What tools can you use for planning a home office build?

Graph paper and pencil

I used this technique while planning furniture purchases for our rather small living room. You decide on a suitable scale, measure the room and then plot it on the paper: the walls, doors, any immovable objects and useful things like power outlets:

My living room plotted on graph paper

You can then cut out shapes that correspond to the dimensions of the furniture that you’re considering purchasing or building, and then see how it fits into the room.

While I really enjoy the “hands on” nature of working with pencil and paper, it doesn’t help you visualize your space in 3-D. With the more complex build I’ll need for my home office I’ll need something that lets me plan the space in three dimensions, which brings us neatly on to our next two tools.

Ikea Planner

If you’re planning on using Ikea office furniture (don’t mock — a couple of the great spaces I covered last week were constructed largely using Ikea furniture), then grab the Ikea Planner, a free (Windows-only) download. The tool enables you to plot out your room — including windows, doors, heating, electrical points etc. — in a 2D plan. You can then populate the room with Ikea furniture. Finally, switch to a 3D view to get a full visualization. You can even get a shopping list to print out and estimate the cost.

Ikea Planner

Ikea Planner is very easy to use, but it’s not flexible, and not very useful if you’re not using Ikea furniture.

Google Sketchup

Google Sketchup is a free, 3-D modeling package, available for Windows and Mac. Because it’s more complicated than paper or the Ikea Planner, there’s a learning curve to overcome, particularly if you haven’t used any 3-D modeling software before. However, as a full modeling package it’s much more flexible than either of the above options, and if you’re planning on building something complicated, it’s well worth the effort of getting to know it. There are plenty of training materials and a helpful community to get you going. You can even share the models that you create with others in a “3-D Warehouse”; there are lots of models available to use a starting point.

Google Sketchup

I think I’ll be using Google Sketchup to plan my build.

What tools did you use for planning your home office?

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Who

Knowing who to follow, and when to communicate with them can be instrumental in making your Twitter interactions more effective and meaningful. Effective management of these two things can massively increase the likelihood that you’ll generate professional opportunities with your tweeting.

To know who to follow, you can keep your eyes open during browsing, pilfer names from the lists of friends and colleagues you already follow, or you can have them delivered to you via Mr. Tweet’s convenient service. Mr. Tweet automatically generates lists of potential connections to take some of the hunting out of finding new Twitter contacts. All you have to do is follow @MrTweet, and he’ll provide you with a link to site where you can view a list of matches made based on your tweeting habits and profile. Mr. Tweet ranks Twitter users based on a number of criteria, and provides solid numerical ratings concerning their follow/followed ratio, how often they post, the degree to which they actually converse, and how often they post links.

When

Once you’ve established who to follow, you need to know when the best time is to contact them to guarantee meaningful communication. Even when cold calling, you could at least leave a message and/or talk to an assistant or someone else, but with Twitter, you can send a message and people won’t hesitate to never give it even the slightest acknowledgment. Some of this might be people ignoring you on purpose, but it might also be the timeliness of your communication.

Tweet O’Clock crunches the numbers for you so that you can quickly and easily find the time during which someone is most likely to respond to contact via Twitter. All you have to do is type in a user name, and it spits out the day of the week, and the time during that day when they are most likely to be monitoring and responding to tweets. It pegged mine pretty good (I tend to slack on Fridays).

How

This tool actually gives you a whole lot more “Who”, which enables you to make some educated guesses at “How”. It’s called Twinfluence, and it measures, as the name suggests, how influential any given Twitter user is. It does this by analyzing their connections, and their connections’ connections.

Of the tools I’ve covered here, this might be the most useful for convincing others of Twitter’s value as a business tool. With it, you can point to some solid numbers about your potential reach and connections. Even if the person you’re trying to convince doesn’t rate net contacts very highly, the sheer volume of people Twitter makes available to you should prove hard to ignore completely.

I won’t deny it, Twitter is a circus. A fledgling circus with too many acts and not enough ringmasters. But, with a little care, it can be put to productive use in a professional context. Hopefully these tools will help you figure that part out.

What tools do you use for measuring Twitter’s value?

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Here are some ways to get the most out of it, and what’s new.

As Simon noted in his weekend post on spring cleaning his Dell laptop,  it’s important to regularly clean up and optimize PCs running Windows. All versions of the operating system have a way of hogging more system resources and doing things you didn’t ask for over time. Startup Delayer aims squarely at the long-standing problem of how long it takes to boot a Windows PC.

If you’ve used Windows for some time, you’re probably already familiar with removing stray applications that make their way into your list of startup processes. (I use Glary Utilities, a piece of freeware that Simon mentioned, to do this when I want to completely remove applications.) Adobe and many other software vendors are notorious about sneaking their applications into the list uninvited.

Startup Delayer provides flexibility on this front, though. It allows you to still have particular applications load when you start your computer, but you can set delays for when you want particular ones to load. I described the easy process for doing so here.  You basically just drag lines representing your startup applications to the left and to the right in a horizontal white space to set the load times.  It’s very easy.

After using Startup Delayer for months, I’ve set my instant messaging application (this makes the biggest difference), a pop-up calendar that I use, and a photo application I use every day to load some 6-10 minutes after bootup. They’re nicely spaced out too, so when they do load, they’re not crashing into each other.

That’s the primary problem that Startup Delayer solves: When you boot a Windows PC, if you have multiple applications loading automatically, they crash into each other and you end up staring at the hourglass, frustrated. I don’t need my instant messenger as soon as I start my system, but I want e-mail and the web quickly.

There are several bug fixes in the new version of Startup Delayer, and there also is an uninstall routine in place now that will take you back to the list of startup processes you had specified before using the application. If you’ve ever held your head in your hands while waiting for your applications to become available, give Startup Delayer a try.

