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I read quite a few blogs. The vast majority of these blogs are technology based. See for yourself. But if you asked me what my absolute favorite blog was, the one that I look forward to reading the most week after week, it wouldn’t be technology based at all. My answer would be Zen Habits.

Zen Habits is a motivational and, I think, inspirational website dedicated to abolishing bad habits and creating good habits. I think what I like most about this site, is the fact that the author, Leo, is just a regular person like you or me. He writes about the different techniques and philosophies he uses to improve various aspects of his life. Specifically, he writes about productivity, organization, finance, family, simplicity, happiness, and health. His two main philosophies seem to be GTD (get things done) and simplification. I’ve always been a big believer in the latter approach toward life, hence the reason why I think I’m so drawn to his website.

If improving your life is subject that interests you, and it should be, then I would highly, highly recommend checking out Zen Habits. It’s extremely well written and I always leave the site with a renewed sense of confidence.

Since my blogroll is comprised mostly of tech sites, it’s sometimes hard to weed out all the other non-tech blogs that I like to read. Here is a list of some other sites that are also dedicated to improving your life in one way or another.

43 Folders
Lifehack
Lifehacker
Pick The Brain
Get Rich Slowly
Dumb Little Man

I’m happy to see that all of the above websites also made it onto Leo’s blogroll. Of course, Leo has quite a few more self-improvement sites in his list than I do in mine. I’ll have to take a closer look at what he’s reading. If they’re even half as good as Zen Habits, then they would be worth a look.

     

Filed under: Life, Productivity, Mind, Body, Soul, Internet
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I am constantly tweaking my Firefox browser and this, my friends, is my latest and greatest creation. I visit these sites at least once a day, some more than others. Have a look.

     

Filed under: Firefox, Productivity, Web 2.0, Internet
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Testing Journler’s blogging abilities — If you see this, it worked. Yay!

For the last few days I’ve been messing around with a great program for the Mac called Journler. It’s like a journal on steroids. It has all the basic features you would expect from journaling software, but then takes it to a whole other level. You can do things like add audio, video, and photos to your entries with the click of a button or record them directly using your built-in hardware. You can even publish your entries to your blog (I haven’t actually tried this yet, cross your fingers). The interface is sleek and intuitive, just what you’d expect from a Mac app.

Don’t look at this as a full review of Journler though, since I’m still plummeting head first through the learning curve, but I was impressed enough with what I saw to give it a mention to anyone who has never heard of it.

Journler

I’m still a big time Mac noob. I’ve had this MacBook for about a year now and I just recently discovered what that weird little diagonal line is that all the Mac tutorials refer to. But I do listen. The OS X gurus may not think I’m listening, but I am — and every now and then I pick up on their good habits. I’ve recently been introduced to a little app called Quicksilver. I’m really not the guy to be giving a full review of this app, or any Mac app for that matter, but from what I’ve seen of it so far, it’s pretty damn incredible. Here’s what I can tell from the little time I’ve spent with it — it’s an extremely powerful search application with a slew of built in macros (is that the right word?) which allow you to do all sorts of things to the items that you’ve just searched for. It uses a lot of keyboard shortcuts (which I love) to accomplish tasks at a lightning fast pace.

I’m really not doing this program any justice, so I’m gonna shut up now. The guys over at the Blacktree Inc. will most likely be sending me a cease and desist letter any day now anyways because of this literary mutilation of their product. Go ahead and check it out for yourself. I think you’ll really like it. If you don’t, blame the gurus.

Quicksilver

     

Filed under: Apple, Links, Software, Productivity
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What have we here? It looks like O’Reilly - of O’Reilly Media, not Bill O’Reilly - has opened up its internet ports to all those who are interested in getting an education in technology. O’Reilly School of Technology offers a variety of online courses ranging from programming to system administration to web development. You can’t earn a degree here (yet?), but you can earn a certificate in a number of technology fields. If you’re not interested in taking full certificate programs, you can always just take the individual courses. The price appears to be between $298 to $498 per class, and less when signing up or a full certificate program. If you’re curious to see how their classes work, as I was, take a look at this video.

I’m still not 100% convinced that paying for an online education is a good idea, but the fact that it’s O’Reilly makes that much more curious.

