Workers Without Cubicles

OmniFocus is a great app for tracking and improving your productivity. It’s currently in beta, and you can download a free copy to test/play with here. The Omnigroup is offering a special discount to beta-testers - if you pre-order before January 8, 2008 you can get OmniFocus for $39.95 as opposed to the release price of $79.95.

I grabbed my beta copy and have been tinkering around with it. What I like is that it doesn’t force you into the GTD methodology - you can use it as a fancy to-do list tracker, and when you’re ready to dig deeper the extra functionality is there. It also syncs with iCal, and can watch your email for incoming tasks that you mail yourself - for example, if you’re at work and think of something to add to your task list, just email it to your home account. OmniFocus will pick it up the next time you check your home email and add it automatically.

Software

We picked up an Apple Bluetooth wireless keyboard on the weekend and I wanted to share my first impressions with you.

For starters, it’s not a full-size keyboard. It lacks separate page up/page down keys, along with a numeric keypad. It is also very thin - I would estimate that it is no more than 4mm thick for the most part, except for the cylindrical portion at the back which holds the batteries and bluetooth antenna. The battery compartment also serves to elevate the keyboard to a comfortable angle for typing (at least for me).

How does it feel? Pretty good actually. The keys themselves are full-size and normally spaced. I find that the design mutes keyboard noise quite nicely - while you definitely get audible feedback when you’re typing, your neighbour isn’t going to hear you too.

The keyboard was super-easy to pair up with my laptop over bluetooth. The right-side of the battery compartment is an power / bluetooth discovery button. All it took to pair up with my laptop was a single press of this button and then following the normal procedure in the “Setup up a Bluetooth Device” area in the Bluetooth System Preferences panel. OS X prompted me to type a 6 digit code on my keyboard, after which it paired with the Mac.

Working with the Nokia N800

I also had no problems pairing the keyboard with my Nokia N800 internet tablet device. Actually, the Apple keyboard + N800 makes an almost unbeatable portable blogging system. I was happy to discover that the Nokia can be driven entirely from the keyboard, with almost no need to resort to the touch screen. I wish I had a setup like this back when I was an on-call system administrator 8 years ago!

N800 tip: Make sure you select a Hardware Keyboard type of pc105 in the control panel. Otherwise the keymappings will be all wrong (it defaults to a Nokia bluetooth keyboard of some sort).

Downsides to the keyboard? Well I can’t think of anything major right now. I’ve been told that I can expect excellent battery life so we’ll see how that goes. I suppose some people might dislike the feel of the keys, and the lack of a separate numeric keypad might be a show-stoppers for others. But for me, this is a perfect little keyboard that I’m looking forward to using on a daily basis.

Gadgetry apple, bluetooth, macintosh, n800, nokia

Merlin Mann of 43Folders is a smart guy when it comes to managing all the facets of your "digital life". Here is a presentation he gave recently at the IDEO offices. The 43Folders name comes from David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology, so if you’re a following of that way of thinking, then you’ll be right at home with Merlin. But even if you’re not, Merlin is still worth paying attention to. 

General

We got tired of paying Telus (our local phone company) a lot of money for what seemed to be little service. I started looking at alternatives and decided to give a voice over IP solution a whirl. By now most people are familiar with VoIP: phone service over the internet. Basically, a VoIP provider acts a gateway between the regular phone system and the internet. You’re probably familiar with services like Vonage - you sign up for a monthly plan and they send you a little box which connects to the internet and your regular house phones. Their plans were certainly cheaper than the regular telephone company’s plans, but I found Vonage’s sound quality to be spotty - no doubt because I live in Canada and the calls were being routed down into the US (where Vonage is located) and back up here.

I’ve found a better way to manage my phone system, and that’s to do it myself. Using a free package called TrixBox, I have been able to run my own phone system using a spare computer. It handles everything from phone greetings to voicemail, can ring both my cell and my house phones simultaneously when a call comes in, and gives me excellent call tracking reports. I can see exactly how long I’ve spent on the phone and compare it to previous months. And best of all, it’s dirt cheap. You still need a VoIP service provider, but since you are handling all the "extras" (voicemail, caller waiting, etc) via Trixbox, the phone plans are cheap. I pay $2.50 per month for my phone line, plus 1.1 cents / minute usage. That means for a typical month, my phone bill is about $12 CDN.

I’m going to put together a small how-to document, but in the meantime be sure to check out the following links:

TrixBox - I use this software to run my phone systems
voipinfo - A great resource for all things VoIP - lists service providers by country/region.

Business, Gadgetry phone, voip

A friend of mine asked me if I could take a look at his Drupal installation - apparently whenever he enabled a particular module his entire site would crash. "Sure, no problem. I’ll take a look this weekend and we’ll get it sorted out for you" was my response. But something came up that weekend and I put it off. I figured that it wouldn’t take me long to figure out, so I could do it Monday. Of course, when Monday came around, something else took precedence and I put my friend’s problem on the backburner.

That was three weeks ago. Each time I pushed the task back it seemed to grow in size. Suddenly it wasn’t a small favour I was doing my friend, it was some giant task that was bordering on a project … at least, that’s how I viewed it.

Last night I found myself with a free evening, so I sent him a quick note saying I would take a look and that it would probably take me a day or so to figure out. I logged in, and within 5 minutes I found and fixed the problem. So simple! My friend was ecstatic that I had solved the problem which had plagued him for weeks… while I felt more than a little guilty for dragging things out as long as I had.

