<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?><oembed><version><![CDATA[1.0]]></version><provider_name><![CDATA[David Hendler&#039;s Writing]]></provider_name><provider_url><![CDATA[https://freetaco.wordpress.com]]></provider_url><author_name><![CDATA[David Hendler]]></author_name><author_url><![CDATA[https://freetaco.wordpress.com/author/davidhendler/]]></author_url><title><![CDATA[link grab bag]]></title><type><![CDATA[link]]></type><html><![CDATA[<p>Lots of links on the dashboard today. And recently we read that clutter is a sign of procastination. Which is something we really need to get rid of (actually, both procrastination and clutter on that tip).</p>
<p>So let&#8217;s start. Psychology Today has an article entitled <a href="http://www.psychologytoday.com/rss/pto-20030823-000001.html">10 things to know about procrastination</a>. The first 5 weren&#8217;t that interesting&#8230; then we got to #6:</p>
<blockquote><p>Procrastinators tell lies to themselves. Such as, &#8220;I&#8217;ll feel more like doing this tomorrow.&#8221; Or &#8220;I work best under pressure.&#8221; But in fact they do not get the urge the next day or work best under pressure. In addition, they protect their sense of self by saying &#8220;this isn&#8217;t important.&#8221; Another big lie procrastinators indulge is that time pressure makes them more creative. Unfortunately they do not turn out to be more creative; they only feel that way. They squander their resources.</p></blockquote>
<p>Sound familiar? Ouch. One link down. See? We are getting to done even faster now.</p>
<p>Now we have a few tools that look interesting:</p>
<ul>
<li>Our first tool is a visualizer for your Windows directory. If you run TaskManager a lot as you plug away, this might be a good tool for you: <a href="http://windirstat.sourceforge.net/">WinDirStat</a>.</li>
<li>If you need to edit file properties for audio files, <a href="http://download.lockergnome.com/download/104066">AudioShell </a>might be a good tool for you. We didn&#8217;t need to fix up a lot of things until we found a set of mp3s that iTunes did not like, which we whittled down to the &#8220;Original&#8221; tag. If AudioShell can help you change that flag, then there isn&#8217;t anything you can&#8217;t iPod.</li>
<li>The <a href="http://www.diyplanner.com/templates/official/classic">DIY Planner</a> is a set of downloads that help you create planners on good old fashioned paper. If you are into that sort of thing.</li>
<li>The <a href="http://www.getdemocracy.com/">Democracy video player</a> touts itself as a supreme badass in playing videos. That is can download in the background and then play videos seems really promissing. But we aren&#8217;t holding our breathes. We still love the VLC player. <strong>Edit</strong>: <a href="http://www.boingboing.net/2006/02/21/democracy_a_new_plat.html">BoingBoing explains</a> that the video player for Democracy <em>is </em>the VLC player. Democracy just bundles it with RSS and BitTorrent sharing.</li>
<li>Here&#8217;s an extension that is vitally important to GMail. This Greasemonkey script <a href="http://blogs.zdnet.com/Google/?p=102">stops all that &#8220;add contact&#8221; popup</a> nonsense that google recently added to their email app.</li>
<li>And lastly in the tool department is an uber-collection, the <a href="http://www.ttcsweb.org/osswin-cd/">TTCS OSSWIN open source &#8220;CD&#8221;</a>. You might recall a few weeks back we talked about the OpenCD, which collects many of our favorite open-source apps, but the TTCS collection also looks promising.</li>
</ul>
<p>Now that we are seguing into lists of links, we can&#8217;t leave without mentioning <a href="http://developer.yahoo.net/yui/">Yahoo&#8217;s &#8220;UI Library&#8221;</a>, a collection of interactive and other AJAXy UI tools that one can use/mod for website deisgn.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gcast.com/">GCast </a>looks like a nice tool for creating podcasts. It might just even trump our other favorite podcasting software, Odeo. What we most especailly like about GCast is that it has a stand-alone player you can embed into your website. We like that. A lot. Plus, they tie in nicely with their (GCast&#8217;s) other service, <a href="http://www.garageband.com/">GarageBand</a>. And their connection helps you key into podcasting music. Which we also like.</p>
<p>Lastly today, we have the video eater site, <a href="http://www.videosift.com/">VideoShift</a>, which culls online video from GoogleVideo and YouTube and presents it in a digg-like format. OUr currentl favorite line of videos is the <a href="http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=Google+techtalks">TechTalks at Google</a>. (Oh, and that one about zero-config with Bonjour networking? Don&#8217;t believe it for a second.)</p>
<p>There. All done. That wasn&#8217;t so bad, was it?</p>
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