That’s right, I’m going Twitter-free for a week. I don’t really use Facebook, so that’s not a problem. The only other social networking website I use is FriendFeed, so I’m cutting that out too. To keep me on track this week, here’s what I did:

• Tweeted that I was doing the digital cleanse and changed my Bio line to mention that I was doing the digital cleanse.
• Removed all Twitter apps from my mobile phone.
• Removed the Twitter and FriendFeed shortcuts from Chrome’s new tab page.
• Hard-coded a bunch of websites so that I can’t even access them. In Linux, you can type “sudo vi /etc/hosts” and add the following lines:
  
127.0.0.1 twitter.com
127.0.0.1 www.twitter.com
127.0.0.1 facebook.com
127.0.0.1 www.facebook.com
127.0.0.1 friendfeed.com
127.0.0.1 www.friendfeed.com


  What these lines say is “Computer, when you try to use the domain name system (DNS) to resolve twitter.com to an IP address, hard-code the IP address to be 127.0.0.1.” Note that 127.0.0.1 is a special IP address that corresponds to your own computer. In essence, these entries make it impossible to browse to Twitter, Facebook, or FriendFeed. You might need to reboot your computer too for the settings to take effect.

I’m thinking that I might blog a little more now that I’ve stopped tweeting for a week, so I’m doing one extra step–I’m linking my blog in Feedburner so that when I publish a blog post, it will tweet a link to that blog post. Here’s how to do it:
1. Log in to http://feedburner.google.com/ and click on your blog’s feed.
2. Click on the “Publicize” tab and then the “Socialize” service on the left.
3. Add your Twitter account and select the options you want. Here’s how it looks:

Then click “Save” and that’s all you need to do.

So far, I’ve been Twitter-free for twelve hours. In that time, I’ve
- worked out
- taken down our Christmas tree, chopped it into sections and put it out on the street
- typed in three months’ worth of data for a project that I’m working on
- taken down our Christmas lights and packed them away
- stored all our various Christmas decorations
- run a couple loads of laundry
- put out the trash
- gone shopping and had a couple meals with my wife
Oh, and written a blog post. We’ll see how the digital cleanse works for the rest of the week.

Step 1. Buy a productivity book.

Any productivity book will do. I use a book called “The Now Habit.” It doesn’t matter what book you order though, because you probably won’t read it. You can use any random “increase your productivity” book.

Step 2. Look at the productivity book and tell yourself, “If I don’t get X done, I’m going to have to read that productivity book.”

That’s it. As far as I can discern, staring at the cover of a productivity book gives you almost as much of a motivational boost as actually reading the book. And if staring at the cover doesn’t work, then tell yourself the punishment for not getting your work done is that you’ll have to read that dang productivity book. Pretty soon you’ll be off and working. Enjoy.

“But Matt,” you say, “my inbox is my to-do list!” I know, me too. So here’s how to do it without losing that to-do list. Add a label like “oldinbox” to everything currently in your inbox and then archive all the email in your inbox. Presto! Your inbox is clean and empty, but you can still visit the “oldinbox” label when you’re ready to whittle down those older emails. I know it sounds scary, but there’s only two simple steps, and both can be undone.

Step 1: Add a label to all the email in your inbox. Click on “Inbox” at the top left of your Gmail. Then look for “Select: All” and click on the “All” link. If your inbox is bigger than one screenful, you’ll see a message like “All 25 conversations on this page are selected. Select all 666 conversations in Inbox.” Click on the second sentence of that message to select everything in your inbox. Now click on the “More Actions” button and select “New label…” . You’ll be prompted for a label name, so enter something like oldinbox as the label name and click OK. Gmail will ask if you’re sure you want to apply this label to all the selected emails, so say yes by clicking that OK button. Congrats! Everything in your inbox now has the label “oldinbox”. Now we just need to archive every email with that label.

