Helpful Stuff

I like to think of myself as efficient. Efficient may have a bit of laziness tied into it, to be honest– I don’t want to work any harder than I have to in order to get something done. In this get-it-now era, there are a whole lot of ways to cut down on the time it takes to get things done, and most of them don’t hurt the quality of the task at all– in fact, a lot of them improve it.

So, here are 7 productivity tools that you’re probably not using, at least to their full extent.

1. Feed readers. If you are spending ages going around to all of your favorite blogs one by one each day, you are livin’ in the ’90s. Get on the train and get yourself a feed reader. My reader of choice is Google Reader. Subscribe to all of the blogs you read, then check Google Reader on your device of choice (my personal favorite is on my cell phone in the check-out line) and read all new blog posts from one spot. No more hopping from blog to blog to see who’s written something new.

If you are way obsessed with keeping up with your social networks, and you’re not following too many people, you can put your Twitter feed or whatever other social feed in Google Reader, too. Be careful, though. If you follow too many people it quickly becomes overwhelming, and then it’s not efficient anymore because you won’t use it.

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I normally don’t do technical how-to posts like this, so if this bores you, please just skip it and move on.

That said, I am assuming that most of you have arrived here by Googling the phrase, “convert GoToMeeting WMV file,” or, “Error: No codec available to render this file,” or, “The requested video codec is not installed on this system,” or maybe, “OMG WTF GTM.” The basic gist is that you want to use your GoToMeeting/GoToWebinar WMV file in the way that WMV files were meant to be used… and you can’t.

As it turns out, GoToMeeting WMV files aren’t WMV files in the way you’re used to. They use the GTM codec, which apparently no one supports but GTM. There are two ways to get around this.

If you haven’t started recording your GoToMeeting yet, take the advice from this post and save yourself some heartache later: Read the rest of this entry »

I did a post about a month ago about buying shoes from ShoeDazzle to fight heart disease.

I take it back.

Fight heart disease some other way. Just don’t join ShoeDazzle. Let me tell you why, in the format of a series of events:

Wednesday of last week: I wore my super adorable ShoeDazzle shoes to work– the ones I wore to the company holiday party that I got a million compliments on. I love these shoes. (However, I’d only worn them 3 or 4 times.)

Around lunchtime, I noticed that the upper part of the shoe was ripping completely out of the sole. There’s about a 2 inch rip in both shoes in the same spot.

No problem, I thought to myself. Most online companies are excellent about quality concerns and will gladly do what it takes to make their customers happy, no matter what their return policy is. I dashed off a quick email to ShoeDazzle client services to let them know about the problem.

Hours later (so good on them for at least being quick about it), I received the following email response: Read the rest of this entry »

It’s that time of the year, when you resolve to be a better person in 2010. There’s an app for that. Heh. Here are some of my favorite New Year’s Resolution apps for the iPhone:

Get up earlier:

Alarm Clock Free (iHandySoft Inc.) – Alarm Clock Free turns your iPhone or iPod touch into a beautiful digital clock and alarm clock for free! (If you enjoy Alarm Clock Free, there is a paid version with more features: set your own song or playlist as alarm, more colorful themes, built-in flashlight.)

Keep in touch: Read the rest of this entry »