Top 9 Ways to See You Laptop Screen Better Outside

These are good tips on how to improve your (wo)man/machine interface while working outside on your laptop. After all, that's why you payed for the portability in the first place right? I have struggled with this problem myself this summer, so in the interest of productivity, here are 9 ideas to try. *The first two are mine, the next 7 are from Web Worker Daily. I am looking for a 10th - anyone, anyone?

Web Worker Daily » How to Use Your Laptop Outside «:

"If you’ve ever tried this, you know immediately what could be better: being able to actually see your laptop screen, that’s what. Laptops are great for many things, but visibility in bright sunlight is not one of their high points. Over my years of mobility, I’ve tried a bunch of things to get around this, and collected ideas from others. If you insist on going out to work, try some or all of these potential solutions to see what you’re doing:"

1. Buy a laptop with a matte screen, which reflect much less light outdoors than the glossy ones.*
2. Override your battery saving settings and turn the screen brightness up to full.*
3. Work under an awning or umbrella.
4. Wear a baseball cap, cowboy hat, or other cap with a brim, pulled low to put your eyes in shadow.
5. Wear polarized sunglasses.
6. Equip your laptop with an anti-glare screen. (The last time I tried this, a few years back, I couldn’t actually find any that worked, but perhaps the technology has improved.
7. Equip your laptop with a sunshade. You can buy a commercial version or spend a few minutes with a big piece of cardboard and some tape to make your own.

8. Take frequent breaks to look away from the screen to ease your eyestrain.
9. Give up, have a beer, and decide that the summer sun is more important than work. You probably need to stop billing in this case, though.

Summary of Online Note-Taking Programs

Here is a good summary of several of the leading online information collecting programs from Web Worker Daily, via Lifehacker.

Web Worker Daily » 7 Apps for Online Note-Taking «:

"If you’re like most of us, you deal with piles of unstructured information every day: phone numbers, ideas for later consideration, snippets of information from the web, recipes, phone messages…the list is endless. For the web worker, moving this information into an online notebook can be an attractive proposition. Rather than tie yourself to one computer, or even one operating system, you can get at your notes from anywhere that has a web browser handy. Not surprisingly, there are a fair number of choices in this arena these days.

For this roundup, I stuck to online applications that let you save free form notes in some sort of organized fashion for later use."

The 7 apps summarized are:

Google Notebook

mynoteIT

Notefish

Notezz!

Stikkit

Yahoo! Notepad

Zoho Notebook

The consensus among Lifehacker, and Web Worker Daily and its commenters is that Google Notebook and Zoho Notebook are the front runners.

Organize Your Information In One Place

It all started with bookmarks in the Internet Explorer toolbar. A way to keep track of my favorite sites. Then bookmarks were not enough as I started researching projects on the web. I was printing out the articles to save them, so I had the full versions at my fingertips, without having to search through a bookmarked web page.

Next I started using Evernote, a great free product for clipping web articles with the touch of a button while I surfed, and the ability to add notes, reminders, etc. Evernote was just the ticket, until I started traveling more and using a laptop in addition to a desktop, in which case I had a different set of notes on each machine. Well, Google to the rescue, with a type of online Evernote-style product called Notebook.

Official Google Blog: Note this: "Note this" 5/15/2006
Posted by Bay-Wei Chang, Senior Research Scientist

"Search is all about finding the answers you need. Unfortunately, some kinds of questions--like where you should stay and what you should do on your Hawaiian vacation, or what kind of digital camera you should buy, or what the latest treatments for arthritis are--can't always be answered in one sitting, or by visiting one site.

That's why we built Google Notebook--to give you an online 'notebook' where you can organize all your research, add personal notes to it, and share it with others. Google Notebook surfs along quietly with you as you browse, letting you clip and annotate whatever text, images, and links that help answer your question, all without ever leaving the web page you're on."

If this sounds like something you'd like to try, you can find it here

There is a Firefox extension that puts a "note this" button on your toolbar for super simple copying. This is a perfect addition to the wired traveler's online toolbox. Spreading the Google Gospel - Amen.