Author: lmc

Save your productivity with Chrome’s StayFocused extension

StayFocused

“You sit down at the computer, and you swear you’ll be productive. Next thing you know, it’s twelve hours later. You’ve checked your email, updated your Facebook status, browsed the trending topics on Twitter, read your RSS feeds, [read Reddit, my drug of choice,] looked up your favorite band on Wikipedia, vanity googled yourself, cyber-stalked your ex, looked at all your high-school crushes’ Facebook photos, watered your plants on Farmville, and lost a week’s pay playing online poker. 


What you haven't done is WORK.
StayFocusd is a productivity extension for Google Chrome that helps you stay focused on work by restricting the amount of time you can spend on time-wasting websites. Once your allotted time has been used up, the sites you have blocked will be inaccessible for the rest of the day."

Of course, you have to be running Chrome.

Three great new tools

Task management: Toodledo, http://www.toodledo.com.  Different than Remember The Milk, maybe better.  I’m trying it out and may switch permanently.

BetterTouchTool: http://www.boastr.de/.  Lots of gestures for your Mac.
BetterSnapTool: http://blog.boastr.net/?page_id=2342.  A subset of the gestures in BetterTouchTool, but in addition allows you to move a window by pressing a modifier key and moving the mouse.  If you use a touchpad, this is actually just a modifier key and dragging your finger.
All are free.

Rapture Saturday, sort of like Super Bowl Sunday …

… except that the Super Bowl actually happens.

So how come “The Rapture” is always supposed to be soon, like this year, next year, maybe five years out … and never, you know, 500 years out?

Even if it IS this Saturday, that still means that 1000 years ago it was 1000 years in the future.  And yet I’m gonna guess that believers back then thought it was around the corner just like they do now.

Of course I’ve never studied the history of prophecies of the end of the world, so maybe there’re some out there that DO say we’re cool for another thousand years.  See you then.  (Except that I’ll be dead, of course.  🙂

Unintended consequences

Problem: Editor creates “backup” files.  Solution: create a script to find all “*.bak” files and delete them.  Run it manually whenever appropriate.

Problem: Files are too big.  Solution: Use the “split” command to split them into 10k line chunks.  Files are big enough that the “split” default (foo => foo.aa, foo.ab, etc) needs to be changed to a 3 character extension, thus foo => foo.aaa, foo.aab, etc.

Solutions collide: foo.bak gets deleted the next time I clean up my backup files.  Oops.

More than one Apple

What’s a good plural noun meaning “my iPhone and my iPad”?  I like “my iPhads”.  🙂

I made this up myself.  But Googling it reveals that I’m far from the first with this idea.  Bummer.  But not surprising.