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From the email bin

Posted in gtd, hack the day, links, productivity, software. Tagged with free software, gtd, productivity.
November 5, 2008 2 comments

During the last year I almost never reposted the links and resources readers of HackTheDay have send me. It took a simple comment(might be a spam, but I hope it’s not) to make me want to get back to blogging over here on HTD.

So, here’s a couple of productivity-related links received from my readers during the last year or so, togetger with a bit of link love :) :

Enjoy your productive day, and keep in touch : I’m back, baby!

Welcome back on Hack the Day! Have you subscribed to my RSS feed? We have some great productivity tips, hacks and daily inspiration!

Get rid of the MobileMe sync icon in Leopard’s menu bar

Posted in osx, software, tips.
October 2, 2008 73 comments

Phew, the title took more to write than what the post really should contain, that is:
SystemUIServer
Keep Command key pressed while dragging the Sync icon out of the menu bar.

Now, why would you do this? Maybe, like me, you have a fresh Leopard install and you NEVER use MobileMe, and you want to declutter the menu bar. Easy, ain’t it?

Happiness is like a pair of sunglasses

Posted in beautiful life, inspirational. Tagged with happiness, thoughts.
July 28, 2008 3 comments

I was eating plums in the orchard of my girlfriend’s grandparents. The countryside evening was spectacular: dogs barking here and there, night butterflies flying around us, birds chirping to sleep. Surrounded by all the beauty of the simple life, I remembered this post.

Learn to be in the here and now, and experience life as it’s happening, and appreciate the world for the beauty that it is, right now. Practice makes perfect with this crucial skill.

Maybe happiness isn’t something you should aim for. Maybe happiness isn’t something you need to work at.

Maybe happiness is just like sunglasses.

Happiness is a state of mind. You shouldn’t leave in the pursuit of happiness. Instead, happiness is all around you.

It’s in the simple things, in the delicious taste of a fresh fruit, in the silent peace of countryside evenings. In the flapping of a butterfly’s wings, in the curly smoke floating out of a cigarette, in the smile of your loved one, the voice of your kids. Reaching happiness is just a matter of changing your point of view: change the way you look at the world.

Instead of focusing at the future, desperately waiting for it, just focus on the present and the beauty it gives. Instead of craving for the past pleasures, enjoy the current ones.

What are you waiting for? Put on your happiness sunglasses and enjoy your holiday!

Create any kind of charts easily with Google Visualization API

Posted in links, software, tips. Tagged with charts, google, online, spreadsheet.
July 10, 2008 Comments Off

Google just released Google Visualization API, which is a really cool great way to generate and embed beautiful charts into any webpage.
While the API is really Javascript based targeting web developers, the really cool thing about it is that you’re now able to generate Gadgets from within any Google Docs spreadsheet.

Easier done than said, actually. Just take a peek at this nice chart attempt:
Continued…

DIY a Firefox Search Engine – Twitter People

Posted in hack the day, productivity, software, tips. Tagged with firefox, mycroft, search engine, step by step, tutorial, Twitter.
May 1, 2008 7 comments

I mentioned it already: I love Firefox’s feature of “Manage Search Engines” (Internet Explorer 7 has copied introduced a similar one as well). Simply love it, and the reason for it is that it saves me lots and lots of time.

One of the “custom” search engines I had installed was called Flickr Tags. Ironically, though, using it was always a burden. Most of the times I didn’t want to simply search Flickr; what I wanted instead was to search Flickr for Creative Commons images(ones I could put on my blog, for instance), sorted by interestingness (to keep the lame ones out). One way to do this would have been to simply search Mycroft Project for a better one. One other way, though, was to just create my own custom search engine, and this proved to be much simpler than expected (the proof is the little plugin over on mycroft.mozdev.org called Flickr Creative Commons Interesting).

For tutorial purposes, I’ll show you how to build, step by step, a Firefox Search Engine for Twitter contacts.

Continued…

Zen of debugging – remember the Seiza

Posted in beautiful life, inspirational, life hacks, productivity, psychology. Tagged with debugging, meditation, Seiza, software, Zen.
April 11, 2008 2 comments

Rereading a text I wrote last year reminded me something I wanted to articulate for quite a while. The power of meditation; but actually meditation is a word with too many and messy meanings. What I’m talking about is that powerful “take a break” moment that precedes most great breakthroughs.

