TiddlyWiki - Personal Wiki for all your information

So, you may be like me in that you have an overwhelming amount of information being kicked at you on a daily basis. Work stuff, emails, things you need to keep track of etc. If you've ever looked at WikiPedia and thought: Why can't I have that for my personal information, then this might just be the post you've been waiting for.

http://tiddlywiki.com/

Tiddly Wiki is just like WikiPedia but for all your personal information. Interlinking, notes, images, or as they refer to themselves 'A Non Linear Personal Notebook'. That about sums it up. The more you use it, the more useful it becomes. It's very much like evernote in that way. The big differences in my book between this and Evernote is that you aren't storing PDFs, images, or audio clips within this file. In fact, it's just a single web page. That makes it extremely portable, and flexible. the other difference is something called Transclusion. I think it's easiest to digest this way:

FEEDSPOT! My fountain of information

There's an age old saying out there about there being two kinds of people in the world: People who miss Google Reader, and those who never used it. I'd be in the former camp. Like many people last year, I was in search of a worthy replacement. Nothing, and I mean NOTHING did everything that Google Reader did, but Feedspot Gold comes pretty close (at least for my purposes).

For the un-initiated, I always described it as Tivo for your news. If you get online in the morning and hit CNN, BBC and ESPN etc you're either typing in those addresses, or hitting your bookmarks. Reader/Feedspot took the work out of all that and just monitored those sites for you, meaning you went to ONE place to get all your news. Yahtzee. This also had the further benefit of giving you a single place to be able to go and look back across all the things you'd read. It was also hooked into Gmail nicely, so you could share things etc. So if you have a memory like a sieve like I do, you could always find stuff.

ZyXEL 3 in 1 Travel Router

You're probably going to be saying to yourself: why in the WTH would I want this dinky little router? It can only handle like three connections at a time; dude. I don't get it!?!?!

Well, let me tell you something, this little wunderkind is worth keeping in your travel man-purse, a.k.a. laptop bag. It doesn't matter if you're a consultant, or a demo jockey like me...whatever. If you travel, even if you spend all your time in hotel rooms, this little baby is worth it's weight in gold. (and then some actually, because it's really very light and that's not a lot of gold). Anyhow, I digress. Imagine this scenario:

You get to the hotel, beat, exhausted after a long day and the hotel (classy people that they are) charge you ten-friggen-dollars for internet access! The NERVE, right? Many of those very same hotels have a tiny little ethernet cable right there on the desk, but I'll be darned if I'm going to sit over there at that desk and check my email (or the finishing touch on my Hobgoblin costume, or whatever) when I could be on the bed, watching TV as well like a champ. Bingo! Plug in this little bad-boy and problem solved. No 'ten-smackers' for wireless thank you, I brought my own. Boom. Have that happen twice and it's paid for itself

On the other hand, maybe you are like me, and you're required to be on site places...somewhat regularly. And the people who installed the three inch ethernet line did so in a way that puts it about 10 miles from the actual projector.Neat. I used to have to travel with like 50 extra feet of ethernet, just in case I ran into this issue. Not no more. Bust out the travel router, and BOOM. My laptop, phone, tablet etc already know the network and password. No problemo.

So there you go ladies and gents. You COULD take the risk, or you could just throw this guy into your bag (man-purse or otherwise) and be ready like a boy scout.

Done. Mic drop.

~Brian (a.k.a. the kludgy reviewer)

What's all this then?

If it's not daily, it's almost daily that I'm asked about my processes and the tools that I used to stay organized. I still haven't figured out why people want to know how I do what I do, because I don't think of myself as a tremendously organized person; nonetheless here is my blog addressing just that: Tools, Software and Gadgets that I can't live without. This will occasionally be supplemented by tools I find, or find useful. People close to me are no strangers to my many emails surrounding topics I think they would find fascinating.

So who am I anyway? And why would you care about the musings around what I find interesting? You probably don't. Anyhow, here's a description anyway:

I'm a former (Local) SEO specialist who developed a passion for finding tools and processes that would  help me to do all the things that I needed to do on a daily basis (and sometimes for others). I currently demonstrate software within the Higher Education space helping them to gain efficiencies. I have a passion for reading about the technological evolution we're bearing witness too such to the point where you might consider it a voracious appetite for blogs. 

There you have it; read the blog if you like, but nearly everything I use is kinda Kludgy. Hence the name.

~Brian (a.k.a. the Kludgy Reviewer)