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Get Organized with Google Tasks

Jason Barry — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 18:17:26 -0500

Earlier this summer Google graduated Tasks from Gmail labs and brought it prime time into Gmail. Today, Google announced that there is a new full-screen version of the Tasks gadget available for iGoogle.

The Tasks gadget allows you create and synchronize task lists from within Gmail, Google Calendar, iGoogle, or your mobile phone. The tasks seamlessly synchronize across all of the Google applications so you can monitor your progress, check off items, or add new errands wherever you are.

If you’re already using Google Tasks, check out the full Google blog post for some power shortcuts in the new gadget. If you haven’t become your own evil task master check out the intro video below.

How To: Organize and Tag your Videos

Mark Soper — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 20:15:44 -0500

If your PC is the hub for your home entertainment system, keeping track of your video collection isn’t easy. Whether it’s footage you’ve captured with your own DV camcorder, gaming trailers you’ve collected from the Internet, or archives of all your DVDs, it’s easy to wind up with loads of media files and yet have no easy way to find that one piece of video you’re dying to see. No matter what types of videos you crave, keeping them organized is an essential task. It’s also easy.

We’d love to tell you that there’s a single free program that’s ideal for keeping track of every kind of video content you own—but we can’t. We have, however, discovered a pair of free programs that can make almost any video collection easy to manage. For organizing anything other than commercial DVDs, we recommend Microsoft’s free Windows Live Photo Gallery, an update to Vista’s Windows Photo Gallery that works with both Windows Vista and Windows XP. For organizing your DVD collection, whether you prefer to play your movies from their original DVD sources or from hard-disk backup copies, you’ll want to use Rock Solid Software’s MovieManager. Both apps offer flawless organizational options for your treasure trove of titles, and we’re going to show you exactly how to use them.

Time = 128 Min

What You Need

Windows Live Photo Gallery
Free, www.get.live.com
MovieManager 2.02
Free, www.moviemanager.ca

1. Install and Configure Windows Live Photo Gallery

To get Windows Live Photo Gallery, go to the Microsoft Live website (get.live.com) and click the Get Windows Live button at the bottom of the page. By default, all Windows Live products except Family Safety for Windows Live OneCare are preselected. If you want only WLPG, uncheck the other options and click Install.

Download the application to your desktop and double-click it to fire up WLPG (Vista users will also need to provide administrator-level credentials if User Account Control is enabled.) The installer will display the programs you selected and offer a final chance to install any applications you might have neglected to check the first time around. Choose what you need, then sit back and relax while Photo Gallery and supporting tools are downloaded and installed.

WLPG might ask if it should open various types of image files. If you want to set it as the default photo-opening program for your PC, click Yes to continue. On Windows Vista, WLPG displays all the videos it finds in the current user’s Videos folder and the Public Videos folder. On Windows XP, WLPG displays the videos in the current user’s My Videos and Shared Videos folders.

To work with videos stored in other folders (such as videos made with Windows Media Center), click File, select the “Include a folder in the gallery” option, and browse to the folder you want to add to the gallery, such as Public\Recorded TV. Click OK after highlighting the folder. Click OK to close the “This folder has been added to the gallery” dialog. Repeat as needed to add folders on local or network drives.

2. Add Tags and Search By Tags

Tags are key words that describe a video or group of videos. They provide an effective means of video organization and searchability. To create a tag in WLPG, click the Create a New Tag link in the left pane and type in the name of the tag. Repeat the process for each new tag you want to create. Use tags to indicate subject, location, format—any identifier that would be useful.

You can apply your tags to any video (or still image) in your collection by selecting the file and dragging it from the center pane to the tag of your choice in the left pane. Property tagname appears when you’re holding videos over a tag as a confirmation that, yes, this is the tag you want to add to the videos. Release the mouse, and the tag is applied to the selected video clip or photo. You can add multiple tags to any video clip (or photo).

You also add tags to a video clip by right-clicking the clip and selecting Add Tags from the context menu. Add Tags fulfills the same role as the Create a New Tag option. Any tags you’ve already created for the clip will auto-populate in the text box; simply enter a new tag to join the ones you already created.

Once you’ve tagged your video clips, it’s easy to find the clips you want by selecting the related tags—expand the tag menu in the left pane and click the tag you’re interested in. Only videos (or photos) with the matching tag will be shown.