Step 2: Archive all your email with that label. Look for the “Labels” box on the left-hand side of the screen, and click on “oldinbox” (or whatever label name you gave). Click Select: All. Do the trick to select all conversations if you need to. Then just click the “Archive” button. That’s it. Your inbox is now empty, but you can get to those older emails if you need to by clicking “oldinbox” in the Labels box.

Can you undo these changes? Yes!

Putting the email back in your inbox. If moving things out of your inbox is too stressful, you can move them back into your inbox. Click on the “oldinbox” label (which you can find in the Labels box on the left-hand side of the screen). Select all of the emails with that label. Then click “More Actions” and click “Move to inbox.” In a jiffy, all that old email is back in your inbox.

Removing the “oldinbox” label. Under the “Labels” box on the left-hand side of the screen, click “Edit labels” and then you’ll see a “remove” option for each label. Note: do not remove the “oldinbox” label if you’re still using it to keep track of your old inbox.

Try this trick to start out the new year with an empty inbox. It’s also great if you want to declare email bankruptcy, but think that you might find the time to get back to those old emails as some point. Try this trick, and you’ll feel like you’ve got a fresh new chance at keeping your inbox at zero.

Ah, turkey-based sauce over spaghetti or pasta. Why couldn’t they just say that?

Tip #2. Comparison shop. A few days ago I was in a college bookstore that wanted to charge $178.60 for a copy of Mathematical Physics, by Eugene Butkov. $178.60? For a used, paperback book? Grrr. I took a picture of the UPC code and/or ISBN number:

You can search for an ISBN or UPC code (e.g. [9780201007275] ) on Google or other search engines and usually find out a product pretty quickly. I found a copy for $115.34 at Amazon, plus eBay had a hardcover copy with a current bid of $23.20. For a college student, $60 to $150 is a lot of savings.

Tip #3. Make a note to remember later. You’re at IKEA or Petco or someplace where you need to remember a part number or the aisle/bin to pick up some IKEA furniture. Do you need to write the info down with a pen and paper? No! Just whip out your phone and take a picture of the label or part number:

In this case, my cat Ozzie loves the “long boa” cat toy, but two different Petco stores were both sold out. Taking a picture let me order the exact right product from Petco later online.

Tip #4. Archive a brainstorming meeting. If you end up brainstorming on a white board, it’s nice if someone is taking notes. But just to be safe, you can snap pictures of the whiteboard before you leave the room:

Now you can refer back to the notes you made.

Tip #5. Keep a food diary. Some blogs have a direct “email-to-post” address that you can add as a contact in your phone. When you eat interesting food, take a picture of it and email it to that address:

Sometimes it’s fun to remember the more memorable meals you’ve eaten.

Are there smartphone tips you’d like to share? Leave a comment..

Reducing Junk Mail

There are several services that will help you reduce your junk mail:

- GreenDimes offers a free basic service, but I decided to do their $20 one-time fee because it offered a few extra things I wanted. GreenDimes walks you through some easy steps that will reduce unsolicited mail, and also lets you decline catalogs. Each time you receive an unwanted catalog, you go to GreenDimes and type the name of the catalog in. GreenDimes takes care of removing you from that catalog’s mailing list. I’ve been quite happy with this service, especially since it’s a one-time fee.

- ProQuo is a free junk-mail reduction service. In the future, they intend to make money when consumers opt-in to request offers; ProQuo will make money from those advertisers. I tried this service today. It lets you stop many services with just a couple mouse clicks per service, but for about 50% of the marketers (maybe 10-15 of them) you have to print and send a letter or leave to an external website to complete a form. It’s still better than nothing though, because even if you’re lazy you can opt out of a lot of junk mail with just your mouse for free. Overall, the service is free, easy, and helps you opt out of a wide variety of lists.

