More on the Pomodoro Technique (Mac Centric)

TUAW's take on the Pomodoro Technique

What in the world?

I'm speechless

When list making isn't enough, eat a tomato

I'm always interested in concepts that are supposed to help me overcome my inner procrastinator. That little fellow may do the most damage  to my productivity when at my desk. Even when you have good productivity habits such as GTD.
Breaking down macro concepts and converting them to small doable tasks is in my opinion the key aspect of Getting Things Done by David Allen. This can still cause bad behavior. [more]

Rooting the Sprint HTC Hero

The enterprising folks over on XDA have figured out how to root the CDMA HTC Hero.
There are several detailed instruction sets right now available here.

MoDaCo has released a very early beta of his custom rom. Now you have to be a little insane to try this because MoDaCo does not have a CDMA Hero so he was unable to do any testing on it himself and is relying on the community for that.

Needless to say I am in the middle of taking the plunge. More on that later [MoDaCo Custom Rom via XDA]

Android and Me, a love story?

For less than 30 days I've been an Android user. As I've written before I am the proud owner of a new HTC Hero (CDMA). Sadly I have gripes a lot of them but they are overshadowed by the good.

Overall when I put the phone into my hand it feels like a well made item. It doesn't given the feel of plastic often encountered with phones but rather just feels clean in your hand. I almost cried earlier today when I put my keys into the same pocket while pumping gas then grabbed my key with some force in pocket and gave my screen a little scratch.


So... if anyone has a good remedy for scratches on smartphone screens let me know...

The phone itself is just simply under optimized or under powered. It seems like coders get lazier in proportion to improvements of the modern CPU. If you have just what you need open when you need it the phone is actually quite snappy but once you dive into SenseUI it is as pretty as it is slow.

Also with several bugs showing up on the phone it is apparent that the Android 1.5 with the CDMA hacks was not quite ready for prime time. I will forgive all that and hope that 2.0 fixes a lot of my concerns. So I'll revisit this with 2.0... but a nice Snapdragon phone makes my mouth water.

Pro:

• Solid build factor
• SenseUI is pretty
• Android Market & Open source development
• Tight integration into the Google environment
• Good OWA integration

Cons:

• Slow Processor
• SenseUI is not exactly quick
• Android Market's search capabilities are piss poor. Yes, I'm using Google & piss poor searching in a sentence.
• CDMA Integration feels hacked, lots of buggy apps
• Battery life (due to bugs?) is awful. I get up at 6AM and usually disconnect my phone from the charger. If I do not recharge my phone during the day and have moderate business use it's lights out at 4.
• Sprint coverage could be better
• I have a bit of Droid envy

My search for the perfect (business) phone

I go through phones on a continuous basis and I always seem to find something I like better two months later. I'm a feature phone type of guy and have gone from phones that might give you scoliosis to little itsy bitsy phones. Let me run down a little short voyage of phones I have used over the years and I'll go into detail on my three most recent phones over the next couple of days.

My first ever phone was a random Motorola phone with D1 in Germany. My first ever US phone was a Nokia 9000 Communicator with Powertel in Florida. For its time that thing was ridiculously advanced but it would be a joke even compared to a cheap Chinese iPhone knock off. What a difference 11 years make.

I then graduated to an Ericsson T28i. A nifty little phone with a neat little spring mechanism to accept calls. It didn't do much except for SMS & voice but it had a good battery & solid form factor. The closing mechanism is a different story. It would wear out with time and I ended up having to heat up the plastic hook and bend it back into place. [more]