The Web Worker Daily blog reminds us that today is National Clean Out Your Computer Day. Want to do some serious PC cleaning but not sure where to start? We’ve got your back, so let’s get with the purging.
One of the first places you’ll probably find bogged down with a bunch of junk you don’t need is your email inbox. If you use Gmail to manage your email, follow these simple steps to free up loads of space without losing important emails. Once you’ve wrestled your inbox into submission, assign a Trusted Trio of three folders to keep your inbox clean: Follow Up, Archive, and Hold.
Daring productivity mavens may want to take this tip a step further and try out our own Gina Trapani’s idea and eliminate the Archive folder:
Gmail comes with an archive area built in: click on the “All Mail” link to see it. When you archive a message in Gmail (either by clicking the Archive button, selecting the menu option or hitting the E key), the message gets yanked out of your inbox and archived in the “All Mail” view. That means there’s no need for the Trusted Trio’s Archive folder. That is, you only need Follow Up and Hold buckets.
Give Your Filesystem a Thorough Once-Over
Now that your inbox is looking svelte, let’s move on to the stuff going on around your PC’s system. If you think your computer may have been infected with some form of malware but have been putting off hunting it down, you’ll want to find a solid, deep-cleaning malware-removal tool and get rid of what ails you. Once you’ve done that, get a better deadbolt on your system with some reliable antivirus software. (In fact, around Lifehacker HQ we tend to think that Windows security tools are pretty great.)
Even after you’ve removed the malware, you may still have quite a few uninstalled-then-forgetten apps sitting around cluttering up your system. To completely get rid of your unwanted apps, try previously mentionedRevo Uninstaller (we’re happy with the free version).
Once you’ve relieved your PC of all the garbage that was weighing it down, make sure it stays in pristine condition with an automated Windows file cleaner like CCleaner (which you can automate to run nightly), and keep your oft-used folders organized with Adam Pash’s Belvedere. Use Windows’ built-in Scheduled Tasks, to make sure your hard drive performs regular health maintenance tasks.
Clean Out Your Hardware Dust Bunnies
Now that your PC’s brain is purring along, let’s give its innards a good cleaning, too. Don’t be intimidated at the thought of opening its case to evacuate PC dust bunnies. Grab a Phillips head screw driver, some mechanical oil with a dropper, and a can of compressed air, then get to work.
These are a few of our favorite ways for cleaning up our PCs in honor of National Clean Out Your Computer Day, but we know you’ve got your own great suggestions, too, so let’s hear them in the comments.
With the Tea Party convention having just ended and with organizers already planning another one for this summer (in Vegas maybe!), it is time to cast judgment on the movement: these guys are old right-wing college activists.
That is basically the Teabagger Movement. First they were theoretically against bank bailouts, but now they are opposed to Kenyan Socialists who Hate America. They are not just taking back NYU, they are taking back all of America!
This is a problem with our limited, mediated, comic strip version of “history:” people have decided that the way to seize control of your own life and this crazy world is to go all 1960s, like you have seen in a movie. Many of these Tea Party people are actually old enough to have lived through the ’60s, but they weren’t on the fun side. Ben McGrath’s New Yorker story on the movement had this fascinating little moment with a local Kentucky teabagger:
Don Seely invited me to his house for coffee the day after the rally at the Kentucky fairgrounds, and showed me his Air Force Commendation Medal, awarded for meritorious service from 1967 to 1971. “At this age, I was so ignorant,” he said. “Every once in a while, you’d catch a glimpse on TV of Martin Luther King-all that kind of stuff was going on. I graduated college in December of ‘66. About a year after I left, that’s when all the riots happened. I’m thinking, What is going on?” Seely had always wanted to be a pilot, but, because of poor eyesight, he ended up an engineer in a satellite-control facility. The medal was accompanied by a photograph of Seely in his captain’s uniform, and he said that Amber, after looking at the image, had proclaimed that he was the only person she knew who’d kept the same hair style for nearly fifty years: short, straight, and parted neatly on the far right.
Yeesh. And guess what: his daughter goes to the New School. The New School!
It is totally fun to be a part of a big movement, and to convince yourself that this big movement you are a part of is not only morally right, but also secretly incredibly popular. You have to be attacked and beset on all sides by shadowy powerful interests—Soros, corporations, the political elite, ACORN—but that just makes you feel even cooler.