- Catalog Choice is a site solely for opting out of catalogs. It doesn’t tackle things like credit card offers, PennySaver, or list brokers, but the site is clean with a really nice user interface. One of the founders, Daniel Katz, has been interviewed by Bill Moyers, so I trust that they’re a legit organization, even though their WHOIS information is private and there’s very little information about the group on their site. It sounds like three different environmental groups formed Catalog Choice as a non-profit. One piece of advice for Catalog Choice: please give a little more information about yourselves (e.g. history, founders, press) so that people can easily see that you’re legitimate.

- 41pounds.org charges $41 for five years of service. The name comes from the fact that they claim to block 41 pounds of junk mail per year for you. I haven’t tried this service.

Contacting services directly

- You can visit the webpage of the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) to opt-out online so that you don’t receive mail from companies that use DMA lists. The pretty url http://www.dmaconsumers.org/cgi/offmailinglist takes you to the url https://www.dmachoice.org/MPS/proto1.php where you want to select option #3 (“Remove your name from DMA Member Prospect Lists”). You will have to provide a valid credit card number, but your credit card will not be charged.

- You can opt out of ADVO online.

Other options

- While you’re at it, why not place yourself on the “Do not call” list at www.donotcall.gov to prevent most telemarketers from calling you? All you need to give is your phone number and an email address, and you will be permanently opted out. Read more about the do-not-call list if you’re interested.

All these actions won’t eliminate junk mail completely, but it will prevent a lot of the junk from showing up in your mailbox. These aren’t affiliate links, just stuff that I think people will find handy. Good luck!

Credit check options

- If you haven’t checked your credit in the last year, visit the official site that lets you get a free credit report from each of the three major credit bureaus. The site is annualcreditreport.com and you’ll have to be on the lookout for upsells like “Find out your credit score for $5.95″ or “Sign up for a credit monitoring service.” But this option is a safe and free way to get access to your credit report from Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax.

- Suppose you don’t want credit card companies sending you offers by snail mail. After all, a thief could steal the offer from your mailbox and use it to open a credit card in your name. Again, there’s a free, official service from the three major credit bureaus to stop getting “free credit cards” offer by postal mail. The site is www.optoutprescreen.com. You can opt-out online for five years, or print out and mail a piece of paper to do a permanent opt-out.

- If you had any type of open credit account between 1987 and May 28, 2008 (which is probably most adults in the United States), you can receive nine months of free credit monitoring. TransUnion, one of the big three credit unions, is settling a class action lawsuit and provides this monitoring for free if you sign up before September 24, 2008. The official site is www.listclassaction.com and you can choose from several options. I chose the nine month credit monitoring service.

If you think you might have been a victim of identity theft or are at higher risk for identity theft (e.g. someone stole a laptop that might have had personal information on it), you have a couple options. A fraud alert requests that before a new lender opens up an account, they take extra steps to verify your identity like calling you on the phone. It should be free if you call the credit bureaus, but it only lasts for 90 days, so you would need to renew the fraud alert every three months.

Meanwhile, a credit freeze is just what it sounds like. It freezes your credit record completely, so that identity thieves should not be able to open new credit accounts in your name. A credit freeze costs $10 per credit bureau each time you want to freeze or un-freeze your credit record.

I used the first three websites earlier to get my free credit report, opt out of getting more credit card offers, and sign up to for a credit monitoring service. Again, all of these are free or official sites; I don’t get any money for recommending them.

Other options

If you’re feeling ambitious, you can also get a public records report on yourself to see what turns up. I believe you can get this report free once a year as well from ChoicePoint. You can get more information here but I believe the short answer is that you need to print, fill out, and mail this one-page form (PDF link). You need to include a photocopy of your driver’s license or other ID and a copy of a utility/phone/credit card bill — see the instructions for the form (PDF link) for more info.

Do you know of other ways to protect yourself from identity theft or otherwise monitor your credit record or score?

Hat tip to Java Jane.

