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May 01, 2005

useful things

In Harvard Square, there is a great little store called the Museum of Useful Things (MUT) (which is nearly as cool as its sister store, Black Ink). In the store you can find all sorts of great things that are, yes, highly useful. Kitchen gadgets, cool cleaning tools, little things to organize your office, etc. Last time I was there I picked up this great little thing that keeps your kitchen sponge in one place.

So in the spirit of the MUT, here are some things that I consider highly useful...

everyday gadgets

The Drop Stop is awesome for keeping wine from dripping.

This bracelet fastener has saved me OODLES of time.

Joe gave me this wicked little Cross Ion pen for Christmas. I keep it on a keychain with my memory stick. Very handy in a pinch and it writes beautifully.

Super Cool/Handy Websites

43 Things ~ Map your goals out with this great community tool.

And another 43, this time Folders. Tips, tricks and "lifehacks." And the wiki (I recently added my coffee hacks--cleaning your coffeepot and novacaine)

And the excellent Lifehacker.

Also can't quite say enough about del.icio.us. You'll notice I streamlined my left nav and cleaned it up a bit. Now you can just click on my list of links to see what I'm checking up on here and there. Let me know if you are a del.icio.us user--I'm always curious to see what my friends are up to. Funny how links can say a lot about a person.

And Angela, you asked about Flickr...yes, its great! It's easy to use, great display capabilities and I like the community aspect--seeing when friends have new pictures and the like.

I'm also excited about the possibilities of Trumba...

I much prefer gMail these days. I have a ton of extra invites if anyone wants one. It is infinitely better than Yahoo, Hotmail, etc.

The Mentat Wiki which is right up my alley as a recent MA grad in Critical & Creative Thinking. Tools, articles and information galore.

Software

Well, I have to give a strong plug (and yes, yes, I'm probably biased here) for AvantGo. Simply put, the best mobile web content provider around. They just keep improving. Now available for BlackBerry too so if you have a mobile PDA or a smartphone you don't really have an excuse. It's the best way to keep up with news and information when you are on the go. Even better, it's free!

Firefox ~ If you are still using Internet Explorer as your web browser, all I have to say to you is STOP! If you don't have tabbed browsing, you are missing out on the best way to quickly and easily use the Internet to your best advantage.

Open Office ~ The best free productivity suite you can find. If you can't/don't want to shell out $400 to Microsoft for its Office Standard Edition, check out Open Office. I use it for my writing--I like the organization of multiple chapters better than the way Word does it. It IS compatible with Microsoft, however, so if you create a spreadsheet in Open Office and send it to a friend who has Word they won't have a problem opening it. All in all a great, cool software suite and the best part is that it's free.

Picasa ~ Google's free picture album/sharing/editing tool. Best free software for quick fixes and the way it organizes all photos on your hard-drive is awesome.

The A-9 Toolbar ~ Amazon's search tool which is based on Google. You can easily search Google, Amazon or A9. The way it displays your searches is especially helpful, with thumbnails of images and other related searches that you can set up. Quickly search for your results on Creative Commons, NASA, Flickr, Feedster and a host of other great sites. One great thing about the toolbar is that you can easily track bookmarks between computers if you have a toolbar on each machine and are logged in. I keep a lot of my private bookmarks (bank, journals, etc) here--that I wouldn't want on del.icio.us.

iPodder --software to quickly subscribe and download Podcasts into your iTunes. Check out PodcastAlley to find podcasts galore. My current favorite? >Grape Radio.

Posted by crystallyn at May 1, 2005 04:05 PM

Comments

Posted by: Shel at May 6, 2005 11:08 AM