And when you’re showered with attention for your work, you start to believe your own hype. The ratio of media to tea party convention attendees was like 1 to 3. 200 members of the media arrived to cover a convention half the size of Daily Kos’ first convention in 2006. The steep cost of attending made the conventioneers richer, and thus calmer, than the angry folks who showed up for the protests with the crazy signs that we all remember so well.
While some in the movement acknowledge the debt they owe to true ’60s radicals (the only reason you hear so much about Obama’s supposed affinity for Alinsky on the right is because the activist arm of the movement is explicitly copying his tactics), the majority of the new populist conservstives adopt a ’60s protest strategy while claiming to be Tea Partiers (and comparing themselves to the Founders when they are, in fact, a bit more like those white populist Jacksonians)—like a campus activist might compare himself to a Freedom Rider rather than just another sad rich kid.
The great irony is that entitled young Campus Activists tend to “grow up” and get jobs supporting the post-industrial capitalist superstructure, while these are people who’ve turned to juvenile attention-craving ’60s-aping dress-up parties as putative adults.
But let them have their fun! Student protests are always destroyed by forces both outside and, more often, internal. This white populist movement has received far more coverage than its actual size merits (60,000 people on the Mall is, what, the Halloween parade?), and as whatever grassroots, populist elements of the movement that remain are fully co-opted by the actual Republican Party (and the US Chamber of Commerce, the nation’s most influential political party) they’ll find themselves just as disillusioned with the process as a sophomore who just go this first taste of tear gas.
Gaining a reputation for producing silly and misguided student videos, Yale has released another smash hit! This one is for the sorority Pi Phi, which attracts potential rushers with promises of fun activities, intellectual rigor, and people thinking you’re pretty.
The best section of the video begins at 2:50, with two Rumpus editors — nerdy non-sorority types — discussing the beauty of Pi Phi girlz, who are often featured in the humor magazine’s 50 Most Beautiful Elis issue. You’ll likely scratch your head in confusion at this, having just watched a girl with a Rhys Ifans wig and raccoon eyes gab about her various extra-curriculars in the previous scene. Ah well. Hey Yale! Stop making videos. Any ivy-covered mystique you may have once had is very quickly eroding away to reveal your dorky and not-terribly-attractive insides. Actually, scratch that. Keep making videos.
So we assume you saw Undercover Boss last night, CBS’ big new reality show that got the plum post-Super Bowl spot? Amazing, was it not? Televised entertainment has now completed its long, winding journey into becoming 100% corporate propaganda.
In Undercover Boss, a CEO goes undercover in his own company to get the real scoop on how hard it is…to work for his own company. Last night’s premiere featured Larry O’Donnell, COO of the thoroughly unglamorous, dirty, occasionally union-busting multibillion-dollar trash company Waste Management. Larry met many hardworking employees in heartstring-tugging situations, and was able to help them, by vowing to form a committee to address their concerns about their shitty jobs!
CONSIDER: In the olden days of television, companies would sponsor an entire block of programming—The Colgate Variety Hour, or whatever. In return for their name on the show and some in-show plugs, the audience got about an hour of entertainment content. THEN, the 30-second commercial reigned. In return for minutes-long blocks of commercial content, consumers got (more) minutes-long blocks of uninterrupted entertainment. THEN, Tivo came along. Many advertisers moved towards product placement—they paid to have their products and branding messages integrated into the shows themselves. The 30-second ads remained! So, in return for the same lengthy advertising breaks, consumers got a bit of advertorial-type entertainment content.
AND NOW, with the advent of Undercover Boss, we find we have come to a new stage in television: An entire prime-time show that is, in effect, an hour-long corporate public relations message, broadcast to a far larger audience than the corporation could ever hope to reach itself, courtesy of one of our nation’s premiere television networks. Can you even begin to imagine the amount of money that an unsexy company like Waste Management, for chrissake, would have had to spend to buy an amount of media exposure equal to a full hour of prime time directly after the Super Bowl? It quite literally could not have been purchased with all the money in Waste Management’s coffers! But, in exchange for what was no doubt hand-and-foot service from Waste Management’s PR team in setting up logistics and tracking down appropriately engaging employees for the boss to interact with, CBS gives the company an advertainment opportunity unparalleled anywhere else on television. SO, The deal for you, the television viewer is now this: in return for sitting through lengthy blocks of ads, you are treated to one hour of a trash company’s employee morale-boosting video, writ large.
