Post by David Pierce. Find me on Twitter.
For whatever reason, the Achilles Heel of my life online has long been my bookmarking system. I read a lot, write a lot, and am constantly looking for “that thing I read that one time that would be totally perfect right now!”
In my search for the perfect system, I’ve learned that many, many people have the same problem: we come across all this cool stuff, and there’s no system in place to put it somewhere we’ll reliably find it, or remember it exists, ever again. I promised that, if I figured out a system, I’d share it.
Well, here goes.
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Post by David Pierce. Find me on Twitter.
A good bit of my day, every single day, is spent reading on screens. I’ll read news on my computer, and then save some interesting stuff to Instapaper to read while I’m on the subway. I’ll read RSS feeds when I get to work, read blogs and news throughout the day, catch up on ESPN when I’m bored, and maybe end the day reading a book on my iPod Touch or my laptop while I’m sitting in bed.
All of that would be fine, except that computer reading is a nightmare. There’s the obvious problems, like “you’ll go blind,” as well as a host of other annoyances. Between blinking ads that pop up over the first nine paragraphs of the story, ads about some girl’s nasty yellow teeth I’d really rather not see, and the “hey there, want to subscribe to my newsletter?” notes that seem to be plastered all over most blogs, reading on your computer (or any screen) just sucks.
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Post by David Pierce. Find me on Twitter.
On Twitter yesterday, I asked my followers for some of their favorite blogs. I got some great answers, which I’ll share, but what was more interesting to me was how many people were in my situation: liking reading blogs, and finding it harder and harder to find new good ones.
I’ve also realized that, for most people, blogs are still a totally foreign concept. We don’t know how to find good ones, how to use those to find others, or how to connect to this whole crazy blogging world. I think that’s why the reactions to my lists of great business blogs and great blogs for foodies were hits.
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Post by David Pierce. Find me on Twitter.
(Every week or so, I post a bunch of resources to get you going with a digital project of some kind. In this case, it’s programming..)
Programming, writing software and web code, is going to become more and more important as the world turns digital – everything from art to software requires some programming knowledge, and there are tons of different languages, thoughts, and methods out there.
Luckily for you (and me, certainly), they’re not that tough to learn. And, thanks to some great resources out there, you can learn them right from the computer screen, without paying a nickel.
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Post by David Pierce. Find me on Twitter.
How do we learn, well, anything? We watch how others do it. It’s how I learned to throw a baseball, smoke a cigar, drive a car, open a can (poorly–don’t ask), and so many other things.
Computers are no exception, either. The best way to learn which software you should use, which computer to use, how to set it up, and what the heck to do with it all, is to see exactly how they do it. In the tech world, people often will review products that might be great, but that they don’t use themselves; the best of the best, tend to be used by the best of the best.
A few smart people, around the Web, have been compiling and sharing what those people are doing—from their favorite software, to the contents of their bag, to what their desk looks like.
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Post by David Pierce. Find me on Twitter.
Every night, between when I go to bed and when I get up, I get about 25 emails. To answer your question, no, I’m not nearly important enough to be getting emails in the middle of the night.
Those emails are all newsletters, or Spam, or Ticketmaster trying to sell me Jonas Brothers tickets just because I went to 19 of their concerts. The vast majority of the email I get is of absolutely no interest to me – and I don’t think I’m alone.
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Post by David Pierce. Find me on Twitter.
I hate Microsoft Word. There, I said it. As much as I loathe it, though, I’ve mostly stuck with it for the last few years, just because it’s the best option out there for word processing.
Or so I thought. Google Docs, as it turns out, offers a huge number of features, some of which don’t get nearly enough press, that make it better for anyone, but especially those working remotely, than Word. I’ve talked about how much I love Buzzword and Zoho before, but Google Docs is really the standard.
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This is a guest post from Candis Bradshaw, a new contributor to Digitizd. She’s a classical musician turned court reporter turned alphatechnogeek, and she’ll be around relatively often, so make her feel welcome!
Does your computer take an eternity to boot or shut down? Do you have frequent system freezes or slowdowns during the course of the day? You may be suffering from the computer slowdown blues. The “slowdown blues” can be caused by many things, but here is what you can do to help cure those slowdown blues.
We’ve discussed a few ways before to speed up your computer, and tips for fixing other problems, but now we’re going to dig into Windows itself.
A note before we get going: before you do anything that deals with your computer’s system and internal files, make sure you’ve got your most important files backed up somewhere. Basically any problem can be corrected, but you don’t want to risk losing some important data. Put it on a hard drive, in Dropbox, on 8,000 zip drives—just make sure you can always get it back.
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