I’ve pretty much given up on Adobe Acrobat.  So slow to load and if you happen to load a PDF in Firefox or IE … well I’ve found that not only does my system start coming to a halt, but it gets rather unstable.  Yes, I know about PDF Download for Firefox, but even if you have it and mis-click and open well … Like the Lifehacker article says, if you haven’t started using Foxit Reader well you should, but if you must you Acrobat sounds like this tip is for you: Granted, most of us left Adobe Reader long ago in favor of Foxit Reader, or even the keyboard-navigator Sumatra, but for those of you who need Adobe Reader for whatever reason, Adobe Reader SpeedUp should go a long way toward a faster Reader. You can... [Read more]

This week online office suite company Zoho announced that they have used Google’s Gears technology and API to give Writer some offline capabilities: Zoho announced early this morning that they’ve taken the first steps toward making Zoho Writer available as an offline app using the Google Gears tool. Initially the docs saved offline will be read only but full offline functionality is planned. Source: Zoho takes the first step towards offline apps | Office Evolution | ZDNet.com Call me a skeptic, but I don’t think this is the best way to do the online-offline bit.  I’ve been playing with Zoho Notebook recently and it is by far a better product than Google’s Notebook (more on this in another post) and also installed... [Read more]

I don’t know how many times I’ve seen computers at people’s offices and homes where several people are using a computer, but all under the same account.  I’m not even get into if it’s an admin level account or not, just looking at the overlap, confusion and organization of this drives me batty. From a practical standpoint you have several people’s logins to manage (like Gmail, Hotmail, etc), documents to keep straight, bookmarks, even just colour preferences of windows.  All of this can be handled with each user having their own login. What about shared documents?  Simple, I know Windows has cross-account shared areas and since Mac-o-philes say OS X is so much better than Windows, then it must... [Read more]

I was reading Dustin Was on lifehack about the productivity ideas (fads?) that he doesn’t get.  One thing hit me, yep he’s right, some of these things don’t work: The 80/20 Rule. The power of Brand You. Making productivity a habit. Visualizing success. Okay, maybe not for me.  I try a bunch of these things, sometimes, but really what it comes down to is I just need to manage my e-mail, remember to do stuff (I’m not so good at that), read RSS, and write.  Yeah the remembering to do stuff is the tough one.   Maybe I’ll try to use GryoQ more with MindManager… Anyway, Dustin doesn’t get mind mapping … Mind mapping. I wanted so badly to believe this one! As an academic, I’m... [Read more]

Now you’re saying, “Huh?”.  This is both simple and amazing–use a banana (the fruit and peel), a soft cloth, and some window cleaner to clean and repair CDs and DVDs: Watch the video: How To Remove CD Scratches With A Banana – video powered by Metacafe  Source: MacGyver Tip: Clean a scratched CD or DVD with a banana – Lifehacker Is that amazing or what?  Since I have kids I have several games and DVDs to try this out on.  Love to hear your DVD/CD rescue stories. Technorati Tags: fix DVDs, fix CDs [Read more]