organization

Free library system

Duck Software's Organizer series of home database programs build on a flexible core optimized for various specific uses. Book Tracker - Collector Edition is for home librarians, bibliophiles, book collectors, or anyone who has a lot of printed material to manage. Of course, books don't write themselves, and they won't find their own way into your database, either; you have to enter or, if you're lucky, import the data. You don't need to enter everything at once, though, and once it's done, updates are easy.

Book Tracker shares the Organizer family's efficient interface, … Read more

Good scheduler with bubbly personality

Efficient Lady's Organizer Free is a free program that manages your contacts, appointments, schedules, and other important parts of your personal life like birthdays and holidays. It includes a Calendar, Notes, Diary, and other features common to personal organizers, as well as some less common ones like password protection and a password generator. It has the same basic interface as virtually identical editions, with the exception of a pink-hued interface and the liberal application of hearts and bubbles to the program's skin. While it's not for everyone, plenty of ladies (and gentlemen) will find it a refreshing … Read more

For men and other disorganized types

Efficient Man's Organizer Free Portable breaks down this way: it's an efficient personal organizer designed for men that's totally portable and totally free. Portability is a key asset in a personal manager since a tool that's chained to your desktop obviously can't keep up with you when you're not at your desk. Efficient Man's Organizer is compact enough to run from a wide range of storage media and portable devices, yet it still offers a full set of features.

We extracted the compressed download of Efficient Man's Organizer and saved it to … Read more

Crappy calendar

We always like to try new calendar applications, because periodically we come across some really innovative programs. Occasionally, though, we come across programs like Kalendra. It's innovative, all right, but not necessarily in a good way. As the kids would say, this program is a hot mess.

Kalendra's interface is fairly similar to other programs of this type, at least as far as the layout is concerned. But it has a cluttered, amateurish feel to it. We set about trying to explore its features and were duly unimpressed. Kalendra allegedly functions as an e-mail client, but we had … Read more

Waste Management CEO places energy bets

LAGUNA NIGUEL, Calif.-- Waste Management wants your waste for more reasons that you might think.

The company, which hauls garbage from 22 million customers, is in the midst of a strategy to invest in technology start-ups in an effort to get electricity, chemicals, or liquid fuels from municipal solid waste. Already, the company generates two to three times more energy than the entire solar industry.

"We took the venture capital route. We make lots of small investments because you don't know what technology will ultimately will win. We need to spread out bets," Waste Management CEO … Read more

Dairy farm feeds grid with manure and food waste

RUTLAND, Mass.--The road up to Jordan Dairy Farm here offers a typical New England view of rolling hills, wood-frame houses, and shade trees. Then up on a hill, there appears a dome-capped silo, a structure that's bringing renewable energy to agriculture.

The silo-like building is an anaerobic digester, one of five that will be installed at small dairy farms here in western Massachusetts. If they perform as hoped, they will allow these farmers to reduce their wastes and make some money in the process. They will also recycle food residue that would normally be thrown away.

The digester, … Read more

Quick tip: Using Faces in iPhoto

Organizing the hundreds, if not thousands, of digital photographs you have on your Mac can be a tedious process. Apple added facial recognition to iPhoto to help ease the pain. Check out these tips to get more out of Faces in iPhoto '11.

If you have recently attempted to add faces to Faces in iPhoto '11, you may notice that there could be an amazing amount of pages of faces to accept. Clicking to accept each face to confirm can take a long time. First, you have to identify a few faces for iPhoto to find.

Click on Faces in … Read more

Tip: Organize PDFs with iTunes

Recently we published an article discussing options on how to convert Web articles into nicely formatted PDF documents. While having PDFs is a convenient way to maintain well-formatted and clean articles on various subjects, after a while you may end up with a number of them, that can lead to a cluttered mess of PDFs.

There are options in OS X for managing PDFs and other documents, including smart folders and other ways of searching for them to consolidate into one location, or you can use spotlight's indexing to locate them by contents. In addition, as suggested by MacFixIt … Read more

Al Gore firm invests in organic waste recycler

Harvest Power, which converts organic waste into energy and soil fertilizer, today said it raised $51.7 million in a funding led by an investment company co-founded by Al Gore.

Generation Investment Management, started by Gore and David Blood as a firm focused on sustainability, will be the lead investor in Harvest Power's series B round. Also participating are existing investors Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, Waste Management, Munich Venture Partners, and TriplePoint Capital.

Three-year-old Harvest Power specializes in extracting valuable products from organic waste, such as food scraps and yard clippings. It uses different techniques either to generate … Read more

Why social media gives your doctor an ulcer

Some runner out there was a little overeager. A member of question-and-answer site Quora used the service to pose a burning question about a potentially reckless activity: "How do you train for a marathon with a stress fracture in your ankle or foot?" Seriously? Ouch.

Luckily, there happened to be a sports therapist who was reading. "There (are) plenty of marathons left in the world for you to do when the stress fracture has healed," the therapist warned. "The amount of training required for a marathon means that this will severely stress the bone if … Read more