I I jumped on the bandwagon and got myself one of the fanciest mobile phone on the market. I am not talking about the “Iphone 3g” but the HTC Touch HD and that phone is really really cool.

Now what is the difference with the “Jesus phone 3g” ?

Well it does everything the Iphone does and few more things. For example you can:
– copy and paste (doh)
– run several applications at the same time
– play full res Divx and Xvid videos (using TCMP)
– change the battery
– swap MicroSD cards (it comes with a 8gb SD card)
– record videos
– use it as a wifi router or a cabled one
– it comes with a very slick stylus
– with a bit of trickery you can view Flash websites (only in USA et UK)
– it synchronizes Outlook Notes and tasks
– connects to Exchange corporate emails
– really fine 800*480 pixels screen
– ultimately it doesn’t drop phone calls!!!

I am too busy at the moment to explore everysingle function but so far I love that phone. After nearly 4 years, I finally ditched my Palm T5 and my recent Nokia N95, the Touch HD replaces all my devices. No need to carry all my chargers and cables with me anymore just a regular Mini usb.

Once in a while Fool.com posts some interesting article and I found an interesting one today entitled “What to do with $5,000“.

What interested me in this article was a series of links to the free online MIT and Berkeley University courses.

I am not too sure how to naviguate on the MIT website and couldn’t find the actual courses but the Berkeley one seems easier to naviguate and finding videos and mp3s was really simple. I am currently listening to the Social Psychology lecture by Dacher Keltner.

On the same topics, Stanford University is also broadcasting some amazing lectures, talks and interviews with some of the most relevant people in business. Do not miss the Ed Catmull talk by the way if you haven’t heard it yet.

Recent hard drives are great, they allow you to store hundreds of Gigabytes of information but without a good backup system you could loose everything.

I got used to make regular backups on DVD but that option became a real pain after I realised that my 300 Gb HD was completely full, only having a handful of gigs backed up.. Time for some clean up. Today I wanted to talk about the softwares I use for clean up: Windirstat and Picasa
Windirstat allows you to see in a very visual manner what you have on your hard drive and it becomes very easy to find out who are the biggest culprits. Each block represent a file and moving the mouse cursor over them will display their name

I won’t need to present Picasa, I guess everyone knows it. It is great to realise how many pictures you have been storing for years. Now one thing I would need though it a software that allows you to find duplicates of pictures. Picasa does it but I am still unsure about how to use it.

Hooray!!! I finally cleaned my Inbox!

For those who know me, this is quite an achievement. I really loved to see the look on people’s face everytime I was logging onto Msn messenger and the window popped up displaying “You have 3000 new messages in your Inbox”. Priceless, but in the light of my recent interest for the David Allen’s GTD (Getting Things Done) workflow I realised that I wasn’t in control of my inbox anymore.

For the past year I had adopted a position that consisted in letting my Inbox grow as much as it could, gathering the various newsletter from Amazon, car rental companies, alerts from ebay and forums but separated from the important emails which were stored in a folder called …. Important. The plan was that when I would reach the Hotmail 2Gb barrier I would just automatically delete everything from the Inbox folder.

This was real nice and really made sense but this wasn’t really GTD, The important email were too far from immediate reach and sometimes I realised too late that I forgot to reply to an important email.

I was contemplating the recent “Email bankruptcy” trend and start fresh with Gmail but that just wasn’t possible. Too many people or organisations have my email and I wouldn’t be able to change it that easily or start all over again. That is not possible but this is always in the back of my mind though, especially since I rely on Web based email service.

Oh, by the way, let me clarify something first. My primary email is on Hotmail and I have been using it for about 8 years. I do have a Gmail one, a yahoo one and even one for my different professional involvements, but my take on it is that if you are serious about being reachable, you need to stay consistent and stick to one and only one email that people have/will know(n) for years and which is both easily accessible and simple. Hotmail through MSN messenger offers just that. Easy access and simple.

Some people don’t like Hotmail because of the amount of junk they receive but to me it has never been a real issue as the junk would usually end up in the Junk mail folder anyway. Previously I would have checked my Junk Mail folder once in a while to make sure I didn’t miss any emails but since they rolled out the new version 2 weeks ago, I now surprice myself only checking it, just to make sure it is still working. From 10 junks a day it went down to 1 a week.

Regarding ISP and professional emails, they are just not in the line of being reachable and consistent. Nowadays people change jobs more frequently than they change ISP so where are your friends, or people you forgot about, gonna contact you once you move from Dreamworks to Sony or the opposite?

Till last week I felt that my email workflow was too passive and I wasn’t on top of things anymore then I thought that it would be great if my Important folder would come up first when I check my hotmail, to remind me of the tasks or emails I have to respond to but unfortunately they don’t allow you to do that so I came up with something different.

What about using my Inbox as a task reminder! Yes that was plain simple 😉 I just went in circle and rediscovered what the Inbox should be. The place where you store important emails you have to deal with.

As such, my new workflow it the following:

As soon as open Hotmail I automatically move the newsletter and not so important emails to a “black hole” folder. This is where I store stuff I would like to read one day, but only when I have time (does it ever happen?). All the other emails become important emails that I have to deal with however I will only open the ones I am ready to read or that I am assuming will take less than 2 minutes to process. If I am expecting an email from a client with a long list of tasks then I leave it aside for when I have more time.

I still have an “Important” folder but that one is only for emails that have already been processed and that must be kept for reference like Invoices or Online bookings. At the end of the day the Inbox must be empty or only filled with emails that will be processed as soon as possible

Crazy stuff! Make your own Wacom Cintiq and possibly a tablet PC on the cheap.
I found a very interesting article where a guy is mounting a LCD screen over a Wacom sensor board in order to build a cheap Cintiq. Bare in mind that he only uses second hand parts bought on ebay, like a very old Ultra pad Wacom tablet. It is obviously possible to do it with brand new parts like an Intuos3 and some other people have even transformed their Powerbook into a TabletPC. A real Tablet PC is a bit more than just an lcd over a wacom tablet but that does the trick for most people including me.

I finally found a use for my old UltraPad tablet that was gathering dust for month unless I finally decide to buy a real Table PC.

Here is the link http://www.bongofish.co.uk/wacom/wacom_pt1.html

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,127922-page,2-c,shopping/article.html