A few years back I discovered a product marketed under names like the Soap Saver. This handy “soap dish” can stretch that bar of soap a few more showers – and prevent it from getting mushy. The “Dry Bar” manufacturer claims a savings of 22% with each bar!

Rather than holding the soap flat, it stores the bar vertically. The container is open on the bottom to let water drain off. What’s more, the container is tapered so as the bar shrinks it won’t slip out.

Pick yourself up a soap saver at Target, Bed Bath and Beyond or online…it’s easily worth a few bucks.

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Make carbonated water or soda at home

For about $1 per liter, the Sodastream carbonated water and soda maker is a super simple, convenient and “no trash” way to get on demand sparkling water or flavored soda at home. And it you’re a big soda drinker, it’s a great alternative to sugary and artificial sweetened sodas. Or simply add your own Sodastream flavoring to the mix.

I never really considered this being a good buy for at home  use, but it really has been one of our best purchases ever. Instead of drinking diet soda with dinner, I drink sparkling water – a cheaper, healthier and no waste alternative.

If you like flavored sodas, the Sodastream gives you many mixes you can easily add to your water for what would cost about 15 cents per can.

The hardest part about buying a Sodastream is deciding which model to buy – they offer four from about $100 to $200. Basically, the big difference is construction material (plastic vs metal) and aesthetic (plain Jane to fancy penguin with glass carafe).

The Sodastream is a simple device – there is no electric or moving parts. You simply insert the pressurized carbonation tank into the unit to “power it”. Insert or screw in the bottle with cold water (the directions suggest using refrigerated water, which I’ve found does yield maximum carbonation). Hit the carbonate  button a few times and you’re done. Once the carbonation tank is empty (appx 40 liters), you simply purchase a replacement tank for about $35 and ship back the old one.

I’ve only found a few minor drawbacks to Sodastream: you should carbonate the water when you need it. Like any bottled carbonated beverage, it will lose its carbonation over time after opened. At the time of publishing, the Sodastream units were hard to find, even online. Finally, with the basic model, you must screw the bottle into the unit at a strange angle, making it cumbersome to use. All that aside, the Sodastream has a been a great purchase.

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Click twice for Larger Image

It’s one thing to suffer from information overload, but what about contact overload? Business cards collecting dust, incomplete contact records in Outlook, duplicate names in your mobile phone. Say goodbye to all that with this simple, yet effective unified contact strategy for the business person: digitize your business cards, import, merge and purge, automatically add email addresses replied to, then keep them in sync across all of your contact files. Here is what I do…

DIGITIZE YOUR BACKLOG of BUSINESS CARDS

Take that stack of cards and send them off to CloudContacts who will get them into digital contact files starting at $30 for 100 cards.

GET READY

1. Sign up for Plaxo Premium account for $60 per year
This will give you the ability to syncronize your Outlook, Yahoo, MSN, Hotmail, LinkedIn and AOL contact lists (Sorry, Plaxo doesn’t have a clean sync with Gmail). Plaxo will also enable deduplication of your contacts file.

2. For Outlook users, purchase and install Add Contacts for $15
This will let you automatically add email addresses to your Outlook Contacts file every time you hit “reply”.

3. For iPhone users, buy and install CardSnap Business App for $15 from iTunes App Store.
This handy tool will help you digitize your business cards as you get them. This assumes you have your iPhone contact file linked with Outlook or of the other mail services supported by Plaxo.

SETUP THE SYSTEM

1. Import CloudContacts contact files into Outlook
This is pretty simple…just login to CloudContacts, download the CSV and import into Outlook.

2. Install AddContacts and set it up
The setup for this is located in the Outlook Preferences tab. You can choose how you want it to behave.

3. Link up your accounts with Plaxo
Install the Outlook Addin from Plaxo and setup the synchronization for all of your various accounts within Plaxo.

4. Dedup the Contacts in Plaxo
Use Plaxo’s Deduplication tool to clean up your unified contact file, which Plaxo now has shared across all of your linked accounts. Once complete, the updates will save and populate to your linked accounts.

ONGOING MAINTENANCE

This is pretty much automatic for you with two exceptions: regular deduplication and importing new business card contacts.

1. Importing new business cards as you get them
Using CardSnap or CloudContacts import new business cards into your Outlook or iPhone contacts file.

2. Dedup your contacts regularly
Access the Plaxo Deduplication tool monthly or quarterly to keep your records and files clean and up to date.

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Hand vac picks up pet hair

The Shark Cordless Hand Vac (aka Pet Perfect Hand Vac) picks up an amazing amount of pet hair and dirt, even when you think none is there!

A combination of a powerful motor and brush head really pulls up an amazing about of pet hair and dirt on most any type of carpet. I’ve used in my cars and on rugs at home.

The brush can be removed for a standard “hand vac” head, or insert a narrow nozzle attachment for hard to reach places.

The biggest and perhaps only drawback to this vac is the battery. The battery tends to get weak very quickly, so the length of time to get maximum power can be limited.

All in all, this vac is worth its weight at getting up dirt.

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By default, Carbonite does not backup EXE files, video files or any files larger than 4 GB! Now if you are getting into the video thing like me, this could be a major drawback. Also, if you have random files that are simply too large, you are hosed. And if you save EXE files you have purchased and downloaded, you are in trouble.

Luckily, you can still manually select these for backup, but there is no way to make this the new default setting. One other way to catch these items, should you forget, is a small clear/white dot on the corner of each folder indicating that folder contains items not being backed up. Files backed up are indicated with a green dot.

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