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Twitter with Remember The Milk
2008-06-08 09:14:00
If you’re a Remember The Milk user, you already know how many features you are getting. Phone updates, IM updates, smart lists, etc, etc, and if you are using Twitter there’s a great feature available for you too. I only recently became aware of this as I started Twittering, and I’m quite pleased with this feature to say the least. You can add tasks, mark them as complete, postpone, get a task list, assign tasks to others, all through simply Twittering a message. Since I need to jot down ideas quickly, many times I use different services for quick ideas and full blown lists, but now, I can just send a load of tasks through Twitter to my RTM inbox, and then manage them later on, how’s that for productivity? If you like the sound of this, take a look at the Remember the Milk Twitter page. You will need to enter your Twitter username, then add rtm as a friend on twitter and send it a direct message containing the displayed code. Simply type “d rtm codehere...

Repetition is the Mother of all knowledge
2008-06-07 22:42:00
As the common saying goes, you need to repeat stuff over and over for it to sink in. Most of what I think of as productivity is the same. Let’s take an example from my own life. I’m getting into all his Twittering business because it enables me to let people know what I’m doing, but more importantly, it lets me have a database of everything I’ve done, so I can search in it for example. Now if you take a look at my Twitter feed in the menu at this very moment, you’ll see that I was creating a Wordpress theme 3 days ago, and now I’m writing a Hack Your Day post. In between I actually did other stuff to, but this data is forever lost due to my chaotic Twittering. With every method, every productivity app you try, you will most likely fail if you can not make it part of a routine. Most of the time people go to Remember The Milk, see how awesome it is, spend 2 hours playing around, inputting everything, and as time passes, their diligence in using RTM ...
More About: Mother , Knowledge

Advanced mouse productivity
2008-06-06 03:40:00
One of my first posts here on Hack Your Day was about buying a new Technica, simple 3 button mouse, and how that’s all I need. Well it was, until I had enough of always needing to change batteries. More specifically I had enough of never having batteries at hand. I went out and bought myself a Microsoft Wireless Laser Mouse 8000. This mouse has 5 buttons, side scrolling and it has an awesome charging pad which is not the stand up thing most people have, but a simple pad you just put the mouse on. One of the best things about it hardware-wise is that it works with Bluetooth, meaning you won’t have to plug in a receiver if you have Bluetooth built in. What really made my day productive was the software Microsoft bundled with the product. You can customize all buttons, like make the left mouse button be a shift button, or the right mouse button become an enter button. What’s even better though is the applications specific configurations. When using notepad for example...
More About: Productivity

Productive keyword navigation
2008-05-31 18:15:00
I’ve already shown you how to use keyword navigation in Firefox, now let’s take that to the next level by creating naming schemes and putting some organization behind it. The problem is that while you may visit up to 50 sites regularly, coming up with 50 unique, short and easy to remember keywords is not that simple. Sure, you can use the site name, but typing organizationandplanning to get to Organization and Planning is not the quickest of methods. Let me show you the method I use, which will work especially well if you’re a webmaster, have some blogs, or visit sub pages of one domain. I currently own or work on a number of websites, and I need quick access to the main pages, the admin panel, the comments section, google analytics, alexa rankings, feedburner page, and some others for all the sites. What I do, is I simply create a keyword for the main pages I visit, for Hack Your Day this word is “hyd”, for Blogtastique it is btq. As you know, all I ne...
More About: Keyword , Navigation

Why you should start using databases now!
2008-05-29 08:20:00
I’ve been promoting database usage for a while now, so let me add another post on top of the pile. I believe a database or your work (or personal) life is the most productive thing you could do which also helps you organize yourself and it may even increase your immediate productivity. I’ve been writing posts for years and I think I’m in the thousand range now, not speaking of the numerous personal blog posts and so on. Ask me if I’ve ever mentioned site “X”. I’ll probably say no, or I don’t know, and in my professional life, a definite answer to that question may be needed. I can not stress enough how great databases are. Sure you can use Remember The Milk for tasks, or Gubb for simple lists and so on, but in Access for example you can do it all. Buy a flower each day and record the species, number of pettles, attach wikipedia entries and record dates. Learn a new guitar tab each day, record the day, the website, attach the tab, the l...
More About: Start , Databases

