June 5, 2006

Outlook “Sent Items” Hack

For years, Outlook’s inability to have Sent Items go anywhere but the Sent Items folder has been a little pet peeve of mine. It might seem a little counterintuitive, but I really like everything I send to end up in my inbox where I sort it, file it, set up a “next action” ala GTD, etc. Up until now I’d just move the contents of my Sent Items folder to the Inbox folder every once in a while. Well, reading CNXN’s article on using Outlooks without folders finally gave me a bit of a nudge, and a quick google turned up the following bit of code. Open Outlook’s Visual Basic editor, go to the ThisOutlookSession object, paste in the following code, save, restart Outlook, and anything that appears in Sent Items will immediately be moved ot the Inbox.

Public WithEvents SentItems As Outlook.Items
Private Sub Application_Startup()
    Set SentItems = _
Outlook.Session.GetDefaultFolder(olFolderSentMail).Items
End Sub
Private Sub Application_Quit()
    Set SentItems = Nothing
End Sub
Private Sub SentItems_ItemAdd(ByVal Item As Object)
    Item.Move _
Outlook.Session.GetDefaultFolder(olFolderInbox)
End Sub
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April 27, 2006

Free SketchUp

SketchUp is a neat, intuitive 3D drawing program from a company called @Last. Following Google’s general modus operandi these days, and in complete opposition to Microsoft’s general approach, Google bought the company a little while back and is “liberating” the software–or at least a version of it. Their objective is certainly to make it as easy as possible to populate Google Earth, but that doesn’t take anything away from the fact that the software’s just cool. Read the rest of this entry »

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April 26, 2006

Back to Plaxo

I’ve installed Plaxo more than once over the years, but in the end I was always guilted into dropping it. Enough folks I know use it now, however, that I’m back. Perhaps I’ll stay with it this time since they’re now "less evil"…

Well, Plaxo has finally announced that they’ve harassed enough people into joining and won’t be making it quite so easy to for users to spam their entire address book. The words they chose certainly tell us that, at least internally, they fully knew how miserable they were making all of us

TechCrunch » Plaxo: Now With Less Evil

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April 17, 2006

First Things First

It’s occured to me over the past month that blogging makes much more sense for folks who have some sort of blog entry-sized opinion to offer on a regular basis. It’s not clear that I do. In other words, it’s good to have content before you build a system for presenting that content. This site is probably much more sandbox than soapbox, and I suspect it’ll morph quite a bit over the next few days/weeks.

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March 19, 2006

Beyond Compare

If you’re a software developer, web designer, or simply use files on more than one computer, you need Beyond Compare:

beyond_compare

Beyond Compare is a powerful time-saving utility for comparing files and folders on your Windows system.

Use it to manage source code, keep folders in sync, compare program output, and validate copies of your data. Beyond Compare can create a snapshot of a live directory structure, and compare it against the live copy at a later date.

Beyond Compare helps you analyze differences in detail and carefully reconcile them. It commands a wide range of file and text operations, as well as script commands for automating tasks.

http://www.scootersoftware.com/moreinfo.php

I’ve used BC for years, and I use it almost every day. Not only is it the best tool I’ve found for synchronizing files from my laptop or desktop PC to various servers, but it’s even saved me when I had to replace a bad hard drive and selectively copy the contents of the old drive over to the new one. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

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