Mind Mapping Tools
Some excellent and free mind mapping tools can be found listed on lifehacker.com. Here’s the top 5.
Two that interest me the most:
- mindmeister (free and web-based)
- XMind (free windows/mac/linux)
XMind
Once you have everything mapped, you can bring it into your presentations using VUE.
Automate with Snow Leopard
If you own a mac and have installed Snow Leopard, you need to take a look at Services. Snow Leopard has seriously upgraded automator and services with this latest release. Services will allow you to simplify tasks that typically take several, redundant steps and consolidate them down to a one click button or even an automatic scheduled event. This could be a very powerful tool in your bag of tricks as a developer of any kind. To learn more check out the automator site. You may also want to view or subscribe to MacBreak (video) episodes 235 – 238.
ThinkPad USB Keyboard
This is so cool. I have always enjoyed the feel and responsiveness of the IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad keyboards. Now you can buy a USB version for $59.00 US for your home PC. I might even try one of these with my mac.
MonoPrice.com
If you need a cable or home theater accessory, I challenge you to find a better price than what monoprice.com offers. Unbelievable. I just found an eSATA cable for less than $4.00. The same cable sells for $20 at bestbuy.
See some of what’s new with Snow Leopard OSX 10.6
Passport security
Why am I writing about passports on a tech site? Because they are now being made with RFID chips inside. Turns out my passport will expire in the coming months and while I was researching what is needed to renew mine, I also heard a great tip while listening to Security Now! with Steve Gibson. He mentioned in a recent episode that passports are now being made with RFID chips and that this creates a possible security threat. All it would take is for someone to get close enough to you / your passport and with a quick swipe of an RFID reader they would have your information. They immediately know if you are U.S. citizen or not. I don’t want to imagine the possibilities the criminals may come up with to use my information while I’m traveling so I am going to pick up a RFID Blocking Passport Billfold from ThinkGeek.com as soon as they’re back in stock.
Search for the best headphones
For the last few weeks I’ve been on a search for really good headphones at a decent price. It’s been difficult to make a decision because I hadn’t found any really good reviews. All the reviews seem so mixed and I was looking for a site that may have a reviewed a bunch at various price points and then give recommendations. I couldn’t find anything until I stumbled upon Matt Mullenweg’s site. He wrote a great post about headphone recommendations that I thought worthwhile to pass along. I’m going for the Sennheiser HD 595.
Microsoft Updates Office 2008 for Mac
And WOW, it’s FAST! I applied the service pack 2 update last night and the speed improvement is dramatic. Don’t delay getting this update. More on the update can be found on Mac Rumors.
Update: After applying the recent follow-up patch to fix the compatibility issue with PC word documents, I noticed that the launch time was dramatically longer. Bummed.
Get Windows for Free for a year
For those of you that want to play around with Windows for some reason, you can. Microsoft is providing its Windows 7 Release Candidate as a free download! The coolest part is that the RC should run for about a year before expiring. So if your running OS X and maybe need to run Windows in a VM, you can get it for free for a year and not feel horrible for purchasing a copy of XP or even worse, Vista.
I recommend running the 32-bit version in a VM as it is a little less resource hungry. Get it while you can… The free download will end in June.
Online document editors
If you’ve been living under a tree, without wifi, not on the twitters or without a netbook for the last few years you may not have known or heard of google docs. It’s nice and gets the job done, but I’m not blown away by the user interface.
Today, I took a second look at Adobe’s offering, buzzword. Also, not super feature rich, but it has a nice UI and it gets the job done as well. Both services are free and provide ample storage for many documents. Both are in “beta” so watch for some form of service fee in the future.
Bottom line is, if you need to author a document and don’t need or want to pay for the insane cost of using all the features of Microsoft Word, one of these web services might be the answer.