3 more GTD wallpapers!

UPDATE

Version 3 is available! Go and grab it NOW!!

Before some weeks I created the first GTD wallpaper, using MindManager and Photoshop.

Today I'm sharing 3 more wallpapers that I created using MindManager, Powerpoint 2007 and Photoshop.

The first one is inspired from David Allen's book showing a "cloudy" workflow and the other two play the roll of everyday teaser :-)
Did you GTD today?


Full resolutions for 4:3 [2048x1536] and wide size [1920x1080] versions are included.

GTD workflow: 4:3 | wide
Teaser 01: 4:3 | wide
Teaser 02: 4:3 | wide

All free to use.

Person of the Year: You!

Yes, you.
You control the Information Age.
Welcome to your world!

Weekend goodies #004

[1]

Drupal 5.0 My favorite CMS goes to RC1 and this release is significantly more stable than the previous beta 2 and also has some major performance improvements.
If you plan to create from a heavy traffic site till a simple blog, Drupal is the best solution.

[2]

Image Minimizer is a fast and light program that changes size, quality and format of an image file.
You can input any picture file you want in Image Minimizer with one easy drag and drop or with right click and "Send to". You can resize many pictures at the same time, too.

[3]

Foxit Reader 2.0 is a free PDF document viewer and printer, with incredible small size (only 1.5 M download size), breezing-fast launch speed and amazingly rich feature set. Its core function is compatible with PDF Standard 1.6.
Version 2.0 introduces many exciting new features, including interactive form filler, multi-language UI support, on-demand download of add-on, self upgrade, Javascript support, improved printing speed, streamlined UI and much more.
One of the best Adobe's Acrobat Reader replacements!

[4]

Foxy Proxy, is for people that cannot get to MySpace from school, or cannot get to GMail at work, or Live in Belarus, or China, or one of the other nations who censor the internet
Download this proxy manager and go out the block!

[5]

Microsoft's Photosynth, is a new technology from MS Live Labs that takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed three-dimensional space.
Check it out!

Have a nice weekend :-)

GTD for Moleskine

Update:
The new improved version can be found here!

As you can see here, I'm a GTDer :-) This is the first point...
The other one is that before 3 or 4 years, I discovered the amazing Moleskine planners and notebooks [yes, i know! Shame on me :-)] and from then I consider myself a Moleskine ...evangelist.

Trying to integrate the GTD method into my Moleskine planner, I designed a "GTD" A5-sized sheet that helps me on my daily efforts to apply the GTD procedure.

The idea behind is, that if the Moleskine planner itself, is the "basket" where we collect the everyday "stuff", then the only thing we need is to have an easy reachable place for the lists of: Actions, Waiting for and Someday/Maybe entries.
Well, after this simple thought, I designed the "beta" version of my "GTD 4 Moleskine" A5-sized sheet, and I have to admit that it helps me a lot, everyday.

Here you can find in PDF format, the two layouts of the same sheet.
Personally I'm using the one with the yellow side-box because it is easily visible, when I have a lot of paper-stuff inserted in my Moleskine planner. [Yes i use my planner as a daily paper-cabinet too :-)]

I would like to have your helpful comments about my "GTD 4 Moleskine" sheet, in order to make it a real useful tool that we can use it with our beloved Moleskine planner [and why not, with notebooks too]

Any suggestion or idea will be more than welcome!

Socialite this story!

Who needs Adobe?

Magazine's and book's publishers Desktop Publishing Departments around the globe, are full of Adobe's super products like Photoshop [for photo processing] , Illustrator [for vector graphics] and Indesign [for design layouts].

Looking at "the other side of the coin", I knew the existence of Photoshop's alternative, the well known image manipulation program Gimp, but I never had look if there were any Open Source applications for vector or layout design.

