Don’t Worry, Live Simply, & Love Everyone.
These tiny apartments are amazing. See what these brilliant designs in architecture can do with a small space.
I love the lego-style transformation of this one.
Those things always inspire me and I thought I’d share. If you know of a cool space like this please let me know.
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Who knew that there was such a thing?
Well apparently there is, and its today.
What is World Backup Day you ask? Well its simply a reminder that you should backup your data. All of your digital files, pictures, music etc are fragile and they need to be protected. Computers crash. Hard drives fail. Natural disasters happen.
You need to make sure you have a copy of those files somewhere as a backup, and thus here we are on World Backup Day.
How/Where to backup your files:
.
. But what happens if your water heater breaks and floods your whole house and wipes out both your computer and your backup?So what should you do?
All three and then some.
I recommend having a USB thumbdrive
I also recommend a good external hard drive – Great for backing up all your data. Its quick, and hard drives are cheap
And finally a good online backup solution is needed. I use Dropbox, and LOVE it, for all my important files I work with everyday so I always have the latest copy where ever I need them. I also use Carbonite for ALL of my files, and they are OK. I have backed up 467GB of data with them (thats a lot) and they have worked fairly well over the years. I had some trouble when I switched from XP to Windows 7 on my desktop machine. I’m also looking at other online backup solutions such as Crashplan, or Backblaze.
I’ve had computers die on me. I’ve had hard drives crash. Its a HORRIBLE feeling to realize you lost some very important file or those great pictures from your last trip. Don’t let this happen to you and backup your data today.
If you’ve got any questions on any of this, let me know in the comments.
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I was going to go to bed early, then I found this…
These guys are on an amazing and inspiring journey that I am eager to watch and learn from.
From their website
We are about 20 families who have purposefully uprooted from out of their comfortable suburban homes and moved into one of the worst neighborhoods in Kansas City. We bought homes within a 5 block radius of each other and we put down our stake for the sake of the youth and the poor.
These guys are doing all the cool projects I’d love to get into. I can’t wait to watch more videos from them and learn more about this project and try to replicate some of what they are doing in my neighborhood.
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If your coffee table looks like this picture, you need help. But don’t fret, there is hope for you.
Those are all my remotes that my new universal remote replaces. I had a great Harmony universal remote
My new remote, the Logitech Harmony Xbox 360 Remote
Universal remotes used to be a pain in the ass to set up, where you’d have to look up and enter in all these codes from a manual and it would never quite work right so you’d still need to keep your old remotes out to make it all work. Harmony works differently. With these remotes you set them up on your computer by simply telling the program what kind of TV, DVD, DVR etc you have and it does all the setup for you.
You set up “Activities” such as Watch TV, or Watch a movie and then walk through the program telling it what devices you use for each and it sets up everything for you. It takes a few minutes to walk through the setup process and most of that time is finding the model numbers off of your devices. Once you set up what devices are used for a given activity, such as Watching TV, the remote does all the work for you and turns on all the right devices and sets them all to the correct settings.
This is the only remote I use now. I encourage you to simplify your life a little bit and get one of these.
I’m going to now sell my old harmony on eBay to someone who’s looking for a broken remote for my 1AW.
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I’m a consummate DIY kind of person. If I had cable, I’d watch HGTV 24/7 (part of the reason why I don’t have cable).
I love to fix things. I love to take them apart, see how they work and put them back together working as they did or better.
Its why I drive an old truck with over a half a million miles on it. Its why I’ve remodeled every room of my house. Its what I do.
That is why I loved when I saw the Repair Manifesto.
Here are the basic tenets of the Repair Manifesto:
Seriously, why not fix the one thing instead of recycling it and having to get a new one, thus creating two things?
See above
This one might be my favorite. Why buy a new lawn mower when I can fix the one I have for a few bucks on a new part?
No, this one is my favorite. I love just trying to figure it out. And if I can’t, the item is still broken and I’m no worse off.
This one is a big one with today’s new electronics and such. I bought it, I took it home, I should be able to open it up and fix it without voiding any fancy sticker warranties.
