As I mentioned a few days ago I aggregated all my digital photos into one place recently. One part of the task involved connecting a bunch of hard drives one at a time and scanning them for the files I wanted. While this wasn’t a problem for the old Windows disks I had lying around, I was stumped for an answer to the Linux disks for a while.

A long time ago I used a tool called Explore2fs that let me get at linux disks from windows, but that was then, and it was fairly primitive, so I went in search of something more up to date…

Which was when I discovered Ext2 IFS (catchy name) which is an altogether slicker bit of software. It works in the background giving you access to linux partitions through any bit of windows software. They just look like standard windows disks (C: D: E: etc…) Clever stuff, and just what I needed.

On the odd occasion I do want to see carefully targeted messages from some of the companies that I deal with, yet at the same time don’t want to be bothered for evermore or run the risk of having my address passed around to other companies, I take advantage of disposable email…

Spamgourmet.com is my provider of choice for this service (There are plenty of others just a search away, but I can only vouch for the one I’ve been using for years.) The home page isn’t exactly web2.0 but it does the job…

Once you’ve created an account that points at your main mail address, you’re free to use any email address of the form:-

<unique-identifier.x.username>@spamgourmet.com

Where x is the maximum number of emails you want to receive from that unique address.

You can hand these out to anyone safe in the knowledge that once the sender hits the allotted number of allowed messages at the individual address, Spamgourmet will eat any further ones without troubling you. Handy, huh?

Just spent the past couple of hours rewriting one of the posts that seems to be getting a trickle of hits from Google. It’s now a mini how-to, rather than the one liner ‘ this is a test’ it was earlier. Hopefully this should be a bit more useful to people searching for how to get WordPress to do timed publishing…

Although, having tried the search terms that are bringing people to that particular post, you have to wade through a lot of results before you get to my article. Frankly, if people haven’t found what they’re looking for by then, I doubt I’ll be able to help them.

So it might have been an evening well spent, or it might not, all I can do now is keep an eye on the logs and let you know if it was worthwhile.

As you might be able to tell I’m quite taken with the Google suite of online apps. Gradually since starting to use Gmail I’ve noticed that I’m using my inbox more like a to-do list than just a repository for my incoming email. Combined with a couple of other free online apps you can turn it into a useful personal organiser.

In order to make this work though, you need to be disciplined in keeping your inbox empty… (I was put onto this way of thinking by way of two posts, the first from ZenHabits, and the second from Tim Ferris who writes a lot of sense…) Inboxes full of mail make me shudder, you know who you are…

In addition to acting on incoming mail promptly, I use the Google calendar to mail me about things I really need to do (as well as sending me texts to let me know and appointment is imminent).

The final weapon in the arsenal is Hasslebot. This is great for irregular reminders. If you want to be reminded to call someone every few weeks, but you don’t want it to appear too regimented you can get Hasslebot to mail you roughly every 14 days. And the key word there is roughly. Because of that you’ll seem spontaneous, just don’t let them know your secret…

The neat thing about getting these reminders thru your inbox is once you get into the mind set of having an empty inbox it provides a real incentive to act on the reminders you receive in order to have the warm fuzzy feeling you get from knowing where your towel is…

Give it a go for a week, see if it works for you and let me know how you get on.

I’ve just spent a pretty miserable few days trying to consolidate my digital photo collection. Over the past six years it’s been left to ramble over a laptop, four desktops, a handful of operating systems, half a dozen camera phones (not all mine) and at least eight hard disks that aren’t even attached to anything at the moment…

Seeing as I use the online version of Picasa, I thought I’d give the download version a try as I wanted to have everything local while I sorted the wheat from the chaff. So after nearly two days I now have a definitive, master archive of every digital image I’ve ever taken. Incredibly I, after six years I don’t appear to have lost anything (temporarily mislaid during the amalgamation, but not lost for good.)

I wouldn’t want to use Picasa everyday, the interface can be a bit non-intuitive at times, but all in all it’s not a bad tool. Now comes the next bit of the project, uploading them all to my Picasa WebAlbums site, because I’m getting nervous with only one copy of a lot of those files now. Only six more gigabytes to go…