Hack Your Day

RSS Feed Homepage

Articles: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

To moderate or not to moderate update
2008-03-25 09:51:00
I wrote a post about two weeks ago about scraper sites which index my content automatically and add it to their sites. You can read all about my comments in the post because there are positive sides to this as well, but in the end I decided that it was not a good idea at all to let this happen. Today I used who.is a whois tool to track down the registrar of the site, after which I used the whois tool of the registrar to get some more info. I found a name, address and email, so I sent the person an email. I asked him nicely to remove my site from his blog, although I was lenient, and I told him that existing content can stay, I don’t really want to go higher up the ladder than this, but I will if I must. So in the end I decided that this must stop. The loss of reputation is a far greater problem than the few hits I get and the few backlinks. Also, I don’t really get acknowledged, since the names are always auto-generated. _________
More About: Update , Moderate

Wake up early for productivity
2008-03-25 09:24:00
Waking up early is one of the tips many productivity people will give you, and it seems to me that many established CEOs and professionals tend to follow this, so it is probably a good idea to try it out at least. I recently read that Leo Babuta of Zen Habits gets up at 4:30 and by breakfast he’s probably through more work than you do until 2 pm. Rising early has two great impacts on your life. First of all, it is healthier. Tuning yourself to the sun-cycle is a good move, apparently if you are in the sun, you can stay up longer as well. The other issue is that by the time the people who you work with or know are up, you have already sent them emails, you’ve gone through all the daily beginning stuff and the day has just started. This enables you to react to and interact with people in a much more efficient and productive way, since you always have the upper hand. If you are blogging from outside the US for a mostly US crowd it will help you a lot in getting to the news...
More About: Productivity , Wake , Early , Wake up

Google code university
2008-03-25 08:59:00
I’m probably a little late with this info, but Google has released Google Code University , a page simply built around teaching people code. It already features some AJAX and CSS stuff plus some more and I bet they’ll expand a lot on this. Knowing Google, in a year this will all be integrated with Google Maps, Gmail and Google Docs, so you can filter documents from Papua New Ginea which contain tutorial sections on AJAX functions and have been sent as an attachment in an email in the past 32 and a half hours. Google Code University perfectly embodies the reason why I love Google, I wrote a little bit more about this in my personal blog, feel free to take a look if you’d like. _________

Dave Matthews Band tabs
2008-03-25 08:22:00
I know this is not a music site, but I found a guitar tab website which is probably the best I have ever seen. If you’ve ever searched for tabs you know that many sites are riddled with ads, and the tabs you find are not that accurate, or at least you have to go through a lot to find the best. One person has created a site for Dave Matthews Band tabs called DMBTabs and this guy is definitely a productivity ninja. The site is very well made, has accurate tabs, and even videos of how to play many riffs. It also has a lot of band info, some articles on Dave’s style and so on. I haven’t seen any ads so far, just quality tabs and writing. Cheers to this guy, if you want to take a look at a site which actually provides good solid stuff take a look, more people should be thinking like this. _________
More About: Dave Matthews Band

Why Open Source contributes to productivity
2008-03-25 08:14:00
Open source software has become quite popular lately and I think it’s awesome that free software like Amarok, Open Office, GIMP and so on, are becoming so good that they not only rival their paid counterparts, but surpass them in many ways. I think this is because open source stuff contributes to productivity. Not necessarily personal, but community productivity. Wordpress is open source and free and I modified a theme to go with my blog. I am modding it more and more every day, and at the end I will simply release it for everyone to download. It may not be the best theme, but hopefully some people will find joy in it, use it and mod it further to make it better. This way I can contribute in some small way to the community and I am happy that I can, or at least that I try. The very nature of open source gives people the impetus to create and share, to contribute productively to the community. In time the community becomes very large and software takes off. I mean Microsoft has...
More About: Open Source , Open , Source , Productivity , Open-Source

