WebedtecH

Here’s a little hack for you Google Calendar users who also like the offline convenience of your Moleskine or equivalent organizer. A print out of the two-week view of your calendar will fit nicely in the back of your Moleskine with the right sequence of folds and a little trim on the sides. The process is:

1. Print the two week view in landscape mode. I recommend using as small a font as possible to give you the most space.
   
2. Fold the paper lengthwise along the top of the first row of dates.
   
3. Fold the paper lengthwise again along the second row of dates. You should now have a page that is 11″ long and about 4″ wide on one side and about 5″ on the other.
   
4. Fold the excess information at the top underneath so it is out of the way. You should now have two rows of dates, one for each week, visible as you flip the paper over and back.
   
5. Take a pair of scissors and trim off the hanging tabs at either end (they were the page borders)
   
6. Now just fold it on the line between Thursday and Friday (Days four and five depending on how you have your calendar arranged)
   

It should tuck nicely in the back of your planner for easy reference. Next step…monthly calendar origami.

I followed the directions supplied in this video from CNet about setting up Orb.com to allow streaming directly from my computer to any other machine. It does actually work and allow you to stream from your machine to your internet connected Wii. Follow each of the steps and you’ll be up and running in about 30 minutes. I’m finding I like it for showing photos just as much as anything else since my camera uses an xD card rather than an SD card (that the Wii uses.)

Ok, I posted a bit ago about how good an idea it was to create quick reference cards to helpful web tools for teachers (since the observation that they never throw out ANYTHING that’s laminated). Here’s the next step. I’ve attached a template I just threw together in Powerpoint (for lack of a more accessible tool) you can fill out and print. It’s sized as a 3″ x 5″ card, so with a single hole punch in the corner and a locking ring through them they should be very helpful.

I had it.  I know I did.  Now I can’t find it.  My precious little 8 GB thumb drive that I kept personal information, portable applications, and associated “stuff” on has gone on walkabout.  Now, I’m not worried so much about the personal info since everything was encrypted on the drive (everything of importance that is) but just the raw inconvenience of not having it is bugging me.  Luckily a while ago I started backing up the contents of the drive on a regular basis.  I’ll explain how…but you Mac users are on your own since my process only works on a PC.

The solution was simple enough.  I wrote a batch file (oh take me back to the good old days) that would copy anything that had changed on the drive to my hard drive with a single command.  Here’s the contents of the batch file (ironically called flashback.bat):

Since F: is the drive letter my flash drive is always assigned to when I plug it into the computer it’s easy to designate the batch file to copy all the contents of the drive.  The cool parts come from the switches at the end.

These two switches are enough to do a complete automated backup by just running the batch file.  If you want a smarter file add the following one:

This way only those files who have been modified since your last backup will be copied, making it process much faster.

No matter how you do it, get into the habit of backing up your portable drives in case they get lost, stolen, consumed by a canine, etc.  You can never be too careful.

Tags: backup, thumb drive, usb, data, portable

Here’s my issue.  I peruse over 200 feeds through my Google Reader, starring those items I want to follow up on later and comment.  I need to find a tool that will streamline my blog writing while interacting with the RSS feed of the items I have starred from Google Reader.

I know I can use ScribeFire in Firefox in a dual window configuration as an option but I’m curious if that is the only option around.  We shall see…

Tags: googlereader, blogging, flock, firefox, RSS