One of the golden rules in the Getting Things Done system is to do a small task immediately, rather than postponing it. It’s a good rule to live by and I guess I needed a reminder.

General gtd

I’m one of those people that needs more than one computer to work. My main workstation is a 15" MacBook Pro that is connected to a 20" Apple Cinema display. To its right is our 20" iMac, which serves as our media server, backup server, and VMware test machine. Due to limited desk space, I didn’t want to have multiple keyboards and mice laying around. My first thought was to use a standard KVM switch to switch my keyboard and mouse between my Macs. But that requires a lot of USB cables, and I really didn’t want that kind of clutter behind my desk. I needed a clean, elegant solution.

Enter Teleport - it’s a software-based KVM that works over your home network. You simply load Teleport on each Mac that you want to share your keyboard and mouse and enable sharing. Your "secondary" Macs (the ones without keyboards/mice of their own) will show up as monitors that you can position around your primary Mac’s display. Then, when your pointer moves offscreen, it will "hop" over to the next Mac. Teleport even allows you to share information between your Macs. You can drag and drop files, as well as the content in your clipboard.

For those of you not running Macs, be sure to take a look at Synergy - an open source alternative that runs on Windows, Linux, and yes, even Macs. One nice thing that Synergy has going for it over Teleport is the ability to mix and match your computers on your LAN. So you can control a Windows machine from your Linux box, etc.

Software

I use a MacBook Pro as my primary workstation, and it’s usually connected to the internet via an ethernet cable, although we do have wireless in our house for those “work from the couch” days.

Last night, I needed to borrow the ethernet cable from the MacBook Pro - so I switched the Mac over to the wireless network. No big deal, right? Only, I was running VMware Fusion on the Mac at the time, with bridged networking enabled. Now, bridged networking simply makes any virtual computer inside VMware appear to be an entirely separate computer on the LAN. It’s recommended that it is used with Ethernet only. That’s because it needs to do some network trickery in order to make it look like the virtual computer is separate from the real one.

After switching to wireless I walked away to get a drink, and when I returned, OS X was displaying a dialog box that read something to the effect of “It appears as though your wireless network may have been compromised. OS X will disable wireless for approximately one minute” - and sure enough, I was offline.

I didn’t think to grab a screenshot at the time, but it looks as though OS X didn’t like what VMware was trying to do to make itself visible on the wireless network. It misinterpreted it as an attack on the wifi and shut the wireless down. Unexpected, and quite cool!

I’m going to try and replicate it this afternoon to see if I can’t get a screenshot or two.

General

For all those web developers who rushed out to upgrade to OS X Leopard - if you’re like me and you used the Sites folder in your home directory for testing your websites, you may have noticed that you can no longer access http://localhost/~username/ after your upgrade to Leopard. It took me a minute or two to figure out, but here’s the problem and a solution (if you are command-line friendly):

Leopard features the Apache v2 webserver, as opposed to the older Apache v1 in Tiger. In the old Tiger OS, the Apache configuration files were stored in /private/etc/httpd/. That’s changed in Leopard. The new path is /private/etc/apache2/.

When a user is created on your system, a small Apache configuration file is created that enables Apache to serve content from their ~/Sites/ directory. Under Tiger, these files were stored in /private/etc/httpd/users/. From what I can tell, if you’ve done an upgrade from Tiger to Leopard, those files do not get migrated over to the new /private/etc/apache2/users/ folder.

So, in order to make your sites work again, make sure to copy your Apache per-user configuration files from /private/etc/httpd/users to /private/etc/apache2/users. For example, I had to do this:

$ sudo cp /private/etc/httpd/users/michealk.conf /private/etc/apache2/users/

$ sudo apachectl restart

General

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, you have to admit that Apple knows what it’s doing when it comes to product design. I stumbled across a great article over at Basement.org: 10 Things We Can Learn From Apple. Think about it: here is a company that turned itself around and went from being a minority player to a major trendsetter in technology. How did they do it, and can the lessons we learn from Apple be applied to other businesses and industries?

Some of my favourite points:

1. Apple is not a software company. It’s also not a hardware company. It’s an experience company.
2. How many other companies do you know of that introduce a product line personally?
3. Mimic real world artifacts and make things feel less like technology devices and more like something you’d find in the real world.
4. Apple designs every single thing they sell knowing that it will be touched by a person.

For me, points 3 and 4 really resonate. Just about everything Apple builds looks good enough to touch/lick/taste. They pay attention to the overall design, both hardware and software.

I have an HP notebook on which I run Ubuntu Linux and occasionally Vista. While the HP is a solid little performer, it looks clunky as hell and feels cheap. I don’t get the same tactile pleasure using it as I do when I use my MacBook.

General

Wow.

I’ve been using Apple’s new Leopard operating system for a couple days now and all I can say is that Time Machine alone made it worth the purchase price.

Time Machine is the backup software built into OS X 10.5 that everybody is raving about. Count me in too. Time Machine runs in the background, doing hourly incremental backups of your data to an external hard drive. What makes it so great is that it is painless to setup - just plug in an external drive, and OS X asks you if you want to use it for Time Machine. Click yes and you’re done.

I’ve already used Time Machine twice to rescue files I ended up needing after I deleted them. Apple has made restoring stuff easy too. Even more, the animated Time Machine screen is so compelling that it makes me want to use it. I find myself clicking on the Time Machine icon occasionally just to watch the stars float by.

General