1. Get one. I got mine for about a buck at Office Depot. It looks like this:



2. Write the date on the outside of the notebook. If you start using notebooks a lot, you’ll find it very handy to be able to sort notebooks by time.
3. Clear out your brain. When you think of a task for work or a book that you want to buy, just write it down. This lets you concentrate on important things instead of remembering small items.
4. Avoid the temptation to write on both sides of the page: just write on one side. You’ll see why in a minute.
5. Keep each separate subject on a separate page. One page could be things to get done at work that day. Another page could be a meeting agenda. Another page could be books you want to read, or movies you want to see. Yet another could be things you want to blog about. But don’t mix the meeting agenda with your blogging to-do list. You’ll see why in a minute.
6. When you’re finished with a page, yank out that page. Crumple it up and throw it away. Maybe you’re back from the grocery store and everything is crossed off your grocery list page. Try to finish out the notebook with almost all your pages ripped out.
7. You want the notebook to be empty or nearly empty when you run out of blank paper. It’s very satisfying to yank a page out of the notebook when you’re done with a task. You want the page to pull away cleanly, so look for a notebook that is perfect bound. That is, the spine of the notebook is square and the pages are held in place with glue. I’ve found the “Square Deal” memo pads from Mead to be just right for me.
8. A bonus tip: if you’re about to head to a big event like a conference and think you might take a lot of notes, feedback, or details, then start with a fresh notebook.

The observation here is pretty simple: the notepad is not your entire filing system. That notebook is just your short-term working memory. Ideally anything that you jot down in the notebook (e.g. movies to see) can eventually go onto a longer-term list, such as your Netflix queue for movies.

If you want to get advanced, you can store some small amount of info in the inside cover of the notebook. For example, there’s a cafe that I like with free WiFi. Their WEP password is their phone number. So I keep that WEP password on the inside cover of my notebook. Arguably things like passwords could go in your head or laptop or phone though. I really only use my “hipster PDA” to remember things until I can move them over into a better place or take care of them quickly.

Step 0: Why getmail?

If you browse around on the web, you’ll find several options to help you download and backup your email. Here are a few:

• If you use Windows, you can back up your email using Thunderbird or you can use Outlook to backup your email.
• If you run Mac OS X (Leopard), you can back up your Gmail using Apple Mail. For the rest of this post, I’ll assume you’re running a flavor of Linux such as Ubuntu.
• If you need a ton of flexible power or run your own mail server, fetchmail could be a good choice.
• If you want something really fast, retchmail might fit your needs.
• If you want a nice mix of simple configuration and flexibility, I really recommend a Python program called getmail. That’s what we’ll be using in this post.

Step 1: Install getmail

On Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon), you would type

sudo apt-get install getmail4

at a terminal window. Hey, that wasn’t so bad, right? If you use a different flavor of Linux, you can download getmail and install it with a few commands like this:

cd /tmp
[Note: wget the tarball download link found at http://pyropus.ca/software/getmail/#download ]
tar xzvf getmail*.tar.gz
cd (the directory that was created)
sudo python setup.py install

Step 2: Configure Gmail and getmail

First, turn on POP in your Gmail account. Because you want a copy of all your mail, I recommend that you choose the “Enable POP for all mail” option. On the “When messages are accessed with POP” option, I would choose “Keep Gmail’s copy in the Inbox” so that Gmail still keeps your email after you back up your email.

For this example, let’s assume that your username is bob@gmail.com and your password is bobpassword. Let’s also assume that you want to back up your email into a directory called gmail-archive and that your home directory is located at /home/bob/.

I have to describe a little about how mail is stored in Unix. There are a couple well-known methods to store email: mbox and Maildir. When mail is stored in mbox format, all your mail is concatenated together in one huge file. In the Maildir format, each email is stored in a separate file. Needless to say, each method has different strengths and weaknesses. For the time being, let’s assume that you want your email in one big file (the mbox format) and work through an example.

