Harkening back to my previous post on Task Reminder Services, I was watching DL.tv on TiVo recently and they showed briefly the new Tasks feature in GMail. It’s a new pane that when enabled in Google Labs preferences, allows you to store tasks and subtasks, check them off, and even convert emails to tasks. It also allows you to set a due date for that task, and I was getting excited as I searched for a “Mail me a reminder” feature.. but no such luck. I did go to their forums and request the feature though. Gmail +Tasks (should equal) Reminder Emails.
2 cooking rss feeds I can’t get enough of
There are some GReader feeds I don’t know why I’m still subscribed to. Either it updates too quickly for me to keep up with or I’m interested in maybe 1/10th of the posts. The little (856) unread next to the feed just makes me feel guilty until I poke in, look at the top couple and inevitably just mark all as read.
Not so with the 2 cooking rss feeds I discovered a short while ago:
The Kitchn: http://feeds.feedburner.com/apartmenttherapy/thekitchn
Just Bento: http://feeds.feedburner.com/justbento
The Kitchn is a very colorful feed, perfect for a food-related blog, with nice basic tips for amateurs like myself. More often than not, San Francisco gets a shoutout, so seems to be local, with local tips.
Just Bento is a curiously fascinating, DIY guide to packing your own bento lunches or whenever else you might need a well put-together portable meal.
Bye Bye Sandy
For the last year or so, I’ve been subscribed to a free service called I Want Sandy. Sandy is like a virtual calendar assistant, in that it allocates me a personal email address, which I can send a specially formatted email to. That email could be something like “remind me to pick up my dry cleaning next Wednesday at 6:45pm”, in the subject line or body of the email. At that time, I get an email back from Sandy with a reminder about my dry cleaning. I certainly am not a power user, using it maybe once or twice a week, but enough to make it convenient for those occasional reminders.
Well, I just got a notice from them that they are shutting their virtual doors on Dec 19. Looks like Twitter has bought their technology, and their CEO is also joining Twitter. Now, on to look for alternatives:
http://twitter.com/timer – Pros: backed by Twitter’s solid foundation Cons: Limited by Twitter’s access methods – text or browser, no email
http://gopingme.com/ – Pros: They seem to be ready for Sandy’s abandoned users, as they have a tutorial for ex-Sandy users on their home page. Just like Sandy, you can postpone event reminders (reply to reminder email with “remind me about this in 1 day”) type of thing.
http://www.rememberthemilk.com – Pros: Has email-task and receive-email-reminder functionality, but they seems to be 2 distinct operations. Cons: seems to be a full fledged task management system, which I already use Omnifocus for. I really need something just to replace Sandy with- a simple email/get-reminder-later system.
Looks like I will try http://gopingme.com, even with the cheesy service name.