Waste Management played it well: they had the boss admit some mistakes and act humble. Future participants should take notes. This is the best deal corporate America’s gotten on CBS since the network dropped that 60 Minutes tobacco story. Don’t fuck this up, guys.
Of all of capitalism’s high holidays, Valentine’s Day is definitely the worst, with its corporate-sponsored emphasis on love, couples, snuggling, and other disgusting things. The only thing worse? The people who empower it with emphatic hatred.
That’s right, all you singleton’s and “black hearts” are just as responsible for the continuation of this wretched festival as all the happy couples cooing into each others’ earlobes after too many expensive oysters and too much cheap champagne.
Sure, Valentine’s Day was created to sell candy, flowers, romantic dinners at overpriced restaurants, and frilly panties from Victoria Secret that will be forgotten about as soon as they are flung off an expectant toe into the dark corners of a bedroom. To get all English major-y for a second, it is a despicable propagation of the hetero-normative monogamy fallacy that plagues the world, telling everyone that they have a “soul mate” and one special person to complete them and anyone who isn’t in such a relationship is a worthless piece of shit who doesn’t deserve to be loved and probably dresses bad and needs more time in the gym.
However, the reaction to these sentiments is just as knee-jerk and trite. Hating Valentine’s Day is a sad fucking cliche. On the outside its says, “I hate the corporate structure that built this shitty holiday” and “I’m doing fine on my own, thank you,” but what it says on the inside is, “I am so sick of not having the validation of someone in my life that I need to rebel against this thing or I am going to wither away like a dried toe nail clipping in the garbage.” These people think that they are going to do something to change the couple-centric world that we live in, but all that they’re doing is giving credence to it. It’s like scowling at the concept but sneaking handfuls of chalky conversation hearts while all their fellow black-wearers go to change The Smiths record.
Just like every year, alternative Valentine’s Day options abound. Jonathan Ames is hosting an anti-romantic poetry reading in Brooklyn and The Village Pourhouse will try to set up single men and women at their black heart’s party. There are plenty of events for those without a mate to attend and weep with each other and talk about how disgusting and lonely they all are while bashing their seemingly happier counterparts. Still, we hate you just as much as those making kissy-face and gurgling about how much they love each other.
Instead of getting their non-frilly panties all in a wad, maybe it’s time for the haters to just leave this whole mess to those who want to call 1-800-Flowers, order up a chocolate souffle for two, and give each other their thrice-annual dose of oral sex (along with both birthdays). What’s so wrong about expressing the love one has for his partner? It’s rare and wonderful to find someone to share one’s life with, and surviving the daily silent tug of war of a relationship shouldn’t go by unnoticed. The protesters don’t want it to end entirely either, because you know that the first single girl at the “Heartbreaker’s Club” dance party is going to be the one who wants the biggest bouquet once she finally has a man.
For those of us who aren’t in a relationship, why don’t we take the night off? Let’s give it up to all those unlucky enough to have their egos eroded by the will of another in the search for romantic fulfillment. There’s no need for hatred, spite, or resistance. Just take a deep breath and relinquish the day with quiet superiority and calm abandonment—and masturbate yourself into a chafey coma.
Reading about the comeback struggle of American Beauty weirdo Wes Bentley yesterday got us thinking about other youngish, once-promising stars who made a big initial splash and then mostly disappeared. Let’s give some career advice to Bentley and four others.
Wes Bentley
Bentley came roaring onto the scene as the skull-capped suitor to Kevin Spacey’s daughter in American Beauty, Sam Mendes’ 1998 popcorn take on suburban ennui. He had a piercing gaze and a wolfish brow and, sure yeah, he could act pretty well. Big leading man roles in duds like the thriller Soul Survivors and the nearly unwatchable epic The Four Feathers (alongside other up-and-comers Kate Hudson and Heath Ledger) followed soon after, but nothing connected and he faded away. The Times profile reveals that he’s been dealing with drug abuse problems, so that’s too bad. The Road Back: Bentley is starring in the well-received off-Broadway play Venus in Fur at the moment, so, you know… theatre is good. But movies and TV! That’s where it’s really at. He’s definitely not ready for some big starring film role yet, but what if he joins the cast of Nurse Jackie as some weirdo holistic doctor who confounds Jackie with his hippie-dippy bullshit but draws her in with that yards-long stare of his?
