Pilgrim Notes

Reflections along the way.

Tag: Tools (page 1 of 3)

Free Calendars

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Calendar templates for free. Print out the style calendar you need, visit Print Calendars.

Philosophy Dictionary for Us Novices

I like ideas and I like to read people who have them. The longer I live, the more I realize I don’t know much about anything. So anytime I can find help in making sense of people who really do know something, I smile real big. Paul Martin provided a nice link to Dictionary of Philosophical Terms and Names.

Multitasking may cost U.S. $650 billion a year

With cell phones, email, ipods, treos and laptops, we’re multitasking more than ever. NY Times points to research suggesting it is an illusion that we can really multitask like we think we can.  Not only is  it causing more accidents, it may actually be slowing down (not speeding up) productivity at work.  Interesting  research. Seems our studies are pointing to an ancient sin the church fathers warned about: sloth (acedia).

Sloth sounds like laziness but it may actually be the result of busyness. If we get too busy, we lose diligence both in work and in spiritual practice. I fear many of us our guilty of sloth. Lord have mercy!

For a more nuanced explanation of sloth, Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung offers a thoughtful reflection on sloth.

Scribd – Writing and Reading with Analytics

I can’t remember how I landed on scribd but somehow I ran across the other day. It’s a basic site to post writings that may or may not have images and other formatting possibilities. Instead of blog, it makes room for any type of entry, and some people are posting research papers.

The community is relatively small right now (a little over 6,000), but the interface is cool and offers a variety of fascinating “real time” analytics. Like the map below of the viewer locations.

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The Google March Continues

In another step toward the tower of Redmond, Google launched the Google Apps Premier Edition for businesses.

Got Pipes?

No I don’t mean a strong sining voice. Everyone (okay not everyone but a handful of geeks) keeps talking about Yahoo Pipes. I thinking about the possible E-Commerce possiblities.

Text to Speech with Accent

Listen to your favorite phrases with an accent. Not sure why we need this tool, but hey it’s something to do.

New Technologies

Jeff Han spoke at TED last February and demonstrated this new multi-point touch application that could have some pretty cool ramifications in the next few years. Check it out.

Tired of Solicitors? Master Opt Out list

NYT today provided a master opt list to get your name away from all those pesky solicitors. Here are the highlights:

PHONE SOLICITATIONS To stop them, go to donotcall.gov. Or call toll free, (888)382-1222, from the number you are going to restrict. (home and cell phones; you need to register every five years).

JUNK MAIL Host by the DMA (Direct Marketing Association). Not a guarantee but maybe a help. Online form – www.the-dma.org/consumers/offmailinglist.html or mailing address – Mail Preference Service at P.O. Box 643, Carmel, N.Y. 10512. There is an online form at If you want to get more mail, there is also a place to sign up to get on the lists.

E-MAIL. No real good solution. You can try to make it harder for spammers to get your address in the first place by never posting your address in public forums. Spammers employ software to scrape the sites of anything with that @ symbol. Instead spell it out in a unique way like “the nameofthiscolumn at nytimes.com.”

CREDIT CARD OFFERS. Call (888) 567-8688, but be ready to give out some personal information like your Social Security number. Als0 www.optoutprescreen.com. You can do it for a period of five years or permanently.

OTHER OPT-OUTS Your personal information is accessible in less obvious ways. For instance, your computer tracks where you have visited online. DoubleClick, a company that collects data for online advertisers, offers a way to prevent your computer from giving it information at http://www.doubleclick.com/us/about-doubleclick/privacy/dart-adserving.asp.

But again, it is only a piecemeal solution. Other online advertising companies will still put “cookies” on your computer to collect the same data. So the next-best solution is to frequently run software that cleans out cookies. You can get Spyware Blaster, Spybot, or Ad-Aware at www.download.com free.

Your personal information, including parts of your Social security number, are available in publicly available data bases that you may never see. The most common ones offer a way to opt out of a listing. Nexis, one of the biggest, says you can opt out of its people-finding lists by going to www.lexisnexis.com/terms/privacy/data/remove.asp. Nexis does not make it easy because it requires that you prove you are a victim of identity theft before it will consider your application.

The Center for Democracy and Technology provides addresses and forms for other companies, like ChoicePoint, that do not let you opt out online (http://opt-out.cdt.org).

YouOS – Cool Web based OS

I’ve messed around with a few different online OS and most disappoint, but this YouOS looks pretty cool.

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