Example with mbox format

- Make a directory called “.getmail” in your home directory with the command “mkdir ~/.getmail”. This directory will store your configuration data and the debugging logs that getmail generates.
- Make a directory called gmail-archive with the command “mkdir ~/gmail-archive”. This directory will store your email.
- Make a file ~/.getmail/getmail.gmail and put the following text in it:

[retriever]
type = SimplePOP3SSLRetriever
server = pop.gmail.com
username = bob@gmail.com
password = bobpassword

[destination]
type = Mboxrd
path = ~/gmail-archive/gmail-backup.mbox

[options]
# print messages about each action (verbose = 2)
# Other options:
# 0 prints only warnings and errors
# 1 prints messages about retrieving and deleting messages only
verbose = 2
message_log = ~/.getmail/gmail.log

- Added: Run the command “touch ~/gmail-archive/gmail-backup.mbox” . If you change the path in the file above, touch whatever filename you used. This command creates an empty file that getmail can then append to.

The file format should be pretty self-explanatory. You’re telling getmail to fetch your email from pop.gmail.com via a POP3 connection over SSL (which prevents people from seeing your email as it passes between Gmail and your computer). The [destination] section tells where to save your email, and in what format. The “Mboxrd” is a flavor of the mbox format — read this page on mbox formats if you’re really interested. Finally, we set options so that getmail generates a verbose log file that will help in case there are any snags.

Example with Maildir format

Suppose you prefer Maildir instead? You’d still run “mkdir ~/.getmail” and “mkdir ~/gmail-archive”. But the Maildir format uses three directories (tmp, new, and cur). We need to make those directories, so type “mkdir ~/gmail-archive/tmp ~/gmail-archive/new ~/gmail-archive/cur” as well. In addition, change the [destination] section to say

[destination]
type = Maildir
path = ~/gmail-archive/

Otherwise your configuration file is the same.

Step 3: Run getmail

The good news is that step 2 was the hard part. Run getmail with a command like “getmail -r /home/bob/.getmail/getmail.gmail” (use the path to the config file that you made in Step 2). With any luck, you’ll see something like

getmail version 4.6.5
Copyright (C) 1998-2006 Charles Cazabon. Licensed under the GNU GPL version 2.
SimplePOP3SSLRetriever:bob@gmail.com@pop.gmail.com:995:
msg 1/99 (7619 bytes) from <info@example.com> delivered to Mboxrd /home/bob/gmail-archive/gmail-backup.mbox
msg 2/99 (6634 bytes) from <sales@example.com> delivered to Mboxrd /home/bob/gmail-archive/gmail-backup.mbox
…
99 messages retrieved, 0 skipped
Summary:
Retrieved 99 messages from SimplePOP3SSLRetriever:bob@gmail.com@pop.gmail.com:995

Hooray! It works! But wait — I have over 99 messages, you say. Why did it only download 99 messages? The short answer is that Gmail will only let you down a few hundred emails at a time. You can repeat the command (let getmail finish each time before you run it again) until all of your email is downloaded.

Step 4: Download new email automatically

A backup is a snapshot of your email at one point in time, but it’s even better if you download and save new email automatically. (This step will also come in handy if you have a ton of Gmail and don’t want to run the command from Step 3 over and over again for hours to download all your mail.)

We’re going to make a simple cron job that runs periodically to download new email and preserve it. First, make a very short file called /home/bob/fetch-email.sh and put the following text in the file:

#!/bin/bash
# Note: -q means fetch quietly so that this program is silent
/usr/bin/getmail -q -r /home/bob/.getmail/getmail.gmail

Make sure that the file is readable/executable with the command “chmod u+rx /home/bob/fetch-email.sh”. If you want to make sure the program works, run the command “/home/bob/fetch-email.sh”. The program should execute without generating any output, but if there’s new email waiting for you it will be downloaded. This script needs to be silent or else you’ll get warnings when you run the script using cron.

