Raven's Brain v1.0: Tools & Utilities

Fun tool to calculate how much your wasted meeting time costs

Tue, 13 Nov 2007 20:51:30 GMT

Donwload Squad has a post on a fun little tool: Calculate what a waste of time your next meeting is with Meeting Miser. If you ever wished you could track the amount of time and money wasted in all those meetings you spend your days in, you've got to check out this tool:

Time is money. And every time you have to sit down with your boss, coworkers, and some random consultant thinking what a big waste of time this meeting is, you could also argue that it's a waste of money.

Meeting Miser helps you figure out just how much money. The little web app works by pulling in average salaries for various job types and determining what their time is worth. So next time you sit down at a meeting, just open your laptop and pop in the job titles of all the attendees. Click the start button and watch the dollars rack up.
Read more here: http://www.downloadsquad.com/2007/11/08/calculate-what-a-waste-of-time-your-next-meeting-is-with-meeting/

Great marketing content from the Meeting Miser website detailing ways to use the tool:

1. Make a case for not attending meetings and impress your boss with your cost sensitivity.
2. Time your bathroom breaks ... or your coworker's.
3. See how much it costs for you and a group of friends to watch a movie on Saturday night.
4. Prove once and for all that calling customer service is a waste of time.

Even though I consider this a fun tool, it does have a practical side. You can enter attendees based on jobs descriptions (I chose: project manager, software engineer, ops manager, SE group manager, Computer tech, sales account manager, Sr. developer, Data analyst) and get a per minute rate. Based on my location (seattle, WA) and the type and number of attendees selected, I received a per-minute rate of $4.55. As of 4 minutes the tally is showing a total meeting cost of $18.20, and we topped $22 before reaching 5 minutes. Can you imagine how much more productive everyone would be if they took these numbers into consideration when scheduling meetings, inviting people (does everyone absolutely need to be here?), creating agendas (are the right people attending?)and facilitating meetings (keep things flowing, stay on topic, be productive, avoid side conversations and attempts to hijack the meeting)? Of course I have no idea how accurate these numbers are or what they are based on, but do like the fact that the tool itself highlights the problem we have with over-meeting.

posted by Raven at Raven's Brain under Tools & Utilities
Tags: Tools & Utilities, Meetings, Meeting Miser, Time Calculator, Productivity Utility , Productivity Calculator

Easily strip ">" and other formatting characters from your emails

Thu, 06 Sep 2007 02:22:49 GMT

I found EmailStripper via a LifeHacker post:

Freeware application emailStripper removes the barrage of greater-than (>) signs and other formatting characters from your email threads. (Apologies if you were hoping for an application that undresses scantily clad emails.) Just paste your email into the utility, click the Strip It Button, and copy the cleaned up results ready for pasting wherever you need them. EmailStripper also cuts out all line breaks preceding the unwanted text so when you're done, you shouldn't need to do any more formatting. This isn't an everyday app for most people, but its simple, one-use purpose might come handy if you ever need to pull content from a long email thread. EmailStripper is freeware, Windows only
Read more here: http://lifehacker.com/software/featured-windows-download/clean-up-email-threads-with-emailstripper-296694.php

I found EmailStripper to be a nice little utility, since I often copy/paste from emails and have to deal with a bevy of >>'s. It was a quick and easy install on Vista and is another one of those tools you might not use a lot, but you'll l-o-v-e it when you do. Kind of like PureText, which I happen to use a lot. It strips formatting from rich text (emails, documents, web text) and pastes as plain text. My post on PureText also highlights a similar tool. All of these utilities are totally free and very Cool!

posted by Raven at Raven's Brain under Tools & Utilities
Tags: Tools & Utilities, Email Stripper, PaperCut EmailStripper, Remove Formatting, Productivity Utility

2 Useful Photo Tools: Online Photo Editing & Image Resizer

Sun, 04 Feb 2007 18:14:00 GMT

downloadsquad referred me to two neat online photo/imaging tools:

Online photo editing with Picnik

If you ever find yourself working on a computer where you don't have the world's number one professional photo editing software, Photoshop, or just don't feel like spending the pile of cash that it demands, smaller online solutions might be for you. In my quest to locate a great photo editing tool that makes editing photos easy for everyone, I have come across Picnik. Picnik has powerful online photo editing tools that you can use through your browser.

