As a writer my work is about sitting by the computer all day (and some nights ;-). When my back began feeling stiff I decided I needed to change my work environment. The solution was to modify the desk so that I could stand instead of sitting.

I wanted to avoid spending a lot of money. Therefore I had to build it myself. At first I thought I would need to build something from scratch out of wood. Then I came to think of my daughter’s Tongoys. It can be used to build a house, a bed, a castle or whatever one can imagine. Why not a standing desk?

First I started taking measures. My IKEA standard office desk is 120 by 80 centimeters and 80 centimeter high. At 191 centimeters above ground I figured I would need to raise the desk 40 centimeter to have a convenient standing height. Then I measured the Tongoys boards and found that 12 x 18 holes (Tongoys is measured in holes) was exactly 80 x 120 centimeters! Six holes high it would raise it 40 centimeter, but I decided to use seven holes to get an edge stopping things from falling over.

When the measuring was done the fun part began. I needed to design the table. At first I thought of making it as simple as possible with only a flat surface to put my laptop on. With the Tongoys solution it was easy to make it a little more advanced so I added a raised shelf to put my 22 inch screen and speakers on and another one inside the desk to hold my six external hard drives. That way I could make room for other things in the cabinet currently holding the disks. Designing my desk took about an hour.

Building it took another two hours. I made it very sturdy. It can easily hold my weight standing on it (if for some reason I would want that). At the back of the table surface I left an opening so I can have the computer cables out of sight.

Once the work was done I put it on top of the desk to see if the design worked. It did! As an added bonus I got a lot of storage space under the desk. The subwoofer fit nicely in there. I am thinking of also putting my printer and scanner there and get rid of another cabinet.

I admit this solution isn’t the most subtle one. It is made from a toy. :-) It does, however, serve its purpose more that well.

Click here to view the embedded video.

You can customize the text and backgrund style, font size and margin width to suit your own preferences. When you are satisfied you drag the bookmarklet to your web browser toolbar and it is ready to use the next time you visit a web page worth reading.

If you use Safari web browser you have a similar function built right into the browser. Just click on “Reader” to the right of the address bar. That view has inspired the theme of this blog. :-)

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Instructions for installing the Joliprint pdf bookmarklet

Instructions for installing the Joliprint button on your website

The balloon rose to 100.000 feet before it burst and sent the space craft back down to earth.

In short Sparrow is a Mac desktop client that currently works with Gmail (more services will be added). But it is more than that. They have stripped away all but the most essential functionality and built a gorgeous interface. To be honest, the idea behind the interface seem to be borrowed from Tweetie for Mac.

To the left you find folders such as inbox, starred, sent mail, drafts and trash. At the top you have actions like compose, reply, archive and delete. In the top right corner you see a search field. In addition to that there is a list view and, optionally, a reading pane. The contents of the list view varies depending on what folder you choose. The reading pane shows the currently active email.

Thanks to clever use of empty space and different font sizes the readability in Sparrow is very good.

Sparrow for Gmail is a beta version and it has a lot of issues. I am sure they will be fixed before the final version goes live and then it will be a really good desktop email client for Mac. I already love it.

With Backblaze you install a small program that is available for both Mac and Windows. Setup is easy. Just tell it which hard drives you want to back up, how fast the backups should be (faster means slower network and vice versa), how often you want the backups to run and if there is anything you want to exclude from backups (backing up your Dropbox folder seems unnecessary). You probably also want to set an alarm that warns if backups haven’t been run for X days. That’s it. The program runs in the background out of your way and you shouldn’t have to think much about it.

Backup speeds depend on your network. My upload speed is about 0.75 megabit/second. In 24 hours I get around 8 gigabyte backed up. This means the initial backup took several days. After that daily backups are run continuously and I am pretty much fully covered all the time. You can monitor backup status whenever you like.

As long as everything work fine, and you pay your monthly 5 USD, you can go about your business as usual. If, however, catastrophe strikes and you lose some or all files on your computer, you will be happy that you subscribe to Backblaze. Just login to the Backblaze website and choose in what way you want to make a restore. Your options are: Download zip file or have DVD:s or a USB hard drive sent via FedEx. The first option is free of charge. You also choose what files, if not all, you want to restore. This means you can undo mistakes if you delete a file that you wanted to keep (provided that you have it backed up).

