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Your contact list and calendar events on your mobile phone have nothing to do with the contacts and calendar items on your Outlook, even though most of them are the same. For instance, you store contact numbers in your phone and email info in Outlook’s contacts. Shouldn’t they both be connected? Shouldn’t the reminders/events you set on your phone, or the meetings you enter in your Outlook calendar be available at your desk and while you’re on the go?

This HowTo will teach you to keep your Contacts, Calendar events and Notes in sync between Outlook and your Nokia smartphone. I have tested this with Outlook 2003 and 2007, and it should work with all Nseries and Eseries phones plus several phones that run S60. If your phone came with a Nokia PC Suite installation CD, it’ll work.

Setting things up for the first time

Install Nokia PC Suite on your computer. Using either Bluetooth or the USB-based cable, connect your phone to your computer, and start up PC Suite. Launch the Nokia PC Sync application. This is roughly how things should look (things may differ slightly depending on your PC Suite version):

Click the Setup icon, bottom center. Select Microsoft Outlook as your email application (this HowTo should also be applicable if you have been condemned to use Lotus Notes at work):

Next, choose what you want synchronized, and how far back and forward you want calendar events synced. If you’ve chosen to synchronize bookmarks too, choose your preferred browser. The list below should be enough for most people:

Synchronizing

Once you’re done with the Setup Wizard, click the “Synchronize Now” button:

It’ll take a while the first time, depending on how many contacts and calendar events you’ve stored in both Outlook and your smartphone:

That’s all you need to do. Once the synchronization’s done, a short summary will be displayed on the home screen:

Conclusion

Take a look at your Outlook calendar and contacts – it’ll be filled with birthday entries and sundry tasks/TODOs, while your phone’s calendar will be filled with your meetings/appointments and your contacts will have their email addresses entered along with their phone numbers.

Notes

1. You might have to weed out significant amounts of duplicate entries if you stored the same contact under slightly different names in your phone and Outlook

2. Reminders are transferred both ways, so you can create an alarm or a reminder on Outlook and have it ring on your phone (and vice versa).

3. If you’re using Bluetooth, you can also set your phone and Outlook to sync automatically periodically.

The most important device at B-school, a laptop is purchased without too much thought, through a bulk deal. A little consideration can make a world of difference to your computing experience at B-school. Most B-schools vote for one of 3-5 shortlisted models. This guide will

• Comment on how to approach the purchase decision
• List what features are important and what are overrated
• Discuss these features in detail
• Make a final recommendation

This guide is for

• Students who are managing the laptop deal on behalf of the incoming batch
• Students who are buying a laptop through this bulk deal
• Students who are buying a laptop just before joining the institute

A laptop will be used mostly for your projects and assignments (Web browsing and Office), communication (email, chat) and entertainment (movies/sitcoms, gaming). No heavy-duty software development/Photoshop work.

The Purchase Decision – Price

Buy an high-end laptop (in a bulk deal) instead of a mid-range one. No one does this. Unfortunately, year after year students opt for cheap laptops instead. They draw a psychological line at Rs. 60000. Spending about Rs. 15000 more on a laptop will give you a dramatically better laptop, and a dramatically better experience over two years. It will also be a sophisticated high-end personal laptop for 2-3 years after B-school. Relative to the total size of your loan (~6-8 Lakh), Rs.15000 is a small amount. So do the smart thing, spend that much more and get a better laptop.

Your vendor will also be willing to sell you a high-end laptop at a good discount. For one, such laptops are already sold in bulk to companies for their higher-level executives, so their actual sales price is much below the stated retail pricen. Two, the vendor gets a higher total deal size (in Rupees) as well as earns a better margin.

As for the “Company baad mein laptop deti hi hai” argument, the reality is that with very few exceptions, post-MBA companies buy the same mid-range laptops for new joinees that students do. Do yourself a favor and get a Good Laptop in B-school. Such laptops have rather high retail prices, and a bulk deal is your best opportunity to own a high-end machine at a bargain price.

The Purchase Decision – Features

Important Features
Weight and Screen resolution are what push the price of a laptop up. They are also what will make the biggest difference to your laptop experience.

• Weight (you’ll be lugging around your laptop during summers too, remember)
• Screen size and resolution (sharper displays, more screen area, more lines of text) (more)
• USB Ports (more)
• Microphone (more)

Overrated Features

• Price (see above)
• Widescreen monitors
• Processor
• Battery capacity (more)
• Hard disk (more)
• Video card (more)
• RAM (more)
• Webcam

How the ideal B-school laptop will look

• Rs. 75000 – Rs. 80000
• 2 kg weight
• 14″ non-widescreen monitor
• On-board video card with shared memory
• 80 GB hard disk
• 1.5 GB RAM
• 2 USB ports
• 6-cell Li-ion battery

Recommendation

The Lenovo T-series (currently the T61) is *the* best 14? Windows-based laptop on the market. Superb build quality, great ergonomics, best-in-class keyboard, high native resolution, light weight and plenty of processing muscle. A T-series laptop will be a bargain at Rs. 75K and won’t be obsolete for 4-5 years at least.

