Category Posts

We bought a house

For the past six months or so, we’ve been house hunting. After looking at probably fifty houses and making offers on five of them, we finally found a house that we are quite excited about.

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It’s a cape cod style home with lots of custom-built work done by the previous owners. There are two redwood trees just outside the front door and one in the backyard. The yard is huge and there are fruit trees. The place is equipped with solar panels which brings the cost of electric down ridiculously low. And the master bedroom has a huge jacuzzi tub.

There’s more I could say about the place but suffice it to say that we are so excited and can’t wait to move in. The movers arrive next week.

Daylite Lite

Daylite is a powerful CRM for the Mac. I own it but rarely use it. Why? It’s almost too powerful for my needs and I just don’t need much of what it offers. For instance, I already use Address Book so I don’t need it to manage my contacts. I already use OmniFocus so I don’t need it to manage my tasks. I already use iCal so I don’t need it to manage my calendar.

One thing I don’t have in place is a solid way to manage the relationships between my clients and the projects I work on with them. My low-tech solution to this is by keeping track of the projects I’ve worked on in the notes field of Address Book. It works but is by no means a very good solution.

So, that’s what I’m doing with Daylite now. Instead of tracking the project in the notes field of Address Book, I now use Daylite to track projects and contacts associated with those projects. I don’t use tasks, calendar, etc. in Daylite. Overkill? Yes. Does it work? Yes. Does it work better than the low-tech solution of entering project names into the notes field in Address Book? Yes. But it is a lot more work.

Daylite is nice because it has a slick iOS app. So, I can see my projects and contacts sorted nicely when I’m away from my Mac. It’s working out well thus far. We’ll see if I stick with it though. All the extra clicks that Daylite makes me go through gets a bit tiresome.

I wish there was a Daylite Lite. If I could customize the interface to remove all the stuff I’m not using, that would be ideal. If they could somehow minimize the number of clicks and steps it takes to add projects and associate contacts, I’d be happy.

Check in before you check in

Though I rarely use Foursquare to check in anymore, this app called Forecast caught my eye. You basically check in before you check in. Interesting. Seems to make sense as an adjunct to the genre.

Instacast is my podcatcher of choice

Recently, I heard about an iOS app called Instacast. It’s a podcatcher and makes it easy to discover and download podcasts. Tired of using iTunes and the Music app on my iPod Touch, I decided to give it a try.

Instacast

Well done. The app took me a bit to figure out at first. The interface, though somewhat sparse, has lots of little icons that don’t really make sense to me. For instance, a little circle represents unplayed podcasts. Once the podcast has been played, the circle gets filled in. Only by touching the circle repeatedly was I able to figure out its purpose. The same goes for other interface elements.

However, I’ve been using it for a few weeks now and I think I’ve figured out everything I need to in order to get the most out of the app.

Why do I like it? Well, for one thing, it gets my podcasts out of my iTunes library. Personally, I prefer music to only exist in my library so outsourcing the podcatching to a dedicated app is nice.

Also, it’s easy to discover podcasts and subscribe to them. Just scroll through the categories, genres, etc.

I like that I can easily download older episodes too. And being able to quickly remove a podcast once I’m done listening to it is great, especially on my 8GB iPod Touch.

The app is inexpensive. A couple bucks I believe. Check it out if you listen to podcasts.

Embracing Linked List Posts (Daring Fireball Style)

This has been on my list for a while. I want to post brief posts to my weblog that follow the Daring Fireball linked list approach. Basically, this means that that post title links directly to the web page that the post refers to.

For now, this only happens for those reading my posts in an RSS reader. When I get around to it, I’ll update my site’s theme to behave similarly. For now, those who visit my site will have to click on a link embedded in the post itself. Kind of a bother for me since I have to remember to add the link within the post as well as the custom field.

Here’s the Daring Fireball-style linked list plugin for WordPress.