First, move older email messages out of your Inbox and into an Archive folder. You should have no trouble doing this. It may take a little while for Mail.app to move all of the messages. If you’re the type of person that has several folders (or Mailboxes) for message categories like family, friends, work, etc. etc. then you may not benefit from this tip. But, if you’re like me, and you leave every single message in your Inbox then you definitely will.

What I’ve done is move every message in my Inbox dated prior to December 1, 2011 into an Archive folder that is locally here on my Mac. This way when I go into my Inbox it is only loading a few months of email. I may do this again in June or wait an entire year if I don’t see much of a slow down. But just doing this has sped up Mail.app a lot.

Second, you could strip the bloat from Mail.app’s Envelope Index. What does this mean? I don’t really know but the layman’s explanation might be this; Mail.app keeps a database and sometimes it gets a little out of control. You can run a few commands via Terminal and it will clean up that mess. Again, do this at your own risk.

Your mileage may vary but with these two tips Mail.app should get just a bit snappier. It has for me.

I’m cataloging these in hopes of one day buying Eliza a new Kindle and I inherit her old one. Shh, don’t tell her.

Eliza and I have been using a Keurig for a little while but we recently picked up a re-usable coffee filter so that we can use our own ground coffee rather than the K-cups. With it we’d have the best of both worlds… be able to brew one cup of coffee at-a-time while being able to use freshly burr ground beans.

The only problem was that this re-usable coffee filter basket was overflowing all over the place. After doing some research online it turns out many people are having this very same issue and returning the baskets. Well, Keurig should really direct these people towards a comment by J. C. Wallace on a review on Amazon. His solution works and is incredibly easy to do. Here it is, verbatim from his comment:

“The overflow has nothing to do with the grind, it is caused by the rubber gasket on the needle. Open up the lid and remove the filter basket,then look at the needle that delivers the water to the basket. You will see a black rubber gasket near the needle tip. Carefully grab the gasket on both sides and lower it until it is almost to the bottom of the needle (do not remove it completely, it is difficult to put back on). Load up the basket with coffee of any grind size and make a cup. With the gasket repositioned, the needle will seat tightly in the hole at the top of the filter basket and you will have no more leaks. Good luck.”

There is a very small rubber gasket (or rubber thingy around the needle if you prefer) that simply needs to move down a few centimeters so that it seals the top of the re-usable coffee filter basket. I got it first try. And now I’m a happy camper.

Thanks J. C. Wallace.

All good questions. Here is how I write on iPad.

First, I use an application called iA Writer. This application gives me a distraction free writing environment that has just the right amount of features to make writing easy.

I do not use nor own an external keyboard for iPad. Never have. In fact, the on-screen keyboard in Writer has a custom keyboard with few shortcuts that I find very convenient.

I also edit within Writer. I read and re-read (unless I’m in a rush for some reason) the post until I’m happy with it. At this point there is no HTML, no links, no images, no videos in the post.

I then copy and paste the text from Writer into WordPress for iOS. I immediately save the post as a Draft (just in case). At this point I’ll either add the links, images, or video. If there is a lot of media to add to the post I may wait until I’m on my MacBook Pro to finish the rest. Sometimes adding a lot of HTML to a post using iPad can be cumbersome. I’m hoping that WordPress for iOS, at some point, adds a custom keyboard for written HTML quicker.

When the post is finished I’ll then schedule it to be published, usually sometime in the morning the next day since I typically write at night or very early in the morning. This gives the post time to stew a bit and gives me a chance to yank it if I end up not feeling good about the post. It also gives my blog a feeling of consistent publishing rather than a sporadic schedule.

And that is how this post was written.

There are a million-and-one tips on how to get things done. Books, applications, methods, processes, workflows. Nearly a year ago I postulated that it could be much easier than that. The best way to get things done is really just by bucking up and doing them.

But, we live complex lives and not everything is as simple or as fun as we’d like them to be. So how can we get more accomplished throughout the day without driving ourselves insane with process? What about doing the things we least like to do? Well, I think you need to make things easy on yourself. If you know that you are going to repeat a task many times, especially tasks that you don’t like to do very much, it is best to figure out a way to make it as easy as possible to succeed at it. Rewards are also good.