In my freshman year of college(Computer Science) I was just discovering the Internet and the vast information one could get from it. Those were the days of MsDOS, Windows 95 and Windows 98, and my geek hobby back then was to subscribe to e-zines of the underground computer virus geeks. I never learned to build a computer virus(it’s bad, evil and it turns you into a criminal) but, being young and restless, I enjoyed reading how one could conceive such software that resembled most to real life-forms – the smallest and code efficient possible, which could replicate, mutate and propagate around. Nothing much stuck with me from that wild age except for a broader understanding of computers, operating systems and assembly language and, completely unrelated, the tale of one of those virus developers.

The guy was stuck at some point trying to understand how to work around the limitations(security) of Windows 98; he had tried all ideas that came to mind, and was starting to get desperate and frustrated. Yet, at one moment, he decided to just lay back. Closed the monitor, closed his eyes. Tried to think of nothing. Quarter of hour later he was coding furiously and excited. His (memory quote) computer coding Zen had struck again.

Without naming it, I’ve been using this method since highschool; now, in my computer programmer existence, I use it more than ever. Whenever I’m facing a bug I can’t understand, whenever something eludes me no matter how hard I try or how much documentation I read, I will stop.

I breathe, I take a walk around the office, get some water from the watercooler. Chat with friends. When coming back to my computer, 10 minutes later, I close my eyes and try to think of nothing. Call it Zen meditation if you prefer; call it  yourKitKat moment.

I prefer to call it Seiza – the seated 1 minute meditation before martial arts training. Letting my mind free of all thoughts is just what we perceive on the outside; on the inside, our subconscious keeps working, freed from the outside stimuli and conscious noise.

More often than once, stepping back is all it takes to solve even the biggest problem.

[photo courtesy of Flickr]

HackTheDay – top 100 productivity blogs

Posted in hack the day, productivity.
March 14, 2008 Comments Off

HackTheDay got listed in the nice list of “The Top 100 Productivity and Lifehack Blogs” on CollegeDegree, side by side with world-renowned blogs such as 43 Folders, Lifehack.org, Lifehacker.com, Zen Habits and 95 more. Pretty nice for a blog I neglected quite a lot in the last months.

It’s this kind of small things that make one’s day better and motivate him to get going.

Top 10 Firefox search engines

Posted in productivity, software, tips. Tagged with browsing, firefox, search engine, tips.
January 28, 2008 6 comments

Quickly, tell me the web browser you use most frequently.

What? Do I hear anything other than Firefox? You’re most certainly way behind on our Productivity 101 lesson.

Quickly, tell me what’s your most frequent way to google or search stuff online.

If you tell me you click on Firefox’s address bar, type www.google.com then Enter, then you’re definitely not making good use of your time and fingers. There’s a better, faster, easier way to google from Firefox – the quicksearch field on the right-top corner. Just type Ctrl+K (or, on Mac, Cmd+K) and you’ve changed focus to the quicksearch field. Type what u want to search for, Enter, and Google opens up with the results.

Continued…

Usability on the Mac – tricks for Mobility Impaired Programmers

Posted in hack the day, life hacks, mac, osx, productivity, tips.
January 22, 2008 1 comment

On the 1st of January I had a skiing accident resulting in the injury my right arm – actually my right shoulder. After about two weeks of waiting for the pain to go away, I got the guts and visited a doctor who didn’t think twice before putting my entire right arm into a tight bandage and forbidding me to use my right arm for the upcoming 10 days.

Easier said then done – after all, I’m a work-from-home software developer, right-handed on top of that. Medical leave being out of the question, how am I supposed to get my job done by typing with only my left hand?

Luckily, I managed to work something out, and here’s a couple of the tricks I did for it, just in case they might help other imprudent skiers out there:
Continued…

My question for 2008

Posted in beautiful life, inspirational, productivity.
January 9, 2008 1 comment

First of all, Happy New Year!

Second of all, I’ve been a lying bastard in 2007 and have blogged extremely little over here, leaving all you faithful readers just hanging and desperately waiting for more insightful, funny, informative or simply original articles.

Third of all, given that this is the best time for New Year resolutions, here’s my question/story for all of you:

How much money would you want in order to NEVER WORK AGAIN?

Let’s pretend I’m a rich bastard that can give you a fixed amount of money, with only one condition: you MUST NEVER work again. Not even for charity, not even for your own freelance gig, not even to help your spouse around the house or to take gardening as a hobby. Would you agree to such a deal? If so, what would your price be?

If you’d never agree to this(as I, for instance), please think a bit about your reasons. I know mine, and I’ll disclose them although I might influence your silent answer:

I like too much doing stuff. I take the most excitement in actually doing something useful, and the feeling of meeting my job deadlines is too good to give up. This is also the reason most successful people have always a hard time quiting their jobs: work is fun and without it we’d be bored to death.

Think about it.