Tomboy - the productivity application for Linux
2008-03-20 20:42:00
Tomboy is a very simple application for Linux in principal, but its uses are extensive and you can build a note taking system as simply, as elaborately and as productively as you want. The basics of Tomboy is that it uses a Wiki like linking strategy, where specific words can be links. For example, start a new note and name it To-do. From then on, this becomes a link, if you write To-do in any other note it will become a clickable link that takes you to this note. This means easy navigation throughout the notes, and together with the powerful search feature you can reach anything in seconds. Getting Tomboy If you have Ubuntu it will be installed automatically and you will be able to find it under Application s - Accessories. The repositories are not yet updated, so this will only be version 8.0, as opposed to the newest, 10.0 version. The newer version enables Notebooks, in other words folders for your notes. Check out the Tomboy website for the new version. Using Tomboy I think I pr...
More About: Productivity , Tomboy

200th Post - Productivity celebration
2008-03-20 11:14:00
Welcome to post 200 of Hack Your Day celebrating productivity and organization for 200 posts! I don’t actually know what I’m writing this about, so we’ll see what comes out of it, possibly something more personal than usual. Oh, let me tell you about my productivity plan. I am still at a stage where I am switching between applications too much. You should choose something you like and stick with it, but I’m starting to take the approach that I’d rather take something open source I like, learn C++ and modify it for myself. I could earn a fair amount of blog readers if I did this, and I also could have an app that’s just for me. This fluctuation in apps is the reason you may read in one post: “I manage ideas in Remember the Milk this way”, and then in the next post (only 1 hour away) you will read that “I manage ideas in Tomboy this and this way”. I’m not trying to fool you guys, I simply change my tools a lot. This goe...
More About: Post , Productivity , Celebration

DIY laptop stands
2008-03-20 05:47:00
I just read a cool article on Lifehacker about 10 DIY stands you can make for your laptop. Indeed, they are all pretty simple, anyone can make them (I mean most don’t require any making at all) and they can be pretty useful. My two favorites are the one with the corks beneath, I love this because I tend to loose the rubber feet of my laptop, and these corks will prevent it from sliding to and fro. I also love the one with the paper towel stand, I love shopping in IKEA anyway. It actually looks very modern, something Apple would create, and for under $10, great! You can also store some stuff under the laptop using this stand, so it’s great to declutter you desktop too. The vertical wall mount is very interesting, I can’t imagine I could use these, but if you want to create a quick workstation out of an old laptop (for music, videos, downloading and so on), it may be great to display it this way. _________
More About: Laptop

How to wake up easily in the morning
2008-03-20 05:30:00
If you are one of those people who feel their life ends each morning, and waking up is like the worst torture ever, you have my total sympathies, I’m probably worse. About once or twice a year I wake up refreshed and ready for action, and it feels so good. I believe I can hunt down how this is done and reproduce it willingly, but until then, I have to make do with what I have. I found that the easy way of waking up is to do it immediately. Don’t think about it, you’ll just go back for that “5 minutes more” that you can’t live without. Just get up and start doing the things you can in automatic mode. Drink a cup of Ice Tea, wash your teeth and so on. The more you’re up, the fresher you feel. In reality the best way to be fresh right away is to wash your face with cold water. I know it sounds drastic, but it works. Usually the period when you feel really bad is about 5 minutes, but the more you go back to bed, the more you try and sleep more, ...
More About: Wake , Morning , Wake up , In The Morning

Command list for your Ubuntu terminal
2008-03-19 18:45:00
Today I was quite perplexed, as I could not unmount a drive in Ubuntu . The message was that I needed to be root to do it. No problem, you can either log in to your root user account (discouraged for security reasons), or you can use sudo. Sudo is essentially a command for doing something with elevated privileges. Let’s say you want to move a file, but you can’t because only the admin can. In this case, you can type the same command for moving the file, but with typing “sudo” in front, you can perform that action as a root user. So my problem was that try as I might I could not find the command to unmount. Mount was fine, it’s simply “mount”, but try as I may nothing worked. I found a bas command list in the end, and it turns out that the command for unmounting a drive is “umount”. I don’t know why the “n” needed to be omitted, but at least I found it. If you need a long list of commands you can use, take a look ...
More About: Terminal , List , Command