Perhaps you’d like to begin exercising each day and you can’t seem to find the time or the motivation to do it. Why not purchase a Kinect or a Wii that let you use your body as the controller? Play a game and get a workout all at once. What about mundane tasks that you don’t want to deal with like filing your taxes quarterly? Perhaps you could spend one night getting your finances set up into a spiffy piece of software that will help you do it quicker then, every time you file, treat yourself to your favorite restaurant or drink. Maybe you want to do write on your blog everyday? Where is your favorite place and time to write? Do it there and with a rewarding glass of wine next to you. If you have a task that you have to do often and it takes you a long time to do it, always try to find a way to make it quicker to do. Cooking meals is a good example of this. Many people don’t cook for themselves anymore because it takes too long. Why not prepare a bunch of meals on Sunday night with a friend and some music? Freeze or bag up a meal for each night of the week. You’ll save money and time, lose weight, and have fun with a friend.

Stop thinking of all of the things you’d rather not do in a negative way. Start thinking of fun ways to make these tasks easier and more enjoyable to do. Who knows, maybe after a few times you’ll start wanting to do them instead of avoiding them!

Some guy named Kirk proposed to me. Sorry Kirk, I’m taken. But I am glad you found the information useful.

Another instant classic from Savage Chickens.

Yesterday I said that I’d share the many ways in which I use Smart Albums in iPhoto. Instead of sharing all of the ways in one post I figured I’d break them up. One of my Smart Albums helps me to locate possible duplicate photos. Here is why and how this works.

I stress possible duplicates because this Smart Album is neither fool proof nor genius. This is a dead simple Smart Album yet it seems to get the vast majority of duplicate photos in my personal photo library. Perhaps it can help you too.

So, why are there duplicates in the first place?

iPhoto has built-in duplicate photo detection on import. It warns you when it finds what it believes might be a duplicate photo to one that is already in your photo library. iPhoto does a fairly good job at this too and it is based on filename and date/time.

In my own personal experience I’ve found that 90% of my duplicate photos happened because of something that happened just prior to the import process. In some cases it was simply that my Macintosh automatically added a _1 or _2 to the photo’s filename because it already existed in a folder that I was using to store photos prior to importing them into iPhoto. This happens, perhaps, when both my wife and I are storing photos on a laptop while traveling and waiting until we return home to import them into iPhoto.

Since iPhoto does not check the binary of the photo nor does it recognize duplicates based on some sort of ‘visual’ check then some of these duplicate photos slip by. What we end up with is two, or sometimes three, photos that match each other in every way but filename.

For this specific case of duplicate photos that share everything except filename I’ve come up with this simple Smart Album that seems to do a good job at finding most of the duplicates in my photo library. Here are the rules.

This simple Smart Album simply looks for images where the filename ends in _2.jpg, _2.JPG, _1.jpg or _1.JPG. (iPhoto’s Smart Albums are case sensitive.) Usually what you’ll end up with, but you should definitely verify with your main library before you delete any of them, is a bunch of duplicate photos that have a match in your library and can probably be deleted. To delete the photos from your main library from within this Smart Album see How to: Delete photos from within Smart Albums in iPhoto.

When I first created this Smart Album for my personal photo library of around 52,000 photos it filtered out little over 1,100 as duplicates. After going through each of them to verify that they were indeed duplicates I ended up being able to delete about 900 of them. Not too shabby.

Like I’ve said before, I’ve been on Twitter since November 2006 and I wanted to know the total number of followers my account has ever had. Even though I’ve only (and I say that with humility) got 1,700+ followers currently – how many times has my account been “followed” over the last three years? Well, I have nearly every email notification that Twitter has sent me saved in Gmail and so I needed find out the number of “new follower notifications” that Twitter has sent me.

It turns out that this isn’t that easy to do. You have to “hack” the URL (in cases where you have tons of mail messages) to figure out the total message count for a search result. Here is how you do it.