Now type the command “crontab -e” and add the following entry to your crontab:

# Every 10 minutes (at 7 minutes past the hour), fetch my email
7,17,27,37,47,57 * * * * /home/bob/fetch-email.sh

This crontab entry tells cron “Every 10 minutes, run the script fetch-email.sh”. If you wanted to check less often (maybe once an hour), change “7,17,27,37,47,57″ to “7″ and the cron job will run at 7 minutes after every hour. That’s it — you’re done! Enjoy the feeling of having a Gmail backup in case your net connection goes down.

Bonus info: Back up in both mail formats at once!

As I mentioned, mbox and Maildir have different advantages. The mbox format is convenient because you only need to keep track of one file, but editing/deleting email from that huge file is a pain. And when one program is trying to write new email while another program is trying to edit the file, things can sometimes go wrong unless both programs are careful. Maildir is more robust, but it chews through inodes because each email is a separate file. It also can be harder to process Maildir files with regular Unix command-line tools, just because there are so many email files.

Why not archive your email in both formats just to be safe? The getmail program can easily support this. Just change your [destination] information to look like this:

[destination]
type = MultiDestination
destinations = (‘[mboxrd-destination]‘, ‘[maildir-destination]‘)

[mboxrd-destination]
type = Mboxrd
path = ~/gmail-archive/gmail-backup.mbox

[maildir-destination]
type = Maildir
path = ~/gmail-archive/

Note that you’ll still have to run all the “mkdir” commands to make the “gmail-archive” directory, as well as the tmp, new, and cur directories under the gmail-archive directory.

Bonus reading!

What, you’re still here? Okay, if you’re still reading, here’s a few pointers you might be interested in:
- The main getmail site includes a page with lots of getmail examples of configuration files. The getmail website has a ton of great documentation, too. Major props to Charles Cazabon for his getmail program.
- This write-up from about a year ago covers how to back up Gmail as well.
- The author of getmail seems to hang out quite a bit on this getmail mailing list. See the main site for directions on signing up for the list.
- If you’re interested in a more powerful setup (e.g. using Gmail + getmail + procmail), this is a useful page.
- For the truly sadistic, learn the difference between a Mail User Agent (MUA) and a Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) and how email really gets delivered in Unix.
- I’ve been meaning to write all this down for months. Jeff Atwood’s recent post finally pushed me over the edge. Jeff describes a program that offers to “archive your Gmail” for $29.95, but when you give the program your username/password it secretly mails your username/password to the program’s creator. That’s pretty much pure evil in my book. And the G-Archiver program isn’t even needed! Because Gmail will export your email for free using POP or IMAP, it’s not hard to archive your Gmail. So I wrote up how I back up my Gmail in case it helps anyone else. Enjoy!

Added March 16, 2008: Several people have added helpful comments. One of my favorites led me to a post by commenter Peng about how to back up Gmail with IMAP using getmail. Peng describes how to back up the email by label as well. He mentions that you could use the search “after:2007/1/1 before:2007/3/31″ and assign the label FY07Q1 to the search results, for example. Then you can back up that single label/mailbox by making the getmail config file look like this:

[retriever]
type = SimpleIMAPSSLRetriever
server = imap.gmail.com
username = username
password = password
mailboxes = (“FY07Q1″,)

[destination]
type = Mboxrd
path = ~/.getmail/gmail-backup-FY07Q1.mbox

Peng also mentions a nice bonus: since you’re backing up via IMAP instead of POP, there’s no download limit. That means that you don’t have to run the getmail program repeatedly. Thanks for mentioning that Peng!

Converting hexadecimal to decimal with a search query like [0x607a in decimal]:

Convert decimal to hexadecimal with a Google query like [1854 in hex]:

You can even convert hexadecimal to binary with a query like [0x770 in binary]:

Of course, you can also use alternate queries like [convert 0x770 to base 2]. Pretty handy.

Bonus tip: did you know that you can do currency conversion too? Just type something like [one dollar in yuan]:

If you have favorite tips for searches, leave them in the comments.