Archive for December 31st, 2007

Quick New Year Tip: Save 100s of hours in 2008!

 Some people have predicted that 2008 will be the year of information overload. Why not start the year with a lighter load?

Do these NOW:

  • Open your feed reader and mark all items as read. You can start from a clean slate now.
  • Most likely you are using Google Reader for your RSS reading. Go to Google Trends and mercilessly remove all the feeds you have not read in the last 20 days.
  • Remove all 'similar' feeds. For example, if you have subscribed to both Gizmodo and Engadget, remove one. 80% of the news they cover are the same.

The above 3 steps will take about 10 minutes to complete, but will save you hours of time in 2008.

Happy new year!

Related: Coping with information overload.

December 31st, 2007 | Posted in gtd, info | No Comments

Better DNS with OpenDNS

If your web pages are taking too much time to load or pages are timing out, chances are that your ISP has a crappy DNS server. This is especially true of some Indian ISPs like BSNL. In case you are suffering from such a problem, you can reconfigure your router to use the OpenDNS servers. All you have to do is type in the following two IP addresses for the DNS server in your Wi-Fi or LAN router:

208.67.222.222
208.67.220.220

Apart from providing a faster DNS, OpenDNS also provides you automatic typo corrections. For example, if you type www.jaganath.ner instead of www.jaganath.net, OpenDNS automatically redirects you to the correct URL. It is also a safer way to browse for your grandma because it filters many phishing websites. So go ahead and change your DNS server entries even if you are not facing any problems from your ISP at this time.

December 31st, 2007 | Posted in info, technology | No Comments