Nowadays I do most of my design work on a Macbook Pro, but spend some of the rest of my time forced to work on a Windows laptop. One thing I got tired of was bookmarking something on one laptop and then not being able to find it when I am working on the other laptop.

I use Firefox on the Macbook and the Windows laptop so I downloaded Foxmarks to see if it would resolve the problem. It works really well and I can definitely recommend it.

It simply installs as a standard Firefox extension and sits in the status bar on the bottom right. When you bookmark something the icon changes, and at the next available opportunity it syncronises with a central server. When you connect to the net on your other machine it syncronises back and you have access to all the pages you just bookmarked.

That really is it, it does exactly what it says on the tim and it does it well. You can tick the option for “sync on shutdown” so you can be sure not to miss anything. It also remembers when you delete a bookmark, and deletes it on the other machine too.

If you don’t use Firefox or use different browsers on different machines then this is not for you. There are other such utilities but I haven’t used them so I can’t comment. What I can say is if you do use Firefox on multiple machines then this is an essential addon.

I think I speak for most small to medium size businesses when I say the bain of our life is often paperwork. We have so much on day to day that finding time to sit down and create invoices, reminder letters etc is something that can all to easily get on top of us.

Recently I discovered Blinksale, a simple, easy to use online invoicing service. I decided to try it out and it really is very good.

Simple

The interface is incredibly simple. You logon to your account and you are presented with some tabs for adding users, customers and invoices. You create an invoice template, set it to recur however often you like (in our case annually) and attach your customers to it. 

Blinksale takes care of emailing the invoice to them, and provides a nice dashboard for reminding you when invoices are overdue, and allows you to automate reminder emails.

Low Cost

There is a charge for Blinksale, based on how many invoices you send out per month. The lowest option allows 3 invoices per month and is a great way to try out the system before signing up to one of their paid programmes. 

Their categories are well laid out, so you would need a fair few clients to move you up the scale, and makes it very easy to justify paying the small amount they ask, based on the client base you have amassed.

Time is Money

Over the past few months we have saved hours upon hours of time by using Blinksale. where we would manually prepare invoices Blinksale takes care of it. It is great to get notification of invoices going out and payments coming in, similar to having a personal secretary!

Just Do It!

I can heartily recommend Blinksale as an invoicing solution. There are other solutions out there with more features and it is important to find the correct product for you. What I will say is these days it is vital to automate as much as possible, giving you time to do what you do best. Try it out and see how you get on.

Considering just how many computers I seem to work with nowadays I decided that I needed some form of portable storage. When I say portable I mean PORTABLE! The reason I say this is because unless it is easy to carry round I won’t do it. Human nature I guess.

I searched the Interweb and came up with a small device that was reasonably priced, the Super Talent 8Gb. What’s the catch, I thought? Seemingly none. Ok, so it is not quite as fast as some of the drives out there, but it is no slouch either.

You can see from the picture just how tiny this is. The other bonus of this device is it is waterproof and very robust. When I saw the picture I thought it looked a little flimsy. It’s not!

So far I have got it auto syncing with my Macbook Pro and also with my work laptop. My next step is to automount a truecrypt volume on both the Mac and the PC just in case it gets lost, but for now I am just impressed with it!

I will post again once I have had time to live with it for a while, but how can anyone not love such a cute little device? (ok, so I need to get out more!)

UPDATE: Amazon now sell these… here are the links

8GB Version (currently £15.50 as of 25/2/09)

4GB Version

EDIT: This article seems to have got a lot of interest through google. If anyone buys this please feel free to leave a comment and let me know your experience with it. I still love it!