Hack the Day

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.

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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.

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:

1. System Preferences -> Universal Access -> Keyboard -> Sticky Keys - this is the single greatest mobility impaired aid on the Mac: all special keys become sticky and appear on the screen as you type them, thus allowing you to single-handedly type complex, 2, 3 or more “simultaneous” keys combinations. Option+Backspace, Fn+Backspace, Cmd+Option+Escape and many more contorted keys combinations become now available to anyone
2. Quicksilver - I never really understood the full impact Quicksilver has on my productivity until now - launching an application without a mouse becomes really a life saver when you can only type with your left hand…
3. Textmate - luckily for me, I’m a Ruby(on Rails) programmer using Textmate on a daily basis. Although no longer being able to use the complex keyboard shortcuts that trigger all kinds of snippet generations, I was still able to remain productive using its built-in code completion and the tab-triggered snippets.
4. Terminal - a ROR programmer can’t get any kind of work done without the command line - be it just to change the working dir to the project’s one, or to start a server or.. many more. But typing in Terminal becomes an annoying pain when you need to run the same commands on and on. So I edited the .bash_profile and added a couple of alias for the most common commands I use on a daily basis. The .bash_profile is to be created(if not already existent) in the User’s home directory (just run cd ~ in Terminal and you’re there); here’s a couple of the aliases I defined for my daily use:
   
alias pr='cd ~/Work/MyProject/'
alias prr='cd ~/Work/Projects/MySecondProject/'
alias matem='mate .'
alias ss='./script/server'


There are more to say about tricks that made my programmer life better these last days, but I’ll take a little break for now; hopefully I’ll get back some day with more cool Tricks for the Mobility Impaired Programmers

(image by The Pack)

You know how I’ve only blogged one or two posts for the last couple of months? I blame it on Timothy Ferris! Yeah, that’s right, he’s the only responsible for my slacking off blogging lately. So if you’re discontent with Hack The Day’s summer/autumn vacation, stop sending me hate mail - Timothy Ferris is the one to blame.

Who is Tim? You haven’t heard of him? What kind of world do you live in? He’s the one who took over the blogging world and the publishing world alike, by writing a best seller book about business and lifestyle - The 4-Hour Workweek(I’ll call it 4HWW from now on). The book which inspired me to make a series of life changes, all successful so far. Letting go of blogging for a while is just only one of the many.

But I’ll take it slowly:
I heard about the book from the author’s blog, where I read some articles detailing the main ideas of it: outsource as much as you can, de-clutter as much as you can; never buy what you can borrow, never waste time when someone else can do it for you.

This was the first task I let others do on my behalf : on my personal (Romanian language) blog, I wrote a post asking my readers to help me to:
Get a free pdf version of the 4HWW book and get a free ebook version of Harry Potter 7 (ok, this one is unrelated to the article, but still a good example). Less than 6 hours afterwards, a reader sent me the Harry Potter book; another 18 hours and I got the 4HWW book as well. So.. the experiment was already becoming successful: don’t waste time looking for stuff: first ask for it. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I’m eternally grateful to my reader friend who sent the books. Something that would have taken me many hours with an uncertain outcome took him, I’m sure, less than a couple of minutes. He has my thanks, and I gained hours of productivity.

Also inspired by Tim was my second successful example of blog outsourcing: I was looking to buy a pair of Crocs shoes, and since I couldn’t seem to find them anywhere in town I again resorted to my reader’s help. In less than a day I received several tips, locations, best prices, as well as offers to have them bought and brought from Italy. What had taken me several days of unsuccessful research was solved by my readers for me. I am, again, more than grateful to them for their help, and to Tim for giving me the idea of outsourcing everything out of my area of expertise.

This was only the beginning, and many more followed: from asking readers tips about the ski resort I should spend my winter holidays, to asking friends and family for help in fields they are better skilled than me, to start using expert websites instead of Google to find the best information in the fields I’m interested in.

But outsourcing deals, tips, research and projects is not what 4HWW is about. After having read the book(I’m still looking for a paper-based version to buy, but couldn’t find any so far, and Amazon shipping is still too expensive in my country), I decided to go on and experiment with the second main idea of the book - de-cluttering your life. But since this article has already gotten too long, and the following risks to take a bit of time to write, I’ll just stop here for now, promising to continue next week. In the meantime, please take a while thinking what time-wasting chores you could ask others(more skilled than you) to do.

Here comes summer, holidays and trips to foreign countries…

I lived in Paris and its suburbs since 2003 to 2006. No big surprise that I fell in love with it - I sincerely believe that it’s the most beautiful city in the world(though Prague, visited 2 years ago, isn’t bad either). Now, after having left France’s capital for more than a year, I’m returning there this week in a short 5-days trip with my girlfriend.

But please, shed no tear - it’s the perfect moment to write down what I missed most about this beautiful city, and start a blog tag game, named Your favorite city’s 5 best spots. While this is not necessarily a post on productivity or life improvement, it is about discovering the not-so-obvious beauties of your favorite city . So please feel free to join in!

The rules are classic - if you’re tagged you must join in, if you’re not but would want to, do it anyways, but also drop a comment below so we can keep the record: write the blog post about the best 5 places/things to do in your favorite city, link back to the blog who tagged you and, at your turn, tag three other blogs.

Me, being a stinkin’ cheater, I’m going to break the rules and share with you a 15 things to do in Paris, as in 3 times as much:

• 5 main tourist sights in Paris
• 5 romantic getaways in Paris
• 5 not-to-miss eating spots in Paris

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A post I wrote as a guest blogger on ZenHabits.net came out today, and you’d better be interested in it:

8 practical tips to cure your internet ADD - I talk about the quick ways to discover and track your internet dependency, and a few easy steps everyone can do to keep their internet addiction under control, remaining productive by eliminating distractions.

Zen Habits is an amazing blog on zen, healthy living and productivity, written daily by the extremely talented and very cool Leo Babauta. If you were to pick the one blog you MUST read to make your life better, Zen Habits would be it. I swear!

The first post. Any blog has it, it comes without saying.  The dreaded first step into the journey  is the most difficult one: full of emotion, fear, expectation and enthusiasm.

What does Hack the Day mean? You probably should read the About page for this. Or, if you’re a fan of fewer word, here you go:

Hack the Day is the source of tips, tricks and hacks to simplify and beautify your life. From computer and Internet-related tips and tricks to simple steps to improve parts of your life, Hack the Day gives you the algorithms to actually make things work.

Simple as 1-2-3, right?