Category Archives: Gadgets & Apps

All posts that don’t obviously fit in one of the sub-categories go here.

flickr interestingness

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UPDATE 5/27/19: Looks like these features are no longer available.

Flickr has something called “interestingness.” I don’t know if this is new or I just never noticed. A photo gets included based on “where the click-throughs are coming from; who comments on it and when; who marks it as a favorite; its tags” and other stuff. You can spend hours on interestingness so don’t go unless you have some time.

Not sure why, but there’s a calendar view in case you wanted to see interesting photos from June, 2008, for example.

Screen shot 2009-12-07 at Mon, Dec 7, 7.39.16 AM

Better email

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Nick Bilton came up with 10 ideas for fixing the email glut. These are my favorites:

  • Add reply buttons for YES, NO and MAYBE – Some messages just don’t need a comprehensive reply. If someone e-mails me and asks if I’m available to attend a meeting, rather than take the time to write back with a detailed response, why can’t I just click a YES, NO, or MAYBE button? One click and the e-mail has been dealt with.
  • Cut off anything longer than 140 characters – Speaking of Twitter, do we really need more than 140 characters for most messages? E-mail applications could add a button that would cut off all content longer than 140 characters.
  • A monthly word limit – We have limits on Internet bandwidth, and surcharges to limit the number of minutes we can talk on our cellphones. Why not limit the number of words an e-mail account can pump out each month? (If you go over, that new government e-mail tax kicks in …)

Gmail Task applet

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I attended my first “time management” workshop back in the early 70s. I got the bug pretty bad. Read and listened to countless books and cassette tapes (before CDs) on productivity. I think there was a recent resurgence under the GTD (Getting Things Done) banner. Somewhere along the way, my passion waned but in those 35+ years, I’ve tried lots of tools and systems.

To-do lists have always been a challenge for me. I tend to put too load them up with too many items and they stay there too long. I recently came across the notion of identifying three things you really want to accomplish during the day and writing those on a 3×5 card. Portable, focused… might work.

tasklist

My current favorite is the Tasks applet in Gmail. Small, simple and available everywhere. Supports multiple lists. About as close to that 3×5 card as I can get.