Links are cool. Links are bad.

Some days I spend way too much time in my computer...







Drawn with Animatee in my lovely Nintendo DS.

Notes to self (voice to gmail)

I often use my phone as a voice recorder to keep track of things that I don't want to forget while on the go. It has proven to be more reliable than my unreadable hand written notes. As an additional bonus, my kids love the idea and they often want to have their say in the recording, so processing the voice notes is often more fun than just listening to my odd ideas.


However, the phone's interface to listen to them is quite crappy, and checking if I have some unprocessed note has not become part of my habits. They really belong in my mail inbox, so I now have setup things to send them to my gmail account (after an unsuccessful attempt of using ShoZu, that's already gone from my phone).

Teaching my Sony Ericsson k610i to contact gmail has not been obvious, since the net seems to be full of uninformed advice about this. As correctly reported here, the problem is that the phone is missing a root certificate required by to verify smpt.gmail.com. To fix it,

1. Download a zip with a bunch of root certificates from http://www.thawte.com/roots/ (no need to answer to the form that you get there)
2. Extract the missing certificate,
thawte-roots.zip\Thawte Primary Root CA\Thawte_Primary_Root_CA.cer
3. Send it to the phone using bluetooth, so that the phone recognizes it and prompts you to install it.
   

I only use the native email interface to be able to quickly send files from the phone, since http://www.google.com/mobile/mail feels more convenient.

I also had to upgrade RealPlayer to be able to listen the AMR format used by the phone. And fix the wrong .3gp extension associated to mime type audio/amr in HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\MIME\Database\Content Type\audio/AMR

Dictate to self to avoid the #%@! tiny phone keyboard

My fat fingers used to fight against my cell phone's calendar application to add appointments and reminders while on the go. I also used to take unreadable notes in tiny pieces of paper whenever an interesting idea appeared while on a crowded subway.

I learned that my cell phone can be used as a voice recorder, and now I use my best Private Investigator looks while recording whatever I want to remember when I'm away of any decent writing gear.

Tab Mix Plus + TiddlyWiki = [productivity | guilt]

• I'm a big fan of the Tab Mix Plus Firefox extension. I have a hard time when using a browser without it and I cannot duplicate tabs, undo tab closing, store several browsing sessions, list all the opened tabs in a dropdown menu...
• I'm an even bigger fan of TiddlyWikis(*), personal wikis that are self-contained in a single html file that can be in your hard drive or usb stick, or hosted in the terrific and free tiddlyspot service. I use them to record personal knowledge, to write docs and "microtag" at the paragraph level, to write checklists, to keep my to-do lists...
  

I just changed a Tab Mix Plus preference to switch to my left tab whenever I close a tab. And my left tab always hosts my to-do list in the shape of a MonkeyGTD tiddlywiki.

Will this change mean that my browsing parties will end up being shorter and I'll be pushed to Get Thing Done instead of following yet another interesting link?

Or am I just adding guilty feeling drops to some future pointless browsing?

(*) aside: It was the former IBM Rational Doug Landauer that pointed me to TiddlyWikis (among the endless list of interesting links that he always posted in his intranet blog(**)). It was the magic of seeing a wiki run in my browser that changed my perception of JavaScript and got me interested in it.

(**) See? I just checked Doug's delicious bookmarks and see a link to the Atomisator, some Python scripts that I'd like to check closer to help me avoid drowning in the rss tide... (***)

(***) The pattern of me getting lost following links should be quite obvious at this point :-)