tips

Great reference in case you want to expand your use of Markdown tags.

After listening to David Sparks’ OmniFocus video series, I’ve been rethinking how I use due dates for tasks. Well, actually, I’ve been rethinking it for quite sometime. Usually when I’m postponing due dates. Forecast I love the OmniFocus for iPad’s Forecast mode. It’s a custom view into tasks, that presents them in a timeline with past due tasks colored red and near term tasks colored orange. This is a great way to see what you are up against for the coming week or check out what slipped through the cracks.

Routines are a necessary and valuable part of getting stuff done with as little friction as possible. However, I try to avoid routines for the most part. I find that they make life feel monotonous and stifle creativity. The routines I do keep, I find fulfilling and enjoyable. They also give me piece of mind when all is said and done. I thought I’d share a few of my routines that involve my iPad and Mac.

Following up on the SSD post from Jeff Atwood, I love my SSD boot drive but I keep the majority of my data on a secondary HDD. My primary home office computer is a late 2010 iMac with a 256GB Apple SSD and a secondary 2TB "data" drive. Here's how I have configured this setup to maximize the speed of the SSD but the storage capacity (and maybe reliability) of the HDD.

I would love for this data to be added to product reviews and packaging. I'm with Jeff, and would still buy an SSD drive. An SSD is the single most significant upgrade you can make to your computer. It's quite surprising how much the OS is limited by disk read/write speeds. Computer "speed" used to be limited by CPU cycles, then it was RAM. Now it's disk throughput. At least data like this puts data backup into the proper perspective.

The iPad keyboard works quite well for general typing. Where it falls short is accessing the extended keys such as @, *, #, [ and alike. Forget trying to type a tab character on the standard iOS keyboard. It’s not available in most applications. The tab requires a developer to implement a custom keyboard like Nebulous Notes (which is rare). Consequently, a user is required to tap the “.?123” key on either side of the space key to access most of the special keys.

In light of the last post, I think it's my responsibility to highlight some important points about securing a Mac Server. These are also just good ideas for any computer. Turn on your firewall. It's easy and it works. Check your router port forwarding. Make sure you know where your incoming traffic is going. Specifically, if you do not forward your incoming HTTP connections, then your router is accessible from the Internet.

Tinkering Dropbox is incredibly useful and I enjoy extending it's utility whenever I can. I also enjoy choosing projects that will teach me something new about my Mac. My latest project was to provide SFTP access to my Dropbox account. For security reasons, I am not allowed to install Dropbox at work. I considered several options for direct access to my files (email, webdav) but FTP is the most simple and universal access I could develop.

Indev makes some ridiculously useful software. I own licenses for them all. Today MacZOT! is having a bundle sale that includes all of the email tools that Indev makes. You're not going to find a better deal on some great Mail.app plugins.

I had already been testing a new iOS app named Notesy when the boys over at the B&B podcast started to recommend it. I have to say, I really like the app. However, I started to see some funny business while I was test driving new note naming systems. I’ll post about that experiment later. However, I discovered some interesting limitations when using Dropbox for taking notes. Dropbox limits the characters used in note titles.