Lifehacking
5 reasons I like Spotify
I recently discovered this online music service called Spotify and after a try-out of a few weeks I just have to let you know how great this concept is. Spotify is a cloud based music service, which means that you don’t have to download a song before you can listen to it anymore. It just streams the music on demand. Spotify is available in Sweden, Norway, Finland, the UK, France, Spain and the Netherlands (sorry USA and Canada). Try it!
1. Big music catalogue
Spotify contains over 8 millions musc tracks including artists from the big labels like Universal, EMI, Sony etc. Of course the traditional ‘difficult’ bands don’t show up (Metallica). The Spotify software has an option to import music files, so you can still listen to these non-available bands with Spotify if you get their music from other sources. Also, I found a lot of local bands (Jacqueline, Acda & de Munnik, Lars Winnerbäck).
iPad is here! Finally…
Yesterday the iPad officially arrived in Holland, finally. With the iPhone 1 introduction a few years ago I bought one (overpriced) at eBay, got into some issues with the seller and had to pay a lot of additional tax at the Dutch border. So I decided to wait for the European release this time.
While waiting in line with over 50 others I thought about how things have changed. 15 years ago I was the only Mac-user at my school and Apple made some pretty boring products. Now in 2010 almost everyone I know owns at least one Apple product. Great!
Below are some pictures of the launch and some screenshots of the iPad in action while reading a SAP Press book and using the SAP BusinessObjects Explorer for iPad.
Going paperless in 2010 part 2
As I wrote earlier on this blog 2010 will be the year that I am ditching paper media. Unfortunately I have to wait a while for the QUE or the Apple iSlate to be available for purchase later this year. In the meantime I already started my next ‘going paperless’ project.
In the first week of this year I needed a new paper binder for our home administration. Looking at a bookshelf filled with binders for the last 10 years of administration I realized that this doesn’t quite fit with my ‘less paper’-goals for 2010 (duh). And how can I quickly find a document that was filed over a year ago? Okay, I have a sorting system for the docs I put in those binders, but that is kinda mehh. I should be able to search through my docs by tags, just like I search for an old e-mail and find it within a few seconds.
Besides the search problem there is another issue with my current administration. The last 2+ years I receive more and more invoices and other interesting/important documents by e-mail. Also when I buy software, the serial keys are always distributed by e-mail. So my home administration is stored in more than one place, which of course tilts me as a BI consultant.
To improve this situation I had to create some kind of HPW for home administration.
Posted in: Going Paperless, LifehackingEasy Lifehack: Shared calendars
It’s almost 2010 and I still see people manually adding ‘standard’ calendar events to their iCal, Outlook or whatever calendar app they use. For example the yearly (school) holidays, but even more frustrating the numerous matches of their favorite sports team! With the upcoming FIFA World Cup in South Africa I expect to see a lot of this unnecessary data entry work being carried out in the next few months.
Let’s end this now and start using ‘shared calendars’. A shared calendar means that you publish your calendar from your calendar app to the web so others can read (not write to!) your calendar. The best thing is that the calendar ‘receivers’ are able to get all the updates automatically.
To get started with these shared calendars, have a look at iCalShare and MarkThisDate. Choose your calendar, click ‘Add to Calendar’ and pick your calendar app from the list. On my Mac iCal opens and asks me if I want to subscribe to this calendar. According to this article subscribing a calendar to Outlook seems to work in the same way. Nice!