Making the Linux jump
2008-03-18 22:17:00
I just made the jump to Linux , partly planned and partly forced. After playing around with some disk partitioning I managed to completely loose the ability to boot into Windows, but luckily I had a Linux on an external drive. I decided to wipe my internal hard drive of Vista, I installed XP on a 12Gb partition (I’ll still need it for work probably) and I gave the remaining space to Ubuntu 7.10, Gutsy Gibbon. I think many people are daunted by the leap and really they shouldn’t be. I also find it daunting, but look at some people in the older generation, for them Windows is daunted too, and I’ve seen 80 year olds with more PC skills than myself! If you have nothing to loose, why not go for it? Ubuntu is very user friendly, it is totally free and gives you tons of software options, all freeware. My initial reaction to using Linux full time is much more positive than I thought it would be. I can access all my files from Windows, I just simply copied my wallpapers and ...
More About: Jump

Skews - Online political news
2008-03-18 21:57:00
I always have problems with news sites because many, especially local ones, tend to be more than a bit biased when telling their stories. With Skews, a new political news site, you can sort of moderate each news item by indicating on a slider how left or right biased you think it is. I find that the main use for this site is for the people who really want to make an informed decision. Leftists and rightists who are “party people” (lol) will not change their mind no matter what, but for the centrists it is great to be able to read about Obama for example from both side’s. I think that what you really should do is read both sides and sort of find their average. I don’t think a totally truthful word is ever spoken in politics, so you have to read between the lines to really find out who’d be best for you. I love the idea of this site since it enables you to at least determine which perspective you are reading. _________
More About: News , Political , Political News , Online

Using Notepad++ to edit online files
2008-03-18 16:40:00
While I was updating the look of my blog I found Notepad ++, a Windows notepad replacement one of the most useful tools ever. It gives you syntax highlighting for many programming languages, advanced search and replacement features, line collapsing, ftp down and uploading and so on, but if you just need a simple text editor it’s great as well. I used it to be able to modify my blog template and php files without the need to upload then after each save. Another feature I found very helpful was automatic line collapsing. This means that it knows where a <div> element begins and ends for example (it also handles many other block elements), enabling me to just collapse lines I don’t need. Using it to edit online files is also very simple. You need to configure the ftp client, but if you have your server details this should be a cinch. Once you have configured the client, you can connect to the server and access the files. They will be opened inside Notepad++ in a new ta...
More About: Online , Edit , Files

Google reaches for the stars
2008-03-17 11:18:00
I bet everyone’s familiar with Google Maps by now, it has become a standard application in our daily lives, giving us location information, scenery viewing capability and driving directions. In fact, I use it to look up all the addresses I need, and I even use Google Earth as a sort of photo album. It is less known that Google has launched three services that go beyond our little planet and out to the stars. You can take a look at Google Sky, and application that let’s you roam around in space and using layers, give you a bundle of information about any solar object. You can even listen to podcasts right there. There are also two services that map the moon and mars, Google Moon and Google Mars. These function basically the same way as Google Maps (no driving directions yet) and enable you to pan, move and zoom about. If you have a child around the house or if you have some astronomer in you, check them out, they’re a blast to play with and Google sky is especially ...
More About: Stars

Finding your productivity turn-ons
2008-03-17 07:32:00
I’ve noticed in myself and others that there are some factors in their (and my) life that trigger much more productivity than usual. I think everyone experiences this, but you may only think of it as simply being in a good mood. A good night’s sleep, a delicious lunch will make you work better because you feel better and thus feel more like working. But the trick is to feel better and more inspired when the conditions are not the best right? In truth, people are quite ambivalent to most conditions. Sunny weather might make you soar today, but it may bring you down the next day. To achieve maximum productivity you shouldn’t try and change the conditions, but find out what you need to do to enjoy those conditions. For example, I of course love sunshine, so when the weather is nice I take a quick shower, open my balcony door, sit close to it with my laptop, feel the gentle breeze, the warm sun and I feel awesome and work away productively all day. On the other hand I ...
More About: Productivity , Turn