Course List:

For the complete I.T. beginner:

* Introduction to HTML and CSS
* Learn Object-Oriented Programming Using Java
* Linux/Unix Sysadmin I: The Basics of System Administration
* Learn C Programming, Part 1

For the beginner/intermediate student:

* Introduction to PHP
* JavaScript 1: Client-Side Programming
* Learn Perl for CGI Programming
* PHP/SQL 1: Introduction to Database Programming
* Learn SQL for Database Programming
* Learn C Programming, Part 2
* Learn VB-Script
* Learn Unix for Web Programming
* Linux/Unix Sysadmin II: Networking and DNS
* Learn XML

For the intermediate/advanced student:

* JavaScript 2: AJAX
* Linux/Unix Sysadmin III: Unix Services (including email and web servers)
* Linux/Unix Sysadmin IV: Scripting for Administrators, Sed, Awk, and Perl
* Learn Visual Basic .NET
* Learn C#.NET

     

Filed under: Productivity, Cyberculture, Technology
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Apple finally revealed their new mobile phone. Head over to Engadget to see pictures and more live coverage.

The phone is absolutely gorgeous. It runs OS X and has a 3.5″ widescreen / touchscreen (only one actual button). It plays music, movies, and TV shows, and integrates seamlessly with iLife. I’m excited and I’m not even a phone guy.

Oh, and it has wi-fi and bluetooth capabilities. Wow…

***edit***

Apple partnered with Cingular (now AT&T)

$499 for a 4Gb
$599 for an 8Gb

     

Filed under: Gadgets, TV / Video, Apple, Software, Productivity, Technology, News, Music, Movies
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joesgoals.com is website that allows you to create your own to do lists for anything you can think of. It’s a very simple, yet surprisingly useful little web app. Since this is the season for New Year’s resolutions, I thought I’d share this tool with you.

The website isn’t the most pleasing website to look at, but don’t let that deter you from trying it out. It’s well worth a look.

There’s tagging, tracking reports, logs, all sorts of goodies.

     

Filed under: Productivity, Life, Web 2.0, News, Mind, Body, Soul, Reviews, Internet
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Four of us were sitting at my friends house a about a week ago, when I brought up some interesting news stories I read about Apple’s OS X vs. Windows Vista. Now, when you’re sitting in a room full of avid Windows users, it’s interesting to see how instantly hostile they can get towards Apple, and how defensive they can be of Windows. This kind of boggles me. I’ve always used multiple operating systems side by side and have found that each of them offer things that the other can’t. Granted, I spend the vast majority of my time using Windows and have invested way, way, more time in that OS than in all of the others combined. It would definitely be a hard sell to get me to switch my primary operating system.

If there were such an operating system that could make me switch, however, it would most likely be OS X Tiger. I’ve been using OS X on a daily basis now for about five months and have loved every minute of it. This is a new frontier for me. I have no substantial experience with any of the other Apple operating systems, so I can’t form a valid opinion of them. Just OS X Tiger.

Here are some of my thoughts on OS X in comparison to Windows and Linux:

First of all, OS X is really just a pretty version of Unix, so we know right away that it’s far more secure than Windows. Having a background in Linux/Unix really helped me with the transition to OS X. In fact, the first time I booted up my Mac I was surprised at how much it looked like Kubuntu, menus and all.

Boot up and shutdown times are ridiculously quick. Noticeably faster than Windows and quite a bit faster than Ubuntu. Coming out of sleep mode is almost instantaneous too.

Installing programs couldn’t be easier. Drag the new program to the Applications folder and voila, it’s installed. Uninstalling couldn’t be easier either. Drag the program to the trash bin and voila, it’s uninstalled. No orphaned DLL files or abandoned registry entries to clutter up your system.

No viruses. The typical argument here is that it’s because the writers of such malicious programs don’t create viruses for Macs, because no one uses Macs. That’s partially true. It is possible to write a virus (or other malware) for OS X — and as the operating system becomes more popular you can bet we’ll see more of them. The simple fact is, however, it’s much harder to write this kind of software for a Unix based OS. One reason for this is because 99% of Windows users are going about their daily business logged onto their computers as administrator, also called a root. Ask any Linux user if he or she surfs the net as root and they’ll most likely laugh at you. OS X, for all intents and purposes, is Linux.

It’s very intuitive to use, but first, you have to clear your mind of all Windows. Only then will yo be able to accept the OS X interface. For example, the whole corners thing is genius. When I move my mouse to the top left corner (or whichever corner you choose), all my open applications are tiled in front of me. It’s like alt-tab times 100. It’s little things like that that make OS X shine.

