This article from NYT has been on the top 10 technology most emailed since December 29, 2010. Almost 16 days now.
Read it at 10 Ways to Get the Most Out of Technology
Here is my take and I’ve added 2 more
1. GET A SMARTPHONE
Also Why: I use my Blackberry for calendar, music (Pandora and podcasts), Evernote to capture all notes (text and photos), maps. No brainer.
Beware: that you can spend too much time on the smartphone and not enough time on self reflection. Listen to this TED talk by Amber Case on Amber Case: We are all cyborgs now
2. STOP USING INTERNET EXPLORER
Beware: There are still sites out there that only support IE, especially the ones in Asia markets that need active X for watch videos. Also Firefox can become bloatware and many others are switching to Chrome. 5 years later, when we have 3 big browsers, the simple, nimble browser maybe the next browser of choice
3. UPLOAD YOUR PHOTOS TO THE CLOUD
Also Why: Having your photos online allows you view them anywhere
Beware: Picasa charges you for $5 a year for 20 GB of storage, where flickr is free. Picasa does have a nice desktop application.
4. GET MUSIC OFF YOUR COMPUTER
Beware: I haven’t seen many people do this on a regular basis. There is nothing wrong with filling your digital devices, use an AUX cable to play it on your portables. I have 2 Apple airports, but seldom use it to stream music. It’s still too much hassle and I use Pandoro most of the time.
5. BACK UP YOUR DATA
Also How: I buy 2 hard disks (2TB) from Amazon for less than $100 and keep one at home and one at work and use Time Machine to backup. The online backup solution is expensive, eats up your CPU cycles and also eats up networking bandwidth. As hard drive price goes down, it makes sense to have the individual do it themselves
6. SET UP A FREE FILE-SHARING SERVICE
Also Why: I put all documents I create myself into dropbox. There is no way I create more than 2 GB of content, so this guarantees I have access to the document on any mobile device. I also also immediately get to work on my documents on any computer I happen to be on.
7. GET FREE ANTIVIRUS SOFTWARE
Beware: Antivirus software kills alot of CPU and makes your machine slow. I tend to turn off virus checkers, backup my data, use Firefox and restore my computer if its gets really infected. I make this trade off because I trust my backup. If the virus kills my backup, that’s another story.
8. GET A BETTER DEAL FROM YOUR CABLE, PHONE AND INTERNET PROVIDER
Also Why: you should consider canceling cable, go with Hulu and Netflix. Don’t use landlines and use cell phone.
9. BUY A LOT OF CHARGING CABLES
I agree. Also I am researching mobile solor power USB chargers
10. CALIBRATE YOUR HDTV
Also Why: I don’t have a TV, how about calibrating your computer monitor?
TT 11: Put your reading list, task lists on the cloud
use Google Reader to subscribe to blogs. Put your task lists into rememberthemilk.com
TT 12: Store your notes on the cloud using Evernote
I enter my text notes and capture web page on Evernote using email, Blackberry app, my computer and I have access to it anywhere. You can also take photos of text from newspapers, magazines and Evernote allows you to search on the text in the images.
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