More about Features

Screen Size and Weight
Important! Opt for a 14″ (14 inch) laptop screen over a 15″ one. There is a noticable difference in weight. This matters because your laptop will do some serious traveling around the campus. Usually, both 14″ and 15″ screens have the same native resolution (see below), so a larger size screen will only add weight without the benefit of extra screen space. Widescreen monitors mean extra screen area but also more weight, so you’re better off without a widescreen. Note: The screen size is measured along the diagonal:

Screen Resolution

Important! Resolution is the number of pixels you can see on your screen; a higher resolution means larger screen area. This is important – you can see more lines of text (in Word), more cells (in Excel), and sharper visuals (while watching movies or gaming). A high-resolution screen can dramatically improve your laptop experience.

Common 14″ or 15″ CRT desktop monitors are capable of a resolution of 1024 pixels (horizontally) and 768 pixels (vertically), denoted as 1024×768. Low-end 14″ laptops are also capable of 1024×768. Ask for a laptop screen that does better – a resolution of 1280×1024 on a 14″ screen is very good.

Video Card and Graphics
Dedicated video card or onboard? Separate video memory or shared? For all your needs, an onboard card will be more than powerful enough. A dedicated card is a needless expense. Just make sure you have enough system RAM (see below) (back).

RAM
You can never have too much RAM. 1GB – 1.5GB is enough for most tasks. A few of you will plan to use your laptop beyond B-school; buy another 1GB chip (ask for a student discount) and fit it into your machine’s expansion slot. Note: I went through B-school with a 4-year-old 14″ IBM Thinkpad with 768MB RAM and faced no problems. It is still my primary machine. (back)

Hard Disk Capacity
80GB should be enough. In my post on Essential College Gear, I recommended buying a high-capacity external hard disk. Keep your photos, movies, videos and other large files on that disk. You will watch several movies during B-school. In fact, a ton of them. Download them from the campus server, watch them, delete them. Copy your favorite ones to your external disk. You really don’t need 100+ GB hard disks. Needless expense. (back)

Battery capacity
Most laptops will have 6-cell Li-ion batteries with 3.5 hours capacity without WiFi and 2.5 hours with WiFi when new. You don’t need the larger 9-cell batteries with 5+ hours capacity. The protrude from the back of your laptop and add to the weight. Needless expense. Keep your meetings short instead In the future, I will write about maximising the life of your laptop battery. (back)

USB Ports
Most 14″ laptops will have two USB ports. Check that you can insert two devices simultaneously into the ports (they are usually one over the other or beside each other): plug in your USB mouse and your USB Pen drive. If you need more ports, invest in a 4:1 USB expansion hub. (back)

Microphone
Choose a laptop with a built-in microphone. The Lenovo Thinkpad, for instance, has a microphone receiver just above the ESC key (or just below the CTRL key on newer models). This way, you don’t have to wear a headphone and with a speaker attachment during voice chat via, say, Google Talk. (back)

Bluetooth
A must for syncing your phone (or your friend’s phone) with your laptop. Also great for open-laptop exams where the classroom WiFi router is switched off

Kensington lock
Some vendors might include a Kensington lock for your laptop as part of the package. A Kensington lock guards against the physical theft of your laptop. Not likely to happen on campus. Ask the vendor to discard it and lower the price instead.

What else would you like to read?

• Essential B-school software
• Getting the most out of your smartphone, B-school Edition
• Maximising your laptop battery life

A sensible guide to what computer gear and electronic accessories you’ll need for a two-year MBA. What’s necessary? Why? What’s optional? What’s a waste? What to buy before college? Hindsight is 20:20. After twenty months at IIM Kozhikode, I can answer those questions. Do note that this guide is written with Indian B-schools in mind – although they make sense regardless where you’re from.

Update: How to choose a laptop, B-school Edition is now available. Click here.

The Necessary Stuff

Laptop

Choose a laptop over a desktop any day, even if you think you can easily transport your home desktop to college. Account for cramped desk space and complete lack of mobility. You need a laptop to take with you to class, to the common room, to the library, meetings, project presentations, home. You can always add functionality with accessories (see below). If there’s enough demand, I will write a post on how to choose a laptop for B-school. Lenovo’s R-series Thinkpads are excellent choices.

How: buy in a bulk deal at college unless you have one already, of course.
Price: between Rs. 50000 and Rs. 60000

Mouse

You can’t get by with tapping and dragging your fingers on a laptop touch-pad. With the amount of time you’ll spend with PowerPoint, Excel and games you’ll definitely need a mouse. Buy a ball mouse or a laser mouse. Optical mice (at least, the affordable ones) aren’t as sensitive as even ball mice. Contrary to popular perception, you don’t need a wireless mouse – the only time you’ll be using a mouse will be in your room. iBall’s Uni-Retractable Laser Precise mouse is a good option.

