punkeydotcom

Hey all! We’re halfway through the moving process from the south of the Netherlands to the middle. That is, we’ve painted the new house (check some pics here) and recoated the floor (is that how you call that?) This Friday, we’ll be moving our stuff from house A to house B and to put first things first: The network cable and Wifi-router are on top of the stack! Anyway, I would like to talk a little about three time-saving plug ins/apps I am using right now to make my life on the web a wee-little easier. Targetalert Don’t you hate it when you click a link in Firefox and darn…it’s a PDF! Or a mailto-link. Well fear no more! Because Targetalert let’s you tweak these links
Now you can see beforehand if the link is for instance a PDF-file. If so, make sure you have installed… PDF Download This nifty little gem gives you a couple of options: Download the PDF, view it in a new tab or view it as HTML. The last option is a bit buggy, but the rest works fine!
Foldercache Foldercache is a nice shareware-tool I actually bought because it saves me a lot of headaches browsing to the right folder on our network. Let me explain: We work on a lot of projects which all have their own client and project folder on our network. I work on 5-10 projects a day (depending the size of projects). During a day I have to go to that particular network folder a lot of times. But I also would like to check some music or find some programs I downloaded. With Foldercache, you will have an extra icon in your system tray which gives you a popupscreen of your last visited folders and your favorite folders. The application has a lot of tweaking power for the way the folders are shown, which drives should be in- or excluded when offline (read: off the network) and a deletable history of visited folders. It sure is a time saver for me to just add a new project folder to the list and delete old ones and I’m ready to go. Also, it nests itself in various Windows-dialogs, so Saving or Opening in the right folder is a breeze!
I hope these little timesavers will help you do your work faster. Do you have some interesting extensions or apps you use? Let me know in the comments!

Noooo….not with this weblog! But in real life! Yep, that’s the reason things have been really quiet (again) on these pages. I have been swamped with things to do for our move to a new city. If you are from The Netherlands or familiar with it, I now live in the town called Breda. It’s near the south. Actually there is a Wikipedia-entry about it. As of this monday, me and my girlfriend will move into our new house in Utrecht, which is in the center of The Netherlands. It’s actually about 60 kilometres (about 37 miles) apart from each other, but nonetheless it’s a big step for both of us. We have been living together for 6 years, but now we bought a house instead of renting one. So we need to take care of a lot of things. That’s were some of the GTD principles come in handy… I already told you I didn’t really pay any attention in implementing the GTD principles at home, since I want my girlfriend to take part in it and help each other make our chaotic life a little less chaotic. But without a full-blown implementation, I still managed to get a few things done in a way that normally would cost me tons of sticky pads, reminders everywhere in the house, in and on my PC and somewhere on our chalkboard in the toilet. But we both bought the little Moleskines and use them as our Inboxes for the move. Everything we think of, brainstorm about, see in a store, in a magazine or on TV, goes in our respective ‘skines. Three times a week we simply look over the pages, compare them, talk about it and make decisions. Sometimes we need to check it more often, most of the times not. When we made the decisions what to do with the items (who calls the guy for the floor, where do we put the table, what about our lighting?) we jot down what we should do the following days and well…just do them. For instance, since my girlfriend is more at home, she’s been in charge of the whole “moving”-process. Everything about that process is not in different folders in different rooms, but we keep it all in one reference-folder. Same with bills and “change-of-adress”-lists, keep’em all in one folder and update once a week. So yeah, I know, it’s not all rocketscience. But let’s face it, David Allen’s principles are not meant to be rocketscience. They are simple and effective reminders on how it is possible to organize your life. The broad view is there (Collect, Process, Organize, Review, Do), how you fill it is up to your personal situation. So, be aware that this might be one of the last posts here the coming weeks. But hey, it’s not that the frequency has been sky high right? Wish me luck with painting, moving, scrubbing, everything in our new house. Hope to be back in 10 days or so! You can check some photos of out new house on this Flickr-page, where you can also find some of the pictures we make for furniture to decide on later

I have a desktop PC and a laptop. Most of the time I use the laptop, but this weekend I was working on my desktop PC for some coding and arranging stuff for our move to Utrecht. After just one week, I realized I missed my OnFolio-plugin in Firefox (are you reading this, Joe?) so I quickly installed this. While surfing and reading some feeds, I realized I found a lot of stuff I would like to read in more detail, put in a safe place (Reference) or put under the attention of a client or co-worker. Ofcourse, I could email it all to myself at work, but why not use some of the other tools at hand? So here’s what I did: I capture links, keywords, snippets in my Main Collection in OnFolio. This collection gets published every 30 minutes or so to my homepage at my ISP. With the inclusion of a RSS feed. Now, all I need to do is add this feed to my OnFolio on the laptop and I have all the information in one place. There I can use it at work, read offline, put in my reference-file or email directly. Kind of a detour-solution for a simple problem? Maybe for you, but for me, using it this way keeps it out of my sight (read: Inbox) when I’m at work and it gives me chance to process the information in a single timeframe because it’s all in the same feed.

This evening, I was just browsing my Reference file because I was looking for the tagging-extension in Pivot. If you’re not familiar with the concept of tagging, be sure to check out this explanation on Technorati. I would like my posts to be in the Tagging-cosmos too. Even more then they already are … Now, a Dutch guy made an extension for Pivot once. Just one Google search and shazam! there it was. But unfortunately the server where the installation-files can be found, is down right now. So no tagging for me right now. As I was looking through i-Marco’s website (I believe I met the guy somewhere) I noticed the excellent design of his blog. Turns out he made it himself and he turned it into a Pivot-template. Yay! I love the template and the slick look of it. When the server with the template and the tagging-extension is up again, be sure to find some new juice over here :-)