Author: Andy Ferguson

Inbox Zero

I get a fair bit of email (up to 100 messages a day), and I think it could be quite easy to get swamped, and to miss something important. Over the last year or so I’ve been looking at methods of dealing with email, and in particular have explored variations on Inbox Zero.

My current routine for dealing with email is quite simple:

  • I only have two mail folders; Inbox and Dealt With.
  • Everything comes into my inbox, and doesn’t leave my inbox until it has been dealt with.
  • Dealing with a message could include reading it, replying to it, or using it as the basis for a calendar entry, a task, or a block of time put aside to work on a particular project. Once the item exists elsewhere, then the email itself is dealt with and so it can be moved.

I do this with all emails; at home and at work. Home emails are really straightforward, because most of them are from mailing lists or are for information only. I use Thunderbird at home, with Google Calendar to manage my schedule and tasks. At work I get a lot more mail, and it is a lot more important. I use Evolution for everything (or Outlook on Windows), and if a task is suitably complicated it gets converted into our call logging software and becomes a task/project with a target date and time put aside to work on.

As far as backups go, work email is backed up centrally. Home email is copied to the mail/file server in our study as soon as it is delivered, so that if I accidentally delete anything I have a second copy.

My other mail rule with email is that I have times in the day when I will always clear my inbox. In the morning before work I clear my home inbox. I then go to work, and clear my work inbox as my first job of the day. Then I clear it again before I leave. I then do home email again when I get in, and then again before I go to bed. I never leave work or leave home with messages that have not been dealt with.

And that’s how Inbox Zero works for me.

More productivity

This afternoon I did a bit more work on our home server (the one I built from bits of my old dead PC).

It’s now running:

  • A full installation of Mediawiki, with a few extensions, which Steph is using a lot right now.
  • A streamable repository of Creative Commons licensed music so that any computer in our house can stream a selection of new and interesting music. This works nicely with Rhythmbox and iTunes (I’ve not tested anything Windows based yet).
  • A local access only mailsever (built around dovecot with a squirrelmail front end), which grabs a copy of all my incoming mail and archives it locally. This means I now have an extra level of backup in case I encounter more problems with my externally hosted mail.

All of this is controlled from webmin, so my main laptop is able to configure everything without me actually having to sit in front of the server. This is good, because the server is noisy enough to consider banishing it to the spare room.

Buying music in 2009

A couple of things have changed about the way I buy music:

  • The iTunes store now sells DRM free music, so I can actually play everything I buy on all my computers and my iPod.
  • I’ve got a 50 songs a month eMusic subscription.

So my usual decision making process usually involves working out which would be the best value. iTunes sells by the song and by the album, while eMusic sells just by the song. This generally means that very long songs and albums with fewer tracks are better value on eMusic, while albums with lots of short songs are better value on iTunes. Of course, if the music is packaged in a pleasing way on CD, then I’ll buy the CD and pay more for it too, but I am quite picky about what I’ll buy physically because our house is getting quite cluttered and we’re running out of space. This year I’ve bought music via all three methods detailed above, and I think 2009 will be the year that I don’t have a consistent way of buying music.

Of course, there’s always Jamendo when money is tight.

Discovering Free Music

So where do you start? There are obviously thousands of hours of recorded sound available legally for free, but it is quite easy to get lost, and to end up with a large amount of downloaded music that is not representative of what is out there.

These are the places I go when I want something new to listen to and don’t have any credits left on eMusic:

  • Last.fm have a page of freely available (but not always freely distributable) songs available at http://www.last.fm/home/freemp3s
  • For an example of a site that makes individual songs available in the “sampler” model, try http://www.jagjaguwar.com/mp3.php. I’ve bought a lot of music based on listening to things downloaded from here.
  • Jamendo (http://www.jamendo.com/en/albums) have a vast array of great music licensed under Creative Commons. They also have a lot of recordings that should probably have never been made. I spend a fair bit of time playing “spot the difference”.
  • The Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org/) has a lot of free music available, and if you look closely you’ll find live performances by some fairly major artists, as well as a few things also available on other sites mentioned above.
  • For an example of a net label that understands about free music you could do worse than try http://aaahh-records.net/. They released the Wind Whistles album last year which makes them great in my book.
  • For an example of a single-artist model of distribution, try http://www.joshwoodward.com/music/. I’d recommend almost anything on here really.