Slim down CSS with shorthand
2008-03-17 04:23:00
If some of you are into tweaking your sites and blogs you may dabble in CSS sometimes. If you want to be all productivity about it, I suggest you “learn” CSS shorthand. Not that there’s too much to learn, it’s just basically a way of writing less inside the file, to make it smaller, hence load faster, hence offer a better user experience. A very common example is the way we designate margins. If you need an element to have a different margin on all sides, you would normally write: margin-left: 5px; margin-right: 10px; margin-top: 4px; margin-bottom:8px; There’s a much-much shorter, more productive and organized way to go about writing all this down, called CSS shorthand. You can write all this in just one short line, like so: margin: 4px 10px 8px 5px; This short line will set all the attributes I wrote above, much simpler and productive right? You can also apply this to padding, borders and whatnot, in each case the first number will set the top of the ...
More About: Slim

Productive Wikipedia searching
2008-03-17 02:01:00
There seems to be some buzz around browsing Wikipedia differently nowadays and I found a site that I would actually recommend to those of you using Wikipedia info often. Lexisum uses some AJAX goodness to give you Wikipedia results as you type. The really cool thing about it is that it’s blindingly fast. I mean when I search for stuff, I usually know what I want, so getting results for “guita” when I’m trying to get at “guitar” is not a huge help. The speed at which I actually get something when I finish typing (almost instantly) is great though. There is of course a link to the full article, which takes you straight to the Wikipedia page, and one other unique feature is the ability to create prints in different page sizes. That’s about it to this webpage, but overall it’s a very handy, speedy tool to use when browsing for info, take a look! _________
More About: Searching

Customize your Wordpress admin Part I Make a to-do list in your Wordpress d
2008-03-16 19:25:00
If you are a blogger and need to keep track of some of your post ideas, but don’t really like writing drafts, let me show you a great way to store some notes. If you follow this tutorial, all you will really need is to be comfortable with writing notes in a text editor. In addition, if you are familiar with CSS you can do anything you like to your list, but this is not needed. We will be modifying your index.php file, the one governing your admin, not the website itself. This file can be found in the wp-admin folder, simply named index.php. Download it and make sure to make a backup copy. Open up the file with a text editor, I prefer Notepad++, and search for the following line: <p><?php _e(’Use these links to get started:’); ?></p> You may notice, that this is the first line of your admin dashboard, so let’s put a to-do list above this. Now there are two ways you can go about this. You can either put the list right here, or you can write i...
More About: Wordpress , List , Part , Make , Admin

Digsby invites up for grabs
2008-03-16 00:07:00
Hi everyone! I was really busy redesigning the site, which you can only see in full a bit later, but most of it in place. My wonderful date calendar and digg button and comment number buttons can be seen to the left and there is only one sidebar now. I think I will increase the length of the one sidebar, and the post area. Also, I didn’t have time to write a post today, but I will be covering Digsby tomorrow. Digsby is an awesome chat client which I have actually started using full time instead of Pidgin. In short it has a great interface, very easily and highly customizable, great chat capabilities like file transfer, a cool notification method and the cutest icon ever. If you want to check it out send me a line at daniel [at sign] hackyourday [d.ot] com and I will send you one when I write the post tomorrow. Get them while they’re fresh! _________

How to label and tag email for productivity
2008-03-14 10:49:00
I have noticed that there are three approaches to using tags and labels in emails (and everywhere else actually), and in reality I have problems with all three. People either go all out and use a lot of tags, use no, or very few tags, or try to think of some strategically placed tags. My problem with going all out is that you get so many tags that it’s no longer really helpful, since you have to search your tags, which is very counter productive, since the essence of tags is to find your emails faster. I’m not saying that it’s slower than actually searching the emails, but there’s got to be a better way. Using very few or no tags at all might be a good approach if you don’t get too much mail, but even then, at least coming up with one or two might help you in organization, and personally I don’t like just having a landslide of emails in one folder at all. Strategically placing a few tags or labels has been the tactic I used so far, but the problem...
More About: Email , Productivity , Label