Next: How To Use MovieManager 2.02

3. Install and Configure MovieManager 2.02

MovieManager 2.02’s advanced capabilities and integration with Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com) make it a great app for organizing your commercial videos. If Java isn’t already installed on your rig, click the Java link on the MovieManager download page (http://moviemanager.ca/) and install it first. If you are installing MovieManager on Windows Vista, right-click the install program and select Run as Administrator.

First, open MovieManager’s configuration options by clicking the Tools menu and selecting Preferences. To specify which movie players MovieManager can use, click Movie Player, then browse to your movie player of choice, such as Windows Media Player 11 or any other media player with DVD support. Make your selection and then press Apply.

By default, MovieManager supports avi, mov, mpeg, mpg, qt, wmv, and iso file extensions. If you want to add or delete file extensions, or make other changes in movie database handling, open the Load Database submenu. The program uses Internet Movie Database information to fill in (or replace) your movies’ details. To prevent certain types of information from being changed, select options in the IMDb Lookup menu.

MovieManager can output an HTML list of your movie collection, but this comes out sorted by title. If you want to alter your sorting options, fire up the HTML Output submenu. You can also use this menu to change the file name and location of the list.

4. Modify Listings in the MovieManager Database

If your DVD collection is full of big-name films produced in the last five years or so, save time by loading sample data for more than 120 recent films and modifying this information as needed. To load the database with sample data, click Tools, then Load Sample Data.

MovieManager stores a treasure trove of information, including title, episode, genre, movie file location, and classification (film rating). To modify a movie listing, select the film from the Movies tab and change information as needed. We recommend that you at least input the location of the movie’s VIDEO_TS.IFO file into the location field. Then change the date in the Added On field to the current date and assign the movie a personal rating. Click Save to save your changes.

Once you update a sample record or add your own movie and save the record (see step 5), you can use the Genre pulldown menu above the Movies listing to select movies by genre. To add genre information to a listing, type the new information into the genre field, preferably after the existing genre categories. Each genre category is separated by a comma.

You can search for listings using a number of qualifiers—such as episode, genre, year, or duration—click the Search icon (binoculars), select a single qualifier, type in your the search terms, and click the Search button. Click Close to return to the Movies listing, which now displays the films that match your search parameters. To view all films again, choose Select All Movies in the Genre menu.

5. Load Your Own Movies Into The MovieManager Database

To load your own movies into MovieManager, click Tools and then Load Movies; next, specify the locations of your movie files. Note that you can browse to local or network locations. By default, movies you load are appended to the database: The program uses the name of the folder where they reside to scour IMDb for the film’s information.

Be wary of two potentially dangerous options when importing. The first is “Replace Database Contents.” Use this only if you do not want to use any of the sample data that you’ve downloaded in MovieManager. The “Remove Movies from Database When the Movie Files are Missing” option is useful only when the movies exist on your hard drive. Otherwise, you’ll be nuking all the information you enter whenever you lose a network connection or don’t have the DVD in the drive.

Finish the import by clicking Save to preserve your changes, then click Load db to locate your movies. To update a movie listing with IMDb information, double-click the movie to load it into the movie information window at the program’s right. Make sure the movie location information is displayed. Click Save to save the listing, then click Goto IMDb. Your default web browser opens on the best match in IMDb.

Because of title duplication, you might need to navigate through IMDb to find the right movie. Once you find it, highlight the ttnumber portion of the URL and copy it (e.g., the “tt0091203” in www.imdb.com/title/tt0091203). Return to the MovieManager program window, paste (or type) the ttnumber into the IMDb Key window and click IMDb Lookup to fill in missing data. Click Save again. Repeat as needed for each of your new movies.  

How To: Manage Your Cables

David Murphy — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 17:21:13 -0600

Cables suck.

But it’s not your fault. You spend an hour or so arranging your desk, moving your monitor, setting up your speakers—the last thing on your mind is cable management. When it comes time to plug everything in, you just want to fire up your rig and commence fragging, or movie watching, or minesweeping. You don’t want to get arm-deep in the mucky muck you’ve created behind your computer. What you can’t see won’t hurt you, right?

Wrong. Given time, sloppy cable management always rears its ugly head. It never improves by itself, and, in fact, it gets worse with each new device you wire into your rig. But you don’t have to get crazy to get clutter free and connected. We’ve broken cable management into four easy steps, and you probably already have all the tools you need!

1. Untangle Your Cables

It goes without saying, be sure your computer is off before you start yanking every cable in sight. And pull gently.

