Category ‘Personal’
Jing
Jing is a small application allowing you to create screenshots and screencasts up to 5 minutes - nothing revolutionary here. The new thing is, that Jing is capable of storing these files at either screencast.com, Flickr, a custom FTP server or your local hard drive (or network drive) and inserting a link to the file into your clipboard. This way you can share screenshots with your mates over IM or Email almost instantly.
After installation Jing docks to your screen edges and reveals it’s features on mouseover. Jing makes it super-easy to take screenshots and share them, once you’ve tried it, you’ll like it. Jing also comes with a screenshot/-cast history that allows you to delete old files to save some space. However, there are two downsides:
- You’ll need to register with screencast.com on first startup even if you don’t intend to use it
- You can’t create multiple FTP accounts (e.g. one for temporary files and another one for files you’d like to post in your blog and store permanently)
Jing is available for Mac and PC at http://www.jingproject.com/
Cool gadgets on my desktop
I often use my computer in the late evening and even when I turn my screen brightness down my eyes hurt after some hours. However, I don’t like to keep the whole room lighted, so I got myself some gadgets: Magic Eggs, a ripoff of the well-known Oggz. Magic Eggs are 9,5cm tall eggs glowing in slowly changing colors. Using LED technology and an integrated rechargeable battery they provide up to 8 hours of colored light. I’m just charging them first time, so I can’t test whether their batteries really last eight hours, but I will test this…
Update: The eggs last even longer than eight hours - I had them running throughout the evening and the night for a couple of times now and they were still not empty more than 10h later when I woke up. Awsome!
Because they are battery-powered, they are portable - I love positioning them across my desk.
I ordered my Eggs from leds.de and it took them quite a while to ship them - seems they ran out of stock.
Oh, and here’s what you’re all waiting for: Images. More to come soon.
Oggz by amitp, released under cc-by-nc.
Update: More images in the full view of this post.
Postponing mails
Have you ever postponed a job one of your buddies sent you via mail and forgot it? Here’s what I do.
I often get that kind of emails saying “Hey, can you quickly do this and that for me?”. Usually, I can - but I don’t want to - at least not immediately. So what I do is, I postpone it and happen to forget it once it’s out of the first page of my GMail inbox. But there’s quite an easy way to prevent this from happening using a neat feature of the GMail web interface called labels. Labels are best described as virtual folders, or if you know iTunes (smart) playlists. The mails are not being moved from the inbox, but you can tag them with something.
I created myself two labels, one called ‘finished’ and one called ‘postponed’. Whenever I read a mail and consider the work attached to it to be finished I apply the label ‘finished’ to it, whenever I postpone some work I apply the label ‘postponed’. That way, I know at a glance in my virtual ‘postponed’ folder that there’s work left.
How do you manage your mail? Any suggestions on mail management? Tell me using the comment function.