Japanese style clean desktop
2008-05-27 20:27:00
I’ve always said that an uncluttered desktop is best because it gives you a sense of accomplishment, a free mind and a sense of beauty too. Icons and your wallpaper is an integral part of this, and today I found a great icon set list, with a beautful Japanese themed set named Yoritsuki icons. Very detailed and masterfully crafted icons, although if you’re looking for meaning this is not for you. Only two “regular” icons can be found for folders, the others are of Japanese traditional items, associated with hot spring inns. I have no problem with this, and I am using these as icons for my current projects folders. I couldn’t really find a good background image for them though, I tried them on a Bamboo wallpaper, but somehow they lost their charm, so I decide to make my own. It’s very simple, the idea was to let the icons be in the foreground, not the wallpaper image. It features a very simple bamboo like texture with one kanji on the top left. The ...
More About: Desktop , Style , Clean

Full CSS support in Google Docs
2008-05-26 19:37:00
Google Docs has implemented a much awaited feature, the full use of CSS in documents. This essentially means that those of you versed in CSS can create great looking documents instead of black, white and grey ones. Color and some format options were already available of course, but you can now specify borders, you can add divs with styling, create different types of lists in seconds. Since all this is implemented in CSS, you can just specify different classes for different types of content and then encase the specific contents in divs. This means you will format your document once, which will take you 10 minutes, and after that formatting a whole blog of text will only take about 2 sends. Considering you may want a border, a different font, a different background color and font color, and underline and so on, this is a huge productivity jump. You can also edit the html, so essentially Google Docs has become a HTML editor with a WYSIWYG option. Tihs is awesome in my opinion, I now ha...
More About: Google , Google Docs , Support , Full

A Blogtastique management service
2008-05-25 12:43:00
I have been working quite hard in the last few days to complete and put a new site online called Blogtastique. The aim of the site is to help beginner bloggers churn out a truly quality site in a day, and to help pro bloggers manage their blogs. With the free Basic Package we’ll install your Wordpress blog for example, recommend themes based on your content, recommend some cool plugins and generally give you some good tips about this and that. the Pro Package means we’ll make some theme customization for you, install plugins, third party applications like embedded Twitter, widgets and so on and we’ll try our best to synchronize the look of your blog with what you write about. The Managment Package is for those of you who don’t like doing the “paperwork” that your blog generates. We’ll pre-configure your categories or optimize them for you, going through each post, we’ll create a custom theme just for you, we can check each new post for...
More About: Management , Service

Paste frequent text with short cuts in Notepad++
2008-05-23 10:10:00
I’ve been ranting on and on about how I love Notepad ++, and recently I’ve started looking ore and more at, let me share a cool feature I found which lets you create keyboard shortcuts for pasting anything really. This helps my productivity to no end, especially when writing html or css code. I use comments a lot when first creating a design so I know where I am later on too. Creating a comment in html means you have to write the following code <!-- Comment Here -->. This can get a bit tedious, especially at the beginning, when I add a comment below all my div containers, and also at their closing tag. For this reason I created a macro to paste comment tags quickly. In Notepad++, just go to the macro menu and choose start recording. Tye the desired text anywhere on screen, in my example I wrote <!-- -->, and then go to the macro menu again, and click stop recording. You will need to go to the menu again and click “save currently recorded macro”. Y...
More About: Text , Short , Paste , Cuts

Automated desktop cleanup
2008-05-22 22:57:00
I found a cool tool browsing Lifehacker today, called Desktop Teleporter. You will find it quite useful for cleaning up your desktop, which it is capable of doing on its own. Simply specify some criteria, and your files will automatically be moved to different folders based on this. This is useful if you download a lot of files with Firefox, and for me the best way of doing this is to simply use my desktop as a repository. This can result in widespread chaos on my desktop, which is less than productive, and having an automatic routine that cleans it for me is a great help. I highly recommend this to people with cluttered desktops, although I don’t use it myself because I am missing one feature which would be awesome. I would like to specify that the program should only move files off my desktop to specified folders which I haven’t opened in over 24 hours. The reason I use my desktop to download is that I view these files often for a while, but after that I just forget ab...
More About: Cleanup , Automated

