Cognitive Surplus - What do we do with it?

If you're like me (and I'm assuming you are), you wonder how you're going to find time to do all the cool things you want to accomplish. You THINK you don't have any time, but when you really sit down and look at how you spend your time, you realize that you waste a lot more time than you actually think. For many of us, a lot of that wasted time comes from watching TV.

About a decade ago, I reached a breaking point and decided to completely unplug my cable TV. I did it successfully for two solid years (this was before I got married). And I have to say, that it was a Golden Age for me. A period of productivity and life enjoyment that I never had before or since. Much like smokers find it impossible to quit smoking when they are living with other smokers, as much as I'd like to once again go completely cold turkey on TV, I live with other TV watchers. So for now, I have to just do my best to monitor and restrict my useless TV watching.

Anyway, here's a great video about how we use our time and how to carve out part of your life to accomplish cool stuff.

Foxmarks (Great Firefox add-on)

Part three in my multi-part series on indispensable Firefox add-ons leads me to Foxmarks. If you have multiple computers you use, say a home computer and a work computer, and maybe even a laptop computer, and you're tired of adding and subtracting bookmarks from all the computers, then Foxmarks is for you!

Once you sign up for it initially (simple sign-up procedure, but it does require you to set up a username and password, which might be annoying to some of you. But it's free, so don't fret),
it uploads all of your bookmarks to an online location (in the Bahamas, I think). Then when you go to your other computers, you just install Foxmarks on the those, log in, and now you've got matching bookmarks on all your computers. Anytime you make a change on one computer, or add a new bookmark, it synchronizes it with all the other computers. The links toolbar is the same, the bookmarks menu is the same, everything is the same on all your computers. The only thing you have to do is set up your user names and passwords on any sites that require them, as Foxmarks doesn't synchronize that.

Once you set it up, it runs without you ever having to mess with it again. Your bookmarks are now just magically synced up on all your computers.

FireShot (Great Firefox add-on)

Fireshot is another invaluable Firefox add-on I use all the time. It's basically a screen capture utility that takes a snapshot of whatever is in your browser. It then immediately goes to a quick edit screen that allows you to do minor editing and cropping of the image. Then you can save it or do whatever you want with it.

It's great for blogging, especially when you just need a small part of a page, or something like that. Just click the FireShot toolbar button (just one little old button. Very unobtrusive) and it snaps a picture.

I like tools and add-ons that become transparent in their ease of use and usefulness. It's as easy as click, crop, and save.

Taboo (Great Firefox add-on)

If you're a Firefox user (and if you're not, shame on you!), then this is a fantastic add-on. It's called Taboo and it's basically a cool little gizmo that allows you to store pages away for later reading, or for research or whatever.

After you install it, it puts two new icons on your toolbar.


They're pretty self-explanatory as to their functions. But what's really cool and efficient about this is that anytime you're on a page you want to save for later, just click on the Add button. Then later on, when you want to revisit some of the pages you tabbed for later (taboo, tabbed... get it?), just click on the View Taboos button and a neat grid of all your selected items shows up. It shows you a thumbnail of what the page looked like when you added it. When you click on the page in the View Taboos mode, it will then take you to the webpage at the exact spot you were at when you clicked on it (say you were halfway down a long page when you saw something that caught your eye).

Anyway, I've been using this for a while now and it's really really useful and simple and intuitive.

Updated!

The designer of Taboo was kind enough to drop by my blog, and within the body of his comment below was a link to this handy little video that kind of shows you a little bit about how Taboo works. Thank you Demo Girl. Can't wait to check out some of your other videos.