Password strength checker
2008-03-14 08:55:00
If you want a fun and visual way to check your passwords, take a look at the passwordmeter webpage. It contains a password checker which shows you the strength of your password and breaks it down into many factors, showing their relative weight in the equation and how well you do in each. It adds points for character count, number count, symbol count and so on, and deducts for things like letters only passwords, consecutive numbers, sequential letters and so on. It’s actually quite a useful tool if you have a password and want to modify it a bit. You can add a number instead of a letter, replace a consecutive letter with a symbol and so on. _________
More About: Password , Checker

Make your blog your management system
2008-03-13 19:30:00
Productivity and organization are powerful tools, but there aren’t really any readily made applications to help you with them. If you want to create a log of your activities, what do you do? Task managers only enable you to track your to-do’s, what if you decide to do something else, will you create a to do list after the fact? It’s feasible, but not too practical. You can use applications like OneNote and Evernote, but personally neither are ideal for me. OneNote is too freeform for me, I get carried away in the details, and it’s also not the best for creating a searchable database. With Evernote I just feel that my stuff is all over the place. Also, I would especially love to keep my database online, which neither application can accomplish. To get around this problem, I just came up with a logging system that enables you to log any even in any way you want. This tool is known as Wordpress. Yep, I am using a blog to track what I do. It’s quite simple ...
More About: System , Management , Blog , Make

Slimming down your feed list
2008-03-12 21:48:00
Sometimes a great feature hides in plain site from me. A great example is the trends link in Google Reader, which I have never checked out for some reason, but now that I did, I want to show you guys what it can do. Basically it’s a statistics factory for your RSS reading habits, which may seem useless or only fun to many people, it does give room for some productivity. I actually only have about 20 feeds at a time, I tend to root out ones I don’t read often. Now that I looked at the trends, I discovered that there are feeds where I only read about 2% of the material published. Google reader shows you this info in a “top feeds” table where you can see the number of items published in a feed per day, and the percentage of items you actually read. This works really well, since if you have 200 items unread in a feed and simply click “mark all as unread” these won’t count in statistics-wise. o if you’re struggling with hundreds of feeds, ...
More About: List , Feed

Customize the logo in Google Apps
2008-03-11 19:09:00
If you have a Google Apps account you can change the default Google logos to your own, putting all your stuff in company colors. Whatever I work with I always customize to give it the smooth Hack Your Day feel, so I needed to put my own logo on there, no question about it. It can pretty simply be done, all you need to do is go and manage your domain, click on domain settings and go to appearance. You will see that you can change the header image, although this will stay the same for all services. Be sure to make it exactly 143×59 or else it won’t work. For some reason Google crops bigger pics, but doesn’t put them in in the end. Another word of advice to Photoshoppers, don’t just downsize your pic if it’s a lot bigger. My logo was about 2400×1200 and it looked horrible. The reason probably is that you’re going too small, sizing a huge image to 300×200 is fine, but with this size it didn’t work for me. I got around it by changing ...
More About: Google Apps , Logo

Moleskine notebook roundup
2008-03-11 13:36:00
Moleskines are the best notebooks ever. They are very high quality, feature rounded edges and have oilcloth bound covers, with acid-free pages. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you productivity ninjas and GTD followers what a Moleskine is it is widely used by many people, including loads of CEOs and historical figures like Picasso and Hemingway. Even I personally own a planner, wow! Here’s a list of my favorite types of Moleskine simple notebooks, if you are in need of one, don’t be shy to order. The Moleskine Notebook This is the original real deal, the simple notebook. The large notebook gives you 240 lined pages to store all your thoughts, tasks and ideas, while the pocket gives you a still impressive 192. The simple notebook truly gives you the freedom that is the essence of Moleskine, since you are free to do anything. If you want, you can use it as a calendar, a notepad, you can sketch in it, use it as a todo list, it’s your choice. There are three ...
More About: Roundup