The productivity ninja unveiled!
2008-05-22 19:51:00
I was looking at some of my comments when I found a trackback to one of the funniest posts I’ve read recently, it makes fun of the term productivity Ninja , and I am linked to! This behavior can not be tolerated of course and the Ninja has bee dispatched to deal with this arch criminal, but until he gets there, take a look at the investigative report by The Growing Life. In light of the current situation as I have said, I have contacted said authority, who is on his way to deal swift, nay, productive pain to the author, who should enjoy the limelight. While he can! Muahhahaha. I just wanted to correct some of the so called “facts” or observations he makes. Here’s the lowdown on the productivity ninja, or at least as much as his second line of command knows. Bruce Lee is not the ninja Bruce Lee is obviously not, and could never be a productivity Ninja. Have you ever seen him walking around with a Moleskine? For that matter, no one could ever see the productivit...
More About: Productivity

StumbleUpon - A blessing or a curse?
2008-05-21 21:32:00
StumbleUpon is a cool phenomenon on the web, it allows you to discover, or stumble upon, websites you like endlessly. People can “I like it” a page, which will get the page into the system, or just add another person who likes it. The page is also tagged, which serves as a basis for categorizing each webpage. Users can specify their interests and based upon that and the tags, pages similar to their interest will be served. This results in two things. One is that one can have so much fun on the net, instead of every 1 out of 20 pages being appealing, the ration goes up to about 1 in 3 or better. This also means that a lot of people become less productive, you can spend hours on end just stumbling. This has led to a debate weather StumbleUpon is a friend or foe, a blessing or a curse. I would like to make the case for StumbleUpon and I think I can make quite a good case too. First let me argue with some of the points made against. My biggest argument is that if you don&rsq...
More About: Curse , Blessing , Stumbleupon

Automatically backup multiple email accounts
2008-05-20 21:24:00
If you’ve got multiple accounts there’s a really easy way to backup all your emails automatically as they are sent/received. If you have a gmail account it’s even easier, but it can be done with many services, and even email clients. The whole idea is to route all your email addresses to one central account. You don’t have to use this to actually read the mail, but it can be used as an emergency backup, or just general storage of all your emails. I personally have gmail accounts and accounts hosted by Bluehost. I get regular emails to all my accounts, but I only need to view a few of them regularly, so those that I monitor daily I route to a central Gmail accounts. I also forward emails from ALL accounts to another Gmail account, which I just use to store my emails. I started this about a year ago, and I only used it once, but it probably saved me about 2 weeks of work, so I guess it was all worth it. It may be hard to find stuff on this account as you may ac...
More About: Email , Backup

Staple free stapler
2008-05-20 11:18:00
Stapling productivity just doesn’t get any better than this folks! This stapler doesn’t use metal staples, but the paper itself to join together your stuff. Apart from being highly environmentally friendly, it will save you money and time, since you will never have to buy staples again! I seem to run out of staples at the worst possible times, although I don’t use them much at all these days. This contraption is a great novelty item too though, I’m probably ordering one this week just to play around with it. If you need industrial office type stapling for 50 pages I recommend getting the usual high performance stapler, but for every day use, I would say up to 10 sheets, this is great. Such a great idea, such simplicity, I love it! If you like it too check out a video and links to buy on my new site, Organization & Planning, where I will be moving all the product stuff that used to be on Hack Your Day a while back.
More About: Free , Stapler

DIY Gmail notifier lamp and beyond
2008-05-19 20:39:00
I see a lot of DIY project around the web, but few are as cool, and actually quite useful as this one. Jamie Matthews on his blog shows us all how to turn an external device into a Gmail notification lamp. The article is fairly detailed, but I think if you put in some time and effort you should do fine. What really got me going was the extent where this tech could be taken. Although physical electronics and me go together like a balloon in an iron maiden, but I think extending this to go bluetooth is just a step higher and that is just awesome. Imagine getting a small bracelet or ring which vibrates or lights up in a cool ambient way when you get an email. I’ll grant you that effective bluetooth distance is about 10 meters, but you could be roaming around in your room for example remodeling, and never missing an email. If you take it even one more step further, you can take it to Wifi. I have a router here at home which is in my room, but extends all the way to the edge of our...
More About: Lamp , Notifier

