Mitch Gann's » Free stuff

Getting organized

Mitch — Thu, 14 May 2009 02:52:03 +0000

I spent time this week getting my online life organized and streamlined. There is a certain irony in this, given the real clutter in my at-home office. But you have to start somewhere. So I started with email. I was inspired by How to Make Gmail Your Ultimate Productivity Center in ZenHabits.

First, I set up my Gmail account to handle all of my email from various accounts. Then I resolved to keep my inbox empty. I set up a label (folder) called “Needs action” where I stick any message I need to respond to but can’t at the moment. Every other message I answer/ delete, answer/ file or just delete or file.

So far, so good. But it is easier to set up a system than to stick with it over the long haul.

I tried some Gmail gadgets, but the only one I have stuck with is “Tasks,” a simple things-to-do gadget from Google Labs.

Now to deal with the actual as well as virtual clutter in my life. I wonder if Google has a gadget for eliminating stacks of books and papers?

Hey, it was nothing

Mitch — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 01:30:54 +0000

Quick blogging at Posterous

Mitch — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 00:21:07 +0000

If you’re looking to do some mobile blogging, or just blogging via email post, check out the brand new Posterous web site.

You can create a Posterous blog just by sending an email to this address: post@posterous.com with the email subject line as the post title and the email message as the post body.

Then you will get an instant response telling you that your blog has been created, its address, and how to create a password. Creating a password also allows you to adjust your address if needed. I got “Mitch” right off the bat.

My Posterous blog is at http://mitch.posterous.com. I don’t have much there now, just an old photo of Niagara Falls. I may just post photos there — old or new, but mostly old. Random shots from my life. Why not? It’s free.

You can post video, too, if you want to. Or just plain old words. To post, you just send an email to post@posterous.com, with your media files attached. Or without media files. It’s easy.

Firefox 3 Download Day

Mitch — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 12:02:04 +0000

Today is the day Firefox 3 will be released in its “final” form (whatever that means in the world of software). I use both Firefox and IE, but have been using Firefox more and more. By all accounts, Firefox 3 will be a faster, more efficient browser. Of course it is free.

I have pledged to download a copy today as part of the effort to set a world record for software downloads in a 24 hour period. The challenge begins at 1:00 pm EDT: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/.

Digital Lit for Nothing

Mitch — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 12:20:31 +0000

Free e-books!

Check out http://www.feedbooks.com for free copies of classic books in a variety of e-book formats and in PDF format.

The books are in the public domain — at least in France where the site is registered and in many other nations of the world, if not always in the United States of America with its determination to copyright protect Mickey Mouse until the end of time plus 100 years. Generally, the authors represented on Feedbooks have been dead 50-plus years. You can download book files in the format of your choice, with or without registering at the site.

Here is the list of the Top Book Downloads for the last week:

1. 1984 — Orwell (1949)
2. The Art of War — Sun Tzu (-500)
3. I, Robot — Doctorow (2005)
4. Le Kama Sutra (fr) — Vatsyayana (500)
5. Animal Farm — Orwell (1945)
6. The Great Gatsby — Fitzgerald (1925)
7. War and Peace — Tolstoy (1869)
8. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland — Carroll (1897)
9. Beyond Good and Evil — Nietzsche (1886)
10. The Divine Comedy — Dante (1306)

On the signs that you are getting up there

Mitch — Fri, 30 May 2008 17:02:41 +0000

Cathy AJ, who is barely a boomer having come into the world the year that JFK checked out of it (that would be 1963 but if I have to tell you that, you are no kind of boomer), notes that she only meets two of the 25 Signs that You are Getting Old: she has a car with a built-in compass and she can read the newspaper without arm-extenders.

Given her relative youth, I am shocked — shocked, I say — that Cathy meets even these two criteria of emergent decrepitude. I don’t have a compass in my car, though somebody gave me one once. I have it here somewhere . . . . And I can read the paper fine with the arms I have. I just need to take off my glasses and hold the paper against my nose. Maybe a little closer.

Where do your teeth sleep?

Mitch — Thu, 29 May 2008 02:21:19 +0000

“Jokes for Baby Boomers” is a “lense” at Squidoo whose name says it all. Well, mostly all. There is a little more to the site than just jokes for boomers; there are also links to other Boomer lenses, ads aimed at Boomers, and comments by appreciative Boomer readers. But mostly it has jokes and funny lists like You are getting old when . . . (“You and your teeth don’t sleep together”) or 25 signs that you are getting old (#5. “You are proud of your lawn mower”). There are apparently several Boomer lenses on Squidoo, which is a site where anyone can create a nicely structured, well-focused and useful page for free. They call those pages “lenses.” You can even make money with them.

Just for the record, my teeth and I still sleep together and I am constantly embarrassed by my lawn mower. I can’t take it anywhere.

Happy birthday, WordPress!

Mitch — Tue, 27 May 2008 14:16:26 +0000

WordPress, the world-class and totally free blogging software used by this site and a billion others (give or take) is turning five years-old today.

Enjoy your day, WordPress, and many happy returns!

Did I mention it’s free?

OpenOffice 3.0 Beta available for testing

Mitch — Fri, 09 May 2008 13:47:41 +0000

OpenOffice has always been a decent replacement for MS-Office, especially given that OpenOffice costs so much less. Like, for example, nothing. (Yes, I do love the free software!) Development continues on OpenOffice, and a new beta has just been released. It promises to address that annoying problem of “.docx”:

OpenOffice.org 3.0 will support the upcoming OpenDocument Format (ODF) 1.2 standard, and is capable of opening files created with MS-Office 2007 or MS-Office 2008 for Mac OS X (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx, etc.). This is in addition to read and write support for the MS-Office binary file formats (.doc, .xls, .ppt, etc.).

Here’s the complete list of features in the OpenOffice.org 3.0 Beta.

The beta download itself is available at http://download.openoffice.org/3.0beta/.

XP forever! (Well, at least for now)

Mitch — Thu, 08 May 2008 13:52:50 +0000

Bill Gates says that Vista is selling rapidly and doing fine, but personally I am sticking with XP. I don’t know of anything I want to do on a computer that I could do with Vista but can’t do with XP. So why bother to switch? It’s nice for Bill that he has sold 140 million units of Vista; I really mean that because the guy does great things with his money. But I can live without Vista, especially since there will be this new “Windows 7″ out in a year or two.

I am also playing around with Ubuntu Linux. If I have Ubuntu on my laptop and an old desktop computer, and the only snag I’ve hit is that I can’t get the laptop install to connect with my wireless network. It detects the network, but can’t log in. I can connect it with a cable, but who wants to have to do that for a laptop when wireless is available? I’d be using it right now to make this post if I could get over that glitch. That’s always been the story of me and Linux — one little thing it can’t do that I need it to do. Or to be fair, something that I need it to do but can’t figure out how to make it do.

Naturally, what I like most about Linux is that it is free.