Alison Lohman
Lohman made her first big impression as a dreamy but troubled teen going through the foster care system in the underrated White Oleander, and did solid follow-up work in Ridley Scott’s similarly underrated Matchstick Men. And then… well, not a whole hell of a lot. She popped up in kiddie flick Flicka, the drowsy dud Things We Lost in the Fire, and last year’s deliberately kitschy horror b-grader Drag Me to Hell. At 30, Lohman is still young enough to play ingenue, especially given her porcelain baby face, and yet the roles haven’t come. Maybe it’s a personal decision, who knows, but we feel like she could be doing a lot more. The Road Back: Lohman is such an ethereal, slightly odd presence, which makes her interesting but also a bit hard to cast. She’d be perfect in a Terrence Malick movie — all dazed lyricism and angelic blonde hair. She’s also got the kind of melancholy that’s perfect for the current spate of bittersweet indie romantic dramadies ((500) Days of summer, the upcoming Blue Valentine), so she’d be smart to do one of those. Paired up with… Oh, let’s say the delicious all-American sandwich that is Zach Gilford.
Samantha Mathis
Remember her? The young star of Pump Up the Volume did some big movies in her time — Little Women, Broken Arrow, a small role in The American President — but she never quite hit the way we thought she would. In recent years she’s done some stage work, lots of TV guest spots (like Olivia the Dharma teacher on Lost), but nothing to match her early-mid ’90s heat. She’s an appealing actress, warm and frank, and we’d like to see more of her. Even though she’s like 39 or something, and thus ancient. The Road Back: Theater is good! We like theater. But, again, movies and TV are really what everyone needs. Mathis should aim for juicy smaller parts in classy independents — she has the face, if not always the carriage, for period pieces — and some smart TV work. Maybe she could appear alongside Gretchen Mol in a few episodes of the upcoming Boardwalk Empire. Or we liked her toting a gun well enough in Broken Arrow to think she’d make a good foil for Timothy Olyphant on his new Elmore Leonard series, Justified.
Kip Pardue
The golden boy actor, who played football at Yale and was an Abercrombie & Fitch model, seemed destined for big things when he was cast in that Sylvester Stallone racing movie Driven and in Remember the Titans. But then despite his drive, no one remembered him (get it?). Maybe he was hyped to the point of premature saturation, like a more male but no less blonde Gretchen Mol. The guy really hasn’t done anything of note since the well-received 2005 indie Loggerheads (movies called Slightly Single in LA and Stag Night do not count), but we remember him being a reasonably talented fellow in things like The Rules of Attraction, so it might be interesting to see him back on the scene. The Road Back: He’ll need a lot of work, mostly because people don’t really remember who he is. So let’s get him a nice meaty theater role to up his cred — Joe Pitt in the upcoming Angels in America revival, perhaps (he looks so much like Patrick Wilson!) — and then put him on an established but still-hot show, something like Damages. Or maybe he could be the pretty-boy serial killer on the next season of creatively-soaring Dexter. You know, something like that: a role that, sure, exploits his looks, but also shows off those Ivy League acting chops (he graduated with an Econ degree, but whatever).
Alicia Silverstone
Oh, Cher. After breaking out a bit too big in the 1995 smash Clueless, Silverstone struggled to define herself as a “real” actress. She was also beset with a less-than-emaciated figure, which pretty much nixed her chances at big-time movie stardom. She’s done smaller film roles, some theater (she’s currently in the twice-extended Broadway production Time Stands Still, opposite Laura Linney), and her own ill-fated comeback TV project, Miss Match. She remains a kind and appealing actress, so let’s make her a star again. The Road Back: Again, the theater is always a good start. It gets you respect, you meet interesting and dedicated actors, and there’s a lot more of it to do. To get back on the screen, we think Silverstone ought to go the Mathis route of aiming for smaller parts in prestige pictures, much like she’s doing right now sharing the stage with Linney. Silverstone could get hot by association, and before you know it she’s starring in her own HBO comedy series about a bored and slightly frumpy fading Midwestern sorority girl who decides one lonely drunken night to move to New York and try her hand at acting school.