Copy all your favorites to a spreadsheet
2008-03-11 12:19:00
If you want to build a personal database of links you can copy all your favorites simply to Excel using a simple tool I already had a look at here on Hack Your Day. In How to copy links easily I showed you how to productively copy all links on a page, or all selected ones. All you need is a Firefox extensions called Copy Links and some organization of favorites. If you go to favorites and organize favorites you can export all this info by going to file and export. The file is saved in html format, which you can open, and view your link list. Now all you need to do is select all, or just the ones you want and copy using Copy Links. You can then paste it into Excel, it will place each link one after another. If you have links mixed up and you need a bunch from here and there, create a new folder and drag all the links you eed in there. When you export, links are grouped by folder, so you can easily select the ones you need. _________
More About: Favorites , Spreadsheet

Chandler - open source Outlook replacement
2008-03-11 09:14:00
Chandler (Bing) is an open source project I came across a while ago, and don’t use, but I can recommend it to anyone. I can describe it basically as an Outlook replacement, with huge, huge benefits for groups of people working together. Chandler in itself is also cool, you can overviews, email, tasks, calendars, the whole deal, in a clean, easily accessible interface. If you’ve used Outlook before you will be instantly in familiar hands, in some respects, better hands. You have POP and IMAP access, you can set up ticklers to remind you of tasks at specific times, advanced scheduling, task management, the features are extensive, and impressive. However I see the real benefit of Chandler if you use a hub account, or your own server. Both are available on site, the software to run the server is free as well of course. The awesome benefit is that you get an exchange server feel, where you can collaborate and share information as if you were on an online collaboration site. A...
More About: Open Source , Open , Source , Open-Source

To moderate or not to moderate
2008-03-10 05:22:00
I usually have pretty set rules set up for myself on moderating comments. I hate spam and I want to keep my blog 100% free of it. I have come across a problem though, like in every aspect of life there are gray areas, spam is no exception. I don’t know how many you guys know, but there are automated blogs, which scrape other blogs for info and basically create a blog out of these posts. Some people do this manually, the excellent Zen Habits Blog is one such example, entries point to other people’s posts, but they are hand picked, and the author in no way means to reap any rewards. Let me show you an example of an auto-blog. I just wrote a post on speeding up Vista and a blog covered it about 5 minutes. This was the second such post, and all Vista related posts are covered in a similar manner, since I’ve been mentioning Vista a lot here, this one will possibly get in too. The spam factor comes in when you see the backlinks in the comments, but I am having a lot of t...
More About: Moderate

Speed up your Vista
2008-03-10 04:10:00
I have a quite low end laptop and although Vista runs fine because I loaded it with a heaps of memory sometimes I just need that extra oomph. A bumped into a problem the other day, I was doing some batch work with macros and often the macros failed because a window failed to open on time. Now I am talking about doing things at 600% speed, with 50 tabs open if Firefox, so this isn’t a normal speed issue, I needed to find some setting to change that would considerably improve performance at this level. Here are some of the things I came up with that smoothed things out a lot. Disable window animation This was probably biggest player of all. My macros minimized and maximized windows, so at 600% speed that’s a lot happening in a short time. Even if you don’t look at load times, the windows need time to pop up, since they slide in from below. Disabling these animations meant that windows would quasi-instantaneously pop up. If you are experiencing jitters ad slow loading...
More About: Speed , Speed up

Natural working hours
2008-03-09 20:26:00
Medical studies have concluded and I myself have seen the effect that working in the morning is better than in the afternoon. Many people say that they like working or studying at night because all is quiet and there’s nothing to distract them. I used to be like that, but then I tried going to bed regularly at 10pm and getting up at 6am. I can safely say that it works and you will feel much better all the time overall. You will get much more done, and you will feel refreshed most of the time. The reason few people actually convert to this lifestyle is that they miss the key word in the sentence, which is “regularly”. If you are used to a night lifestyle don’t expect to be able to convert in a day or two. It takes at least a week, but you will feel better by day three at least. There are many benefits, possibly the best is that it allows more flexibility. Sometimes I am up until 3am or 4am (poker party), and I can still get up reasonably early (8-10), but more...
More About: Natural , Working , Hours