How: Buy before you reach college
Price: ~ Rs. 800

2GB USB Stick

You’ll use this very often. While delivering presentations, plugging into the Computer Center machines to print, backing up all sorts of stuff, transfering music, and so on. Carry one with you all the time. USB sticks have become extremely cheap, so purchase at least a 2GB one. I have a 2GB SanDisk Cruzer Micro, which has served me admirably during my time at IIMK.

How: Buy before you reach college; ones bought in bulk are typically cheap brands.
Price: Rs. 900 for the 2GB Cruzer Micro

Ethernet Cable

Buy a standard RJ-45 ethernet cable before you reach college – regardless of whether you have a laptop or buy it on campus. There’s a mad scramble for cables once the laptops bought in bulk arrive, so it’s best you have one available. Buy about 4-6 feet of cabling from any electrical store, get the connectors on the ends crimped at the store itself.

How: Before you reach college.
Price: Under Rs. 100 inclusive of the connectors and crimping charges

Scientific Calculator

Several courses will require one – statistics and finance courses in year one, and some in year two. The engineers among you will already have one; for the rest, Casio’s fx-991MS seems to be the model of choice.

How: Buy with a bulk deal before classes begin
Price: ~ Rs. 400 after bulk discount

Surge protector

So you don’t fry your laptop in case of a surge. This has happened not only at the IIMK campus, but others as well. You will charge delicate devices – your laptop, your phone, camera via the electrical socket. Buy one for their sake. Another reason is that your charger pins may fit loosely in the electrical sockets (very common), and you’ll need to resort to all sorts of tricks to fit things correctly.

How: Buy one before you reach college
Price: ~ Rs. 100

Laptop Bag

To lug your laptop around. While buying your laptops in bulk, ask for a backpack with a laptop sleeve instead of a traditional bag that you sling over one shoulder. Backpacks are better than sling-bags to store your other stuff – notebooks, files and the like.

If you’re buying one on your own, buy one from the Samsonite range. I’ve had one for over three years; been everywhere from the Kerala backwaters to New York City to the local trains in Bombay, keeping my laptop and other stuff perfectly safe. Avoid ones which have separate compartments for CDs, MP3 players, water bottles and cables.

How: With your laptop if buying at college; from any Samsonite store before you reach college if own laptop
Price: ~ Rs. 2000

Optional Stuff

External Hard Drive

To back up the gigabytes of movies, music, pictures, software, videos, MBA-related stuff and more, get a large desktop (3.5 inch) hard drive with an external case that connects via USB. A 2.5 inch hard disk (the kind that fit into laptops) are probably not ideal, since they only do about 4200RPM (the speed at which the disk rotates). Also, since they’re delicate, they’re more prone to crashes. Finally, larger-sized 2.5″ disks re obscenely expensive. So get a 7200RPM (or 5400RPM at a minimum) hard drive with capacities of about 250-300 GB.

How: Buy with a bulk deal
Price: ~ Rs. 3500 with casing

DVD Stack

Even though you have an external hard disk, you’ll want to store your movies, sitcom episodes and documentaries on DVDs. It also makes sense to back up essential data onto optical media – it’s much more stable than magnetic media such as hard disks – whether internal or external.

How: Buy locally in stacks of 25
Price: ~ Rs. 12-15 per DVD.

Smartphone

A smartphone that sync contacts and calendar events is extremely useful. Having your contacts backed up is extemely important. Also, by syncing your phone calendar with Microsoft Outlook (which most Nokia phones are capable of) is a great way to keep track of classes, submissions, deadlines and other events even when not tied to your computer. Finally, by syncing your Outlook contacts with your phone’s address book, you can store several details about people in addition to phone numbers. In a later HOWTO, I’ll demonstrate how you can use Outlook as your master information database during your MBA.

How: Buy before you reach college
Price: ~ Rs. 10000. The Nokia E50 is highly recommended.

Office chair

Most B-schools provide terrible chairs in hostel rooms. I’ve seen moulded plastic ones and a range of metal chairs with weaved seats and backrests. Add bad posture to that and I’m not surprised at the number of classmates that complained of backache all the time. It’s worth investing in the best office chair you can find locally. Remember, you’ll be using that chair several hours a day for two years. Do it for your back’s sake. You can either auction it to your juniors when you leave, or have it transported back home.

How: Buy at the local furniture store. Try to round up enough numbers for a bulk deal.
Price: ~ Rs. 5000

Speakers

2 satellite speakers and one subwoofer should be enough. Remember to place the subwoofer unit as close to the ground as possible. 

How: Buy in a bulk deal or from a senior
Price: ~ Rs. 2300

What else?

So there it is. If you’ve been through a B-school, do write if there’s anything this article missed or got wrong. If you’re a to-be B-schooler, let me know what else you’d like to know.

Coming up – Essential Software Guide, B-school Edition

Having tags for each post on your blog is one of the best ways your readers can find the content they need. That translates directly into more loyal users, better referrals and ultimately, more quality traffic.