There are many other folks who fit the just-slightly-missed-it bill — people like Chris Evans, Barry Pepper, Marley Shelton, Radha Mitchell, Estella Warren (Pardue’s costar in Driven) and Derek Luke. Who’s an actor you thought was going to hit big but then mysteriously fizzled?
Unsurprisingly, most Wavers use it as a real-time wiki, but some take advantage of features unique to Wave, like inline and private replies, public tags, and gadgets. I featured the most unique use cases I got in a brand new chapter just added to The Complete Guide to Google Wave. The following is the text of the just-published Chapter 10, which describes ways in which a few people who don’t work for Google are using Wave to get things done—with screenshots.
So far you’ve learned the finer workings of Wave in great detail, but there’s a big difference between understanding how to swing a hammer and building a house. In this chapter, you’ll meet regular people who are already getting things done with Wave in their daily work and life. You’ll learn the Wave techniques they’ve developed through trial and error, and the specific Wave features they use to get certain jobs done. Finally, you’ll create wave templates you can use and reuse for your own purposes.
Take a look at some real-world case studies of Wave in action.
Wave as a Group To-do List and Daily Work Log
Justin Swall runs Swall’s Associated Services, a small company which provides computer repair and consulting for small businesses. Justin uses Wave as a daily to-do list that he and his co-workers update to track who has done what. He makes use of the “Copy to New Wave” feature to transfer undone items from one day to the next, as shown in Figure 10-1.
Here’s Justin’s Wave workflow: every day he uses a fresh wave that contains that day’s tasks, ordered by priority, and what time they’re due. Over the course of the day, Justin’s group updates the wave to reflect the current status of each task.
Justin says:
During the day either the initial wave is edited (usually by me) to add additional items to the list, and everyone else uses inline replies to update when items are completed, or if additional information needs to be conveyed back and forth. At the end of each day I copy the day’s wave to a new wave, change the date to the next day, remove the items that were completed the day before, add new items or notes to the list, or move items from secondary to primary. Wash, rinse, repeat.
By creating a new wave that carries over the outstanding tasks left on yesterday’s wave, Justin leaves behind a daily work log that he can reference later.
Justin prefers Wave to discuss tasks because it’s a single, hosted conversation.
For various reasons, Outlook tasks never seemed to work for us. Emailing is a nightmare (I either keep thinking of more things to add to the list and end up sending out five or more messages by morning, or I’m so afraid of doing that I keep it open as a draft so I can keep adding to it then forget to send it at all).
If you’re interested in using Wave to manage projects beyond daily tasks, see the later section in this chapter, “Wave for Project Management.”
Wave as an Event Planner
Wave is a fine productivity tool, but it also can help you have fun, too. Fifteen-year old Sean Cascketta uses Wave to organize weekend get-togethers with his classmates.
Sean explains:
If I’m formatting a Wave for organizing an event, it usually comes with a basic list of the details (like who, what, where, etc…) as well as a Yes/No/Maybe gadget, which is perfect for these events as we can both constantly check on the RSVP status of people, and they can use the status feature to give any extra details (like if they’re bringing along some party favors, electronics or such).
Sean used Wave to create an invitation to a viewing of The Goonies, as shown in Figure 10-2.
Brunch-lover Jed McClure uses Wave to organize his weekly “Brooklyn Brunch Club,” a group of friends who brunch somewhere different in Brooklyn each week, and RSVP whether or not they can make it.
Jed describes the process:
We have a pretty dedicated group of brunchers here in Brooklyn, and many brunch options. But the onerous task of coordinating usually ended up resulting in people getting left off the email list. With Google Wave, the idea was to maintain a permanent Brunch wave, where people in the group could check in with and see where the next brunching would happen, and then reply if they were going to try to make it. We also set up a map widget and filled in all the spots we like to hit, to help when making suggestions (and to avoid the dreaded brunch rut).
