or, indeed, any iCal based calendar including Google. Registration is required.
Source : techsupportalert