The Monthly Archives listing is almost useless for visitors. Put yourself in the shoes of a first-time visitor to your blog. What does he/she care about what you wrote in January 2007? But if your blog were about, say, Gardening, a user would definitely find posts tagged Rose or WateringTechniques useful. The visitor wants to primarily browse by content, not by timeline. My Archives page, for instance, lists my posts by tags first and by month later.

I recommend a three-level tagging technique that, in my opinion, will help visitors locate your content much better. While these tags may have a tech bias, it can be used, almost without any change, for blogs on most topics.

In essence, you describe your each post using three sorts of categories: Type, Technology and Product/Firm.

Each post can contain multiple tags from each sort. First, what type of post is it? Is it commentary on a recent development? You might want to tag it “News“. Or an opinion piece on something you feel strongly about? Tag it “Opinion“. Second, what aspect of the topic is it about? From the Gardening analogy, if you’re writing about how to better water your rose plants, you’re talking about “Watering” your plants. Or you might be talking about gardening “Equipment“. Third, have you made references to products or companies? “Trowels” or “Gloves“, or the name of a fungicide are what make it to this third sort of category.

Here are some of the tags I use for my posts (in no particular order):

• Type: HowTos, Editorials, Insights, Predictions, Trends, Off-topic
• Technology: RSS, Mobile, Internet Social, Blogs, Video WiFi, Affiliate, SEO, Policy, Email, Spam, Marketing, Telecom, VC, Broadband, OpenSource…
• Firms/Products: Linux, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Sun, Opera, Twitter, Apple, Firefox, Safari, Outlook, Thunderbird, Vista, Nokia, Facebook, iPhone, Gmail, IBM, Novell, SQL, Thinkpad…

Example 1: “The iPhone question – and why Arrington is wrong” was, briefly my opinion about why a certain Mr. Arrington was wrong about the impact that Apple’s iPhone would have on the future of mobile technology. Here’s how I tagged it: Type: Editorials, Insights. Technology: Mobile. Firms/Product: iPhone.

Example 2: “HOWTO: Google Reader Power User Guide” was about how to read your RSS feeds more effectively using Google Reader. Here’s the tagging: Type: HowTos. Technology: RSS, Social. Firms/Product: Google.

The three-category technique is based on my estimate that visitors searching for content will typically have one of these three intents – either they want to search for all HowTos, or all Trends. Or they are looking for articles about specific products: Firefox, Google. Or, finally, they’re looking for posts on the technology itself – RSS, Blogs, or the like.

From my experience blogging for four years, I’ve discovered that it’s worth investing time and effort to tag (or re-tag) your blog posts. Your readers will love you for it.

Speed up Windows XP and Windows Vista, tweak performance, free up disk space, and optimize your computer.

Everyone complains about how slow their Windows computer or laptop gets. You do too. Here are some simple changes you can make to dramatically improve things.

Note: While there are a hundred ways you can squeeze more juice out of Windows by changing settings in the System Registry, that is beyond the scope of this article. These tips will probably account for 80% of the performance improvement you can possibly get; the registry tweaks will get you the final 20%.

Free up disk space

Turn off System Restore
System Restore creates a “snapshot” of your computer every time you make changes to the system (install programs, update device drivers, more). Should things go wrong, you can “roll back” the system to the last-known good configuration. This is great in theory, but you’ll probably never use it. Just don’t go about installing random applications, and you can safely turn it off and reclaim disk space.

On Windows XP, System Restore is located in Control Panel -> System -> System Restore. Select the “Turn off System Restore on all drives” option. On Windows Vista, navigate to Control Panel -> System. Click on “Advanced System Settings” and then on the “System Protection” tab. See screenshot:

Turn off Disk Indexing

Windows creates a database of all your files so you can do fast file searches. My advice is to leave search to a good desktop search application like Google Desktop. So turn off disk indexing.

Open My Computer, right-click on your Hard Drive icon (C: or D:) and choose “Properties”. At the bottom of the dialog box that opens, uncheck “Index this drive for faster searching”. and click on “OK”. In the dialog box that opens, select “Apply changes to drive C:\, sub-folders and files”, and click on “OK”. See screenshot:

Delete hidden monsters with WinDirStat
Use WinDirStat to clean up files that are occupying space on your drive but are hidden deep in sub-sub directories. Manually searching for all these files is practically impossible.

WinDirStat displays a “Tree-map” view of your entire filesystem. Each file is a colored rectangle. Larger files are larger rectangles. All files in a directory are again arranged as a single rectangle. So the directory rectangle size is proportional to the size of that sub-tree.

For instance, here’s a view of my C: drive:

I can see that there’s a large file in the bottom right-hand side of the tree-map. It happens to be a file in the “MSOCache” folder. Running a quick check on the Internet for “MSOCache” reveals that it contains installation files for Microsoft Office, which can be safely deleted if you have the installation DVD. Deleting the MSOCache folder will free up 550MB on my hard drive – and I hadn’t known that it even existed.

Of course, as always, beware of what you delete.

