Productivity

Productivity tips, useful tools, workflows, utilities, and time-saving techniques.

Productivity

Slack is my new RSS reader

I've finally found a solution to the vacuum created when my favorite RSS reader got the axe (RIP Google Reader). I loved being able to quickly browse through the headlines of my favorite blogs and news sites. For the past couple of years I've been depending mainly on Twitter our Medium notifications when someone posts something new but unless I'm actively looking I'll miss most things. Recently I discovered that Slack has an integration that allows you to subscribe to an RSS or Atom feed URL and receive updates in a Slack channel.

2 min read
Productivity

Out of DiskSpace? Use Ducks | aplawrence.com

I'm always looking for better ways to find the disk hogs... there are a ton of one liners and tools but this is the first time I've heard of "ducks". Thanks A.P!


Where has the space gone?

Although time consuming, the following procedure can be used to track down where your space has been used.

cd /

du -s *

(Some folks like to use "du -cks *", which is easy to remember as "ducks".)

2 min read
Tutorials

HOW TO: Run Your Business Online with $10 and a Google Account

Online infrastructure for your small business doesn’t have to be complicated or expensive. By leveraging many of the free and inexpensive products offered by Google, you can create a website, a domain-branded e-mail system, and a document collaboration platform, all unified under one master login and password.

Once all of the virtual wires are connected, these services are extremely user-friendly, allowing anyone with a bit of web savvy to become the “system administrator” for their office.

1 min read
Security

Circuit Simulator Applet - falstad.com

This is a very cool little app that I found after listening to Security Now Episode 233: Let's Design a Computer. Some of the basic circuits were hard to visualize and this app kind of brings them to life with animated current flow and some interactivity. For the podcast you'll want to look in the Circuits menu for the Logic Families/RTL for the circuits being discussed.

This java applet is an electronic circuit simulator. When the applet starts up you will see an animated schematic of a simple LRC circuit. The green color indicates positive voltage. The gray color indicates ground. A red color indicates negative voltage. The moving yellow dots indicate current.

1 min read
Tutorials

iPhone Wifi not working? Reset your network settings | A Mountain Top, LLC

iPhone Wifi not working? Reset your network settings | A Mountain Top, LLC.

From the Home Screen, I clicked on "Settings". From there, I scrolled down to "General" and clicked on it. From there, I scrolled to the bottom, clicked "Reset", then "Reset Network Settings". After accepting the warning that I was doing something dangerous and clicking the giant red button, the iPhone started buzzing and shaking and generally throwing a fit. After it was done getting reset, I simply went back into Settings -> Wifi, saw my network, connected and it worked!

1 min read
Tutorials

Google PowerMeter

| Google PowerMeter | Google PowerMeter is a free electricity usage monitoring tool that provides you with information on how much energy your home is consuming. Google PowerMeter receives information from utility smart meters and in-home energy management devices and visualizes this information for you on iGoogle (your personalized Google homepage). And, Google PowerMeter is free.

Studies show that being able to see your electricity usage in near real time, throughout the day, makes it easier to reduce it and save money. This sort of feedback requires either an advanced electricity meter, a "smart meter," or a consumer-owned electricity management device, and many of today's smart meters don't display information to the consumer. Consumers should have access to data on their personal electricity use, control who gets to see this data and choose from a range of services to help them understand and benefit from this data. We're working with federal and state governments to ensure our energy policies encourage consumer information; read our comments to the Department of Energy on smart grid investment in the stimulus, Edward Lu's testimony to the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, and our comments to the California Public Utilities Commission and our joint statement with leading companies and NGOs. We hope that consumers will soon be empowered with an entire ecosystem of energy information products and services.

2 min read
Tutorials

5 Ways to Test If Your ISP Throttles P2P « NewTeeVee

| 5 Ways to Test If Your ISP Throttles P2P « NewTeeVee | Do your torrent downloads seem to be taking longer than usual? Are you trying to transfer, say, a home video to a friend via Pando and the upload keeps getting stuck? Or maybe you’re having problems with BitTorrent’s new streaming service, which just doesn’t seem to work on your system? There’s a good chance your ISP is at fault, as more and more providers are putting the brakes on BitTorrent these days.

1 min read
Tutorials

Songbirdnest.com | Songbird Media Player

| Songbirdnest.com | Songbird Media Player | Play music. Play the Web. Powered by Mozilla

Songbird is a desktop media player mashed-up with the Web. Songbird is committed to playing the music you want, from the sites you want, on the devices you want, challenging the conventions of discovery, purchase, consumption and organization of music on the Internet.

Songbird is a player and a platform. Like Firefox, Songbird is an open source, Open Web project built on the Mozilla platform. Songbird provides a public playground for Web media mash-ups by providing developers with both desktop and Web APIs, developer resources and fostering Open Web media standards, to wit, an Open Media Web.

1 min read
Productivity

How To Bootstrap Your Startup - readwriteweb.com

| How To Bootstrap Your Startup | Written by Matt Rogers / September 10, 2007

The first in a series of posts about how to run a startup and develop a product, written by guest author Matt Rogers of Aroxo - a person-to-person trading exchange for consumer electronics, computer gear, whitegoods, and more.

The aim of many entrepreneurs is to take a business idea and convert it into a professional and functioning business on a low budget. This is typically called “bootstrapping” and it is fraught with potential pitfalls and dangers. But when done well it can really help get a company going fast, professionally and without the founders having to give up much if any equity - or bankrupting themselves.

