Posts from ‘email’
How To Find An Apartment Like a Geek
We currently live in an amazing apartment here in Vancouver. It’s probably one of the best in our neighborhood (not the one above) at a very reasonable price. People are shocked when I tell them how cheap it is to rent.
Here is a small part of our view from our vancouver webcam
It wasn’t luck that got us this place, it was our super geekyness… To find this place we used combination of craigslist, rss, feedburner and gmail.
How to find an apartment using RSS and email:
- Go to the city you want to live in on craigslist
- Find the apartment section
- Add your search criteria
- Grab the rss feed for that page
- Now pipe that feed into Feedburner
- Activate email subscriptions on that feed
- Subscribe to the feed via email
- Confirm subscription
Now you’ll receive a daily email of apartments that match your criteria only. Just set it and forget it. You’ll automatically get results in your inbox. It took us three months of going through these emails every day to find out current place. Of course we weren’t in a rush to move out either.
How to find an apartment using Twitter:
- Go to your the city you want to find on craigslist
- Find the apartment section
- Add your search criteria
- Grab the rss feed for that page
- Create a new twitter account
- Now pipe that feed into twitterfeed using the new twitter account
- Follow that new account with your old account
Good luck apartment hunting!!
[Photo by Proimos]
Here’s a little ‘pro tip’ for you:
Batching
If you’re not already, start task batching stuff you need to get done as much as possible. Do you empty your garbage each time you put a piece of trash in it? Do you do your laundry every time you toss a dirty item into it? Obviously not. It’s clearly a waste of time in these cases because of the time it takes to switch back and forth from task to task.
Saving Time
Think about this in terms of basic productivity. Are you reading and responding to emails and calls as they come in? Does it take away from the work you are doing at the time? You might want to start batching that stuff and then attack each batch with the agility of a ninja. Think about batching your errands, emails, calls, meetings, bills, etc etc.. It will save you time and will help you focus properly on what you actually want to be doing instead of being constantly disrupted by inbound stuff. If you’re not task batching you might as well be taking out the trash every time you get a new email.
This dovetails nicely with inbox zero, and GTD.
[Photo by laszlo-photo]
Just wanted to share this quick little iPhone tip with you guys. Normally when you send photos the iPhone resizes them and makes them small and crappy…
To send iPhone photos in their full resolution (highest quality) just do this:
- Launch the Photos application on your iPhone. Tap on Camera Roll.
- Tap on the “arrow” in the bottom left corner. Highlight images you want. Tap Copy.
- Exit Photos and launch Mail. Compose a new email. Click and hold in the body of the email, let go and tap Paste.
Voila you are now emailing full resolution iPhone photos from your phone…
Grab your Flickr upload email address for simple Flickr uploading.