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Keen not to be left behind by Apple’s increasing repertoire of multi-touch interface control gestures, Microsoft recently previewed a new technology called “SideSight.” SideSight is not just Redmond’s version of Apple’s tech, though. In fact, Microsoft’s new offering is not touch tech at all. More like proximity tech.

Gearlog provides an overview of SideSight, based on a paper presented by Microsoft U.K. at the User Interface Software and Technology conference. The paper describes the new input tech in the context of touchscreen interaction, which it claims is unsuitable for small devices which, naturally, have smaller screens. It’s a good point. Even on the iPhone, my meaty digits occasionally obscure some important piece of information.

How does SideSight, ahem, sidestep the problem? By allowing users to interact not only with the device directly, but also with the surrounding space. Using outward facing optical sensors lining the device, movements made by a user on a surface beneath or in the air around it are detected and translated into control actions. Gearlog provided these examples of how this might work in practice:

Pages could be panned and scrolled by moving a hand up and down, and Microsoft also proved that text could be entered and edited on the main screen through a stylus while the other hand scrolled the page — a movement that would be akin to the motions a user’s hands would make if he or she were writing on a sheet of paper.

So should Apple be wary of Microsoft’s latest foray into hand-waving? A lot will depend on third-party support, and integration with Redmond’s own future products. While cell phones are clearly a target market for the tech, the report also cites PMPs and watches as candidates. While I can see the appeal of SideSight in things like eBook readers, I have a hard time picturing a lot of consumer interest in watches with gesture control. What do you need to do with your watch that would require you to flail your hands around like a magician about to pull a rabbit out of a hat? And does Apple even care about those markets? Probably not, since Steve Jobs doesn’t even seem interested in the netbook market, which is much closer to their core business.

That still leaves the possibility of home computing, especially when tech like Surface moves downstream into consumer markets, and with software support on the OS side with Windows 7 and upcoming versions of Windows Mobile. Which means a lot of orchestrating needs to happen between now and then, and as it stands, it’s still not clear how intuitive SideSight is or has the potential to be. Multi-touch works because people don’t have to think about learning it. Mastering a complex series of gestures performed in mid-air is a different story.

In the end, as with most of Microsoft’s innovations, the payoff won’t come until long after the announcement. Even then, it will probably be disappointing. Therein lies the major difference between the two companies’ innovation policies. Apple keeps things hush-hush and then wows you with little warning (though we try to spoil the surprise) while Microsoft tips its hand and under delivers. In its infancy, SideSight is a fairly interesting interface technology, and worth talking about, but just think of all the babies Apple isn’t showing off.

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And tonight might be Planet Earth’s last hurrah, that is if anything goes wrong with the launch of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. But what’s the purpose of the particle accelerator? Large Hadron Rap explains it all — and offers some small comfort that maybe the world will hold together, just a little longer. Why is that? Sign up for a free trial.

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Embedded below is the premiere episode of the show, along with a video of our interview, which covered topics like these:

- Blah Girls will come out twice a week, most likely Monday and Thursday on BlahGirls.com, Yahoo, YouTube, and other partners
- Kutcher has never seen Arrested Development (he likes lower-brow humor)
- The challenge of making an animated (in other words, slow to produce) show about the fast-paced world of celebrity news
- What Kutcher watches online: Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog (though he didn’t quite get the name right), Funny or Die, YouTube, fantasy football stuff
- Kutcher’s impressions of paparazzi journalism and fair use

For me, the first episode didn’t kill, but at least it’s got a sense of humor. Besides, I absolutely love Arrested Development, though I have followed Beauty and the Geek too. Kutcher, of course, has an audience of his own, and said he’ll be promoting the site to his hundreds of thousands of MySpace friends…so that’s a start.

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The two organizations have a bit of a history, and have had failed discussions about the merger before.

From August 2005 to June 2006, NLR expended significant energy, time, and financial resources in merger discussions with Internet2 (an NLR founding equity member), until the Internet2 Board chair called off negotiations. In October 2006 NLR and Internet2 signed a Cessation Agreement severing Internet2’s membership responsibilities in NLR. (From NLR annual report.)

Better late than never. The timing of the merger is perfect. Internet2′s new network with 100 Gbps capacity is going to be completed this spring. NLR which owns its own infrastructure has its entire 11,700-mile nationwide backbone fully operational.

In an email to their respective communities, Tracy Futhey, and Jeffrey Lehman, Chairs of National LambdaRail and Internet2 respectively wrote:

Both Internet2 and NLR provide advanced networking capabilities critical to the U.S.research and education community. We believe bringing these two organizations together will enhance those capabilities needed today, and provide a solid foundation for providing capabilities required in the future.

The decision to do so was taken this weekend, and by April 20, 2007, a definitive plan for the merger is going to be presented to the boards of the two organizations. They want to complete the merger by June 29, 2007. They plan to hire a new CEO for the combined venture.

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Despite its obvious problems, the news business is getting back to its roots and is getting social again. Mashable points to a story from Terry Heaton’s PoMo blog that talks about MySpace launching a social news site, based (I am guessing) on Newroo, a company they acquired in April 2006. The preview of Newroo had features that are showing up in the MySpace News offering that is scheduled to go live sometime in the second quarter of 2007.

Given the heavy emphasis on the “hook-ups” on MySpace, I am not sure how much of this new service is going to find traction (okay sports and gossip news might work, but then who the hell knows what works on MySpace), but it does add up to an interesting trend. Last week we saw USA Today launch a very social news experience, though the initial reaction of their users skewed negative. Perhaps they overshot, and instead should have focused on a few things first: letting the readership patterns auto-generate a front page and fostering conversations – just like those grizzly old men, discussing politics.

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