Have you ever tried mounting an .iso image? You need 3rd party software, you need to most likely reboot since it installs a driver, and you get a huge memory footprint compared to the task at hand. I just found a way to mount an .iso image using a 23K program, with a 9K sys file driver.

The best thing about this is that the files used were created by Microsoft, so there’s no danger of harmful bloatware being installed. The downside is that this file is actually not supported by Microsoft, meaning they are not developing it, and probably won’t accept any support requests for it. However, I am using 32bit Windows 7 and it works perfectly, here’s how.

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Opera has a much-promoted feature called speed dial, which basically showed a wall of your favorite/most visited websites. The same option is built right into Safari as well, but Firefox can also give you this functionality with a number of addons.

I tried a few, among them was the visually appealing  FoxTab which gives you 3D tab browsing and a nice looking speed dial, but it was buggy for me, and wasn’t customizable enough. In the end I arrived at the very simple looking, but extremely well customizable Fast Dial. The simpler looks were actually welcome, since the functionality of this should be for me to launch a site really quickly, not looking at it for ages.

Once installed the addon gave me exactly the options I wanted, and more. You can add sites by entering their URL directly, but you can also right click on any page to add it quickly. In the options you can choose how many sites you want to show, you can change the dimensions of the boxes to fit more, and of course you can completely customize the look. Apart from the 3D aspect, you can do anything with it, so you could make it much flashier than it is, but for me the simple elegance of the default look is fine.

More importantly, you can change the text of the windows (or leave them out altogether). This is a must for me, since I sometimes work with very similar sites, which are nevertheless totally different, like cPanels for different accounts, phpMyAdmin’s for different sites and so on. Here the text and the favicon would be almost the same. The addon gives you great options for customizing the favicon, which you can actually change to a different one from the web, or use your own, and you can also change the website preview to an image of your own.

This is one of the best speed dial addons since it seems no-frills, fulfilling the needs of those who just need launching power, but in reality it has the power to extensive customization easily.

A month or so back, I think I found the ultimate iPhone time waster, although the app (or apps) is pretty fun! The company is called Tapulous, and the app in question is Tap Tap Revenge 3. The experience is much better than you’d think, just like on Guitar Hero, you have a set of ribbons 3-5 with dot thingies coming at you, and you have to tap them on rhythm.

From all the suites available, I have purchased 3 actually, and they were my best purchases in terms of usage so far. You can check them all out at the top of the page in the previous link, I have bought the Metallica, the Lady Gaga, and the Dave Matthews Band version as well, all are extremely well done. Dave Matthews Band is one of my favorites, so I was very excited to play with it, but if you’re looking for a challenge, definitely go with the Metallica version.

In most of them (except the Metallica version, grrr) there is a multiplayer option to play on one phone, but the newer apps offer iphone to iphone challenges as well. You can also import content into Tap Tap Revenge 3, so that way you can also access the Metallica tracks for multiplayer use. The full suite, which is the aformentioned Tap Tap 3 allows you to download tons of free tracks as well as great paid ones. You can create an avatar, challenge people, and so on, it’s all very social.

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Wordpress 3.0 is about 2 months away, and we will see the addition of the single feature that kept Wordpress from being a full blown CMS, post types! This comes in handy when you’re building a blog with a few different sections, for example a personal blog, with a section about movies you’ve seen.

You could separate the posts using categories, it would work, but it wouldn’t be the best way to do things. Also, a normal post isn’t necessarily the best medium through which to convey a movie you’ve seen. With Wordpress 3.0 you can create different post types, meaning that below the “Posts” menu in your backend, you will also see a “Movies” menu if you’ve created the post type. You can enable comments, categories, tags and so on for these, and what makes it even more powerful is the custom taxonomy you can bind to them.

For example, when writing your personal posts you may have categories like “Daily awesomeness”, “Food”, “School”, “Work”, and so on. Movies on the other hand require a different set of categories, and if you would also like to catalog recipes you’ve cooked, you would again need a different set of categories. You could of course just keep all of them in the categories box, but with Wordpress 3.0 (actually this is also available in the current version), you can create new taxonomy types.

In the above case, you could have “Personal Categories”, “Movie Categories”, “Recipe Types”. These would all act in the same way as your usual category box, but only categories belonging to that taxonomy will be seen.

The extent of how awesome this is may not be that apparent if you’re not a developer, since the above blog could be accomplished with other methods, but the new platform offers extremely good options, and much more logical ones too, no hacking. In addition, the features I mentioned mean that you can now use Wordpress to manage any type of content more easily. Create a catalog, use it as a business card database, use it as a calendar, so on and so forth. I think we will be seeing a lot of websites spring up running Wordpress which are not blogs, and hooray for that since the new 3.0 Wordpress is truly awesome.

If you visit many sites often, chances are you either don’t use the bookmark toolbar because it would get crowded, or you have a bulging toolbar. To save a load of space, and make the toolbar look better, you can force it to show only the website favicons with a simple tweak to Firefox, read on!

A lot of what you see in Firefox can be changed (this is why themes are possible), and molding your browser to your own needs is not that hard. The first thing to do is find the location of your userChrome.css file. If you’re in Windows you can open any folder and type “%appdata%\Mozilla\” in the url bar (without quotes) and you should be transported to the folder where your application data is held. In most cases this is located in “C:\Users\Your-Windows-Username\AppData\Roaming\”. If you’re on Linux you can find this folder in “~/.mozilla/” and if you’re on a Mac, you’ll see it in “~/Library/Mozilla/”.

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I was thinking about my next meal last morning, and when I have no idea what to eat, I just cook something by starting it, end seeing what happens. Completely by chance, I managed to make sauce which tasted pretty much like pesto. It is not pesto, it doesn’t look like it, and won’t taste 100% like it, but if you generally like the yummyness of pesto sauce, here’s a quick way to mimic it.

All you will need is sour cream, cheese and basil, some salt and pepper and ground garlic, although this last one is not that important. I started by emptying around 250 grams (about 1.5 cups) of sour cream into a pan. I waited until it was almost boiling and I then dropped in a pinch of salt, a pinch of pepper, a tiny bit of ground garlic and a big dose of basil. I actually used something called “garlic pepper”, which is a mix of the two, and for the basil, if I would have to put a number on it, I would say, put in about 2-3 big spoons of it, don’t hold back. Normal pesto is made up of a LOT of basil, so you can’t really go overboard here.

Once those are mixed in I start adding some cheese, which I quickly grated, so it would melt in better. I have no idea how much cheese I used, I think it was close to 200 grams, which is a bit under a half a pound I think. Once that was all melted in, I deemed it done, and poured it on some pasta. Now, when I did this the first time, it was very thin, it didn’t feel viscous enough, so I though my spontaneous recipe wasn’t that good. However, the pasta sucked in a lot of the moisture, so what happened in the end was that the pasta itself tasted of the sauce, plus the sauce took on a nice viscous feel, like sauce should have. Oh, and it tastes pretty much like pesto sauce, but nor quite as strong.

So there you go Hack Your Day’s first cooking productivity recipe which you can use when you only have 5 minutes to whip up something nice. Let me know if you have some sauce recopies like that, I’m a sauce maniac and would thank you kindly for such advice!