Searching further for free alternatives I found two real gems:
1. Inskape, that is an open source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, Freehand, CorelDraw, or Xara X using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (.SVG) file format.
Supported SVG features include shapes, paths, text, markers, clones, alpha blending, transforms, gradients, patterns, and grouping.
Inkscape also supports Creative Commons meta-data, node editing, layers, complex path operations, bitmap tracing, text-on-path, flowed text, direct XML editing, and more. It imports formats such as JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and others and exports PNG as well as multiple vector-based formats.

and
2. Scribus, that is a cross-platform open source page layout program with the aim of producing commercial grade output in PDF and Postscript. Originally developed on Linux, Scribus also runs natively on MacOSX and Windows 2000 and XP.
While the goals of the program are to make professional page layout accessible for beginners without limiting support for professional publishing features such as: spot color support, CMYK color, high grade PDF creation, Encapsulated Postscript import/export and creation of color separations.
Scribus was a really surprise for me because all these years I was not imagine that could be a so professional open source layout application.

Well, it's amazing what you really can do with the above Open Source applications!
And this is a prove that if you want to use Open Source software for real professional results, in a strong demanding environment, you CAN DO IT!

And if you are looking for some great free photo processing tools you can take a look at Mediachance's free tools. They will surprise you! [I know these are not Open Source ;-)]

Socialite this story!

The Perfect Gin 'n Tonic recipe!

I think it's time, to leave back for a while the technology buzz...
Well, in warm places, icy cocktails are one of the best pleasures you can have.
I know to mix very good only 4 cocktails, and one of these is Gin 'n Tonic and I'll share with all of you today, my old "secret" recipe :-)

You need:
1. Some Collin/Highball glasses or just tall glasses for water
2. some lemons [well washed]
3. ice-cubes [a lot :-)]
4. Gin [I prefer Bombay Sapphire but if you want strong taste you can try Tangueray]
4. Some Tonic cans [I prefer Tuborg]

and now the recipe [with its secrets...]
1. Cut a lemon slice and squeeze it into the glass, to get out all its oil and juice and after this put it at the bottom of the glass
2. Full with ice cubes till the edges of the glass [i repeat: till the edges!]
3. Squeeze a half lemon above of the ice cubes. Wait for 30 secs.
4. Fill the 1/3 of the glass with Gin [how much strong do you want your cocktail?]
5. Fill the rest of glass with Tonic
6. Gently stir the mixture with the knife you have cut the lemon

Thats it!
Now you know, how to make the PERFECT Gin 'n Tonic!
Cheers! ...and please drink carefully...

NewsCloud Released as Open Source Media Platform

NewsCloud began in 2004 as CommonBits, a community directory for distributing political videos via BitTorrent.
It evolved into CommonTimes, a social network for news and was rebranded as NewsCloud.com in May 2006.
NewsCloud is primarily the work of Jeff Reifman, a former Microsoft technologist and free-lance journalist and co-founded by Garrett Moon, a computer science student at Western Washington University.

Before some days they released the code for NewsCloud to the open source community under a GPL license.

The NewsCloud platform is written in PHP and MySQL.
One of the interesting things about the NewsCloud platform is its expanding use of Smarty as a template engine helping to fully customize the look and feel of the final result.

For more info you can visit the NewsCloud Blog, the related Wiki and the files repository on Sourceforge.

The competition is very strong between the open source CMSs and the crucial point is, who has the stronger developers community...

Free Christmas MP3s

It's the third year that the sound designer Gary Garritan has released a free collection of Christmas songs recorded by musicians who use his software instruments.
The Garritan Community Christmas Album, is a unique musical project.
A community of musicians from all over the world met on the Garritan community forum and agreed to submit their own recordings of holiday music, to be freely distributed.
This album is part of a holiday musical tradition like no other.
It’s a Christmas present to all of us from the users of the Garritan Libraries music software.
Composers and songwriters, both professional and amateur, have submitted
recordings of their original arrangements and compositions, and the eighteen best entries are included here.
You’ll find both new arrangements of timeless classics as well as some completely original pieces in a variety of styles.

Scrolling down the page you can find also the 2004 & 2005 albums, plus their covers.

Feel the Christmas spirit...