Top Ten Geek New Year’s Resolutions

10. Start a video podcast

Video has been hot online for a few years now. Broadband has become more widely available and YouTube gave us a simple channel for distributing our videos. However, in the past year, a number of video cameras have been introduced that cater to a new generation of online content producers. Cheap cameras are available from Flip, Creative, and Kodak (among others) to fill the niche. These cameras are tiny, shoot decent quality video, and make transfer to online venues quick and easy.

9. Maintain your social networks

No, we aren’t talking about your Facebook and Myspace profile although there are certainly benefits to participating in those communities. We’re talking about maintaining connections with the people you actually know. You never know when you may find an opportunity to collaborate with a friend who has a unique skill or when you might need a reference for a job application or maybe you know someone in a high place who could get you a job if times get hard. Maintaining your existing relationships when you don’t necessarily need them is much easier than making new ones when you do need them.

8. Fully utilize your calendar

I’m a big fan of Google Calendar, but there are plenty of nice calendar apps out there–web-based and otherwise. Whichever calendar you use, you may not be getting out of it everything it can offer. Sure, the calendar is a no-brainer for tracking events like birthdays, meetings, appointments, and the like, but have you ever thought of using the calendar to remind you when that promotional APR on the new credit card expires? How about a reminder every six months to make an appointment with the dentist? Maybe a reminder for changing the filter in the A/C unit in your home. Dare I suggest a reminder for your wedding anniversary? You wouldn’t forget that now, would you?

7. Get rid of stuff

It’s 2009, and you’re a geek. Unlike some people, you understand that movies and music are data. They are no different from Word documents or your computer’s alert sounds. I’m betting you don’t have a burned CD lying around for each document you want to keep, but you very well may have a stack of DVDs and CDs ready to play at a moment’s notice. Rip those bad boys to a cheap internal hard drive and ditch the mountains of discs. They will be easier to organize and access, and you’ll appreciate recovering that space they were taking up.

6. Who needs paper?

In keeping with the theme of getting rid of unneeded stuff, most paper records can be digitized and the original documents trashed. All you need is a scanner and a little free hard disk space and you’re ready to go. If you really want to do it in style, consider a Fujitsu ScanSnap scanner which will feed multi-page documents, save as PDF, and OCR (That’s optical character recognition. It makes the text of your documents searchable!) your documents with the press of a button. It makes things much easier.

5. Setup a home server

So, now all your video, audio, and paper records have been digitized. It would be nice to have a centralized location to store all this data. You can use a spare computer you have lying around as a server to create a central point for storage and access of all your files! If you go with Linux, you can expect to do a bit more tweaking, but you can get away with a bit less in terms of hardware. I retired my old gaming PC into service as a home server/media center. It is connected to my TV and receiver so that I can fully enjoy all my media. I have a couple of 500GB hard drives in it to store everything. They are RAIDed so that I always have my data if one of the drives goes bad. If you’re really serious about preserving your data, there are several off-site backup solutions that give you peace-of-mind for a price.

4. Keep up-to-date backups

Speaking of backups, here we have the nerd equivalent of the “lose weight” New Year’s resolution: that thing that everyone knows they should be doing yet no one does or wants to do. The thing about backups is that they don’t pay off unless something goes wrong. You gain nothing from having one if everything is running smoothly which makes them that much more difficult to do because you can only perform them when everything is running smoothly. Don’t be that guy who has to mail off his hard drive and pay hundreds of dollars to have mission-critical data recovered the next time disaster strikes. Try one of the aforementioned off-site backup services or just buy a cheap USB hard drive and copy your entire hard disk over to it every couple of weeks or so. You’ll be glad you did.

3. Cut the cord and ditch your landline phone

It’s nothing new to cancel your landline and use the cell phone exclusively. Nearly 16% of Americans have taken this step already. If you’re like me, there may be some reason compelling you to hang on to the old standby. If that’s the case, you may be able to retain key functionality while saving loads of dough with a Skype subscription. Skype is an excellent VOIP service that works through your computer. I was able to cancel my already-cheaper-than-traditional-phone-service VOIP line which was $25 per month in favor of a year’s subscription to both SkypeIn and SkypeOut which gives us inbound and outbound calling for only $60 for the entire year! And if you really don’t want to have to use the computer as your phone, you can always pick up a standalone Skype handset.

2. Be more active on the social web

This may seem frivolous to some, but you’d be surprised at the value you can glean from seeing what everyone is raving about on the web. Certainly, some communities have more to offer than others, but “crowdsourcing” is an awesome way to find cool stuff online more efficiently. Take a social news site like digg or reddit: you have a group of net addicts surfing millions of web sites, finding the best content, and putting it all in one place. Then you have those same users collectively voting on the content which should be seen most of all. The content that gets the most votes is what you see. It’s a win-win for everyone involved. Just don’t forget to give back by participating.

And the number one New Year’s resolution for the geek masses:

1. Make awesome things and put them online

Human beings need a creative outlet. The feeling of making something that others can enjoy or derive some sort of value from is without compare. Everyone can contribute something. If you are a professional geek, take what you do as your job and apply it to your own pet project. Developers- make a web app on your own time that fills a need you have (most likely, others have that need too). Writers- write an awesome story or a how-to article and post it on your blog. Artists- put up some of your work online for free. Troubleshooters- hang out in the forums for some software you like a lend a helping hand occasionally. There is no one who cannot contribute something of value to the fantastic ecosystem of knowledge we call the Internet.

Are there any of these items you would like me to elaborate on further? If so, hit me up in the comments or @raddevon on twitter. I love hearing from you!

Image used under Creative Commons license. By Mr Magoo ICU @ Flickr

The deficiencies of Google Reader as a sharing platform

Google Reader is a fantastic app. It is the perfect way to wrangle all those cool web sites your following into one easy location. I am able to take in far more information much more quickly and efficiently than I could by visiting each individual site. Google Reader also offers a sharing feature that allows user to easily broadcast their favorite items to other Reader users in their Gmail contacts list. Recently, Google added the ability to provide notes making the sharing even more robust. However, I now find myself re-sharing friends items with replies to their notes or my own notes or even e-mailing them a story they originally shared to give my two cents. As is the way of the web, there is a better way to carry on a conversation surrounding web content… and you don’t even have to ditch Google Reader to get there!

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