40Tech

Producteev, one of our favourite  — and one of the best — to-do apps, has released a massive upgrade that includes some long-awaited features and platform updates. The web and iPhone apps have gotten a makeover, the much clamoured-for Android app has finally arrived, and there is now a Windows 7 desktop app to balance out the Mac version. Even the logo has been updated (bye bye Tasky the beaver)!

To top it all off, Producteev has added a few new features into the mix — and yes (drumroll), that does include sub-tasks…

Back in August of last year, we wrote about Summify, a fantastic tool for getting to and sharing the highlights of your social streams and feeds. I’ve used this tool religiously for the past several months and have found it to be incredibly useful, especially with Twitter. Just last week, however, I received an email from the Vancouver-based start-up and discovered that they had become yet another in a long line of services to be snatched up and absorbed by a tech giant – in this case, Twitter. Great for them, but sad for you and me.

If you ever play around with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and don’t want to set up a testing environment, check out JSFiddle. JSFiddle is a web app that lets you input HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, hit a button, and see the results of your code.

I’ve recently started having issues with my WiFi network, such as dropouts and slowness. One of the first steps I’ve taken to address the problem is to try to determine if I’m getting interference from other networks. To see nearby networks, and what channels they’re using, I’ve found WiFi Stumbler to be valuable.

When I began college, I was determined to keep track of all my homework, papers, tests, and scheduled activities. A staple of college scheduling is the syllabus, which lays out the due dates and assigned readings and homework for each class. However, syllabuses are just pieces of paper. I realized that it would be a huge pain to look up daily, from four or five different sources, what the assignments were for that day. I wanted to look at a single source and grasp all the work I had to do for that day, and for that week. More importantly, I wanted to keep in mind upcoming tests and papers several weeks ahead of time, in order to prepare time to work on them.

With this predilection for planning, I looked to my built-in OS calendar, iCal. There were many advantages to using it. I didn’t have to boot up Chrome or worry about web browsing. I could organize by color, assigning one to events, one to assignments, and another to work. I actually put my entire class schedule, as well as ordinary things like “lunch,” into iCal. I put not only due dates, but little reminders when certain benchmarks should be met in prep for those due dates. It was my lifeline.

However, little problems grew to be big annoyances. 

So, Pinterest… It’s received a lot of coverage in the past year — it’s even received in the realm of 37 million in funding — but I had trouble seeing the appeal. I wasn’t sure the world needed another social bookmarking site. I wasn’t sure the world needed another way to share, well… anything. I admit, most of this feeling had nothing to do with Pinterest, per se, it was really more about social media overwhelm. I’ve seen a ton of social sharing services go up and down over the past few years, and, as much as I love Google+, I think it maxed me out. Besides, you can do things similar to Pinterest using tools like Evernote and Springpad, right? Right?

Then my lovely wife — a person who has no real interest in tech, barely any interest in social networking, and who only got a smartphone because it was free and I “was bugging her about it” — was somehow inspired to try it out. No prompting from me, or anyone else — she came to it entirely on her own. Now… she’s obsessed. Seriously. For example, I see her awake at 3AM and think that she’s feeding the baby, or something — but no. What’s she’s doing is maniacally pinning and re-pinning things to her boards, and often giggling like mad as she does it. There is apparently a lot of funny on Pinterest…

I stumbled across this completely by accident. I was looking at some very cool ideas for creating furniture from shipping pallets (my lovely wife’s new obsession), and I saw that one person had done a mock-up of what she wanted her living room to look like. Then I saw the little “Autodesk Homestyler” branding on the bottom of the image and gave an audible “Heyyyyyyyyyy!”

What followed wasn’t pretty. Picture me — or yourself, if you don’t happen to know what I look like — wandering about my house with a tape measure, measuring every wall, window, doorframe, article of furniture, you name it. I was approximating angles, imagining what changes I might like, and constantly running back to my laptop so I could re-create — and then improve upon — my living space. It was obsessive, it was zen-like, and it was surprisingly effective.

Did you know that, every 60 seconds on the internet, there are over 695,000 Facebook updates, 168 million emails (which, frankly, shakes the whole “email is dead” theory), 219,000 PayPal payments, over 12,000 new Craigslist ads, and about 2 million people watching porn? That’s every single minute, according to the pretty infographics put together by Go-Globe.com. There are also 925 iPhone 4S sales, 11 million IM conversations, 232 computers that got infected with malware, and some 38 tons of e-waste generated.

These are only a few of the highlights of the 40 items listed across the two infographics.

Sadly, we live during a time when the U.S. Congress has earned a much-deserved reputation for whoring itself out to the highest bidder. The latest committee hearings on SOPA heightened the average tech geek’s frustration with Congress, where a Congressional committee lined up several supporters of SOPA (the entertainment industry and the Chamber of Commerce, to name two of five), while only allowing the testimony of  a Google representative on the other side. Does money play a role in this? While it is impossible to get inside the head of a congressperson, the money trail can be pretty damning in some instances. How do you easily check the money trail? MapLight can help.

Mark this one down as not very useful, but pretty cool nonetheless. Wolfram Alpha, an online service that answers queries, now will tell you what planes are flying above you. Simply type “flights overhead” into the search box, and Wolfram Alpha will return a list of flights overhead, including the altitude, the angle from the horizon, the type of plane, and the distance away.