Business Hacks

A cup of coffee (or two) is an essential part of my morning routine. Besides keeping me awake, caffeine also does lots of other wonderful things: improve short-term memory; reduce post-workout soreness; and even make those morning meetings feel remarkably shorter [PDF].

In order to avoid drinking crappy coffee from work, a lot of people (including yours truly) buy a to-go cup as part of their morning routine. But besides for the incredible cumulative cost—check out this chart for the depressing details—a store-bought cup only gets me to about 10 am before I need another kick. (That also holds true when I bring a cup in a travel mug from home.)

There is a way to have multiple cups of great coffee every day without breaking the bank. Get a double-shot French press mug ($27 from Amazon) that allows you to brew a cup of your favorite Joe on the go, and has an airtight storage container attached to the bottom that holds enough grounds for two more cups later in the day. All you need is access to hot water. (For the sporty set, there's a similar REI version that's a couple bucks cheaper.) Both presses also work well for picky tea drinkers who eschew pre-packaged bags of their caffeine of choice.

One of the biggest headaches about Microsoft's new Vista OS is that the several different versions (among them: Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, Ultimate, and Enterprise) have such variable features. For example, the BitLocker Drive Encryption feature that's so perfect for protecting sensitive files on your work PC (or, indeed, all of your data and software) doesn't come with the Business Edition that many companies will use. But even if you can't use BitLocker on your new Vista system (or, indeed, your it-aint-broke-so-don’t-fix-it XP system), there are tricks that enable you to take advantage of some of its coolest features.

My favorite of these turns a specific USB device into a key that must be plugged in to allow your OS to boot up. (Hackszine has the intricate details.) Think of it like a car key for your computer, and a thumb drive is certainly portable enough to be carried in much the same way. (As it happens, a concept Mazda already needs a USB drive to start, as you can see in this CNET video.) There are a few software downloads that allow you to do this for your current system, with our without the proper Vista upgrade. The one that has gotten the best reviews is Double Password, which creates an encrypted file on a flash drive of your choosing. (You can download it here for $30.) Just remember to make a spare key—You don’t want to get locked out!

One of the biggest bummers of traveling with a laptop is trying to use the built-in trackpad and nub to navigate. Apart from my general difficulty dealing with the cramped design, I always end up inadvertently hitting the pad with my thumb while typing, thus moving the cursor to elsewhere in the document. To solve the problem, I used to travel with a USB mouse, but I ended up not using it often because it was too bulky.

A smart solution has arrived. The MoGo Mouse is a wireless Bluetooth device that folds up to fit (and recharge) in a spare PC card slot in your laptop. A review of the mouse over at Cool Tools found that it was very easy to use. Have a MacBook Pro instead of a PC? MoGo has designed a mouse (available in June) to fit into your ExpressCard slot. Don't have Bluetooth on you machine? MoGo's developed a tiny adapter to plug into your USB port (available in June as well). Too bad the FAA still doesn't allow Bluetooth use on planes—this little mouse would be perfect for the cramped confines of a coach-class tray table. 

After PC Magazine columnist John Dvorak wrote a screed about the evils of using AutoReply, the folks over at LifeHacker set up a poll asking readers whether they used the feature when they were away on vacation or otherwise unable to answer email. Surprisingly, over a third claimed that they don't set up an AutoReply because they worry about continuously replying to spammers and mailing-lists. For businessfolk, however, this is seldom an option. Customers and colleagues  need to know why you won't be getting back to them quickly, and if they don't hear from you at all they're likely assume that your're either A) rude, or b) disinterested.  Both outcomes would be bad.

Obviously, setting up an out-of-office AutoReply depends on your email interface. Those of us who manage our mail using Microsoft Outlook can add rules to specifically exclude sending replies to  mailing lists. (You can see the how-to details on this Ask Metafilter page.) If you use Mozilla's Thunderbird, it is also possible to set up an AutoReply, but it's more complicated (Mozillazine).

Besides, for the AutoReply feature to work for either of those programs, (I believe) they must be left open while you're away. That's not always an option. Instead, you should take a look at the features of your email system to see what features are available to protect yourself from AutoReply embarrassment. 

If you don't want to navigate the settings on your email system, a quick fix is to get a Gmail account and set up your email to forward there. Then, you can use the Vacation Responder in the Settings section to send back a message of your choice to incoming messages. Gmail only sends back Out-of-Office replies once every four days to incoming senders, no matter how many messages they send you. If you'd like to make sure that only people who you know get your away message, import your contacts into Gmail—it's easy to do— then click the box in the Vacation Responder that says (duh) "Only send a response to people in my Contacts." None of that protects you from other people's less-savvy (and annoying) AutoReplies, but at least you're not the jerk.

If you don't have access to a top-of-the-line scale and postage meter, sending snail-mail  can be a real drag. (True confessions: I recently had an important package returned because I'd guessed the weight and underpaid the postage. The resulting fallout made me wish that SNL's Jiffy Express were a real company.)

Using an all-in-one service like the one offered by stamps.com is tempting, because it includes a free scale and allows you to print postage directly off the internet. But the privilege costs an extra $16 a month. A cheaper-in-the-long run alternative is simply buying a digital scale like the DigiWeigh DW-36XP ($30 from Amazon) to weigh your packages (up to 36 pounds). Then just apply your own stamps based on the ever-changing prices of the USPS. If you really get into it, you can have Zazzle send you custom stamps bearing your company's logo for a small markup. For packages, the postal service also allows you to print priority and express mail shipping labels. It certainly beats waiting in line at the post office.