1. Do a search in Gmail. Don’t forget about operators, they increase the accuracy of search results many fold.
2. If you only have a few pages to “page through” then simply find the last page. That will show you the total number of messages.
3. If you have hundreds of pages then I suggest hacking the URL. Take the contents of the search box and append it to the URL in the following way. /#search/SEARCH BOX CONTENTS HERE/p50

The URL for Gmail varies if you use the regular, vanilla Gmail service or Google Apps. So that is why I didn’t simply link to an example search result. My URL isn’t the same as yours.

The “p50″ in the above example URL is the current page of results that you’ll be on. You may start at 50 and go up until you find the last page. Or, you can start anywhere and increase or decrease the page number until you find it. On that page it will tell you the total message count for that search.

Oh, so how many times has my Twitter account been followed over the last 3 years? My best guess is a little over 10,000. Perhaps this shows just how much spam has been on Twitter. Or how boring I am.

What I appreciate the most about Jesse’s tutorial is the step-by-step detail that is given. A lot of tutorials, that I’ve come across for similar things, are a mess of screenshots with captions as instructions. I like this balance better.

Source: Texture Tutorial 01 – Seamless Grunge Textures.

What resulted was around 30 episodes of a podcast that turned out pretty well!  How was this done?  How can you do it with your own podcast?

Keeping it simple

The first obvious thing when you want to do something in a short period of time is to keep your idea as simple as you can.  Our podcast “theme” was dead simple. Two minutes, three questions.  The format of the podcast made it really, really easy to shoot.  Second, we were at an event where we had a few thousand people to interview at our disposal.  Had we each come up with this idea at our respective homes, it would have been a long time before we could have produced 30 episodes.

In one of the best sessions at the New Media Expo, Shane Robinson and Roxanne Darling of Barefeet Studios, walked through “How to produce a low cost, high quality daily Internet TV show”.  On the third slide of their slideshow presentation, you will see the “Daily Show Ingredients”.  The first two ingredients are “Simple Concept” and “Simple Execution”.

In other words, if the idea for the podcast is too difficult to pull off, you’ll probably not be able to do it.

Ask for help

I couldn’t have produced a single episode of 2 Minutes at New Media Expo without Kyle and Brandice’s help.

First, Kyle recorded each of the episodes with Brandice’s digital camera’s video feature.  He also gave us hand signals when our time was almost up (remember, our goal was 2 minutes or less).  Brandice and I took turns interviewing each attendee.  We did this for a variety of reasons. The first reason was because we thought it’d be a good thing to have two different hosts.  The fact that she and I are male and female I think added something to the show.  We also had different people that we wanted to interview, so it helped that while one of us was recording an episode, the other was taking notes.

Just a small aside about taking notes.  You have to take notes if you are doing interview-style podcasting.  And don’t be shy about taking lots of notes if you can.  Brandice, Kyle, and I shared a Moleskine (which Brandice lovingly referred to as my hippy notebook) and each of us made sure to jot down all of the information we could about the person.  Name, URL, title, etc.

The equipment doesn’t matter

I can hear the video and audiophiles storming my apartment’s front door right now!  When it comes down to it though, you just have to start making video.  Even if in the beginning you’re using your digital camera’s video mode, as we were.  Or maybe a Flip video, or the new Zi6, which aren’t too expensive.

The point is; you can always upgrade video equipment later, you can never get back time.

Dead simple video editing

To be honest, shooting the videos was by far the easiest part of the process.  The cost of time really comes in production.  Editing, titling, tagging, clipping, etc. can really become quite a process.  The key here is to keep your edits simple.

For NME2Min we simply added a 16-second title at the beginning of each video with the name, title, and URL of the attendee.  When we imported the videos into our Macbooks, we opened up iMovie ’08, dropped the videos in, added the titles, exported, and uploaded to Viddler.  The process was very simple and required only a few minutes per episode.

Publishing with Viddler

Viddler had the privilege of powering the official New Media Expo Videos Web site. We thought, “what better place to share our videos of the New Media Expo than right on that page”.  We did toy with the idea of building a brand new site, but again we wanted to keep this idea as simple as possible.

So we setup a new profile with the Viddler username of nme2min, which meant it gave us an official New Media Expo URL to send people to for updates.  This gave us a feed, flash videos for easy viewing, and an instant community of viewers in one move.

