Productivity Roundup

Over the last months lots and lots of tools have crossed my way, all of them aiming to make one’s (my in this case ) life easier and more productive.

Social networking

I personally like last.fm not only because I love good music, but also because of its feature to listen to your “neighborhood”. You’ll always find new stuff that really deserves it to take a step out of the cloud and be recommended to the world. So, why not combining your well-maintained “loved tracks” with twitter by automatically posting updates on twitter when hitting the “love song”-button?
It really is easier than you might think to bring both services together – by using twitterfeed: create a twitterfeed account, allow access to your account on twitter, and plug the RSS of your loved tracks from last.fm right in it. That’s it.

Pushing your loved songs to twitter is great, but what’s with the twitter-like feature on other social networking platforms like facebook or studiVZ? I certainly log in very rarely to my accounts there to see what’s happening. But, on the other hand, I want my status on these platforms to be the same as on twitter – you know, just to keep my friends informed who reject to use twitter.

Get in the right mood

Join the stereomood community! As I mentioned in the previous paragraph: I love music, especially music that keeps me energetic, that helps me to relax, to think or “simply” digs me out of a hole of self-pity. That’s where stereomood is really good at. Give it a try.

Note taking and paperwork

Surely, it might never win a beauty-contest – but it’s damn useful. Xournal lets annotate PDFs on Windows and Linux in a very lightweight fashion. The big pro: The notes you take are stored separate from the original file; you “draw on” the content if you will. Just keep the *.xoj called file with your annotations, e.g. push it into a repository while omitting the (perhaps) binary file you’ve annotated.

Note taking via Xournal

Mendeley (thanks to Martin for the suggestion ) is an ambitious bibliography manager that automatically extracts the references, that lets you synchronize and/or share your library with the world (note: Mendeley gives you 200MB of free space for your library), and allows annotating PDFs (very appealing!). Plus: you get an online profile showing your research interests and activities (for example, my profile). A perfect place to be as a (young) scientist. The platform itself is currently in its beta-stadium, but already works well as I can say.

Mendeley Bibliography Manager

Taking a step back to the point where you have to write stuff to share (e.g. all kinds of papers). If you work on many different places on several different machines, of if you simply like it to back up your data, you might take a look at beanstalkapp.  beanstalkapp is a free Subversion hosting service, giving you 100MB of free space and – unless opensvn – it really is fast with nearly no downtimes.

Google is your friend

You might not use Google Mail, but if you have a Google account and still searching for a lightweight web-based todo-list manager, “Google Tasks” as part of Google Mail might be something you should take a look at. A link to it is located in Google Mail’s left sidebar, right above the integrated chat.

Tasks within Google Mail

Reading a lot of news, articles and blogs? Then use Google Reader. It has (as you might expect from Google) an interface that unifies the layout of the aggregates news, and it couldn’t be easier to use. Besides all of its useful features, posting articles you like on services like twitter, or simply sharing it on your personalized Google Reader site (for example, my site) are two of them I use most often.

Future stuff

Both inbox2 and Mozilla Raindrop (ars technica article) are ambitious projects, aiming to unify all kinds of streams that are currently out there, like twitter, facebook, mail and feeds. Interesting projects – simply mentioned here for the sake of completeness.

If you have more of those handy tools and services, then please leave a comment or write me an email (using the feedback tab). Thanks.

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