CrapCleaner
Automatically cleans up your reycle bin, web browser caches, temporary files that have accumulated in your system for months, and lots of other lint that occupies needless space. On typically sluggish computers, I have cleaned up over 1GB of this sort of trash. See screenshot:

Now for the standard stuff, which everyone all too often forgets:

Uninstall Programs from Control Panel
In the Control Panel, under “Add/Remove Programs” (XP) or “Programs and Features” (Vista) look for:

• Multiple music and video players, browsers, chat clients, photo editing software
• Trial versions of programs
• Games you don’t play anymore
• Multiple toolbars for browsers: Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Real, StumbleUpon, and countless others

and get rid of them all. While uninstalling,

• Select the “Complete uninstall” option if there is one.
• Select the “Delete personal data and settings” option if there is one.

Keep only a minimal set of applications that you use regularly. Once you’re done, navigate to the Program Files folder under C: and remove the folder for the application you uninstalled – Uninstalling often doesn’t automatically remove this folder.

Uninstall Microsoft Office components
If you don’t use Microsoft Office applications like Project, Access, Visio but still have them installed, get rid of them.

• From the “Add/Remove Programs” (XP) or “Programs and Features” (Vista), look for “Microsoft Office”
• Click on the “Change” button against the entry for Office
• In the subsequent dialog box, select “Add or remove features”, and deselect the components you don’t need

Don’t install language files
If you run Windows in English, there’s usually no need to install support for additional languages. Whenever you install an application, always make sure you choose “Custom Install”, and deselect the “Support for additional languages” option. For instance, here’s the ‘Custom Install” dialog box during the WinDirStat installation:

Speed up Computer

Defragment your Hard Drives

The oldest and least followed trick in the book. Windows can locate and access files faster on a defragmented disk. This means a noticeable difference in performance, for no cost at all. Run Disk Defragmenter once every couple of months. Set up your laptop defrag to run during lunchtime, or your desktop overnight. Disk Defragmenter is located under Start Menu -> Accessories -> System Tools.

On Windows XP, you can choose which drive to defragment, and there’s a graphical bar that shows before and after defragmentation views of the drives on your disk. On Windows Vista, Disk Defragmenter is rather opaque, with just a “Defragment Now” and a “Modify Schedule” button. See screenshot:

Stop Applications from loading during startup
Having too many applications start automatically when you turn on your computer slows down your startup time, hogs system memory and slows down overall performance. Keep only the ones you need.

• Under Windows XP, go to Start -> Run and type “msconfig” in the box that pops up
• Under Windows Vista, go to Start and type “msconfig” in the search box at the bottom
• Choose “Selective Startup” in the System Configuration box
• On the Startup tab, deselect the applications you don’t want automatically started when you switch on your computer. You’ll be surprised at how many there are.

Use Lite applications

• Use Foxit Reader in place of Adobe Acrobat Reader
• Winamp Classic in place of Winamp Modern
• OpenOffice 2.4 in place of Office 2003/2007
• VLC Media Player in place of Windows Media Player
• CDBurnerXP or IMGBurn in place of Nero Burning ROM
• Windows XP in place of Windows Vista

Store your documents on a separate drive
The “My Documents” folder is usually on the same C: drive as the rest of the Operating System. This means more frequent fragmentation of your drive, leave less space for your system’s paging file and reduced performance. Moving your personal documents to another D: drive will both improve performance marginally and protect your documents should you need to install Windows on C: drive again.

With these simple tips, you avoid doing anything dramatic to harm your computer, and also get surprising gains in free disk space and in performance. Think of it simply as keeping your computer in shape. You owe your machine that.

If you’re the kind who keeps track of information on the web by subscribing to RSS feeds, chances are things aren’t entirely satisfactory.

You’re probably swamped with an ever-growing backlog, yet reading your feeds takes too long. You’re annoyed at several feeds repeating the same news item. And your feed list looks like one chaotic mess.

Surely this wasn’t the way it promised to be – you thought you could wade through information effortlessly with RSS.

A few simple techniques and just a little but of discipline, though, can get you back in business. I’m assuming you’re using Google Reader.

Adding feeds:

• Subscribe, as far as possible, to blogs that do filtering for you. For example, instead of subscribing to several of the “official” Google blogs, I merely subscribe to “Googling Google”, “Google Blogoscoped”, and “Google Operating System” – they’ll give me all the news I need to know about Google, and other rumors/previews as well.
• Add feeds liberally, but label them smartly. If you see an interesting website add it to your feed list, but label it immediately.
• Label according to use/function, not topic. Labeling your feeds “politics”, “tech”, “humor” is no use. Something like this makes more sense:
  • A “News” label for your online newspaper/Google News feeds.
  • A “Daily” label for other, topical feeds you read once a day.
  • A “Evenings” label for humor blogs, cartoons, and the like.
  • A “DB” label for websites that spew information you’ll only need to refer to once in a while (techies, I’m talking Engadget, Ars Technica, Gizmodo and the like). Use Google Reader’s search function when digging out info later. (Thanks to Steve Rubel for this one.)