The Brooklyn Brunch Club wave consists of maps, inline discussions debating which brunch place to hit up next, and a Yes/No/Maybe gadget to collect RSVPs, as shown in Figure 10-3.
Jed says:
So far it has worked pretty well. The threaded nature of the dialog means that it needs to be ‘pruned’ after each brunch, so that the relevant info remains at the top of the wave. And also train people to look in the history for past brunch details.
With maps and Yes/No/Maybe built in, party, vacation, brunch, or any event planning is one of Wave’s most obvious use cases.
Wave as Holiday Gift List Tracker
Hal Wilke has two young children, and when the holidays approach, he gives gift suggestions for his kids to their grandparents. This past year he and his wife used Wave to share and update the list.
Hal explains:
We always email Christmas lists to Grandparents, and then get emails back sometimes to me, sometimes to my wife. Or phone calls at odd times telling us what they bought, so we have to track notes that we write about the phone calls. It was much easier this year [in Wave] because the grandparents could edit the wave as they purchased gifts, and we did not have people buying duplicate gifts, and didn’t have to track multiple lists of purchased gifts. Pretty cool that the grandparents were cool with using Wave.
The kids’ gift wave included Hal’s wife, but Hal used Wave’s private reply feature to discuss a surprise gift for her with the kids’ grandparents, as shown in Figure 10-4.
Wave for Collaborative Meeting Notes
One of the most common suggested uses of Wave is taking collaborative notes[1] during meetings, classes or conference sessions, and Indiana University employee Manjit Trehan does just that. Manjit’s meetings usually have about 10 people attending, and four or five are in Wave, taking notes.
Instead of everyone co-editing a single blip, Manjit separates agenda items into their own individual blips.
Manjit says the process evolved from trial and error:
What I learned after a few meetings [of taking notes in Wave] is that it is best to enter one agenda item per blip. This allows a separate thread to progress below each item. Say we are meeting about ordering some hardware, and there are three open items to be discussed. Vendor selection, Installation schedule, and deployment schedule. Each of these would end up in a separate blip.
Manjit says meeting note waves can get lengthy, but he created a sample meeting wave with separate agenda blips, shown in Figure 10-5.
Wave for Project Management
You’ve already seen one way to use Wave as a daily task tracker; you can also manage a more complex group project in Wave. This very book, produced by a team of six people-including the authors, our copyeditor, designer, tech lead, and project manager-used Wave to track and manage its production process.[2]
Create a project workspace in Wave using an agreed-upon tag and a saved search for waves with that tag. For example, when we started managing the book project in Wave, our group decided that every book-related wave would get the “cwg” tag (short for CompleteWaveGuide.com). Each of us also saved a tag:cwg search and referred to it to see only project-specific waves, as shown in Figure 10-6.
When you’re managing a project in Wave, create a new wave to discuss each topic, task, or facet of the project. For example, for this book project, we used one wave per chapter to discuss chapter-specific questions and edits. For each new edition, we’d clean out the chapter wave of old blips, and start anew, knowing that old conversation was still archived in the wave’s playback should we need to see it. We kept other separate waves to draft the style guide, discuss pricing, and see cover image revisions.
Wave as a Conference Backchannel
A smart use of wave tags works well in public waves as well as private ones. Tagged public waves make it easy for anyone to find a relevant place to discuss news or a current event, as it happens, in real-time. In fact, many tech-savvy conference organizers publicize a unique tag for its attendees to use when they post status updates to Twitter or photos to Flickr about the event. Attendees can use that same tag in Wave to create and add to event-specific discussions, too. (Those who aren’t at the event can eavesdrop on those public waves, ask questions, and add to the discussion from afar.)
For example, at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York in November of 2009, I (Gina) gave a keynote presentation called “Making Sense of Google Wave,”[3] and invited attendees to wave about it using the public, agreed-upon conference tag w2e. Before I took the stage, I started a public wave and tagged it w2e so that anyone who searched for with:public tag:w2e could discuss my keynote or any other session they attended, as shown in Figure 10-7.
This technique has been used at events beyond Web 2.0 Expo; bloggers at both eComm Europe[4] and the MediaWiki conference[5] noted that attendees used Wave to take minutes, discuss sessions in real-time, and collaborate on notes.