Top 5 Adobe Air productivity apps
2008-05-18 17:15:00
Adobe Air has quickly become a favorite of mine, and has quite some hype surrounding it, and for a good reason. Possibly for the first time in internet history it brings together the internet and the desktop in a usable, easy, productive and very stylish way. There have been, and are, other projects on the horizon like Prism and Bubbles, but Air provides the best interaction between your desktop and online world. Say hello to some of my current favorite Air Apps, all of which further your productivity in one way or another. Doomi The very sexually named Doomi is actually quite misinterpreted if looking at its name alone. It is a very simple, unobtrusive and easy to use to-do list enabling you to take down tasks on the fly, very quickly. My favorite thing about this Abobe Air app is that by default all you see is a bar showing you your to-do items, completed items and number of reminders at the top, and a text area for inputing a task. Just jot and press enter, that’s all. When...
More About: Adobe , Productivity

The future of desktop and online productivity
2008-05-17 13:47:00
If you take the internet out of context and forget about all the obvious productivity advantages it has given us, like email, skype and so on, it’s still not anywhere near to being as much of a time saver in productivity as it could be. Let me explain. Take a look at the average internet user for example. He loads up gmail, sends and email, browses for an attachment, sends it. Then he logs in to his blog, writes an article, fires up GIMP and makes an image for the post. He simultaneously logs on to Twitter, to let the world know he’s writing a blog post, and so on and so forth. Much of our time is wasted on switching between apps, and overall, using too many application to accomplish our goals. Services and technologies spreading like wildfire on the net are constantly changing this, and making us more productive. For once I’m not talking about Remember the Milk, or even Gmail, but the applications that serve to bring these all together. Prism, Adobe Air, Google De...
More About: Desktop , Future , Productivity , The Future , Online

Use Google’s Cache to retrieve code
2008-05-17 00:09:00
As I was happily updating my theme on Hack Your Day I managed to overwrite the index.php file of my website danielpataki.com instead of the one for Hack Your Day. I only noticed now, so I had no undo option and no local copy, since I just made that page 2 days ago and hadn’t backed up yet, stupid, I know. I a last desperate attempt I looked up the page on Google and clicked on cache to see Google’s view of my site, which luckily was the one I designed earlier. Instead of spending 5 hours pulling out my hair and shouting I managed to restore everything in 5 minutes. If you’ve lost some website related code and you found out in about 24 hours you have a very good chance of recovering the data with Google’s cache. It depends on when Google’s spiders get to you, but if you get lucky you can retrieve everything.
More About: Code , Cache

Register on Hack Your Day with your Open ID
2008-05-16 23:35:00
A quick update for all of you on the new commenting system and Hack Your Day in general. I have implemented Open ID registration for the blog, so you are now free to use your Open ID. If you don’t know what it is, take a look at OpenID.net where you can find all the info needed. Just so even this post digs into productivity a bit, I’ll quickly tell you that you might have long had an Open ID and not even know it. If you use Blogger, Flickr, Yahoo, Wordpress.com, Technorati, AOL, LiveDoor, Orange, SmugMug, or Vox, you can already use you identities there to sign up and use any service that is Open ID enabled. To get started you need to use your profile page URL usually, take a look at the list of Open ID URL’s you can use. Your username will be that horrible long URL though, so please take a moment to put down a nickname in your profile, which can be found by clicking on the profile link to the top right of the Wordpress admin panel when you log in. You can also add...
More About: Register

Hack Your Day changes
2008-05-16 17:43:00
Hello to all of my readers, a new updates is almost ready for you guys. Chances are most of you already see the new design, which is not radically different, but I think it looks better. The first thing you’ll notice is the bar on the left side which will be a staple of all my websites. The biggest change I made was in the commenting though. It now looks much better, and it now looks the same on IE and FF. From now on commenting on Hack Your Day is only available to registered users. My reason is that this way it will be just that much easier to stop spam, and also, I want to create a nice community of my awesome readers. Entering your email address is perfectly safe, I won’t sell it, lease it, eat it or steal it, all it does is enable me to contact you personally if you have a problem. In the future it will also allow me to contact the readers who do the most commenting so that I can maybe give them elevated privileges and so on. All in all, registering is super easy an...

