In a previous article I gave an introduction to GTD. In this post I’ll describe how I actually implemented that system using the fabulous DEVONthink. DEVONthink Pro First a word of introduction. If you don’t use DEVONthink yet, I recommend you to try out specific tools like iGTD or kgtd first. They may be better suited to implementing a basic GTD system. I went with DEVONthink because all my reference material is already in there and so putting in my actions and projects into the same system makes sense. Additionally I don’t mind some custom hacking and customization which definitely is necessary with DEVONthink. ...

Earlier this year I showed you a script to show count downs as Skype mood message. Today we were talking at local.ch (almost a Mac shop now) about the MacBook Pro CPU temperature (too high). So now some of us are putting the temperature into the Skype mood message. First you need to download SpeedIt. Make sure you get the version for the correct operating system release. Then instead of the script in the original article, use this: ...

As announced I got married two weeks ago. We had a really wonderful party on Schwägalp / Säntis. Thanks to everybody who could make it and all the others who sent their best wishes. There is a set on my Flickr profile with my favourites from the wedding. Additionally there is a Loyda & Patrice Flickr group where different people (mostly from local.ch and namics) added pictures. And should you wish to, you can see all of my pictures. ...

This Saturday - August 4th - I’m getting married. On the Schwägalp at the foot of the mountain Säntis we’ll have our wedding party. If you are interested in more information, check out loypat.com - our wedding site (it’s in German and Spanish, no English available). To see photos after the wedding, make sure you are on my friends list over at Flickr. The pictures will appear on my photo page.

Changes are that as a geek you have already heard of the book Getting Things Done by Dave Allen. It’s been a buzzword on the blogosphere for quite a while now. Recently I gave in and finally read the book - and I can heartily recommend it. Getting Things Done (or GTD for short) is set of basic principles about how to get work done more effectively. I’ll just describe the ones that I found most interesting. ...

About two weeks ago I did a slight adjustment to my mail reading approach. So far it has served me really well and thus I’d like to document it. The basic approach is that I want a clean inbox. My inbox it should only include known good mail. This is opposite to the traditional approach which is to have mails in the inbox which are not known to be bad. A slight but important difference. ...

Saw an interesting presentation on Google Video about data mining in the TV world at Rentrak. They talk about how they mine lots of data and get real-time reports from them. Basically it comes down to using a patched/extended PostgreSQL plus a simplified query language that they convert to SQL. In that context it might be interesting to check out Bizgres, though it was not mentioned in the presentation. The Bizgres web site says: bq. The Bizgres Project aims to make PostgreSQL the world’s most robust open source database for Business Intelligence.

Apparently I’m in ranting mode today. Or just unlucky. I’ve used the Yahoo! search for a long time. But today I noticed what might be a bug or a deliberate change. The URLs are no longer communicated in full. See for example this search result: The link which is shown as just “wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails” actually goes to “http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/pages/Plugins”. That’s a big difference and one I care about. Anybody else having this problem? ...

Disclaimer: This is a rant. You may want to skip it. A lot is being written about the new Plazes. They have gone from beta into public. In that they have taken a solid, robust and good application and destroyed it. First, they stopped the existing API from working. The Plazer (the client application which automatically saves your current location to the server) stopped working for a few days. Then the single most useful feature is gone from the Plazer. So far there was a list of friends currently online. And for every contact I saw where he is. That’s all I ever wanted from Plazes. It now adds some more stuff like groups and twitter-style-what-am-i-doing-messages. But it does not offer the existing feature anymore. ...

I recently stumbled over Dasher. It’s a text input method which can work without any keyboard. It can be controlled with mouse, touch pad or even an eye tracker. It would be very interesting to try out the same approach for source code. Basically you could use source code - e.g. your current project - as the learning source. And then by having a more efficient input method than the current demo it might actually be an efficient way to re-use code.