No jokes about the cliche vowel-dropping, please. :D

Labelr aims to overcome one significant shortcoming of Google's Blogger service - the lack of post categorization. Basically, Blogger gives you no way to categorize your posts, so Labelr allows you to do just that.

As most of you know, this blog is powered by Blogger behind the scenes. On one hand, not having the ability to categorize posts is nice - it gives me one less thing to worry about. On the other hand, categorizing posts allows visitors to find related posts quickly and easily. So, in the spirit of doing what's best for my dear readers (*grin*), I'm going to try incorporating this feature later this month, after finals are done...possibly just in time for e-piphany's third birthday. No promises though. :)

It's a closed beta at the moment, so I have to see if I can actually get in first. Let's see how it goes...

Well, it's not quite what you expect, but I liked the catchy title. :)

Check out this 7 minute long timelapse video showing the production process involved in building an Airbus A380 aircraft. It's truly breathtaking.

There were rumours about it earlier this week, but it's now official. For those of you who haven't heard about Writely, it's a free, web-based, collaborative word processor.

Very smart acquisition. Combine this with Gmail, the upcoming Google Calendar (aka CL2), and Google's vision of GDrive, free unlimited online storage space, and things start to look pretty interesting. And since Writely allows you to post to a blog, the acquisition could also lead to some sort of integration with Blogger too.

Well, "Week 3" has finally rolled along, and the details are officially starting to appear. A community site has just launched which houses the official team blog and forum. Channel9 has the Otto Berkes video up as well.

Origami devices currently run XP Tablet PC Edition, as expected, but there are some nifty new things that enhance their useability. Take for instance the customizable Program Launcher with a slick, MCE-like UI, optimized for touch-based input:



Or the thoughtful arrangement of the on-screen keypad (DialKeys) for quick typing with your thumbs.



Being a first-generation line of products, however, the Origami is aimed primarily at early-adopters and enthusiasts. The battery life of these early models is only about three hours, which is seriously inadequate, but it's expected to get much better in future revisions, with more power-efficient CPUs and hardware coming into the market. In the meantime, batteries are swappable, so it's possible to carry a spare. On the bright side, there's a good chance these devices will actually end up being pretty affordable this time around, especially as additional OEMs step into the arena. Here's an encouraging excerpt from the official press release:

"Pricing will be determined by our OEM partners. We anticipate pricing in the US$599-$999 price-range. Part of our objective in creating the original reference design for the UMPC category was to engineer a platform that’s both very compact and, through careful component choice, possible to sell for $500 MSRP."

A two pound, seven-inch wide, touch-enabled Origami running a full-fledged Windows OS, with a solid battery life, and a pricepoint of about $500 would make one hell of a device. These first gen devices may have not lived up to the hype that was created by the eager community during the last couple of weeks, but I think they really have some serious potential going forward.

Update: Marc Orchant shares a similar opinion and says it best in one sentence - "My interest, frankly, is less about the first generation devices announced this week and more about the implications this in-between form factor represents for anytime, anywhere computing." Right on!
Also included in Marc's post are a couple of choice quotes from Jupiter Research's Michael Gartenberg and ArsTechnica's Ken Fisher.

When you have everything from homeworks, projects and exams to rent and fee payment dates, registration deadlines, meetings, teleconferences and a mountain of other things to keep track of, it's almost impossible to remember everything unless you put it all down somewhere. Outlook has been my central hub for this purpose for several years now, but I've found that there are a couple of ways to complement it that can help to keep things more organized, easier to manage, and always readily available.

Outlook allows you to create calendar items and tasks, and it displays all of the information for the week on the main Outlook Today pane in a simple, at-a-glance format. But I tend to keep Outlook minimized and running in the background most of the time, so I found it was handy to use an app that could pull data from Outlook's store and display it right on my desktop. I was using Rainlendar for this purpose for a long time, and I recently switched to using a widget for Yahoo! Widget Engine, just because I like to change things around sometimes. DeskTask is another standalone app that performs the same function.

This setup works great when I'm around the desktop, but how do I keep track of all the new stuff that I need to add to my calendar or todo list when I'm on campus for most of the day? Pulling out the laptop and turning it on just to do that is not very practical, and synchronization of data is another issue that you have to keep in mind, but that's a topic for another post. Instead, I took the old-fashioned pen-and-paper route and recently started using the handy little PocketMod to jot down quick notes to myself. It's a single sheet of paper, cleverly folded to give you an eight-page notepad that's small and thin enough to fit in your wallet or pocket. At the end of the week, just discard it and fold up a new one. No need to worry about drained PDA batteries or anything of the sort, and it's definitely more starving-student-budget-friendly. :) Everything that goes into the PocketMod during the day goes into Outlook in the evenings. The process takes less than a minute each day.

I find that this works well for me, but I always enjoy hearing people's ideas, especially from fellow-students. So how do you go about keeping track of the multitude of things that you need to do?