1 min read
Productivity

Zenoss Blog » Open Source Software Configuration Management

| Zenoss Blog » Open Source Software Configuration Management | If you are already familiar with open source monitoring, you might also be interested in open source software configuration management. Software Configuration Management (SCM) attempts to identify the configuration of software at discrete points in time and to systematically control changes to the configuration for the purpose of maintaining software integrity, traceability, and accountability throughout the software life cycle.

For example, say you have a cluster of Apache servers and you want to update them all with an additional mime-type, or add a virtual host to each. Rather than manually updating each configuration file on each server you could use a tool that process all the changes simultaneously. Or a tool that pools all the configuration variables into an easily readable form driven interface. The other benefit for some of these tools is the ability to have a changelog so that if your roll out a new configuration and it doesn’t work you can revert to the last good configuration easily.

1 min read
Tutorials

Screencasts of uncommon browser features [dive into mark]

| Let’s not and say we did [dive into mark] | # Introduction to tabbed browsing | # Opening links in a new tab | # Bookmarking a group of tabs | # Using a group of tabs as the home page | # Rearranging tabs | # Introduction to live bookmarks | # Introduction to spell checking | # Introduction to search engines | # Adding a search engine | # Removing a search engine | # Installing an add-on | # Changing add-on options | # Enabling and disabling add-ons | # Uninstalling add-ons | # Installing a new theme | # Switching between installed themes | # Uninstalling a theme | # Adding a Print button to the toolbar | # Rearranging buttons on the toolbar | # Removing buttons from the toolbar | # Changing the size of toolbar buttons

1 min read
Tutorials

Rolling Your Own Online Office

I've done a lot of telecommuting in my life. My first real writing gig came when I was 16 as a freelancer for a computer magazine whose offices were 3,000 miles from my house, and since then I've worked for a number of blogs, web startups, and computer game companies in an online, virtual office environment. During that time I've found that the key to a successful distributed team is communication. The difference between the ventures that failed and those that succeeded was how well set up the communication structure was for the team.

1 min read
Productivity

SXSW Panel: How to bluff your way in Web 2.0

Andy and Jeremy ROCKED THE HOUSE. Panel discusses how to bluff your way through Web 2.0 at a party or conference. Don't be the idiot who does not know how to speak the speak even if you have no idea what it means. Also has a video about the definition of Web 2.0 and pictures of some of the best of Web 2.0 bluffing.

read more | digg story

1 min read
Tutorials

Introducing the Hipster PDA | 43 Folders

| Introducing the Hipster PDA | 43 Folders | The Hipster PDA Parietal Disgorgement Aid is a fully extensible system for coordinating incoming and outgoing data for any aspect of your life and work. It scales brilliantly, degrades gracefully, supports optional categories and “beaming,” and is configurable to an unlimited number of options. Best of all, the Hipster PDA fits into your hip pocket and costs practically nothing to purchase and maintain. Let’s make one together.

1 min read
Tutorials

Keyboard Shortcuts for Bash :: the How-To Geek


Ctrl + A Go to the beginning of the line you are currently typing on

Ctrl + E Go to the end of the line you are currently typing on

Ctrl + L Clears the Screen, similar to the clear command

Ctrl + U Clears the line before the cursor position.

       If you are at the end of the line, clears the entire line.

Ctrl + H Same as backspace

1 min read
Tutorials

Top 10 Things You Don't Want to Forget before You Begin the Build!

Top 10 Things You Don't Want to Forget before You Begin the Build!

The following article is featured in the ExtremeTech book "Build The Ultimate Custom PC." This article details simple, yet sometimes forgetable, steps a builder must take before building a custom PC.

There's no worse time to realize you've forgotten something than when you need it in order to be able to proceed with the job. Things seem to be coming together well and you feel you're on a roll, and then you find you need something small but important, and the job is delayed until you can get it. Not having everything ready can cause big delays. At minimum, it's a delay until you can take a trip to the local computer store; at most, it's a wait of a few days while you have to wait for it to be delivered. A wait of a few hours is disruptive enough, but a wait of a few days can really put your PC project off course.

1 min read
Tutorials

Spybot Search and Destroy 1.4

| FileForum | Spybot Search and Destroy | Spybot Search and Destroy searches your hard drive for so-called spy- or adbots; that is, little modules that are responsible for the ads many programs display. Many of these modules also transmit information, including your surfing behavior on the Internet. If it finds such modules, it can remove them. In most cases the host still runs fine after removing the spyware/adware.

Another feature is the removal of usage tracks, which makes it more complicated for unknown spybots to transmit useful data. The list of last visited websites, opened files, started programs, cookies, all that and more can be cleaned. Supported are the three major browsers Internet Explorer, Netscape Communicator, and Opera.

1 min read
Tutorials

Google's New Personalized Homepage

| From slashdot.org | jgaynor writes "Citing user requests to coalesce it's disparate services, Google today released its new personalized homepage service. It allows you to arrange your Gmail, Google News, Google Maps driving directions, weather and a few select news services (including Slashdot) on a single page. Future plans include Universal RSS support. Clearly a shot at existing services like My Yahoo."

1 min read
Tutorials

A new way to search with Safari

| Grokker comes to Mac OS X, Safari | By Dennis Sellers dsellers@maccentral.com as reported on www.maccentral.com

| July 17, 2003 9:00 am ET | Groxis Inc. has brought the Grokker Internet research tool to the Mac OS X (10.2 and higher) and leveraged the Safari Web browser's software development kit (SDK) for high performance "Web Grokking." It's the company's first Mac product.

Grokker is designed to offer search capabilities beyond a Web browser-search engine combination, which were designed mainly to display a page of information at a time. The Groxis tool can display thousands of pages of data via "information maps."

1 min read