They get big fast, don’t they?

notebook covers 1982-2008

This is such a refreshing inspiration, and a strong antidote to the time wasting, office supply fetishism that dominates most online productivity conversations. If I let go of the (silly) notion that each notebook/journal entry needs to be a work of art, I’m much more likely to actually use a notebook to get things done – maybe even something nice.

reference

Beruit, Michael. “26 Years, 85 Notebooks.” http://designobserver.com/archives/entry.html?id=38831.

Wreck This Journal. http://www.wreckthisjournal.com/?page_id=2.

As I started to collect all my “stuff,” in preparation for my GTD rehabilitation, I noticed that I’m hanging on to a lot of old magazines. Tons of old magazines. They all went into the recycling bin, save a few articles I clipped and filed. Amazing how much space that freed up in my small home office. Took only a few minutes too.

A quick kill. Makes me wonder how much real junk is cluttering up my life.

Zen Habits is a good place to start for de-cluttering and simplifying ideas.

My inbox is overflowing. I’m making do at work, but in my personal life, I’ve fallen off of the Getting Things Done bandwagon. Our large suburban home is full of clutter. My website is stale. My personal development projects and writing are stagnant. I’m living in the middle of half a dozen incomplete home improvement projects, and I’m having trouble keeping up with which kid is doing what which night of the week. I’m always in a rush, reacting to things blowing up, rather than planning and being prepared.

In some sort of a not-getting-things-done addiction cycle, I skip one, and then another, weekly review. And, like junk mail, the stuff keeps piling up. By then it would take a big sweep to get started again, which I convince myself I can’t do until I tweak my GTD system some more. At which point I give up and waste my evenings mindlessly surfing the internet, watching youtube, avoiding the piles around me, and feeling depressed about all of the above.

This isn’t about feeling guilty for not worshiping at the alter of GTD, it’s about not accomplishing the things that matter in my life. So, over the next couple of weeks I’m going to crawl out of my self induced pile. I’m going to use a simple system, and force myself to change only what’s broken.

Less fiddling, more doing.

My old Netgear router doesn’t support the new and more robust WPA standard, and WEP provides almost no security: there is nothing to be gained by enabling it. No more dealing with hex keys. It’s easy for friends and family to drop onto the network when they come over. Likewise, new machines are easy to configure.

What’s the worst that could happen? I live in the suburbs. The idea of someone sitting in a car, in the Colorado cold, stealing my connection isn’t a likely scenario. And if it they did, so what?

More likely, a neighbor would connect to my network – probably inadvertently - and steal band width from my connection. Unless my network is running slow, I’m not really worried about this.

But what about our family’s computers and data? We have several Linux/FreeBSD boxen, and two Macs. Our wireless router is no less secure than any of the free wireless hot spots I connect to: the airport, cafes, office park free wireless, etc. We simply take the same precautions at home we would take at a public wifi connection.

A few simple things should keep your data safe:

1. Keep your computers up to date.
2. Use a safer browser, like Firefox.
3. Don’t enter any data you care about – passwords, web forms, etc. – from a web page that is not being served over SSL (https in the url).
4. If you use an email client, make sure you use SSL to pop/imap your mail.
5. Encrypt any sensitive data on your machines.

Make sure you do the above when you use a public wifi connection.

I do a couple other things, that won’t stop anyone in the know from using my network, but will keep the neighbor kid from accidentally using my printer.

• You can use access by mac address to white list your computers. This can be easily spoofed, but will prevent anyone from ‘accidentally’ connecting to your network.
• Turn off (or disconnect) your printer when you’re not using it.
• Check your wireless router’s log files.

References

Cracking WEP and WPA Wireless Networks

Bruce Schneier. My Open Wireless Network

Good luck to Genki wherever the future takes him. As a fan, I’ll miss his ring antics and skill.

Once installed, insert and mount a CD; type abcde -o mp3; abcde will prompt you to confirm the CDDB settings, and you’re done.

I’m also not interested in any of the so-called desktop integration Ubuntu uses; I use fluxbox and it’s easy enough to add soffice to the root menu.

The Linux download of OpenOffice.org includes RPMs. Here’s how to install it on a Debian derived system – like Ubuntu.

Make sure you have Java installed

  $ java -version
  java version "1.6.0_01"
  Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_01-b06)
  Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.6.0_01-b06, mixed mode, sharing)

Download OpenOffice.org

Download OpenOffice.org (currently version 2.2.1) for Linux, without the jre, from: OpenOffice w/out JRE

Untar the download someplace.

Navigate to the RPMS directory.

Use the alien program to convert the RPMs to deb packages.

 sudo alien --scripts --keep-version -d *.rpm

 sudo dpkg -i *.deb

(If you don’t have alien installed, sudo aptitude install alien first)

OpenOffice.org will be installed in /opt/openoffice.org2.2

Start OpenOffice.org with /opt/openoffice.org2.2/program/soffice

UPDATE: 8 February 2008

Sun SDK 6 is now available in the Ubuntu repositories. Here’s how to back out the above, if you’d like to return to a solution under package management:

Install the Sun Java 6 SDK

   sudo aptitude install sun-java6-jdk

Get rid of the Open Office install we did above:

  sudo aptitude purge openoffice.org-core

(Accept aptitude’s ‘solution’)

Install OpenOffice from the Ubuntu repository:

sudo aptitude install openoffice.org

Now your OpenOffice install is managed by Ubuntu, and you still didn’t have to install the grotesque GCJ. Life is good.

For annoying political reasons, Debian doesn’t include Mplayer. See the Multimedia Debian Packages for a solution. Kudos to Debian for this milestone.

If your searching for a rock solid, well thought out, free operating system. Debian is a great choice.