Library Info : productivity

Online Recipe Finders

Betsey Blanche — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 20:05:00 GMT

Although I am a lover of food and cooking, I have found that, much to my chagrin, I am terribly unimaginative in the kitchen. I need direction. I need a list of ingredients and clear instructions on how to put them all together. In other words, I rely on recipes. Luckily we have access to all kinds of great recipes. For starters (no pun intended) the library has a great collection of cookbooks (Nonfiction 641). I’m always impressed by the variety and breadth available there.

Sadly, in addition to not being a very creative cook, I’m also not a champion of planning ahead (terrible combination). So I sometimes find myself at home with the urge to cook but in need of some guidance. This is when I turn to sites like allrecipes.com, The Food Network online, or Epicurious. These are tried and true favorites which let you search through recipes, view comments and reviews, and sometimes even view nutrition information. Luckily sites like these continue to add features which make them even more valuable. In addition to these favorites I have recently discovered the sharp-looking, featured-filled site Yummly.

In Yummly, users can set up a profile which helps narrow down searches. You can add diet and allergy information; favorite and least favorite foods; information about where you like to shop; how much you can spend on your at-home meals; and how much time food takes to prepare. This feature is nice because it still allows you to search for specific meals or foods but it also provides the FoodFinder which lists recipes that meet your specific tastes and needs. Yummly also has a social feature which allows you to share recipes with your “friends” on the site. It will be interesting to see what other recipe sites emerge over the next year or so.

Have a favorite recipe book or cooking site? Feel free to add it to the comments section!

Other cooking tools:

Convert Center (change units to suit your cooking needs).

Bing Recipes (recipe searching provided by the search engine Bing).

Speed Up Boot Up Time with Soluto

Betsey Blanche — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 19:30:00 GMT

I own a laptop that runs Windows Vista. When I made the switch at the beginning of grad school I was so so pleased. There are photographs of me actually hugging the thing after taking it out of the box. However, as with all laptops certain problems began to appear over time. For instance, turning my laptop on became a precarious business. Sometimes it boot up immediately and other time s I would sit and stare at the welcome screen for long periods of time (once I waited twenty minutes) before getting tired of it and forcing it to turn off. So I finally took some action. For starters, I removed a few things from my hard drive because I had less than 10% free which puts it in what I like to call "the danger zone."

But the booting issue went beyond hard drive space. In my case - and I'm confident I'm not alone in this - my computer simply had too many things all trying to start at once. Windows makes it fairly easy to find the list of processes and applications starting while your computer is booting up but it's easy to feel like you're in over your head with that approach. It takes time to figure out what each item is and whether or not you need it. In comes Soluto. Soluto gives you the information you need to make informed decisions about what can stay and what should go, ranking items in three categories: No-brainer (remove from boot), Potentially removable, and Required (cannot be removed). Additionally, Soluto gives users a description of what the item does (for almost all items) and allows you to pause it, delay it or take no action. This takes away some of the guesswork. If after reading the description you're still not sure what to do you can rely on the wisdom of the masses and see what other users have chosen to do. Another nice tool but also an indication that Soluto is collecting information on users. From what I've seen and read however, Soluto has indicated that the information is strictly about your machine and not personal data. The information they gather adds to their "PC Genome" which is how they are able to make recommendations to users.

I used Soluto this morning and, despite the fact that I removed some items manually about a month ago, I was still able to shave about 25 seconds off of my start time. Not too shabby.

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Further Reading

This Week's Technology Tip: Take a Break from Technology?

Betsey Blanche — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 18:02:00 GMT

Last week Stephen Colbert interviewed Nicholas Carr – author of the newly-released book . Three days ago I came across a blog post titled “Do You Purposely, Regulary Go Offline?” Today, to top things off, I read a brief synopsis of a study which shows more than two hours per day of screen time (particularly watching TV or playing video games) can have negative impacts on one’s attention span. It’s worth mentioning that all three of these were online interactions. This got me thinking about how we use technology and the negative and positive effect it can have on us.

In this blog I make it a goal to provide some tips on tools created to make our lives easier and more productive. What Nicholar Carr and the others show is that sometimes maximizing productivity requires disconnecting from the Internet. In Nicholas Carr’s 2008 essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Carr writes “In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas.” With this in mind, I present this week’s technology tip for increasing productivity and quality of life: take some time to unplug and focus on one task for an extended period of time. Maybe start by reading Carr’s new book (located in our New Non-fiction section), or by perusing some of the excellent book recommendations in Linda’s blog Reader’s Exchange.

Perhaps this is a bad message for the technology blog writer but I think it’s a great thing to be aware of. Plus, you could use those long periods of reading or contemplation to win great prizes through our Adult Summer Reading Program!

Browser Add-Ons Can Help Boost Productivity

Betsey Blanche — Sat, 15 May 2010 21:12:00 GMT

As I write this blog entry I have the following open: our checkout software, an Excel spreadsheet, a browser with 5 tabs open, and two Word documents. This is far more than the human brain can deal with at a time (at least this human brain) but we often overload ourselves in the name of multi-tasking. Luckily, there are oodles of tools you can add to your browser to help up your productivity. Today I will feature two such tools.

Limit the number of tabs open at once
Both Firefox and Chrome allow you to download tools that will keep you from going “tab wild.” No More Tabs (for Chrome) and Window and Tab Limiter (for Firefox) allow you to set your tab limit and keep you to that limit. Both tools do what they’re meant to do and are easy to download and edit. My only complaint is that rather than just letting you know you’re about to go over your limit, the add-on automatically closes a tab without giving you a warning. I can see the logic in that (since I was probably ignoring that first tab anyway) but I would prefer getting a chance to choose what to close. Still a pretty useful tool if you find your web-surfing has taken you far afield.

Let your browser restrict your surfing time
Leechblock (for Firefox) and StayFocusd (for Chrome) keep you on task by keeping you away from time-wasting sites during designated productive times of the day. Have a problem checking the Library’s Facebook page constantly? Love the adorableness of Cute Boys with Cats? Can’t stop searching for yourself on Google? Let your browser play time police! The onus will still be on users to define their forbidden sites and decide when those sites are off limits but after that initial setup you can kiss your (predetermined) distractions goodbye! Pretty neat, huh?

What other tools do you find useful for eliminating distractions and staying focused? Share them in the comments section!

P.S. You may have noticed that I didn’t provide any tools for Internet Explorer. That is partly because of a personal bias against it but we’ll have to save that discussion for another day.