Your backups are encrypted on your computer and sent over an encrypted connection. You don’t have to worry about things being easily viewable by your neighbors or cyber terrorists. Encryption is military-grade.

All this cost just 5 US dollars each month for each computer and external drives, regardless of size. They figure that it will work out in the end since not everyone has as much data as I do. :-)

I do have external hard disks for backups but that won’t help if the house burns down or they get stolen by burglars. That’s why I use Backblaze too.

If you want to test drive Backblaze before you buy it, you can. They have a free trial period so you can test backup and restore. If you want to secure your company computers too they offer a business option.

Next time someone ask if you do backups you can answer that you do.

Backblaze website

Soap Bubbles ten or fifteen meters long and several meters wide. They were made by Sterling Johnson at Stinson Beach in California.

You can make your own super soap bubble mixture by following the recipe found here:

Make your own soap bubble mixture

And the magic super wand can be assembled using this illustrated guide from Instructables:

GIANT bubble blower

I found the video and links via Lifehacker.com.

Voddler can give you all this thanks to commercials and ads. Before the shows start there are a couple of minutes of commercials. If you pause in the middle of the movie there will be ads. There are no breaks while you watch, unless you decide to take a break.

It’s all quite smooth. You will have the choice to continue where you last left if you reopen a movie that you began watching earlier. You can also create playlists and save favorites for fast and easy retrieval. If you are the type who like to write reviews you can. Show them to the world or keep it to yourself. Import your Facebook friends and keep in touch with their movie preferences.

If you want to see the latest flicks you can do so too. Then you will have to pay. The cost is about the same as when you rent them in a store. You’ll miss out on the fresh air and the walk though. ;-)

Voddler is not available on all markets and still in beta. What I have seen so far is very good. I have not experienced any glitches and the quality is as good as on TV. This is how I want to watch movies from now on.

Voddler website

Open Notational Velocity. Write a title and press Enter. You have just opened an empty document, given it a name and saved it. All in one go. If there already were a document with the name you wrote, it would have opened and positioned the cursor where you last left off.

You see, Notational Velocity is clever. It assume that when you first start writing you are looking to see if there is a document with the name, or contents, you write. If there is not, it guesses that you would instead like to create one. So it does. It saves a lot of time when you are a busy writer.

Notational Velocity is shortcut based. Press Ctrl – L to jump to the search/create field. Use arrow keys to choose between documents. Hit Enter to enter a new or existing document.

Those are the most useful shortcuts, but you can do most of the things of any other text editor. Cut, paste, search, replace, check spelling and grammar, import and export to and from other document formats. You can even write with rich text formatting and add tags to your documents.

You never have to save anything. It’s done for you as you write. E v e r y  k e y s t r o k e  i s  s a v e d  a s  y o u  t y p e. Magic.

If you want to be able to access your texts from any computer, or your phone, make Notational Velocity save them to your Dropbox. That also takes care of the backups.

If you are worried about secrecy, the program can compress and encrypt the database.

Like I mentioned at the beginning, this program is free, as in open source. Get it:

Notational Velocity website

Dropbox is like a tele-porter on steroids. Put any file in it and the file will magically, and almost instantly, appear on all computers and phones where you have installed Dropbox. You will also be able to see it on the web. And if you have shared a folder with someone else, it will appear in her or his Dropbox too. Make changes to the file and the changed file will be available everywhere. Remove it and it will disappear. Unless you change your mind and decide to bring it back. All events are stored in Dropbox so you can undo any mistakes.

It doesn’t matter if you have a Windows PC or a Mac, an iPhone or an Android, Blackberry or iPad, or even a Linux machine. Or all of them. They can share the same Dropbox.

How much would you be willing to pay for all of this? It’s free. You get 2 gigabyte of storage to start with. If you tell a friend about Dropbox, and the friend register for an account, you will receive more storage. 250 megabyte for every referral. And the people you refer will also get 250 megabyte extra added. I have done that a lot. Currently you can get up to 10 gigabyte in total this way. If that is not enough you can buy more storage. 50 or 100 gigabyte extra to play with. You can put all your documents in Dropbox and have them available at all times. If you belong to a workgroup you can share folders in Dropbox and not have to buy a company server.

I use Dropbox for many things. One of the obvious is for backup purposes. Another is to easily transfer files, like screen captures, from my iPhone to the Mac or PC. I also share images and movies with family and friends.

Sign up for Dropbox now and get 250 extra megabytes (I will get more storage too :-).