Processing feeds:

• Read different labels at different times of the day. From the above example, you’d read “News” as soon as you come in to work, “Evenings” to unwind, and so on.
• Use the “List” view. You can see more headlines that way, so if you don’t want to read it, there’s no need to scroll through it to reach the next item. Also, you don’t have to wait for images to load.
• Use “Mark all as read” liberally. After scanning 20 news headlines and reading 4, for instance, make all 20 read. The other 16 never mattered anyway.
• Use keyboard shortcuts. At a minimum, “n” and “p” are “next item” and “previous item”, and “u” hides/shows the feed list pane on the left.
• View entire labels instead of clicking and viewing individual blogs. For instance, simply click on “News” and sift through all your headlines – what do you care what order they’re in or what feed they came from? They’re all news.
• Star actionable posts. Once you’re done reading, see all your starred posts and take action for each of them.
• Go offline! The offline feature (at the top right of your GR page) downloads your latest 200 feed items. Then disconnect your computer from the network, and read through your feeds without distraction.

Maintaining feeds:

• Friends’ shared items can be useful/amusing. Or they can be a pain. Hide friends whose shared items you don’t want to view.
• Use the trends view in Google Reader to see which feeds you don’t read any more, or ones which haven’t been updated in ages. Unsubscribe from them.

Work smarter, not harder.

So my Thinkpad’s hard disk (a standard Hitachi 2.5″ 4200 RPM 80GB HDD) died Saturday evening. It began making ghastly noises all of a sudden, signaling imminent mechanical failure. I shut down the computer immediately, and on restarting, a BSOD informed me my boot volume was un-mountable.

I haven’t tried to recover any data yet, but that disk contains my entire music collection, and pretty much everything from my IIMK days. Tremendous loss. However, lessons have been learnt.

I’m going to use this post to chronicle how I’m getting my laptop functional again, the applications I use – both on the desktop and online, and strategies I’m using to move as much data online as possible.

Recovery

I had an external 120GB HDD (the same Hitachi make), which I plugged into the Thinkpad. And installed my copy of Windows Vista on it. After that, I downloaded and installed several Windows Vista device drivers for the Thinkpad R50. It took me about 4 hours from crash to a working (but data-less) machine.

Local Applications

What I installed immediately afterward. All of these are freely download-able applications, most of which I’ve been using for several years now.

• Firefox 3 Beta 5
• PowerPro 4.8 – shell control software
• iTunes 7.6.2
• OpenOffice 2.4
• VLC Player- all-in-one media player
• Nokia PC Suite 6.86 – interfacing with my N73
• Filezilla FTP client
• Paint.NET – midway between MSPaint and Adobe Photoshop
• Foxit Reader – lightweight alternative to Adobe Acrobat Reader
• WinRAR – archiver par excellence

The installers for all of these are now on my SanDisk 2GB USB pen drive (along with all the Thinkpad Vista drivers). I’m going to update these every six months. It’ll take me far less time to get back on my feet in the event of another crash.

The Online Life

Although I was a pretty heavy user of Web-based applications, it’s going to become a way of life now. I’m now going to move as much data as possible online (except for large files like MP3s and videos), given that I usually have access to a high-speed connection – at home, work and on my phone.

PIM – Email, Scheduling, Contacts and Notes

All my email from 2004 onwards is in my Gmail account. I forward email from my RahulGaitonde.org and IIM Kozhikode mailboxes into Gmail. I also used Gmail’s ability to import email via POP3 to pull old email from these accounts too. I had also configured Thunderbird for Gmail via IMAP, but will be using Gmail’sweb interface exclusively now. To send email from other accounts, I use Gmail’s ability to use a custom “from” address.

As an aside, does anyone know of a good Series 60 email client – with IMAP support – that I can use on my N73?

I’ve used Google Calendar extensively, right from its launch. I have three calendars – one for Work, another for Birthdays and Anniversaries and the default calendar for miscellaneous, casual events. I used to sync these calendars with Thunderbird using GCALDaemon, which I highly recommend.

Contacts is where I’ve got a problem. Outlook (and then Thunderbird) used to be my repository for contacts. Over the years, I had built up an extensive database of email addresses, phone numbers, blog URLs and work addresses, and used to sync this database with my N73. Thankfully, that syncing means my contacts are safe.

However, I’m not sure what my future setup will be. Most probably Gmail’s contacts will be my repository. But I don’t know how I’m going to sync that with my smartphone. I’d love to hear suggestions. (I hear GooSync’s paid service can do this)

Google Notebook is my trusty scrapbook. Although I don’t think much of the interface and its questionable integration with Google Bookmarks, it works well enough. I’d use it even more if it had an Offline mode (say, through Google Gears). That’d bring it close to MS Office OneNote (which is an excellent piece of work).

Finally, I use Google Bookmarks through the Google Toolbar, but ever since I’d started using the Firefox 3 Beta, my list of local bookmarks had grown – because you can now tag them and search them using the Address bar. Those recent bookmarks were lost in the crash – ironically, just days after I blogged about the need to integrate Google Bookmarks with Firefox’s local store!