The idea of Farecast.com used to work much better for me than the actual site. For the uninitiated, Farecast serves up the current lowest prices for specific flights and a prediction (complete with a percent confidence rating) about whether the current price will rise or fall in the future. (It also gives a lengthy list of historical prices, the purpose of which, it seems, is to mock you for not making plans earlier.) At any rate, Farecast is a great innovation, and it's the next step up in utility from fare aggregating websites as Sidestep.com.

But Farecast is terrifying to use. First off, according to the Seattle Times, its predictions are only 61% accurate. And when it does tell you to wait for fares to drop, the resulting stress can be incredible, especially if you're in a major time crunch. For example, I was planning to fly out to Raleigh-Durham from San Francisco right before the Christmas holidays. Since I procrastinated until the week before, the prices for a round-trip ticket were almost a grand, and I was desperately hoping to pay much less. So I was thrilled when Farecast told me to hold off. The next day, prices had jumped up another $200, and the day after that, they were up again, though Farecast kept telling me to wait. I chickened out and ponied up the dough well before the price ever got close to the original one I saw, much less below it. As it turns out, the prices dropped steadily in the two days before my flight, and I could have picked up a ticket at the last second for almost $300 less than I paid. So thanks to Farecast, I felt like both a chump for paying and a weenie for not waiting.

Luckily, Farecast has devised a way for me to hedge my bets, called Fare Guard. For about $10, I can protect the original fare if Farecast predicts it will stay the same or drop. That means that they'll pay the difference if I end up buying a more expensive ticket later in the week. While a few people (including AOL's Rocky Agrawal) have noted that Fare Guard has many of the features of (generally useless) extended warranties, I've found that it definitely a needed stress-reliever when I'm buying high-priced tickets.

Even in hi-tech San Francisco, I spend roughly 2-3 hours of my work week without high speed internet access. (My provider, Comcast, has consistently crappy service, as evidenced by its recent third-to-last-place performance in a Harris Interactive poll of the reputations of major U.S. corporations, as described in the WSJ. On the bright side, Comcast did beat Halliburton, so I've got that going for me.)

Generally, I spend my time in forced offline purgatory doing things like berating the Comcast customer support person and trying to mooch limited connectivity from nearby wifi networks.

Until technology advances such that webpages, webmail and internal servers can be accessed offline—The Dojo Offline Toolkit will make this a possibility soon, says eWEEK—this frustration will continue. But there are plenty of productive things you can do on your computer even if you can't IM with colleagues or research a project on the web. You could, for example, try out some of these offline productivity ideas from Cleverclogs and Speaking Freely. My favorite tip from the latter site recommends deleting programs you don't use in order to speed up system scans, and, perhaps, your computer in general.

One of the more frustrating things about collaborating with colleagues and customers on projects is that they often use different editing software than you do. This, in turn, can cause the documents, images, and presentations you're dealing with to get garbled in translation. Just because your client refuses to pony up for Microsoft Office, though, doesn't mean that you're doomed to spend time erasing the weird little symbols that show up in all the forms he sends you. There are several free sites and software programs that tackle this exact problem.

As the guys at the Lifehacker blog noted late last year, there are two websites that convert sound, text, image, and video files up to 100MB to other formats quickly and without too much trouble. (Think .jpg to .gif for an image file or .pdf to .rtf for a text file.) Zamzar has the cleanest and easiest look, and saves you the trouble of inputting the type of file you are converting from. Plus, the resulting file is downloaded from a url you can simply send to the person you're working with. If you need more formats to choose from (but care less about the aesthetics of the site), check out media-convert, which works just as well for me, plus it has few more bells and whistles (like quickly turning a whole webpage into an image file).

Do you have a file you created on your desktop machine at work, which you want want to access later from your computer or at home, but which is too big to email to yourself? There's plenty of .zip and FTP software available, but many of them are complicated and/or require specific programs that the remote computer may not have installed. There also are a few file-swapping sites—like yousendit.com, senduit.com, and mediafire.com—that are simple and work perfectly well for uploading small files (ie around 1MB or less). But for far larger files, they can be painfully slow. (Dowload speeds were around 1MB/minute on my laptop. Zzzzzzzzzzz.)

The fastest solution I've found is DesktopTwo, which as the name implies, is meant to be more than just a file sharing application. (In fact, according to this Business 2.0 article, it's mainly used as a personal computing environment by Latin Americans who don't own their own computers.) But it works remarkably well as a file-sharer—my 20MB file was uploaded in less than 5 minutes, and downloaded to my home PC in less than 30 seconds. There are a few minor drawbacks—there's required registration and Firefox users will have to enable popups to see DesktopTwo—but it's a great way to store and access up to a gig of data on any computer.

If you are planning to upgrade to Windows Vista, there's a lot to know about your new Operating System. Over the coming weeks, we'll have lots more info for you about how to take advantage of some of the cool features (and get rid of some of the annoying bugs) of Vista. But for now, here's one cool tip you can make to really boost your Vista-powered computer's performance.

Vista takes advantage of a new technology called ReadyBoost that allows your computer to use outside devices like USB flash drives to speed up loading times for start up and other applications. The extra flash drive acts as a memory cache that's much easier for the computer to access than data on the hard drive. (Think of it as a cheap way to add more RAM to your PC.) People have found that ReadyBoost can make applications load up to ten times faster—here's a Google video of its effect on one PC. 

It's a neat trick, but like most of Vista's advances, it requires certain tech specs that aren't really obvious. Some new flash drives work and some don't, and in order to find out if yours does, you have to let Vista sniff it out. Or, you could simply spend $45 for a  Vista-ready flash drive like the 2 gigabyte Apacer HT203 USB 2.0 Flash Drive from supermediastore.com. ZDNET's Ed Bott checked out a ton of different flash drives and found that this one had the highest read and write speed — which likely means it's the best at speeding up your PC.