Genuine Curiosity

Author Dwayne Melancon is always on the lookout for new things to learn. An ecclectic collection of postings on personal productivity, travel, good books, gadgets, leadership & management, and many other things.

 

DIY with expert guidance

My wife and I are having some remodeling done to make our house more hospitable for her father, who can no longer deal with stairs.  We’ve had some excellent assistance from a contractor for “big stuff” like adding a shower on the ground floor. 

In addition, we’re taking the opportunity to perform some other maintenance and updates, but are doing those ourselves to try to save some money.  One of the projects was to repair or replace a pocket door in one of our rooms, and it wasn’t obvious to me just how to do the job.

In the process of researching the topic, I came across “Ron Hazelton’s HouseCalls” site.  This is an excellent resource for do-it-yourself home repair jobs.  I started with “How to Repair and Replace a Pocket Door,” but you can search the site and there are tons of relevant, practical tutorials from Ron.

Each one has very clear, step-by-step instructions (with pictures), tells you what tools you’ll need, and offers printable instructions.  Most of the topics even include videos you can watch online to see how things ought to be done.

This resource is a real time saver and confidence builder.  If you’ve got home repairs that you want to tackle on your own, check out Ron’s site.

What about you – any favorite DIY resources to share?

iPhone Productivity Apps

There is a great list of 20 iPhone productivity on the Web Design Schools site that should help you weed through the many choices you have on Apples App Store.jottiphone

As I’ve mentioned in the past, I used one of the 3G iPhones for a while and I think they are awesome devices – and part of the allure is the robust (and growing) set of choices for applications.  I used some of the apps mentioned in this article but many were new to me, and they may be new to you, as well.

Why am I not using the iPhone any more?

A friend of mine reminded me yesterday that I never wrote anything here about why I dropped my iPhone 3G and went to a Blackberry (I’m now using a Blackberry Bold, which I really like).

Here is the short reason:  Many of the business-oriented tasks I perform frequently were very difficult to achieve on the iPhone since it’s not tailored for business use.  Here are my top 3:

  • I couldn’t cut & paste.  I often send excerpts from articles, emails, etc. from my mobile device so this was very inconvenient.  This is very easy on my Blackberry.
  • I couldn’t invite others to appointments (i.e. initiate meeting requests).  Sure I could create an appointment, respond to calendar invites, and such on the iPhone but I could not invite others to meetings.  In contrast, on the Blackberry I can do all of this and I can click a button to find the next available time slot in which all of my invitees are available.
  • I couldn’t attach / forward contact information to others.  I often need to send virtual business card information (mine and others’) to people and this couldn’t be done on my iPhone.  This is a long-time function on Blackberry devices.

So that’s the short scoop on why I no longer use an iPhone.  I can still use many of the cool apps, by the way.  I upgraded my iPod Touch to the latest firmware which allows me to use any app in the App Store that isn’t exclusively for the iPhone.

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Link sharing (December 22, 2008)

Here are some links of interest I’ve gathered in the past 24 hours, as shared on Twitter (you can follow me, if you like).

I’m just getting more active in sharing links via Twitter – what do you think?  Leave a comment with your feedback.

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New Year’s Resolution: No more mystery chargers

OK, so sometimes I’m slow.  I’ve had an excellent Brother label make(the linked one at home, and an older one at work) for a looong time now.  I started using one in 2002 when I first drank the Getting Things Done elixir, I believe.  And I’ve had a ridiculous number of chargers and power adapters for even longer.

But it just dawned on me that I can actually use my label maker to mark my power adapters so I don’t:

  • throw one away because I don’t know what it’s for (yes, I’ve done that);
  • unplug the wrong one while crawling around under the desk (yes, I’ve done that);
  • accidentally bring the wrong charger with me on a trip (and I’ve done that once, as well).

So from this point forward, one of my resolutions is to label my power adapters when I first acquire them. 

blackberry_charger

Learning the hard way is still learning…

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Taskwriter is a cool tool for GTD

I’ve just started trying out Taskwriter, which is an online tool designed to help you with Getting Things Done (GTD).  As you might expect from a GTD-oriented tool, Taskwriter understands the notion of Next Actions, Contexts, Projects, etc.

taskwriter

I’ve included only a couple of tasks on this screen grab, but Taskwriter’s UI makes it easy to filter, print, and manage lots of items through the selection boxes on the left side of the screen.  This makes it easier to take the distractions of irrelevant contexts out of your view, for example.

Another thing that is pretty cool is the Calendar view they provide – anything that has a due date on it will show up on the calendar.  This helped me recognize, for example, that I had too many things due this Friday so I renegotiated a few to push them out.

Wish list

As you may know from some of my other posts, I often have a hard time with online-only tools because I spend a lot of time without connectivity.  I can work around this by printing lists, etc. with Taskwriter, but wish it had some integration with Outlook, Google, etc.  One workaround might be if they had an email parser that I could send tasks to and have them show up on my Taskwriter dashboard.

With that in mind, I will be making some requests / suggestions for future enhancements to see what happens.  Based on what I’ve seen at the Taskwriter blog, I stand a pretty good chance of seeing my suggestions show up someday.

Give it a try

If you want to give Taskwriter a whirl, you can set up a free account from their homepage, or use it as a guest (obviously, this won’t save what you enter, but you can try all aspects of the product without providing any contact info).

Keep an eye on these folks – I like what they’ve done so far.

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