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Archive for the Resources Category


Two Critical Ingredients In Learning New Things

Over the last few months, I have been taking music theory lessons from a wonderful teacher, Heidi Wischler. At my choice, these lessons are rather free-wheeling, and we get into some pretty interesting discussions that take me to learning things in a fairly eclectic way, and I am very pleased with the way this education process […]

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Measure items on your screen

Do you do any kind of graphics work?  Do you sometimes need to know the dimensions of something you’re looking at onscreen? Would you like an easy way to go from pixels to points to get these dimensions in pixels, points, inches, centimeters or millimeters? And would you like to be able get such a […]

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Feedly! A Great Replacement for Google Reader

I logged into my account with Google Reader today and got a message that the service is being “retired” as of July 1. I found this somewhat annoying because, as you might imagine, I have subscribed to many RSS feeds over the years, and it’s always a comfort knowing where to research things when the […]

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Video Creation Challenges

I thought I would describe  a few of the challenges I have when creating videos for you. Perhaps it will help you with your own video creation efforts. First, I’m using a new computer and it doesn’t seem to “let” the video tools I use work the way I am used to. For instance, the […]

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Saving Time by Scanning Smarter

This short video illustrates, among other things, how assumptions can keep you from doing things more easily. In it, I describe how a task that could take as long as an hour gets knocked down to 10-15 minutes. If you’ve been using old technology because you think “it’s good enough” (and not because you can’t […]

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Windows Live Writer – a Real-time Evaluation

Unlike ScribeFire, Live Writer (part of Windows Live Essentials) does not require you to use Firefox. (It does require Windows.)  Downloading and installing Live Essentials includes Live Writer. I’m not saying it’s a good or bad thing. Just reporting. And obviously, I downloaded and installed Live Essentials. In this real-time evaluation, I will do the […]

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ScribeFire – A Real-time Evaluation

A Firefox extension called ScribeFire promises to make the life of a blogger better and easier. Here’s a real-time evaluation. Task: include an image. How about a scribe by a fire? Success! In the process of adding the image, I had to set up my API and FTP settings to create the handshake between ScribeFire […]

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Going Paperless? Thoughts – #1 of 2

I have been very reluctant to go paperless. Despite the convenience of it, I just don’t trust electronics. And two recent hard drive failures make me even warier. However, with some decent precautions, going at least partially paperless can be very helpful. And while I may be a bit late to this party, perhaps there are […]

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How I Gained 2 Productive Hours a Day – For Free!

I have gained two hours a day in productive time – for free.  It was free and has made my life a lot easier. If you habitually waste time in the same way I do: spending time on websites (political sites, various “interesting” forums that have nothing to do with your goals, etc.), you will […]

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What’s up with productivity?

As I write these words, I am contemplating two blog posts. The first, which inspired this writing, was a post by Cal Newport at http://bit.ly/J16l4k called Welcome to the Post-Productivity World. The second was by Lynn Terry, written more recently at http://bit.ly/J16GUP called A Day in the Life of Lynn Terry. Cal Newport argued that […]

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