So who’s the moron that updated his wordpress theme after spending hours modifying it?…… Me!

Yep back to the old dated theme until I can find some time to change it all over again or until I finally just break down and buy the Standard Theme from 8bit.io

Updated: For now I am going to use the Starter Theme provided by tentblogger.com

This Fathers Day my amazing wife surprised me with the best possible photo of our first child. Him with glasses on and my old Macintosh SE. He’ll be turning 5 months old in a few more days and you better believe their will be more nerdom to come.

Oh and this (picture below) was the first picture taken for the public to see after her was born. Poor kid was only 30mins old and daddy was already putting glasses on him. Which, I must say he’s really grown into the glasses quite well.

As I was struggling this week to get an blog post in I found the most amazing little app called Lock Screen (SlideToUnlock) in the Mac App Store.

I’ve been using an Expose’ hot corner and locked screensaver to protect my system for years and I hated that there was no easy two key press locking system like on windows. I’ve tried a few others in the past, but none compare to this. All it takes is going into the preferences and setting up what they call a PassPattern just any combination of keys to slide across (Tip: don’t make it too hard or you’ll lock yourself out. Don’t jump rows!).

After you have your PassPattern set, you can hold the (⌘)-L keys down and your system locks right away with whatever wallpaper you set in the preferences. It’s that simple.

Be sure to pick it up today while it is still on sell!

Also incase you do lock your self out. When you get back in to remove the old PassPattern. Close the lockscreen app and navigate to Home->Library->Preferences and in there find the file “th.co.idevelop.lockscreen.plist” and delete it. Reopen the app and you can set a new PassPattern.

I guess it also depends on the developer, but personally I know when I have a rushed development job my code takes the beating for it. I always end up with oddly named variable like sAnotherTest or iTryThis, so all I really know from the name is what type it is, I usually try to at least keep that info. But don’t even think about commenting or at least informative in 6 months from now comments.

So I hope you didn’t come here for help on it, cause I am not the one to do it, but if you do happen to be a developer and have any tips, feel free to leave them in the comments.

I do my best to keep my home account fairly organized with rules and many many folders, so I was able to turn 500+ emails into 0 in very little time, but at work with the 4,000+ things got a little more complicated. But I figured I would share a few tips on my methods. and new organization since was able to turn 4000+ emails in my inbox into 4.

Recipient’s folders – I believe no matter how small or big the company you work for is you need to create a folder for every employee in the company that emails you on a regular basis. If you have some that only email once or twice a year then that may be able to go in an “others” folder if is it something you need to keep.

Timed Rules – At work I have multiple projects emailed from multiple sources a day usually these projects are due within a period of about 5 days and usually I wont start on them until day 4 or 5. So I have setup some times rules so that after a period of 1 week that my emails will automatically get sorted into the Recipient’s folder

Trash it! – Why are you keeping all those emails? seriously do you really need 1,000+ emails in your inbox. Throw them out. I know I personally had probably 1,000+ emails that were just basically spam(that I signed up for). There is no reason to keep it. Read the email and trash it, don’t save it for more then a week or before you know it you’ll be back where you started.

Thats all. There is no need to make you inbox more complicated then it already is. It a very simple system so keep it that way.

Hope you enjoy.

However, as I was looking for a cheaper alternative. I noticed that RTM had a mobile version of there site. But even more importantly, I noticed that the push notifications from the RTM app were still coming through everyday. Now if I open the actual app I get a pro account required screen and get booted out, but to me the popup notifications is what I use the app for.

So, for all you iPhone/iPod-Touch users out there, all you need to do is download the RTM app from the app store, setup a trial account. Get the setting just the way you want them, use the app during the trial, then switch to the mobile version once your trial runs out. I also recommend creating a shortcut to the mobile version on your iPhone/iPod-Touch home screen. If you call it the same name as the RTM app it will have the same icon (see images below). After that I just moved the RTM app icon to my last home screen page and all is well and I get to keep my $25 bucks for my trip.

click images for larger view

]]> http://www.brianminor.com/2009/11/10/remember-the-milk-pro-features-without-the-cost/feed/ 0 http://www.brianminor.com/2009/11/09/google-voice-and-your-top-5-list/ http://www.brianminor.com/2009/11/09/google-voice-and-your-top-5-list/#comments Mon, 09 Nov 2009 15:47:20 +0000 Brian Minor http://www.brianminor.com/?p=468 It seems like almost every carrier is doing a top 5 (some even 10) list. With these lists they allow you to add 5 to 10 “friends”and no matter what carrier/provider they use, you can call for free and not waste any of your minutes. They all seem to have their own little names. AT&T calls it the “A-List” and Verizon calls it “My Fave Five”. But in the end it’s all the same.