OS X is a very powerful development platform which comes preloaded with languages such as Python, Perl, PHP, and Ruby, while still remaining incredibly user friendly to the computer novice.

Spotlight! By far the best search utility in any operating system. So good that Microsoft is putting a Spotlight clone in Vista.

Plenty of software applications. From what I used to hear about Macs, the main problem was that no one made software for them. Like I said, I don’t know anything about the older versions of Apple’s OS, so this may be true. I can tell you that with OS X, there is definitely no shortage of software. Because OS X is Unix based, you can essentially run any Linux program you want on it. For example, I don’t use Microsoft Office anymore, even on Windows. I use OpenOffice which is a free, cross-platform office suite. I don’t use Dreamweaver anymore. I use NVU, which is a free, cross-platform HTML editor. Software that is cross-platform is especially nice because no matter what OS you are using, your workspace remains familiar.

OS X is geared more towards the user. In the world of Web 2.0, content is king. In the world content creation, OS X is king. It’s hard for anyone to argue the fact that the Mac reigns supreme in the area of photo manipulation and audio / video production. With bundled apps like Garage Band, Photo Booth, iTunes, and iMovie, the average user can easily produce rich content, ripe for a new dynamic web.

These are just some of the examples of why I love OS X, and it’s only been 5 months. So if you are a Windows user and you haven’t looked at an Apple in a while, I recommend that you take another look, you may be surprised.

Or you can wait a bit. Apple and Microsoft both have new operating systems due out shortly, OS X Leopard and Windows Vista respectively. 2007 could turn out to be an interesting year.

     

Filed under: Apple, Microsoft, Software, Productivity, Reviews, Technology
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I have to say, Tracksy.com is a pretty slick website. I heard about it on an episode of commandN and they had had nothing but good things to say about it. At first glance, it seems to be very similar to Google Analytics in that they both offer free web statistics for you website (or multiple websites) and have a huge variety of reports that you can generate for your viewing pleasure. In fact the two sites almost compliment each other. Google’s site may be a little more robust than tracksy’s, but tracky’s interface is much more user friendly.

Installation is a breeze. When you sign up with Tracksy (or Google for that matter), they will generate a little javascript snippet that you place in the html of your website. It’s literally cut, paste, done. I’m currently running both on all my sites.

Here is a list of some of tracky’s user generated reports and features that they offer:

• Exclusion Cookies
• Exclude Selective I.P. Addresses
• Invisible or Visible Counter
• Detailed, Real-Time Reports
• Recent Visitor List
• Traffic Reports
• Traffic Per URL
• Traffic Per Year
• Traffic Per Month
• Traffic Per Weekday
• Traffic Per Day
• Traffic Per Hour
• New vs. Returning
• Referrers
• Referring Sites
• Search Engines
• Search Engine Keywords
• Visitor Computers
• Browser
• Operating System
• Language
• Screen Size
• Screen Color Depth
• Internet Service Provider
• Connection Speed
• Visitor Locations
• Country
• Region
• City
• Visits
• Pages Viewed
• Visits Per Month

Not bad for a free service. Give it a try and if you don’t like it, it’s as simple as deleting the javascript from your website. It can’t get much easier than that.

     

Filed under: Productivity, Reviews, Design / Development, Internet
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I just installed a Wordpress widget for my Macbook and I decided to give it a spin. If it works like it’s suppose to, I will be able to post messages a lot faster than going through the normal interface.

Granted, I won’t be able do much text formatting. I also won’t be able to add photos or videos to my posts. At least not easily. I do think it will be a great little widget for posting quick thoughts though.

Let’s try it out…

     

Filed under: Apple, Gadgets, Software, Productivity
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I was writing an email a couple of minutes ago and I noticed Google has a new feature called Google Spreadsheets.

I had a chance to mess around with it for a couple of minutes. It seems very smooth considering it’s a web app. I’ve used other online spreadsheets that are clunky by comparison. It also seems to have all of the features you would expect from Google, i.e. sharing capabilities, import/export options, etc…

At first glance, it looks like a nice little spreadsheet for day to day use. It’s definitely a great addition to Google’s ever growing list of web apps. Free web apps at that. I look forward to playing around with it some more.

     

Filed under: Software, Google, Productivity, Web 2.0, Technology, News, Internet
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