Posting has been very sparse lately, as I’ve been working on signing up for classes for the Fall semester at Allegany College of Maryland. While I only have classes on Tuesday and Thursday, I’m hoping to find a full or part time “normal” job in order to try to round out our income for the rest of the month. We’re still a good bit away from being able to stay completely afloat while avoiding credit disasters, but everything seems to be moving in a better direction.

Speaking of moves in the right direction, or at least the general direction of right, Mozilla Labs has released a video of the Ubiquity Firefox Extension. Ubiquity brings to Firefox and the web what Quicksilver and GNOME Do have brought to the desktop in terms of productivity and time-saving methods of computing.

Ubiquity makes sharing things on the web, and more generally, getting things done much easier. As shown in the video, let’s take an idea and run with it. Say I want to meet a friend at a restaurant in town, the easiest way to show him the location of said restaurant would be to email him a link to Google Maps. That takes things way out of the context we want to have, and ends up proving more work for not only me, the sender, but also for my friend, the receiver.

What Ubiquity allows us to do is take that change of context and throw it out the window. It provides an easy interface for you to include a Google Map right in your email, as well as many of the other open API sites that could be easily used to provide relevant information. This allows us to send a full-context email, in which the receiver gets a map, reviews, a shared calendar, basically anything the sender can think of right in the comfort of his email client, eliminating unnecessary legwork which would need to be done in order for all of that information to be at his hands on the standard web.

This is an amazing step in the right direction, allowing plain English into an application to accomplish tasks that only Mashup gurus were able to do in the past. If you are interested, view the video here:

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Thanks to Merlin Mann over at 43 Folders for pointing this out.

Tags: GTD, Rants, Uncategorized by Benjamin M. Strozykowski
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I’ve been doing more work using my aging iBook G4, and I’ve come to miss one main thing that I get from my desktop: screen real estate.

The iBook maxes out at a 1024×768 resolution, and though that might have been amazingly convenient when the iBook was first released, now in the age of high resolution desktops and multiple monitors, it’s really just a pesky limitation.

The display physically can’t display anything more than 1024×768, so it seems that I’m stuck with switching spaces or dealing with apple-tabbing through windows in order to get anything done.

I realised that the one app that’s really taking up the most space on my desktop is Firefox. I could use the zoom feature of this wonderful browser to view web sites at a lot smaller zoom level, therefore saving a bit of screen real estate. The only real problem is that I would have to change the zoom level every time I open a new site.

That’s where NoSquint comes in. NoSquint is a Firefox extension that allows you to save a default zoom level for all pages, and even allows a list of certain pages to be configured to load at a separate zoom level on a site-by-site basis.

Now I’m browsing at 75% zoom level, and I’m able to keep my Firefox window much smaller, which allows me to better switch between applications while I’m working.

Tags: GTD, Uncategorized by Benjamin M. Strozykowski
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I just wanted to make a quick shout out to 43 Folders and let everyone know that it is a great and useful source of GTD information and articles. [Read more →]

Tags: Article Review, GTD by Benjamin M. Strozykowski
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Rather than spout numbers and figures off here, I’m going to just give a brief glimpse of how my first “Weekly Review” went. [Read more →]

Tags: GTD, Uncategorized, weekly review by Benjamin M. Strozykowski
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As I don’t currently have a job, most of the time, the calendar in my GTD system is empty.  I just realised today while going through some mental inventory, that there are indeed a lot of things that I could be putting into Google Calendars. [Read more →]

Tags: GTD, Rants by Benjamin M. Strozykowski
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Not nearly as many things as I would like to have gotten done today, but I was able to cross a project off of my list, as well as taking care of a few things that came up during the course of the day. [Read more →]

Tags: GTD, Roundups, daily review by Benjamin M. Strozykowski
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