The back of your computer can look bad enough if you’re a simple PC user; if you’re a gadget geek, it turns into a mythological nightmare. First, there are the must-have cables: a power cable for the computer itself, video and power cables for the monitor, a cable for your mouse and keyboard, and a network cable. Sound enthusiasts will add a few more to the mix, as a typical 5.1 setup comes with cables for all five satellites, a power cable for the subwoofer, and possibly an additional cable for an external volume control.

Get a little fancier and you can throw in a USB headset for gaming, two cables to power and connect an external drive, USB and power cables for a printer, and a USB cable for a webcam. That puts us at 19 separate cables, all undoubtedly going to a single tower and surge protector.

Before you start tidying, you need to start untangling. And to untangle, you must first unplug. Going with the clean-slate approach is the best way to start managing your cable catastrophe. It’s impossible to make order out of a chaotic mess of wires. You’ll save far more time by disconnecting all your cables and carefully laying them on the floor next to your workspace. If you’re overambitious, you can organize the cables by type—speaker, USB, power—but no matter how you do it, you’ll want to have a game plan.

2. Label Your Cables

You can certainly tell some cables from others by sight alone, but what about all of those black USB cords you have? Or your speaker wires?

Don’t use a Sharpie to label cables—it will surely make a mess. Thin-tipped markers are your friends.

Labeling your cables is just as important as tying them together because you don’t want to have to trace through a tangled web of cords to find out what’s what. You can buy fancy labels from the store or do what we did—use colored tape to label cables by type (USB, power, etc.), then write their purposes on the tape itself.

3. Protect your Power

Most computer-based cables are thin, efficient, and tidy. By comparison, power cables are large, unwieldy, and irritating. And they take up a ton of room when they’re all jacked into a single surge protector.

Just throwing a surge protector on the floor is the surest way to begin a cable nightmare. Concealing wires is an art form, and you can start your magnum opus by making sure your surge protector stays in one place. We used screws, but you can also use Velcro strips to mount your power strip. Some good target locations include baseboards, the underside of your desk, or even the back of a desk leg.

4.Clamp your Cables

Now that you have laid the framework for your masterful movement toward cable happiness, it’s time to get to the nitty-gritty. Grab your zip ties, roll up your sleeves, and start bunching cables together. Be sure to combine like-minded cables as much as possible. For example, speaker wires shouldn’t go alongside USB cords, as your speakers might pick up interference when you use a USB device. The same is true for network cables and power cords—consider them the oil and water of your wiring setup.

Tie, tie, tie. You can never use enough cable ties, trust us. They’re easy to cut off if you make a mistake, just don’t nick a cable along with the tie.

Start at the back of your motherboard and work your way toward each major area in your workstation: desk, subwoofer, and so forth. Keep the overall line tight by throwing on a new tie every six inches or so. And once you’re done, you can use cable clips to conceal these larger cable mash-ups along the underside of your desk.

Organize Your Life With A Wiki

Gina Trapani — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 12:13:16 -0500

Everyone with a hyperactive brain needs a simple tool to organize lists and notes, and a special type of website, a wiki, could be just the ticket. (The name comes from the word wikiwiki, which is Hawaiian for “quick.”) A wiki is an editable website, like the one that powers the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Anyone can add, update, and remove pages on a wiki site using just a web browser and easy-to-use, free software—no text editor or special knowledge is required.

While Wikipedia proves that wiki software enables large groups to collaborate, wikis have a lot to offer individual users, too. You’ll realize this when we show you how to build your own knowledge base and organization center with a wiki installed on your local PC.

Install Instiki

Instiki—free, simple wiki software—is easy to set up and use. It’s written in a programming language called Ruby, so you’ll need to start by installing the Ruby engine. Here’s how to get Instiki running on Windows:

Set up Ruby. Download Ruby from www.ruby-lang.org. Look for the Ruby on Windows section and download the One-click Installer. Run the installer using the default settings.
Set up Instiki. Download the Instiki.zip file from www.rubyforge.org. Extract the package to a folder on your computer. Rename that folder instiki and move it to the root of your C: drive.
Run Instiki. From Windows’s Start menu, choose Run. Type cmd in the Open text box and click OK to launch the Windows command line. Switch to the Instiki directory using the cd \instiki\ command.
Start the Instiki server by typing instiki.cmd and pressing Enter.

Start Instiki for the first time in the Command Prompt window.

Configure Instiki

Once Instiki’s installed and running, it’s time to visit your new wiki. Switch to a web browser and type your Instiki installation’s address into the location bar. It will be available at http://localhost:2500/.

