Laptop Legal » Tips and tricks

Need a mac only internet cafe? Try the Apple Store.

Jordan — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 15:46:18 +0000

I popped into the Apple Store the other day to have a look at portable hard drives and their backpacks and related gear. While I really like the Osprey pack I bought to replace my trusty Timbuk2 bag, it isn’t built for laptop road warrior use and it’s more than a bit awkward as the framework for my portable office-on-a-back.

Anywho, I was shocked at the amount of people just using the machines to check email and surf the internet. Just about every demo machine was being used as if we were in some sort of high-end internet cafe. Pretty funny. I think I even saw someone writing a blog post.

Guess if you’re in a pinch and need on the ‘net, you can head to the Apple Store on Regent Street.

Scheduling with Tungle

Jordan — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 17:14:06 +0000

Off the back of a post on Tungle over at Lawyerist by Allison Shields I’ve been giving the service a try. One week in, and I’m liking it quite a bit. It’s a service to help you schedule meetings across several people and advertise your availability to others.

To me it’s a bit like a supercharged Doodle, which I’ve been using for awhile to help schedule meetings. The added advantage with Tungle is that if your schedule changes so too does your availability for meetings you’re trying to book, which is super handy when trying to book something with those late-to-reply people who end up having you hold multiple slots open for a meeting or make you rebook because you’ve already scheduled something else. Plus Tungle looks better.

The connector program for the Mac is in beta, and has stuck on me a few times but more or less runs smoothly. Currently it refers you to the Tungle website when scheduling, I’d like to see a way to schedule meetings directly on my machine. Syncing works pretty well with iCal back and forth.

Right now, there doesn’t appear to be a pricing model attached, so not sure what direction it will head, but this is a great idea, and well implemented.

You can find me at: http://tungle.me/jordanhatcher

Using Grab on your mac

Jordan — Wed, 20 May 2009 10:15:54 +0000

Your apple mac comes with a handy tool for doing screen grabs, funnily enough called Grab. It’s located in the “Utilities” folder within “Applications”.

Applications –> Utilities

If you use an application launcher such as LaunchBar (which is an awesome app that I highly recommend), you can just type “grab” and it will pop up. Otherwise click through all your folders in the Finder.

Grab is pretty self explanatory after that. You can do the whole screen or just a window.

Addendum: making symbols on mac

Jordan — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 13:03:56 +0000

As an addendum to yesterday’s post, I needed a reference to insert the copyright symbol (as you do) – wikiHow has a nice list of all the shortcuts on how to make the various symbols on a mac, such as “ALT and g”. ©.

Type foreign characters on your mac

Jordan — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 16:28:29 +0000

I had to add in a funny looking “e” for a contact today (the one with the accent but going the other way, “è”), and didn’t know how to insert the character easily. Apple lets you access the full character palette by going to the international preferences pane and selecting “character palette”. You then will get a little flag icon on the menu bar which has the palette option.

See the full tip at Apple.

iTunes hacking: 4 tips

Jordan — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 20:52:13 +0000

I’ve been on a drive to hack some common tasks that I do as part of my workday on the laptop. I listen to music and podcasts on iTunes quite a bit as part of my workday (mostly when doing filing, cleaning, or coding). I’ve mostly ignored doing much with iTunes to improve its fit with my life, but that has changed as of this week. So I bring you four tips to implement greater iTunes efficiency:

Music Only smart lists for shuffles etc – better random tunes from via 43 Folders

SRS iWow – for better sound out of your system.

Launch bar – not something that you do inside iTunes but rather a killer launch app (like Quicksilver or Butler) that lets you pause and play tunes from the keyboard as well as start specific playlists, albums, and songs.

Constant fresh songs on your iPhone/iPod – if you are anything like me you have more music and videos than will fit on your iPhone. Use the music smart list from above to create a random music list of songs not played in the last 14 days and limited to a certain file size (I set mine at 1 gig). Then sync that playlist with your iPhone.

GTD set up on the mac?

Jordan — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 18:12:47 +0000

Any suggestions – I’m working on tweaking my system and there are so many choices out there that it’s a bit overwhelming. I’m going to test out OmniFocus for the next week as so far it looks like a leader.

Any other recommendations? My Moleskine and Hipster PDA system needs expanding.

iPhoneJD

Jordan — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 12:29:44 +0000

Just discovered iPhoneJD for all the tips and tricks for you iPhone lawyers out there.

iPhoto and iPhone – annoying?

Jordan — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 10:16:27 +0000

I don’t actually plug my iPhone into my computer that often, but when I do iPhoto always pops up. I like using iPhoto to import photos from it, but don’t want it to auto load. But I do like it when iPhoto autostarts when I plug in my proper digital camera.

37 signals has a solution that involves AppleScript, but I’m wondering if there is a simpler solution? Some setting that I’m missing in my haste and annoyance?

Doodle polls for meetings

Jordan — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 10:13:10 +0000

Doodle allows you to easily organise a meeting by setting out some slots for people to select their availability. Stop sending rounds of emails to figure out who can make what and just schedule it already!