Some Recent Toys

A few recent toys.

Panasonic GF1. This is my new camera and it’s rekindled my love of photography. It’s small enough to fit in a jacket pocket but it takes phenomenal photos and HD video. Because it’s so portable, I carry it around almost all the time. So I’m actually using it, unlike my big SLR, which sits on a shelf most of the time. And since I’m planning to spend a lot of time traveling in 2010, this is feeling like a brilliant purchase.

Here are a few pictures I took with it. I can’t do it justice so you should check out this great review of using it in the Himalayas.

Big thanks to Garrett for recommending this one.

Pinboard. This is an online bookmarking service. It has a pretty basic design but it’s easy and simple and it works. Their tagline is “antisocial bookmarking.” You can share your pinboard bookmarks with other people or you can set them private. I have my bookmarks set to private by default because my bookmark stream is a record of what I’ve been researching lately and I don’t always want to broadcast that to everyone.

Pinboard charges a small one-time fee to join, and I like that too. Paying for a web service that I use makes me feel like they’re not going to sell all my data to some advertising firm when they suddenly realize they don’t have a business model. And they’re not going to put ads in my face while I’m just trying to bookmark things. And I like what they do, so what’s $5, really? The price is based on the number of users they have so it’s gradually increasing. Neat huh?

They have an extra service where they save a snapshot of all your bookmarks (all the HTML, CSS, js, images) at the time you bookmark them so that you never have stale bookmarks. I haven’t signed up for that yet.

Sleep Cycles. This is an iPhone app that uses the iPhone accelerometer to track your sleep. You put it near your pillow and when you toss and turn at night it knows. You set a wake-up time and it rings an alarm to wake you up before your deadline when you’re in a period of light sleep, and will wake up more easily.

It also gives you a little graph in the morning, based on your movements. Here’s my graph from last night:

It’s a cute app and what’s funny is that it’s made me excited about going to sleep at night. Thanks to Mat Wiemann for the recommendation.

Remember the Milk. Ok I’m late to the game on this one. RTM is the biggest todo list tool on the web. For a long time I’ve used a local text file to keep track of my TODOs. But with multiple computers and not carrying a laptop so often and wanting to be able to mark TODOs from my phone, I needed something new.

The great thing about using RTM has been making a completely comprehensive TODO list. Every time I think of something I should do, I put it in RTM, even if I’m not sure what the priority or deadline should be. This is really calming. On some level, I’ve already taken care of the thing, and I can relax about it.

I set RTM as the home page in my browser and whenever I open a new tab I see my TODO list. It’s a lot better than checking twitter all the time. I’ve already got a bunch of stuff done that was lingering for a while.