There you’ll see Instiki’s initial setup page, where you can set your wiki’s name (you can use My Stuff) and an optional password to require administer privileges to change Instiki settings. When you’re done, click the Setup button. Congratulations! You’ve got your own personal wiki running.

Keep in mind that your wiki will be available only when instiki.cmd has been executed—otherwise, your web browser will give you a “page not available” error. Check out the heading below for more information on starting Instiki automatically as a Windows service.

Set your wiki's title and password and click the Setup button.

Run Instiki As A Service

Instead of using the command prompt, you can run Instiki as a Windows service. The Instiki service can start automatically with Windows every time you reboot (so you don’t have to do it manually), and it eliminates the unsightly Command Prompt window from your taskbar. There are several methods available; get instructions on how to run Instiki as a Windows service at rubyforge or google's cache of instiki.org's page.

Windows Firewall may pop up and ask if you want to block the Ruby interpreter. Choose Unblock to access your Instiki server.

Next: Edit and Create Wiki Pages!

Edit and Create Wiki Pages

Immediately, your new wiki confronts you with a gaping, empty text area. Remember: A wiki is a website you author, so the home page is empty until you fill it. Thus, the first thing you should do with your wiki is fill in the home page.

Instiki’s page edit mode has three components: the text area on the left containing the page’s current content (none on a newborn wiki), a text formatting guide on the right, and the Submit button next to an author name on the bottom.

Instiki's Textile formatting tips detail special wiki markup that formats the text in your pages.

To add text to your home page, simply type in the text area. Before you submit your changes, you can set the author name to your name (by default it’s AnonymousCoward). Specifying the author’s name is more important on a group wiki, where others are likely to check to see who made what updates. If this wiki is for your personal, individual use, it’s not as necessary.

Once you press Submit, you’ll see your newly created home page, which contains the text you entered. From there, you can click the “Edit Page” link on the bottom-left of the page to change or add to the page’s content.

Keep in mind that a wiki is not just one web page. It’s a collection of as many web pages as you wish to create, interlinked using what are called “wiki words.” Double square brackets designate a word or phrase as a wiki word. You’ll use wiki words to create new pages and link to wiki pages throughout your Instiki web.

For example, if you want to create a to-do list on your wiki, first click Edit Page on the home page. Somewhere inside the home page text area, add the wiki word [[My To Do List]]. Save your changes. Your new home page will contain the phrase “My To Do List” with a question mark next to it (minus the brackets). The question mark indicates that the wiki word points to a page that hasn’t been created yet. To compose the My To Do List page, click the question mark and you’ll be in the new page’s edit mode. From there you can start entering your list.

Once you get comfortable editing your wiki’s pages, you’ll want to format your text to your liking for easy readability. Instiki uses the Textile markup language by default and offers a quick guide to Textile formatting on the right side of the edit mode. For example, to create a bulleted list, add an asterisk (*) to the beginning of each line item. When you save your changes, you’ll see you’ve created a bulleted list of items with those asterisks, like the one seen here.

✦ Take clothes to the dry cleaner
✦ Mail the rent check
✦ Finish writing wiki article

Likewise, you can bold, italicize, and color text in your pages and create numbered lists, tables, headings, images, and links to external web pages.

Put Instiki to Good Use

Unlike most specialized software applications—like a project planner or calendar package—your wiki doesn’t have predefined fields for specific types of information. You can create any number of pages, linked from one another in any structure you choose based on the wiki words you enter. Every page is just a wide-open text area, and you format its contents however you choose. Therefore, there’s no limit to the types of information you can store in your wiki. Here are some ideas:

Lists: Whether it’s a to-do list, grocery list, or laundry list, your Instiki wiki’s a great place to stow it. Simply enter one item per line or use the asterisk to bullet each item. While you can’t cross items off a list in your wiki, Instiki stores page-revision history over time. So you can click the “See changes” link at the bottom of any page to see items that have been added to a list (in green) and removed (in red) backward and forward through time.

Bookmarks: Add web-page links to your Instiki wiki using the yourlinkname:http://example.com notation. Alternatively, simply enter a URL into a page, and Instiki will automatically make it clickable. While plenty of web-based services—such as del.icio.us—can store your bookmarks online, storing links in your Instiki wiki keeps them private and doesn’t limit the amount of information you can enter along with them.