Staying updated

Google Reader is the answer. Apart from friends’ blogs, I follow:

• Tech News and Opinion: GigaOM, Techcrunch, NY Times Bits, BBC’s dot.life, Startup Duniya, WATBlog, Google Blogoscoped.
• Tech Lifestyle: Lifehacker, Lenovo’s Design Matters
• News: RSS Feed for my Google News

There are several other technology bloggers whose blogs I subscribe to. For news and other non-tech material, once a fortnight, I’ll check up on the Economist and BusinessWeek.

To stay in touch with what I find interesting, visit my Google Reader Shared Items page, or subscribe to it via RSS.

Photos

Thankfully, I’ve been fairly regular uploading pictures into my Flickr Pro account. I have about 500 photos on Flickr now, tagged and categorized. In the future, Flickr will become my primary photo repository.

Blogging

RahulGaitonde.org is hosted on Wordpress 2.5 using TheWebBrains‘ hosting service. I’ve been with TWB since 2004, and they haven’t let me down.

I use Filezilla to manage files on the remote server. Here are the Wordpress plugins I use:

• Akismet for spam filtering
• FeedBurner’s FeedSmith to redirect my Wordpress RSS feed to a custom Feedburner one
• Twitter Tools for integration with my Twitter account
• Random Redirect for readers with some time on their hands
• Wordpress Database Backup
• I also have a list of my Google Reader Shared Items on my sidebar. The code for this is easily available through your Google Reader page.

Web traffic monitoring for RahulGaitonde.org is done through Google Analytics. Again, something I’ve used since it was available.

Office

I’ve always used Google Docs and Spreadsheets whenever possible, right since the Writely days. Most of term papers, plans, databases have been composed, created and stored on Google Docs – so they’ve survived the crash.

Whenever I don’t have access to the Internet, it’s always OpenOffice (although Office 2007 is a splendid piece of work, and at least three years ahead of OO.org). From now on, any document I create with OO.org will be imported into Google Docs as soon as I’m connected.

Issues

That’s the rosy bit. But what about my music collection and videos? I can either back them up on external storage (which I don’t trust right now), or on DVD (cumbersome adding files and preserving albums), or on remote bulk storage like Amazon’s S3 (bandwidth too costly in India). So large files are a problem.

What about file formats such as PDF and ZIP? Miscellaneous settings and configuration files? Right now the plan is to back them up manually, periodically, on RahulGaitonde.org. But that’s far from ideal; there are too many such files.

Finally, the volume of remote data is already so much (4+ GB in Gmail alone) that downloading all that data locally (should the need ever arise) is impractical. What if I need to move from Flickr to, say, Picasa Web Albums? Or what if I need a few dozen photos to take with me on a USB pen drive? It’s extremely cumbersome to download assorted photos, even in batch mode. It’s the same for documents, spreadsheets, notes, email.

It’s clear that making the move online is adopting a fundamentally different lifestyle – which implies moving back offline is a major task. It’s one that I’ve been driven towards by my recent massive loss of data. The move has been made easier because I was already half-way there. In the weeks to come, I’m going to cross the other half and go completely online.

Questions? Suggestions? Comments? Do let me know.

Why are so many presentations boring? Sleep-inducing?

Why do so many presentations have too many slides, too much text, too many bullets, speakers reading out from their slides, running overtime?

Here are a few things to keep in mind while preparing your presentation. With this presentation philosophy, you’ll move the focus from your presentation to the audience – which is what matters.

Prepare

1. Prepare your talk without PowerPoint. Assume it’s just you and the audience, and no projector, no PowerPoint. This is KEY. Here’s where you place yourself above your presentation.
2. Break this talk into sections.
3. For each section, think hard about what the audience will find difficult to understand. Put that on a slide. Graphs (very sparingly!) need to be only One Per Slide, and the only item on that slide.
4. Deliver the talk with the presentation at least once. Stay 5 – 7 minutes inside your alloted time. Always. The audience loves it if you finish ahead of time. Even when you’re a rock star tomorrow, remember this.
5. Appearance: Use dark backgrounds and white text. Stick to the corporate template. If you aren’t using one, don’t use a template at all. Plain black background is perfect.
6. Ask yourself these questions:
   • Do I have to read out anything from the slide? If so, remove it from the slide immediately.
   • At any point of time, is the audience’s attention going to be drawn to the slide, when I’m speaking? If so, remove. Again.

Learn

Watch good Presentations. Keynotes. Welcome addresses. Speeches. See how the world’s best showman, Steve Jobs, talks on stage. His Macworld addresses are available on Apple’s site. Watch how little there is on his slides. Observe how he synchronises his talk with his slides. The slides follow him, not the other way round.

The Nokia 6670 I bought recently has turned out to be a computer in itself. I’ve found myself using my ThinkPad less and less as the week’s gone by.