Here is an example episode of Brandice interviewing C.C. Chapman.

Be sure to watch all of the episode of 2 Minutes at New Media Expo.

Conclusion, have fun!

In just a single day we were able to produce about 30-episodes, get them uploaded and ready to share with the world.  Many podcasts have a schedule for new episodes; daily, weekly, monthly, etc.  We could have easily made NME2Min last 6 months worth of episodes if we wanted to.  In one day!

The most important thing about this process was that we had a lot of fun doing it.  We got to interview some really great people and help them to advertise themselves, their companies, and their products to the world in a fun way.

So, do you have an idea for a video podcast? Get out there tomorrow and build one.

(This post was also suggested via the suggestions page. Do you have a suggestion for a post topic? Please use the suggest page!)

Update: Somewhat unrelated, new post called How to: Delete photos from within Smart Albums in iPhoto.

For an entire year I’ve wanted to be able to do this easily.  And I think I’ve now found the best way to do this without the possible side-effect of losing all of your photos on your iPhone.

One of the problems with the iPhone is that you can’t delete all of the photos you’ve taken within from within the iPhone’s interface.  If you, like me, sync your iPhone photos with your iPhoto Library then you’ve no doubt noticed that iPhoto does let you delete all of the photos you are currently importing. But, if you’ve imported several times then iPhoto will only allow you to delete the current photos being imported.

So you’re only option has been to create a new iPhoto Library, import all of your iPhone’s photos again, and ask iPhoto to delete the photos when the task is complete.  Or, you could click delete on every single photo on your iPhone one-at-a-time.

Solution: Use Image Capture.

My iPhoto Library has become very cumbersome.  Opening iPhoto is a chore.  Also, with the iPhone in its dock, iPhoto will compare its library with the one on the iPhone prior to allow you to import the new photos – and this takes a very long time.  So, I’m going to show you how to use Image Capture, an application on your Macintosh that you may not even know you have, to create a backup of your iPhone’s photos and, subsequentally, delete them from the iPhone – in one step.

1. Mount your iPhone using either your dock or the iPhone’s USB cable.
2. If you have iTunes or iPhoto set to open automatically, eject the iPhone from both of these applications.
3. Open Image Capture.app ((You can find this application in your Applications folder.))
4. Create a new directory to dump your iPhone photos to.
5. Click “Options” and select “Delete items from camera after downloading”
6. Click “Download all”.

Here are some photos of the process.

Image capture.

New folder.

Delete the photos.

Empty camera roll result.

Depending on how many photos you have on your iPhone this process may take a little while.  When the downloading is complete, the iPhone’s photos will be deleted – permanently.

What if you want to save some of the photos on your iPhone?  This can be done but it takes some work.  After you’ve imported all of these photos into your iPhoto Library, create a new album in iPhoto called something like “iPhone camera roll”.  In your iTunes preferences for this iPhone ((You’ll need to mount the iPhone again to see these options in iTunes.)) select this album for syncing.  This way you only save the photos that you have put into this album.

I hope this helps those of you that want to delete their iPhone’s photos in a quick and easy way without worrying about losing your photos!

However, there are some Twitter accounts that I’d like to follow, but not “follow”.  Take for instance the Twitter account for a local newspaper in my area The Times Tribune (timestribune on Twitter).  The Times Tribune’s web site sucks, since it doesn’t even have RSS feeds to subscribe to, yet they manage to syndicate their news to Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and Flickr. Go figure.

Anyway, long story short.  I don’t follow them on Twitter.  I created an “imaginary friend” on FriendFeed ((Unfortunately, and I’m not sure why, FriendFeed does not allow me to share my imaginary friends with you. I’m hoping that in the future FriendFeed enables the sharing of one’s imaginary friends)) using their Twitter account and the RSS feed for their group on Flickr.  Now I get news updates delivered to me through Twhirl.

Just incase I miss something on Twhirl (since I don’t watch it 24/7), I’ve also subscribed to the feed that FriendFeed generates for this imaginary friend.

I told you it was a simple tip.