Use OS-X style stacks in Windows
2008-05-15 09:45:00
I have been doing the blog for so long I couldn’t remember If I’ve ever done a post on RocketDock. I had a feeling that I didn’t, but I haven’t even mentioned it, oh the horror of it all! If you haven’t heard of it, RocketDock puts a little Mac-like dock on your Windows desktop and enables you to extensively customize everything from visuals to icons, to size and hover behavior and so on. I actually had quite a problem naming this post, since it could easily have been “put folder contents on the desktop productively and stylishly” because I’m going to show you a way to use OS-X style stacks with RocketDock that makes navigating some folder’s files very easy. I have a drafts folder for example where my drafts reside, but the contents change daily, and any single file will be gone in a maximum of 2-3 days. I needed to put the folder contents on the dock, not just the files, so I had a look at the addons page and found the Stacks Do...
More About: Style

Always be prepared for productivity with a notebook and pen
2008-05-13 21:45:00
Always be prepared would be a nice motto for Rambo and John McClane, but productivity ninjas often use the phrase too. The point it that there are many situations where you would have the time to organize your thoughts, jot down notes, or outline a speech, but you can’t use your laptop, don’t have room, or have to stand for example. Enter, stage left the trusty notebook and pen combo. Invest just a few bucks in a small pocket notepad and a pen and you will be ready for action any time. Sitting in traffic? Waiting in line at the pharmacy, whenever, wherever, you can always put some thoughts down. You may not save hours, but just a four minutes a day saved (or spent extra) could amount to as much as an extra day spent organizing every year. I always have a small notepad at hand because I’m quite the forgetful guy, an awesome idea that comes to me while grocery shopping may be long gone by the time I get home. If you frequently find yourself in situations where you ha...
More About: Notebook , Productivity

Fluency admin theme for Wordpress
2008-05-13 00:48:00
I’ve praised the new Wordpress admin theme in the past, but I’ve found a theme called Fluency that is so cool, I just have to show you. I first saw it at MUO when posting and it looks breathtaking. It has a darker approach, but I wouldn’t say the design has a dark feeling. In fact, I think it’s a lesson in design, since the only color type used is gray, and not even hundreds of shades, just about 5-6. It’s amazing that someone can create such a beautiful, simplistic, yet useful theme, out of just 5 shades of one color. The biggest change you’ll see is that all menu options are now in a left side menu bar, which seems a bit more logical and drastically more contrasted, so you can find stuff more easily. Sub menus show up on the top, again in a tasteful, and very usable way. I know I’m ranting on and on about this too much, but this theme is so damn good. I haven’t taken a very in-depth look, but it uses css a lot, so it should be custom...
More About: Theme , Admin

My own homepage
2008-05-11 11:53:00
As part of my plan in becoming a full time blogger, I finally managed to quasi-finalize my homepage. If you want to take a look at what I’m doing, and even what I’m doing at the moment (twitter integration coming up). take a look at danielpataki.com I am still working out content, but I’m pretty happy about the way things look, especially under the hood. I have moved from html files to php files and I am using the php include function to call most parts. My goal was to achieve the simplest design possible that still looks good, I would really appreciate your feedback on this. I want to slim down the html and css even more, and I am actively thinking about how to do it. If you have any comments, questions, or would like to get your name and blog added on the page let me know and we’ll discuss the matter. Any good friends are welcome, please take a look and do leave your feedback! _________
More About: Homepage

How overorganizing can help
2008-05-10 23:04:00
I’m an avid believer in the saying that “too much of anything can be bad”. I probably just made that up, but it’s true nevertheless. I have found though in my own experience that over-organizing may be a suitable action plan for some people. The organizational curve I think the against arguments are fairly obvious. Organization works like economies of scale. Up to a point the more you do, the exponentially more you benefit. After a while you benefit more, but the gradient is not as steep as it was (economically speaking, the marginal worth of your extra organizational input is declining). After a critical point, more organization brings you less benefit. So the moral of the story is, that by organizing yourself a whole lot takes away precious time you could spend actually doing something. External factors What the above model doesn’t, and can’t generally take into account is the fact that there are loads of other inputs in the equation. Your mood,...

