Ravi’s Rants

I was recently in the market for an “e” fax solution. I looked at quite a few services. My basic requirements were these:

• Reliable
• Low cost (not necessarily free - because I wanted the service to be reliable and accountable)
• Didn’t need a local area code - anywhere was fine, as I don’t receive too many faxes
• Offer a free trial - so that I can experience it first-hand
• Offer a decent number of incoming pages in the package
• Offer a low-cost pay-as-you-go model for additional use

• After hunting around the web, looking up various forums and wasting time on made-for-adsense spam and junk-review sites, I stumbled across MaxEmail.com.

  You can get your incoming faxes sent to your email address as a PDF attachment.

  I went through their 1-month free trial, was highly satisfied with the quality of their service, and just now signed up for a whole year at $24/year (their “lite” plan).

  If you are looking for something similar, go check out MaxEmail.com

“Bacn” - pronounced as “Bacon” - is spam (kind of), but not really the lewd, disgusting, “killing my inbox” type.

From Jargon Watch at Wired.com:

It’s not really spam. You want to read it (and probably would), you just don’t have the time. Thanks to the folks at PodCamp Pittsburgh, there’s a new web-term you can now use specifically for these types of e-mail notifications. Things like bill-payment receipts, Twitter requests, newsletters, project notifications—all are bacn.

Here’s more if you want more.

Camtasia is giving away a slightly older version of their famous screen-capture software, Snag-it, that lets you go beyond the “Prnt Scrn” button.

Here’s where you can download it.

A Print-Screen Tip
If you press the “Alt” + “Prt Scrn” buttons together, you will capture only the front-most (active) window - which means you no longer have to capture your entire screen along with pieces of your desktop and other windows open, just to get a screenshot of your browser window.

Also, it helps to reduce the size of the browser (or whatever window you’re trying to get a screen-shot of) first, and re-size it to a much smaller size before hitting “Alt” + “Prnt Scrn”. That way you won’t get a gigantic image when you’re just trying to capture just a small portion of the window.

I save about 1/2 hour every week on grocery shopping thanks to this list. That’s 26 hours a year. Assuming I would have done this for at least 40 years of my life by the time I’m dead, that means 1040 hours saved (26 * 40).

1040 Hours = 43.33 Days

Yes, I get (at least) an extra 43 days of my life back because I used a simple, grocery list.

Can you imagine how much more you and I could save if we got just a little bit more organized in stuff we do every day (or week)?

Click here to download and customize the original excel spreadsheet that I use.

Take a copy of it and stick in on your refrigerator. Every time you run out of something, or if you are expecting guests and need more of something, just quickly jot it down. Yes, it is more productive than just writing down a plain list on a erasable board.

- Ravi Jayagopal

If you’ve used a computer long enough, you probably have tens of little icons in your system tray (next to your system clock), that are an indication of all the apps that are currently running. Many of them may be programs that automatically add themselves to the startup process, or may simply be applications that you no longer actively use and may not need them to launch during startup any more.

It used to be easy to delete these apps simply by deleting their shortcuts from the “Startup” folder, but not all apps create a shortcut there, and many directly modify your Windows registry and add themselves to it.

So, if you want to remove programs that launch during startup (when you re-start your computer), here’s a handly little app called “StartupRun” that I use myself.

- Ravi Jayagopal / LinkOverLoad.com