1 to 5 recipients = 2 to 4 revisions
5 to 10 recipients = 8 to 12 revisions
Company-wide or to Executive Committee = 30 to 50 revisions

Do you think such revision is needed? Maybe I take the wrong approach, but in 95% of my emails I don’t really care in the sense that it’s not my problem if people don’t read my emails. I’m all for revising emails, but sending an email to 20 people and doing 20 revisions? Come on!

Generally speaking I would say you should revise your email once, to make sure you didn’t make any factual mistakes. If you’re sending to a wide audience, maybe you could revise once more to make sure everything is clear, but noone really cares about the odd spelling mistake, or anything like that. I mostly email my clients with project updates and such, they care about the project status, not the correct placement of commas. They are perfectly happy with a completely garbled email, as long as I do what I need to.

Obviously there are scenarios where careful wording and extreme revision is needed (job offers, investment opportunities, etc), but I think in the day to day email business there is no need to be so meticulous. Yes, you will make some mistakes, but you won’t spend all day revising your simple email.

While many of these icon sets look similar they are all beautiful and each one is subtly different. I especially like Chalkwork which is a great take on the standard iphone like icon design, and Aquaticus Social which I have known for quite some time now, and have used on many sites.

If this isn’t enough, I also use two great icon search engines, Iconlook and Iconfinder to find icons, if you need a specific one, your best bet is searching these sites, or doing a Google search. I also showed you some beautiful and free icons from Jordan Michael before, take a look!

I don’t really use tiff a lot, but scanned files are often saved in tiff, which can be a multi-page document that some software has problems with. I didn’t try this myself, but apparently Gmail will have no problem with these documents, they will open in the same way as they were intended to, multi-page images.

The ability to view presentations on the fly, in the same viewer, is also great, no need to download and open with office, or go to a separate viewer, it will open right there in your browser. Again, on my end I usually do not need to actually have these saved, I use ppt-s for data flow information and so on, no need to have them constantly on my hard drive.

Osalt is a site which suggests a lot of open source alternatives to widely known software, or the other way around, showing you the commercial borther of free software. With 11 categories, a searchable database, multiple suggestions and system config notes, the data you can find is very useful.

You can also find a short description for each app, links to the homepage, rss options, tags and so on, so you’ll find what you need in a jiffy. I like this site a lot because it doesn’t just point me to one open source item, but many, allowing me to choose from a wider range. I would love to see some commenting options on there, although a star rating is available. Some filtered comments would make it easier to choose without downloading, but I’m not complaining, a great service regardless.

You can now also follow the blog on Twitter, or you can click the super friendly and inviting RSS link at the top to follow via RSS. If you have anything to say, any comments, suggestions, post ideas, please let me know in the comments, or you can drop me a line any time at daniel [@atsign@] hackyourday [dot.] com.

If you’re not interested in some comments, YouTube has implemented a new filter system that lets you hide them altogether, or filter them so only comments with a rating of 1 or better are shown for example. You can also hide profanity and racial stuff, so you might just get some relevant comments if you’re lucky.

Personally I go for vids, not comments, so I don’t really mind, but if there would be any interesting comments it would be great to see them. It’s great that they’re trying to raise the user experience bar though, I hope they think up some even better mechanics, allowing video posters to close comments to profanity, they just wouldn’t show up at all.

If you’re writing posts, write all of them in the same file and save it regularly. This will mean that you only have to handle one file, you won’t loose the contents so easily. Also, if you work in Notepad, not a more resource hungry app like Word, you can probably prolong your battery life too.

I actually hate writing posts in Notepad, or anything else that is not code for that matter, but it beats having to rewrite it from scratch, especially since I always feel that the second edition isn’t as good.

Notepad++

First of all, open notepad and click the record button, which can be found toward the end of the toolbar, a big red circle. Once you clicked it, the app will start recording, so it’s time to type what you need, in our case: “<!– –>” (without the quotes). Once done, press the save button, which is the right most icon in that group and give it a title (eg. HTML Comment) and add a keyboard shortcut, in my case this was ctr + shift + c. Once saved you can press that combination any time to paste an HTML comment.

There are two things to watch out for when recording. First of all, don’t copy paste, since the copy paste action will be recorded, not the actual clipboard contents, so next time you invoke the action, the actual clipboard will be pasted. Secondly, your actions are all recorded, so pressing the arrow, or backspace and so on. This way you can record the same comment by pressing back 4 times after you typed it, and saving like that. This will place your cursor between the two dashes, which is where you will write your comment, saving your the time of pressing back every time you insert a comment.

This allows for a lot a fancy macros, but for now you can create simple text snippets. I’ll be covering a lot more advanced macros a bit later though.

Once you install it, you can use the print screen button to evoke it, it will drop a gray canvas over your screen and you can select any area of the screen. Pressing print screen again will take a shot of the whole screen, but you can also draw a freehand shape, or a rectangle.

The shot taken will hover to the right of the screen while you can choose options on the left. This part looks extremely impressive by the way, it is a joy to look at when I take a screenshot, seriously. You can choose to copy to the clipboard (you can also choose to do this automatically in the settings), you can choose to edit it, or save it to the desktop.

The coolest thing is that the hovering image can be drag and dropped, so if you want to edit it in Photoshop, just drag it onto the Photoshop taskbar entry, and then onto the canvas. You can also save it like this, dragging it onto the desktop, or any other folder.

There are a number of options available, but really this is a just an extremely new and cool way to take screenshots, and if you do this regularly, you will find PrtScr a joy to work with.

It contains 150 pages of engineering graph paper which you can use to jot down ideas, notes or whole wiring diagrams if you need to. The really cool thing is how the notebook is printed to help organize. It has page numbers which is quite rare, a two page, pre-ruled table of contents, and also blank fields on each page for project names and so on. This makes it really easy to find everything later on, which is a part of note taking many people overlook.

Apparently this notebook is pretty populer with DIY project people, like Tom Igoe, creator of the popular Arduino board. Customizing the front end is also a big deal, a lot of people use stickers and other items to mod theirs.

It’s a tad pricier that the Moleskine, but since it is a highly specialized notebook, and quite thick with 150 pages, the price seems well worth it to me, a Moleskine in Europe would probably be priced the same.