Did you ever know a person in school that was into the same kind of stuff you were into, but because that person was such an insufferable know-it-all, the stuff you had in common actually drove you apart? It’s like that with me and lifehacker.com. I should be a huge fan of the content (which is about cool useful tech stuff, as long as it’s about getting something else done, not just tech for tech’s sake), but there’s something about the tone over there that just drives me insane.

And so it goes for their year-end apps list. I would link to it, but so much of it is so good (the selections, I mean, not necessarily the writing), that I have to note some of it here.

1. Parallels. LH writes “THIS is the reason any on-the-fence switchers with cash for spendy Apple hardware and an affinity for that one Windows app will make the jump to a shiny new Mac.” She misspelled “available consumer credit”, but other than that, she’s got me pegged. I wouldn’t have even considered a Mac until Parallels came out. I don’t even use it that much (I run it on my XP box, actually, so that a very badly behaving networking app only takes down its virtual machine, instead of my whole system), but the fact that it’s there lets me explore Apple’s offerings with a safety net.
2. Google Reader. LH writes “My longtime love affair with Bloglines ended this year with a switch to Google’s new feed reader, and I’ve never looked back.” I look back kind of a lot, but I did ditch Bloglines for Google Reader. I don’t think you’d go wrong with either app: Bloglines offers single-use email addresses, has more “per-feed” options, but Google Reader seems to be up more often and has some more tools for tagging, sharing, etc.
3. Windows Vista. Ho boy. See what I’m saying?
4. Google Calendar. I am not a power calendar user. While I’m capturing more good stuff in my GTD system, and making better decisions about it all, I’m not honestly that busy. I find ways to fill the time, but very little has to be done at a certain time in my life. (At work, it’s a little different.) The point is that I can’t get myself involved in the calendar vs. calendar wars on the internet right now. Comments say that 30boxes integrates better with Flickr. Seriously? It’s a poorer calendar app if it doesn’t share photos? If you say so.
5. Hamachi. A free VPN solution that apparently works very nicely. I have been obsessing about VPN / SSH / tunneling for about a month now (I’m using WiFi at Caribou, and learning more about how you can leak plain text during a GMail / surfing session), so I’ll have to look into this. (But SSHing into a home server is working just fine for now.)
6. Campfire. If someone can sit down and explain Backpack, Basecamp, Tadalist, and Campfire to me, I’ll make them some brownies. The appeal of this stuff eludes me like owning a ferret. I am hoping there’s nothing very cool I’m missing out on, because “group chat in a browser with your coworkers” sounds like as much fun as catching your finger in a car door.
7. OpenDNS. I use this, but I am no longer sure why. It, uh, goes faster? It catches phishers (reactively, not proactively), but seriously. Maybe I was having nameserver problems with my ISP. Either way, it’s not a bad layer to throw between you and the real-deal internet.
8. Foxmarks. I can’t say either way. Bookmark syncing is a pretty hairy programming problem, but I think you’re better off throwing links into del.icio.us and hoping for the best. I just don’t sync anymore.

So yeah, overall - good list of apps that came out this year, and a couple I have to give a chance to.

I’m using Mozy at home now.  It waits until you’re not using your computer and starts sending changesets to Mozy servers.  It’s free if you sign up for their goofy newsletter, which I do, and since I understand how to use mail filtering, I wouldn’t have to bother.  Still, I occasionally do.  It’s not the worst newsletter.

If you want to go beyond a certain number of gigabytes (I can’t even begin to backup my photo collection in their limit, to say nothing of my music collection), it’s a flat fee per month, but it’s a good bailout plan for free.  There’s another application by someone else, and they let you back up 1 gigabyte for every 10 gigabytes you sacrifice to them, but there again, we’re talking about giving up a terabyte to just get my MP3s safe.  (And my iPod does a theoretically good job with the most important 60GB, anyway.)

Another consideration would be FolderShare, and just sync up folders on extra PCs.  I don’t have a lot of problems with FolderShare, and if a couple of machines were ONLY backing up files, and not actually doing anything with them, I think it’d work okay.  All of these choices are passive, and passive backup systems are much, much more likely to be used than ones where you have to push a button.

The whole point of GTD, for me, is that each project might have a bunch of actions, but only one is Next. My todo list should only have the things that don’t have prerequisites: the prerequisites should be on the list instead of the dependent action.

I don’t care very much for contexts… I have to make pretty agile decisions about what I’m working on, and sometimes that’s calling for an oil change from work, or doing a report from home. The overhead of having to ignore things I can’t get done from my physical location is minor compared to the overhead of maintaining contexts and thinking about how they all apply all the time.

I also have two PCs I use a lot, and the system (which is in the computer, of course,) should be reflected from one to the other.

The combination of pyGTD and FolderShare is actually meeting my needs quite nicely.  The idea is that you fill a “projects” folder with Fitness.txt, WeddingAnniversary.txt, Housework.txt, and each one is full of tasks:

* Clean the gutters.
1. Borrow a ladder.
2. Start scrapin’.

And a Python script (really!) churns through them, parsing everything out and giving you a reasonable to-do list.

Awesome story: I found this app through some dumb list on Listible, and having found a few bugs (and a note on the author’s website from a year ago, saying he’d update the documentation), I wrote him an email.  He real quickly said that he hadn’t used his script in a while, since it didn’t work on multiple PCs, but that my FolderShare solution sounded interesting.  So he might update it, and I might have helped him!

Either way, I have been doing my daily and weekly reviews, getting back in charge of the actual urgent things and the dumb someday-maybe stuff, and pretty happy about it.  This week was so busy, good lists were about my only salvation.

(Since the author doesn’t explain how he handles contexts, I’ll tell you in a little bit how I handle them.  It’s not hard, it’s just a little hacky.)