Gareth Jones

I’ve recently changed my broadband provider and wondered how reliable they’d be. I figured I needed a way for my house to let me know whenever the connection had dropped and for how long for etc. Remembering my post a little while ago about
publishing to Twitter about local Bluetooth devices, I thought I could do something similar. So now I’ve written a little script (twitter-netcheck) that notices whenever my internet connection is dropped and then publishes to Twitter whenever it comes back. It also sends me a direct message so I get alerted by SMS or IM immediately. Quite handy I think - try it out for yourself

Andy Stanford-Clark recently got a few people together to talk about blogjects and tweetjects after getting his house to tweet about the various goings-on there. That inspired me to think about what I could do with Twitter and remembered a while ago I’d created a little script that polled for nearby Bluetooth devices and published them via MQTT. So as a good distraction from work I thought I might integrate this with Twitter and so we now have a little python script that lets my laptop publish details of any bluetooth devices it sees appear and disappear. So what’s the use of this then? Probably very little but it might be interesting to hook it up in my flat and see who goes in and out of there…

[Update]
I failed to find the time to set this up as a proper project somewhere but here’s the scripts in case anyone wanted to make use of the application:

• scanner.py
• twitooth.py

Ok, I’ve realised that I am being bothered so much that I can no longer be productive. By friends or colleagues? No, all my own doing unfortunately. Throughout the day I am constantly interrupted with important information such as a new work email, a new personal email, a new blog post, etc etc. The amount of things I had automatically checking and notifiying me was a bit large. Suddenly inspiration hits with a little help from Merlin Mann over at 43 Folders.

So last week I took the plunge. I turned off automatic mail checking in Lotus Notes for my work email, uninstalled my mail notifier for my personal mail and kept my feed readers closed (Liferea for internal feeds behind the firewall and Google Reader for everything else). I made sure all my RSS feeds were split up into categories so I could process them more efficiently (blogs in priorities 1 to 4 plus some extra feeds separately such as comments on this blog or on my Flickr photos, twitter updates of interest etc. I also customized some of my feeds such as Twitter using Feed Rinse. This allowed me to filter the feed so that I only show updates from particular people, and only those that are @replies to me etc - I really don’t need to make sure I miss every single tweet from everyone I follow!

So now with this new setup in place I’m trying to only check my mail and feeds once in the morning, once in the afternoon and maybe once before I leave the office. If I happen to be at the computer in the evening or weekend then I can check my personal stuff if I feel the need. I certainly feel more in control and I haven’t seen a problem with it yet - if anyone expects an immediate reply to an email, they should contact me by phone or instant message! We’ll see how this goes…

For anyone that’s interested, I highly recommend watching Merlin’s recent MacWorld presentation on ‘Attention Sinks & Time Burglars‘. I’d also recommend any of his other presentations, particularly Inbox Zero.