Take a look at the manifesto and next time something breaks, check the warranty first, but then if you can, dig it and see if you can fix it. You just may learn a thing or two and save yourself some cash in the process.
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The other day a co-worker asked me how to turn on email alerts in Gmail. I didn’t know the answer and more importantly I asked her why she would want such a thing turned on. She replied, “so I don’t miss an important email”. I followed up with “how often do you actually receive an ‘important’ email?” And thus lies the problem.
Most of your email isn’t important.
But wait, doesn’t more email mean you are more important? Working harder? More connected to whats going on?
nope, nope and nope.com
Most of the time email isn’t work. Its a distraction from the things you should be doing. Its a crutch to help yourself feel and look busy. Its not helping get the product done. Its not helping the customer with their problem. Its a distraction that “feels” like work and its time to stop it.
I have a bad habit of living in my inbox. Leaving your email open 24/7 and jumping every time the iphone buzzes with a new message. This is a wonderful way to work if you want to get nothing meaningful done. I am working on changing that habit and here’s how I’ve gone about it.
This one is easy. The goal here is to reduce the amount of email you get.
The first step of this is to eliminate all extraneous emails. Simply unsubscribe from all of those messages that come into your box that you don’t want, you don’t read, and you just throw away anyway. Go through all the messages in your inbox and do a clean sweep of everything you don’t want and get rid of it. Unsubscribe, unsubscribe and unsubscribe some more.
Gmail just came out with their Priority Inbox feature which helps a lot with our goal here, but it still isn’t quite where we want to be. You want to filter your mail so only the really important things hit your inbox. You can still get the rest of the mail, but you just don’t need it in your inbox distracting you.
I’m doing this in Gmail but you can do it any email program.
1. Select the message you want to filter and choose “Filter Messages Like These” from the menu
2. Create the filter and select the criteria by which you want to filter. Gmail is great at doing this for you and it will usually filter by the email address, which is fine for this process. You can also filter by the subject or key words if you need to.
3. Now figure out what you want to do with those messages. We want to skip the inbox as much as we can here. You can also select to mark it as read which is great for emails you may want to get and keep but aren’t important to look at. I do that with re-occurring bills that are the same every month. For this example I am filtering all my Groupon deal emails into a filter I call “Stuff to buy”.
How you set up what filters you have is up to you. I’ve created the following for my setup:
You can create as many filters as you want.
Rinse, and repeat as necessary. Now as you go through your email start unsubscribing from all the crap you don’t need and filtering the ones you want but don’t need to read right away.
I only get emails that are important or that I want to read in my inbox. Once I’ve read it it goes in the archive folder. I keep only those in my inbox I still need to do something with, i.e. follow up, or research something on etc. Then on Friday’s I go through and purge everything into the archive folder. The goal (for me) is to have no mail in my inbox. Its a clean slate. A new start. And its a great feeling.
I’ve been doing this for several weeks now and here’s what I’ve noticed.
As you begin you will feel a great sense of peace sweep over you but you’ll still check those other folders when you see the little numbers next to them. This sensation will pass. You will soon start checking those folders only once a day, or once every other day, then once a week, then less. Its such a great feeling to not be a slave to email. I now get very little email and I love it. All of it is sorted and waiting for me whenever I get around to looking at it.
Additional tips for you iPhone users: (applicable to all smart phones)
Turn off push email delivery and turn off sound alerts and vibrations for when mail arrives. Don’t let yourself be setup to be distracted. You don’t NEED to know IMMEDIATELY when you have a new message. That’s what this is about. YOU are in charge of your email and YOU will get around to checking it when YOU want to. Don’t let your phone dictate what you are doing and when you are doing it.
This email method allows me to only see important emails in by inbox. All others are sorted and I can dig for them on my iPhone if I want, but I don’t.
I hope this works as well for you as it does for me. If you’ve got a good tip on managing your email please email me: ben (at) trulysimple.com.
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I want to provide a truly simple way to make people’s lives better.