I’d like to recommend iTunes singles of the week, but they need to strip the DRM off first. Although I should say that I did buy something on iTunes this week which plays fine in Rhythmbox, so the claims of trying to make their music more accessible to non iTunes/iPod users are not just an empty promise.

Using wcid instead of NetworkManager on Ubuntu 8.10

This post came about due to an issue with NetworkManager connecting to our wpa-enterprise authenticated network at work, but demonstrates that there is more than one choice when it comes to almost everything on Linux. It’s not too fiddly, and I’ll hopefully have a rebuild of Ubuntu incorporating these changes within 24 hours.

First off, you need to add a line to your sources list, by issuing the following command:

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

Add the following line at the bottom of the file:

deb http://apt.wicd.net intrepid extras

Then press ctrl+o to save and then ctrl+x to quit and then issue the following command:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install wcid

This will download wcid (a network management tool that doesn’t suffer issues connecting to enterprise level networks), uninstall NetworkManager and then install wcid. At some point in this process you will lose network connectivity, but this is fine.

To make wcid start at boot, go to System > Preferences > Sessions and add a new item to startup. The path for the application is:

/opt/wicd/tray.py

Reboot, and you should find that wcid adds an applet similar to nm-applet which will allow you to view available networks, and connect and configure them. I’ve tested this with my EeePC 701 and an Acer Aspire One (both running Ubuntu 8.10), and it is known to work (with a bit of tweaking) on Fedora 10 as well.

Renovations

So far this weekend I have:

  • Built a webserver out of the useable parts from my dead PC (and the case of another less powerful machine).
  • Set up webmin on all my Linux machines and built a webmin cluster.
  • Copied 10gb of music (the stuff I actually listen to) onto my new laptop.
  • Rebuilt my old PC (OS and config files) as a VM on my laptop.

So all in all a busy weekend.

New laptop

On Sunday I finally got round to replacing my dead desktop computer. As planned, I ditched the idea of buying another desktop, and decided to get something that would replace both the dead PC and my slowly dying 5 year old laptop. I ended up with a Sony Vaio laptop that is far more powerful than both computers put together, and which pretty much caters for all my computing needs (with my EeePC still very much in use for lunchtime browsing and computing on the move).

OS-wise I’ve stuck with Ubuntu, with a 50gb Vista partition because I promised myself I would learn Vista this year. So far I’ve been in Ubuntu 95% of the time at least, but it is good to know that if I need to test a bit of Windows software then I can do it without bugging Steph.

Going from 768mb of Ram to 3Gb feels quite liberating, and this is actually the first computer I’ve owned with a DVD burner. I think I might have to do something creative at some point.

Ubiquity 0.1.5

I’ve not blogged about Ubiquity for a while. It’s a Firefox extension that I use every day to do all sorts of things (updating twitter and complex calculations mainly). The latest version is out today, and has gone a long way towards making it ready for the masses to use.

xmessage

This week I’ve been looking at ways of setting up alerts that only actually happen when I’m sitting in front of my computer to read them. This has lead to me using xmessage. For example:

xmessage -center Hello! This is a message created using xmessage &

This would give me a message popping up with the text I choose to input. Not too useful on its own, but when used as part of a shell script it becomes really powerful.

What I’ve done is set up several of these as cron jobs. These run when I need to do something useful like stop checking email and get ready for work, or (most usefully) when I have to go to bed in order to get my perscribed 6 hours of sleep.

The package in is Debian and Ubuntu at the very least, and the manual is straightforward.