Email:
I’ve configured both my Gmail and RahulGaitonde.org POP3 accounts on the phone. The built-in email client does a very good job at retrieving, composing and displaying messages and their attachments. It’s also well integrated with the rest of the system, so I can click on most files and select “Send as email”. I’ve heard that Profimail’s the best email client out there, but i.) it isn’t nearly as integrated as the default mail client, and ii.) it isn’t free! After spending nearly Rs. 13000 for this beast, I’m not spending a paisa more

Internet Browsing:
Netfront is a decent browser. It loads reasonably fast, has Javascript support, renders pages quite well, supports SSL. All-in-all, I’m happy. The only thing is, it’s a pretty big application – if you’re running Netfront, you might not be able to open other heavy apps like RealPlayer. According to TaskSpy, while it itself is using 104KB of memory, Netfront (without loading any web page) is taking up 5104KB! I use Netfront and Opera alternately. Both are neck-and-neck in terms of features and usability, but then again, Opera’s only a 14-day evaulation. I don’t see why. Opera is now a free download for Windows and Linux, without the ads, so why not for Series 60? How long before browsers on mobiles outnumber those on desktops? Think issue: Business models for broswer-based ISVs.

In any case, having an Internet browser on your mobile phone is a great timesaver. It takes my bus about 30 minutes to reach my workplace. I use that time to catch up on my personal email, daily news and blogs. By the time I’m at work, I can be productive right away.

The Nokia PC Suite is a wonderful way of connecting to your phone. You can use either the provided data cable, or Infrared (which newer phones such as this one don’t support aynmore), or Bluetooth.

I use the Nokia Phone Browser all the time to manage documents and contacts on my phone, through an Explorer-like interface:

Another fantastic component is the Nokia PC Sync. I can sync my Lotus Notes calendar, address book and TODO list with my phone.

No more typing in stuff into my phone. Simply use Lotus Notes and hit “Synchronise”.

Speaking of not typing in stuff, you can send SMSes via Nokia’s Text Editor. It even integrates with your Address Book.

There’s this database template in Notes by the name of Personal Journal, that’s invaluable for managing information. I don’t know what release of Notes this was introduced in, but those of you using R6 and up should find it.

Well, think of the Personal Journal as a kind of scrapbook. You can create journal entries, file them under zero or more (user-defined) categories, format the text with all the rich elements that you associate with a word processor, paste attachments in exactly the same manner as you do in a Notes email or Document Library.

We all have dozens of Word and text files lying around our Documents folder, right? Containing lists, tips, TODOs, email drafts, temporary code snippets, drafts of articles, and numerous other stuff. Now think of the Personal Journal as a way of consolidating all that data, being able to give all your data a consistent look and feel, being able to categorise it, perform all sorts of searches, including full text searches, leverage the advantages of it being a Notes database, like replication, the ease of being able to forward a Journal entry as an email through one click.

I have categories like Articles, Blog Post Drafts, Email Drafts, SANFS (that’s the product I work on at IBM), Defect Analysis (my work), and the default “Uncategorized” category. And I’ve only been using this for about three weeks, I’m sure I’ll add a lot more categories as time progresses. You can even create folders, and categories within folders. I’m not sure if entries can belong to more than one folder, but I don’t think so.

Since I discovered the power of the Personal Journal, I’ve been able to get rid of the HUGE amounts of small text files I’ve tried to maintain over the years. I have been tirelessly evangelising the Personal Journal here at IBM’s India Software Labs Pune, with very positive feedback! My TODO list is now a Journal Entry, a number of useless text files containing little UNIX/Windows tips accumulated over the years are now neatly arranged in a “Tips” file, which I can and do search extensively before I turn to Google for what I want. This kind of feature is right in line with the concept of Notes being the focal point for all your communication and collaboration.

If you use Notes at work, you ought to give the Personal Journal a try! Do email me if there’s a cool tip about the Journal that you’d like to share, and I’ll put it up here.

There are two products that Personal Journal ought to learn from:

Tomboy for the Linux desktop – http://www.beatniksoftware.com/tomboy and
Microsoft OneNote.

I won’t go through what PJ should take from each product specifically, but here are a few improvements I’d like to see very much, in the Personal Journal of the future:

• Be able to create links to documents that open in external applications. I’d like to be able to create a list of path links to MP3 files lying somewhere in My Music, then simply select this piece of text, and hit “Enter”. This should open up Winamp/Windows Media Player/whatever with this list as the curent playlist.
• Alternatively, create links to emails, in drag-and-drop fashion, which could open up in my Notes Inbox. The possibilities are endless.
• Links between Journal entries, like a Wiki. Tomboy does this in spectacular style. Personal Journal must be able to do this. In the future, we ought to be able to link to elements to other databases. Today, we can easily create links to entire databases, but we’d like specific elements within databases. At the very least, only in local replicas.
• I’d also like my TODO list to be linked to my actual TODO database, or alternatively, my TODO database to be exported as a Journal entry. Now that I think about it, there needs to be greater interoperability between the calendar and the TODO database.
• Being able to edit attachments, and have those changes show up in the original document. Like, for instance, I attach a Word document to a Journal entry, and edit it after opening it in the Journal, then all the changes that I make ought to be reflected in the actual Word document on disk, in my Documents.