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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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)

I spent the day before yesterday cleaning up my MacBook hard drive and reinstalling anew my Tiger operating system.
Sure, OSX is a very powerful system, but even it gets cluttered after months of intense usage and hundreds of apps installed. So.. nothing like a fresh new install to get rid of all unwanted apps, documents, archives or garbage.

So, if you are a new Apple owner, here’s my list of 9 tips for you to do on a fresh OSX install:

Read the rest of this entry »

A man goes to the doctor saying “Doc, I have a problem: I can’t make any decision. I’m always in doubt. Or… hmm.. am I?”

I’m a smart guy. Really. I graduated from top European universities, with impressive academic results, etc. The problem with smart guys is that they have too many choices. Knowing you performed pretty well in the college classes makes you confident you’ll do the same in real life. After all, there were so many courses I was clueless about, but aced them after just a couple of days of study, that any random field can become familiar after a thorough 2-3 days study.

But like any teenager growing up, once I graduated from college I was met with a handful of choices: start a career in software development, follow a PhD in one of the many Computer Science-related fields, or even start my own business. The problem with smart guys is that they get too confident. Any field seems accessible. Yes, unfortunately almost any field IS accessible. So the problem is… which path should YOU take? Most life choices are therefore reduced to decision problems: should I take this path or that other one? Read the rest of this entry »

Any mobile geek has more than once craved to have access to online maps from their phone. You know, when you’re stuck in traffic and looking for directions to the nearest Sushi restaurant or to that old vintage clothes shop you saw online yesterday. Yes, the iPhone has Google Maps integration, but it won’t help you much without GPS and with the limited set of features.

Undoubtedly the best mobile maps application around is Mobile GMaps. Free as in beer, it was the first mobile application of its kind, and the several years of age and sustained development turned it into the best and most feature-rich mobile maps piece of software. Read the rest of this entry »

Remember I promised I’d show you how to do your basic computer stuff from within Quicksilver? Well, it took me a while but I finally pulled myself together and wrote this tutorial - a beginner’s guide on doing all kinds of nice and useful stuff with Quicksilver.

What is Quicksilver, you ask? I dare you ask this again after reading my articles on Application Launchers - the ultimate geek Power Tools

Read the rest of this entry »

Disabling the Trash Can

Sometimes the Trash really stands in your way - for instance, if you have a small capacity USB drive, a memory card or a Windows partition. You want stuff deleted from the Finder to be immediately erased instead of moved into the Trash Can.

To do this you need the Terminal (if you’re a beginner, see our terminal tutorials first). You’ll first need to change directories to the USB drive location - all drives addresses are to be found in the /Volumes directory. Once in the right location, you just need to remove and recreate the Trash folder - see below how:


cd /Volumes/YOURUSBDRIVE
rm -rf .Trashes
touch .Trashes


Easy, right? From now on, whenever you delete something on the drive, OS X will alert you that it will be deleted immediately.

How to view hidden files and folders in Finder?

Still in Terminal, type “defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles ON” (no quotes). Press Enter.
Next, restart the Finder process - type “killall Finder“.

From now on, in Finder you’ll see all hidden files and folders. Warning, it won’t be very pretty.

To reverse, repeat the same steps but with the first command “defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles OFF”.

(via applepedia)

Right-clicking with only the trackpad

All new switchers learn pretty soon that in order to right-click on OS X, they need: a. a two-button mouse or b. to press Ctrl while clicking.

Well, Apple laptop owners have a third less-documented choice(I didn’t know about it until recently): tapping the trackpad with two fingers.

If it doesn’t already work for you, then you must enable it: in System Preferences, open the Keyboard & Mouse item and make sure to check the “Tap trackpad using two fingers for secondary click” check box.
(via Ron Miller)

Ever since I bought my sweet white Mac Book, it’s existence has been threatened by a minor yet annoying little thing: the startup sound.

While the startup chime doesn’t bother me a bit, it drives my girlfriend mad, and her threats of throwing the damn thing away have been getting more and more frequent. As any Mac Book user out there knows, there’s no way to change the chime sound or disable it from within the system. Even plugging earphones before booting up fails, and if you don’t want to hear the annoying chime each morning, you’d have to carefully(or automatically) switch off the sound before shutting the computer off.

But all these worries are now gone, as today was my lucky day - randomly browsing macosxhints made me discover the little free application that’s bound to save my laptop’s life.

StartupSound.prefPane 1.1-BETA comes form Arcana Research Japan, is free and available at this link (direct download link here). Being a beta version makes it possibly unstable, but so far it worked out great on my Intel Mac Book.

Your computer productivity is directly influenced by the ease with which you are able to launch applications or find, organize and retrieve your internet downloads. A cluttered desktop only makes you lose time and focus trying to find the things you look for among the zillions of icons.

You might remember my article on turning your desktop into a productivity tool which is one of the most popular articles on this blog so far. At the time I wrote it, I was finding it strange that no other productivity blogs had tackled this subject yet. Boy was I wrong - the subject of organizing one’s desktop proves to be a favorite topic of discussion for a lot of productivity-oriented blogs and bloggers. Talk about insufficient research -

Since the subject of the perfect “productive” desktop is far from being closed, I decided to give you the

Top links list for a more Productive Desktop

- introducing you to the best ideas around the web about setting up your computer desktop for improved productivity.

Read the rest of this entry »