Most of you are thinking, yeah, we know this already, but as I was changing some setting in my beloved Google Voice account I noticed that they allow you to change the number that appears when you received a call from someone. You can have either their number display, which is of course the default and what most people would want. But they also allow you to always have the google voice number show up with every call.

So my workaround is why not just add your google voice number to your top 5 list and give everyone that number. Then change it so that all incoming calls come from your google voice number and never waste your minutes on incoming calls again.

But thats not all, google voice allows you to make outgoing as well, by calling your google voice number, then dialing the number you want to call. So no wasting minutes on outgoing calls either.

Okay, now I know for some of you this just wont work. A lot of us love to always know who is calling before we answer the phone, but google helps with this as well. Google Voice give you control of what numbers you want to ring straight through, but it also give you the ability to have callers announce themselves first and/or just announce their number or name (if in contacts) and then gives you the ability to answer or send to voicemail.

Also, keep in mind you can still give out your real number to the other 4 in your list and anyone else who is worth wasting your minutes on. This workaround is meant to be given out to all those that call you constantly and love to talk for hours or perfect as a business line.

If you think this is something you could really use and want to give it a shot, I have 2 Google Voice invites to give out just leave a comment below and I will pick 2 at random and send out the invites later this week. Just be sure to add the tag “I want an Invite” to the beginning or end of your comment.

Before I start it all out though, I wanted to give all of you a heads up on some of the topics.

They include:

• A newer Google product and how you can use it to save money.
• A hack on your iPhone that you may never use, but if you need it, its amazing!
• Using a popular task managing service for free with the benefits of the paid account
• and a couple others…

Along with those, I will also be posting my thoughts of MonoPrice’s iPhone/iPod battery backup and I plan to end out the week with a topic I don’t normally post about, but one I plan to do more of in the future.

Along with all that, I also plan to start working on a redesign of the blog and get my priorities straight with where I want it to go and what I want it to be about. Hopefully all this will help me keep up a daily post (or more) schedule.

So, keep an eye out later today for the first post and I hope you will enjoy this week as much as I plan too.

Be sure to let me know what you think with comments and/or emails.

This time they are offering 5 apps for free and a 6th app free when they reach 500,000 participants. The total value of the nanoBundle is $154 bucks. So you may be thinking wow, free?, I gotta have this, just as I was when I first heard about it. But then I took a look at the apps they are offering.

Here are the apps:

ShoveBox

Catch all the little scraps of information that you can’t immediately act on, but don’t want to forget. ShoveBox sits up in your menu bar, waiting for you to drag in text, images, URLs, and more.

WriteRoom

WriteRoom is a simple, but powerful app that provides you with a distraction-free writing environment. WriteRoom does one main thing and does it incredibly well: It’s all about writing…

Twitterific

Twitterrific is an exquisite app that enables you to make the most out of your Twitter experience. It has a clean user interface that’s designed to take up little of your precious desktop space.

TinyGrab

TinyGrab is a simple, powerful app that enables you to quickly share screenshots of everything on your Mac.

Hordes of Orcs

Hordes of Orcs is a Tower Defense strategy game where you build walls and towers to defend your village from orcs gone rogue.

And if enough people participate

Mariner Write

Mariner Write is a fast, streamlined word processor that’s useful for everyone… professional writers, educators, students, casual computer users, and everyone in-between. It has a simple, elegant user interface so that you can create beautiful documents the very first time you start using it.

If you ask me most of them are pretty worthless. I guess if you don’t already have a better word processor, then Mariner Write would be nice once it is available, but the others really don’t seem worth the process to even download them. I already have a better twitter client and my the other seem pretty pointless.

But hey thats just me. Let me know what you think.