Software serial numbers and website passwords: You just plunked down $50 for the latest version of your favorite software package, and you want to store the license key information in a safe, central place—like your wiki. Create a Serial Numbers page and keep a list of all the license keys you’ve collected over time. Use the same technique for low-security website passwords: Whenever you create a new login, drop it into your wiki for safekeeping.

Recipes: Copy and paste your favorite chicken recipe into your wiki, and when you experiment with the ingredients, update the page with your adjustments. The wiki’s free-form structure makes it perfect for recipes—you can include images, ingredient lists, notes on preparation, and links to the original recipe on the web. And when you’re craving your favorite chicken and mushroom dish? Just type “chicken mushrooms” into Instiki’s search box to retrieve the recipe.

A page of information in Instiki is free-form and can contain lists, links, section headings, and paragraphs.

Research: Planning a party, work event, vacation, or home-improvement project? Collecting information for a report at work? Your wiki’s a great place to save web clippings, phone numbers, directions, and addresses, which you can search by keyword later.

Wish lists and gift ideas: Your wiki’s an easy, private place to store wish-list items and gift ideas with links to buy the items online or reminders about what her favorite wine or his favorite cologne is, so you’ll be ready when a special occasion arises.

Digital diary: When was the last time the dog got shots? Or you got the oil changed? Or the kids went to the dentist? How many cigarettes did you smoke today, or pounds did you lose this month, or miles did you run this week? Your personal wiki’s a good place to log information like this for instant recall later on.

Holiday card lists: Easily track the names and addresses of people you sent cards to and whom you received cards from in your personal wiki. If you enter each person on one line, with each piece of information separated by a comma (e.g., name, street address, city, state, zip code) you can easily copy and paste the text from your wiki page into Excel or an online card service to do a quick mail merge. Also, Instiki automatically links email addresses for one-click message composition from any page.

Next: Tips and Tricks!

Instiki Tips and Tricks

Once your wiki’s an essential part of your digital information store, you’ll want to take advantage of it as much as possible. Here are some advanced Instiki usage tips and tricks.

Roll back changes: Make an edit to a page that you regret later? Here’s the beauty of the wiki: Every version of every page is available to view, compare against the current version, and restore. To roll back a page to a past state, click “See changes.” Using the “Back in time” and “Forward in time” links, locate the version you want to restore and click the “Rollback” link.

View your wiki index: Keeping track of all the pages you’ve created in your wiki isn’t an easy task, especially if you’ve linked them from subpages several layers in from the home page. Luckily, Instiki does it for you. Click the All Pages link at the top of any page to view an alphabetical list of pages in your wiki on the left; on the right, you can view a list of “orphaned pages”—that is, any pages that have no reference via a wiki word elsewhere.

Click on "Show Changes to view edits to your My To Do List pages.

Export your wiki pages: Instiki can export a copy of your entire wiki as a set of interlinked web pages or as Textile markup for importing into another wiki package. To do so, click the “Export” link to the left of the search box and click either HTML or Markup to download a zip file of your wiki’s pages in the respective format. This is the perfect way to back up your wiki data into a read-only format on a thumb drive or CD.

Other Wiki Options

Skip the Installation with PBWiki

The hosted service PBwiki (http://pbwiki.com) is the perfect way to test your wiki legs without installing anything on your computer. Register at PBwiki and you’ll get a full-featured wiki with unlimited pages, 10MB of space to upload files and attachments, page comments, and an optional wiki password for access control. A free PBwiki option is available, with paid upgrades for extra features like backup, advertisement-free pages, traffic statistics, lockable pages, and a custom domain.

MediaWiki, an Advanced Wiki Package

Advanced users who want the features of the granddaddy of all wikis, Wikipedia, can install the software that runs the online encyclopedia, MediaWiki (http://mediawiki.org). MediaWiki is a free, open-source wiki package that requires considerably more setup time but offers advanced configuration options and features, including user registration and login, page discussion, reverse page links, more text formatting options, design customization, and file uploads. To run MediaWiki, you need the PHP programming language engine and the MySQL database server installed on your computer—both are free but are aimed at developers, not casual users. Also, you have to manually edit a PHP file in order to start MediaWiki. Many affordable website hosting packages come with PHP and MySQL for installing software like MediaWiki—or might even come with MediaWiki preinstalled. The advantage of installing MediaWiki on your web host is that you can access it from any Internet-connected computer.

Gina Trapani is the founding editor of Lifehacker.com and author of Lifehacker: 88 Tech Tricks to Turbocharge Your Day (Wiley, 2006).