The Cranking Widgets Blog

8 Ninja Uses for Binder Clips

I would be willing to wager that most people, during their first office supply shopping trip after having read Getting Things Done, pick up some binder clips. This is probably because they happened across the Hipster PDA at some point during their GTD travels and thought, “man, that looks like something I could really [...]

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Reasons to Get a Tattoo (and Reasons Not To)

digg_url = 'http://blog.crankingwidgets.com/2008/05/05/get-a-tattoo/'; I have lots of tattoos. Something like 30 at last count, if memory serves. As tattoos have grown in popularity and social acceptance, it’s very likely that your average 20-something has one or more tattoos. And while I’m certainly not an expert on the art of tattooing, I’ve got a [...]

Getting Things Done with 37signals’ Backpack - Why I’m Switching Back

As some of my twitter friends noticed this week, I’ve made the switch back to Backpack as my primary GTD tool. Some found this surprising, given how heavily I’ve pimped Remember the Milk. This post will outline why I left RTM and why Backpack makes so much more sense (for me, anyway). Let me [...]

11 Tips for Better Tech Support

We’ve all been there. Something’s dreadfully wrong with your trusty computer - you can’t print, you can’t get on the web, you can’t play Bejeweled. For whatever reason, the problem is major enough to warrant one of the most desperate acts you can imagine - a phone call to tech support. Now, before we [...]

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Cranking Widgets Theme Updated!

I hope everybody is doing well, and thanks for hanging in there during the last few weeks. Just wanted to invite everybody (especially those of you reading this via your favorite RSS reader) to come by and take a gander at the new look. I’ve completely redone the layout for this site, the [...]

Keep Your Notes in Order with the Daily Scratchpad

Image courtesy of London Permaculture The following is a guest post by Gretchen Rubin of The Happiness Project We’re all looking for ways to work both faster and calmer, and I recently hit on a trick that keeps my desk tidier and my thoughts clearer. One of my most annoying habits is my tendency to scribble down important [...]

The Single Most Useful Contact on Your iPhone

Like most adults living in America today, I get many phone calls. Some from my wife, my mom, my brother, my friends. But sometimes, I get phone calls from the local health club, the local car dealership or somebody trying to get me to buy 5 pounds of veal. Unsolicited phone calls. We [...]

Happy Monday: Odds, Ends and other Minutiae

I hope everybody had a fantastic weekend! I’ll start by apologizing (again - seems like I’m doing this an awful lot lately) for the slowdown in posting over the last week - some personal events had most of my attention during non-work hours. Thanks for hanging in there, I’ll be posting new and [...]

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Bloggers: Show the World What You’re Up To

The following is a sponsored post. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t mean every word of it, because I really do. Like it or not, the age of social networking is upon us. There is no escaping this reality, and if you’re looking to make your blog a success, there’s a [...]

Describing Twitter in Plain English

I’m a big fan of Twitter (even though we’ve had our differences in the past - mostly due to my not “getting it”). While my updates may not be as fast, furious or incessant as some of the people whom I follow, I do try to pop on there as often as is feasible [...]