Productivity tips for freelance writers
2008-05-06 13:31:00
Apart from blogging I actually used to do (and am starting again) to do a fair bit of freelance writing. There a lot of things you can do for yourself that enables you to work better, get better work and to organize yourself better. Let me share some tips I’ve accumulated to make your job easier. Find work I used to rely solely on one site to get work and that is Elance. Since then I am doing a lot of guest blogging, which I attained through relations with other bloggers, but even if you’re new to blogging you could apply, many blogs are searching for good writers. If you do want to become a guest writer I really suggest not pushing the envelope. If you’re an all round nice guy and offer to write a guest post or two for them (without mentioning employment or money) they will probably take you on anyway if they need the writers and you do a good job. I suggest being polite friendly and sincerely helpful. Elance is a great site for finding many types of work, not jus...
More About: Tips , Productivity , Freelance , Writers

Tripple booting made easy with Hardy Heron
2008-05-06 11:09:00
Now that the new Ubuntu release has come out tripple booting has become very easy. I am now trip booting XP, Vista abd Ubuntu. I have a multitude of reasons for having all three, I am making Ubuntu my full time OS as you know, but Vista still has its merits. For starters, I know it better, so if I need something done quickly thats still where I go. I use XP for the little gaming I do, about once a week I get together with a friend and play some games, XP is still the best for that. If you take a look at APCmag, you’ll quickly find instructions for double booting Xp and Vista, regardless of wich one you have installed first. Then comes the beauty of Hardy Heron, the WUBB install system. This enables you to install Ubuntu from within the Vista environment and Ubuntu will be added to the Windows bootloader. Since I really hate trying to find out how to get Grubb to boot Windows this was a Godsent and now I’m happily and easily booting all three systems. As a side note, my F...
More About: Made , Easy , Hardy Heron

Back in business
2008-05-06 10:58:00
Hey everyone! I’m back from my stupid hiatus, which I needed to take because of my dayjob (again). I’m trying to work things out so I don’t need to go away again, but no promises this time. I can tell you that there probably won’t be any more stops in Hack Your Day, when I’m making a bit more I’ll take on guest writers who can take care of things in my absence. I am also working on multiple other projects, taking on some more writing work apart from blogging so that I can become filthy rich, but so far I’m just filthy, but I’m at least halfway there grammatically. I’m working on some web stuff too which will be unveiled as I’m ready with them, but o course this just means more work, and I only have 24 hours in a day (I know, lame). Anyways, welcome back to Hack Your Day, I will continue to give you productivity tips now, about 1-2 a day, which will increase as my time allows. Some ad changes will be made because I hate grea...
More About: Business , Back

Hack Your Day downtime
2008-04-16 08:20:00
Hi Everyone! It’s another bad month here at my normal job so please stay with me a bit longer! I will be back to posting regularly soon, but I do need some time off. Just as a breadcrumb, I am working on another webpage when I have the time, hopefully I can unveil it when I get back, which I really hope will be Monday. It will be an organization and planning related blog which is mostly about products available in stores, rather than technology. It will mostly look like the product posts (see the Moleskine Notebook roundup), but it will have good articles too to keep the interest of people who don’t want to buy stuff all the time. I actually had two reasons for doing this, the first is that I always wanted to do a product oriented blog, that’s why I had some posts like that here, and the second is that I do not want to post products on Hack Your Day, I’d rather “outsource” to a different blog. I am guessing that my audience is mainly here for the...

Powerful contact management with Highrise
2008-04-11 09:11:00
Highrise, by 37signals, is a very powerful contact management system that lets you keep track of anything contact related. You can use it for customer care, networking, team management, even task management if you want to. Basics At its core, Highrise is a place to store contact information and interaction. You can create contacts, enter various contact information and you will see a list of these contacts. Nothing really special there. Once you’ve created someone, you can add a an entry to his history, anything you did together, or agreed upon for example. This entry will be saved and once you’ve been using the app for a while you will have a neat log of events that took place with different people. All searchable, with different views as expected from a quality application. This alone gives you a lot of power and flexibility in your organization, but what really boosts your productivity is the ability to add tasks, follow-ups and dates to remember. You assign tasks con...
More About: Management , Contact