(Watch a video of the 15-minute “Making Sense of Google Wave” keynote at http://goo.gl/7cK3.)
Wave for Breaking News
The live, real-time nature of Wave makes it a natural fit for collaborating on breaking news as it happens. In fact, when Seattle police were on the hunt for a man suspected of shooting four cops, the Seattle Times used a public wave to rapidly publish updates about the manhunt[6] and solicit information from reader in the process, as shown in Figure 10-8.
Granted, most people aren’t conducting a manhunt for a suspected killer, but we all have a reason to broadcast and get live updates on events as they happen to us-like when your sister-in-law goes into labor, or Aunt Martha’s undergoing surgery, or Mom in New York is worried about how close the forest fires are to your home in San Diego and whether you’ve been evacuated.
Wave for Q&A
Wave’s inline reply feature makes it a solid choice for having conversations that require back-and-forth on individual points: like an interview. Question and answer interactions can happen very easily in Wave, because the interviewer can start a wave with multiple questions. Then, the respondent can reply to each question inline, and the interviewer can optionally follow up to the response right below it without disrupting the flow of the series. The result is a readable Q&A in the correct order, as shown in Figure 10-9.
Create Wave Templates for Reuse
If you create waves with the same formatting and gadgets often, create a “template” wave for reuse to save yourself repetitive work. For example, if you plan a recurring event in Wave, create a new wave, and format your event title, description, and details area to your liking, and add the Yes/No/Maybe and maps gadget. Save that wave in a “Templates” folder you create.
Then, the next time you need a wave to plan the event, open the template, and select “Copy to new wave” from the timestamp drop-down. Fill in the details for the event in the new copy.
Public Wave Templates
Googler Pamela Fox did just that and made her templates public and read-only, available for anyone to copy for their own purposes. Visit the read-only, public wave which lists her templates at http://goo.gl/GNUw, like the event planner wave template shown in Figure 10-10.
Inspired by Samsung’s new Dual View TL220 digital camera that has a second LCD screen on the front so you can see yourself when you snap your own picture, I velcroed a small mirror to my existing digital camera and saved over 300 bucks! When I thought about how many pictures I have taken of myself … By: noahw
Who doesn’t love sketch of themselves or their loved ones? but… and but… You probably don’t have a Tablet PC (or iPad), drawing skills are good for making amoeba and lazy enough to not use existing copying techniques then I have something for you (sounds pretty theatrical ) - A $2 Sketch portra… By: manish15
Rein fire from the sky with this mockery of a Chinese balloon! This instructable requires: - A couple of meters of incredibly thin wire. - Cheapest trash bag/bin bag liner you can find (these are the sort bin men hate as the split if you look at them funny) - A couple of balls of cotton wool - Sello… By: fallscrape
The Web Worker Daily blog reminds us that today is National Clean Out Your Computer Day. Want to do some serious PC cleaning but not sure where to start? We’ve got your back, so let’s get with the purging.
So we assume you saw 
Wes Bentley
Justin Swall runs Swall’s Associated Services, a small company which provides computer repair and consulting for small businesses. Justin uses Wave as a daily to-do list that he and his co-workers update to track who has done what. He makes use of the “Copy to New Wave” feature to transfer undone items from one day to the next, as shown in Figure 10-1.
Hal Wilke has two young children, and when the holidays approach, he gives gift suggestions for his kids to their grandparents. This past year he and his wife used Wave to share and update the list.
One of the most common suggested uses of Wave is taking collaborative notes
Inspired by Samsung’s new Dual View TL220 digital camera that has a second LCD screen on the front so you can see yourself when you snap your own picture, I velcroed a small mirror to my existing digital camera and saved over 300 bucks! When I thought about how many pictures I have taken of myself …
Who doesn’t love sketch of themselves or their loved ones? but… and but… You probably don’t have a Tablet PC (or iPad), drawing skills are good for making amoeba and lazy enough to not use existing copying techniques then I have something for you (sounds pretty theatrical ) - A $2 Sketch portra…
Rein fire from the sky with this mockery of a Chinese balloon! This instructable requires: - A couple of meters of incredibly thin wire. - Cheapest trash bag/bin bag liner you can find (these are the sort bin men hate as the split if you look at them funny) - A couple of balls of cotton wool - Sello…