Registration is free, and pictures can be uploaded from Flickr, your computer, directly from a website link, Yahoo search, Flickr search, or from a webcam.
Picnik's list of editing tools include auto fix, rotate, crop, exposure, colors, sharpen, and red-eye reduction. There are five special creative tools one can use, but only one is currently active.
When photo editing is complete, photos can than be uploaded to your Flickr account, email the photo directly to an email address in small, medium, large, or full mode, save it to your computer, or create a Flickr slideshow.
Users can also choose to email photos to websites including Photobucket, Costco, Snapfish, Kodak and Photolog where they can be printed and ordered online.
There is also another option where you can print photos directly from Picnik onto your home printer if you choose.
The interface is easy to navigate, and it's a joy to use. If you prefer to work full screen with no browser borders, simply click on the Picnik logo.

Read more from the post: http://www.downloadsquad.com/2007/02/02/online-photo-editing-with-picnik/
Go directly to Picnik: http://www.picnik.com/

The second tool is a quick and easy photo resizer:

QuickThumbnail - online photo resizer
QuickThumbnail is an extremely pared-down online service offering the ability to upload an image and resize, then download the resulting file. Uploaded photos and their resulting copies are kept on the server for only 10 minutes as a security precaution. Resizing options include resizing based on a percentage of the original image's size, using one of a set of fixed sizes, or resizing my a set of "standard" sizes, for example 100x75 for an avatar, or 468x60 for a web banner.

The image quality seems very reasonable, and the process took mere seconds. In fact, I may find myself using this site for more images in my posts, considering how drop-dead simple it is.

Check out QuickThumbnail: http://quickthumbnail.com/

Both tools are free, online and accessible without installing any software, and, more importantly, they're easy to use. Obviously QuickThumbnail is limited but as you'll read in the comments in the post, it's so darn quick and easy you can't complain. Picnik is more robust and offers additional imaging tools, so this is the tool to use if you really want to work with your photos, instead of doing a quick resize. Thanks to Chris Gilmer and Jason Clarke from downloadsquad for the great info! Enjoy!

posted by Raven at Raven's Brain under Tools & Utilities

Tags: Tools & Utilities, Picnik, QuickThumnail, Photo Resizer, Photo Editing, Image Editing, Image Resizing

2 Useful utilities: Send to Notepad and PureText remove text formatting when using copy/paste

Sun, 28 Jan 2007 21:10:42 GMT

I came across two simple but useful tools to help remove rich text formatting when copy/pasting. PureText and Send to Notepad both remove formatting from text for easy pasting but each tool works a little differently:

From a downloadsquad post:
Send to Notepad is a tiny little application that sits in your system tray, using the typical Notepad icon from Windows. When you want to copy text to an instance of the Notepad, you simply copy the text you want to copy, then double-click on the Send to Notepad icon in the system tray. Poof, it opens a copy of Notepad and dumps the contents of the clipboard there.

I tried this out and love it! I frequently copy text from the web and paste it to notepade to remove formatting, then copy/paste the clean text into my blog post. Now if you don't want to bother with notepad and simply want to copy text and then paste it, sans formatting, directly into Word, Excel, etc., check out the next tool:

From the PureText Page:
Have you ever copied some text from a web page or a document and then wanted to paste it as simple text into another application without getting all the formatting from the original source? PureText makes this simple by adding a new Windows hot-key (default is WINDOWS+V) that allows you to paste text to any application without formatting.

PureText is basically equivalent to opening Notepad, doing a PASTE, followed by a SELECT-ALL, and then a COPY. The benefit of PureText is performing all these actions with a single Hot-Key and having the result pasted into the current window automatically.

After trying out both utilities, I prefer the simple and quick PureText Hot-Keys: Select text, use CTRL + C to copy, go to your app to paste and use Windows Key + V to paste the text with formatting removed. I still have Send to Notepad enabled for those times when I want to save a text file but will be using PureText much more regularly. What a time saver!! Thanks to creators Utkarsh (STN) and Steve Miller (PT) for posting these awesome, easy to use time savers!

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