Sorry for missing a load of updates recently but I’ve been busy redesigning, which you can see for yourself right now. I am still in the process, I want to re-layout the tags to actually make them useful, get the sidebar organized and put everythingin place so I can bring you all productivity news and tricks again.For a few days the sidebar may change, labels may be removed and jumble around again, and other minor changes may take place, but all articles will remain in place, so feel free to roam about the older posts until then.

Hack your day will be fully back by February 1st, but I will be posting until then, just not 3-4 a day like I wanted. I welcome all suggestions so if you have any layout ideas, design ideas, or just any general thoughts please do share them in the comments section.

I found a cool little application that ads a lot of information right in the file manager to your songs. If you hover over a file, you will be able to see info like artist, length, title, album, and so on, anything you would see in an ID3 tag.

Personally I don’t have much use for this, since I store all my music by album, I hate directories with various artists, I’m a bit weird like that. I know that many people don’t really care and especially if you rip tracks often, you may have “untitled song 1.mp3″. This is all ok, until you do some reorganizing and find that nothing is where it used to be. This little tooltip will come in handy, you will be able to identify each one, without having to actually listen to them.

In addition the app displays tooltips for text files (txt, ini, bat, etc.), shortcuts and executables. The shortcut tooltip is especially appealing to me, I won’t have to go through the right-click menu, properties routine all the time.

Get Info Tag Magic from the Contextmagic website (via Freewaregenius)

I actually new about this awesome productivity tip for Firefox, but I forgot about it for some time. Make Use Of’s recent article on 7 powerful shortcuts made me see the light again though, so let me share one of Firefox’s best shortcuts.  It allows you to bookmark search fields, so instead of going to Wikipedia and doing a search, you can just type “wiki astronauts” right in the address bar to search for the term astronauts. It works with any search field, be it YouTube, Flickr, or search engines.

All you need to do is go to right-click on the search field here on Hack Your Day for example and choose “add a keyword for this search”. You will be presented with the usual bookmark window, you can name it and give it a keyword. It will be saved in your bookmarks, so you may want to create a Search sub folder there. Once saved, you can search Hack Your Day right from the address bar. If the keyword you gave was “hyd” you can just type “hyd privacy” and you will search for this term.

There is a feature in Windows which isn’t too known called the send-to menu. Right-click any file and you’ll see it there, with options to send the file to a mail recipient, fax it and so on. I find these options terribly useless, with possibly the exception of send to compressed archive, but since I use a separate tool for that it becomes redundant.

There is a way to modify that menu and put shortcuts in to whatever you want, let’s take a look at how to do it. Windows XP users, open up the run box and simply enter “sendto” and you’re there. Windows Vista users need to type “%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\SendTo” into the same place. Vista stores all this in the folder “Users\User\Appdata\Microsoft\SendTo” and the %APPDATA% string will whisk you away to that folder with your current user.

Once there you can create and delete shortcuts as usual, and you will be able to access them from the right-click menu. I use this heavily in my job where I assign different tasks to people. I usually process 5-10 at once and them send them to 1-3 people. When I’m done with one, I quickly send it to the Assignments folder. All the assignments I need to send will be copied there, so I can just pull them into an email as an attachment and delete them when done. This is a great way to productively manage work flow like this actually!

Ok, I know I’ve seen a couple of posts about this before, but let me just ad my piece of mind to the mix. The internet is a very different medium to all the others, and techniques that work elsewhere completely break down. I don’t pretend to be a designer, but I’ve been on the net long enough to know what irritates me, and most people, so here’s a list of things I hate about some web designs.

Sound

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This seems to be the most hated amongst equals. This is a plea to all webmasters/webdesigners out there. Do not put autostarting music anywhere, ever. Not even if you’re a band, not even if you think you have the best music in the world, just don’t. I’d even like it better if games loaded, but the music and sound had to be turned on at the beginning.

Do I go to your home with a ghetto-blaster on my shoulder, sneak up to you, turn the volume to the max and let it scream into your ear? No I don’t. Seriously though, this is very annoying, I really doubt that anyone who has ever been on the web for 5 minutes likes this.

The actual reason I don’t like it is that I rarely sit down, let a page load and then look at it. I usually open 5 tabs at once, and read through everything. If I start a game on one tab, and some music stars up in another tab, the cacophony is just too much to bear. Anyway, do you think the marketing value of this is high? For me: “music starts = close tab”. Not “look at tab and buy everything because of cool music that jumped me in the middle of an article I was reading”.

Also, do not make drop down menus with sound. This sort of leads into the next heading on flash, but boy, having sound in a menu is something that will drive me away from your site faster than the speed of sound (so that the awful menu sound can’t catch up).

I think people use sound in web design for the reason I use a lot of filters in Photoshop. I’m an absolute Photoshop amateur and I still look at that charcoal filter and think “wow, that’s so awesome”. Let’s set it up to max… oooo, that’s so cool. Yes, in reality it looks like I actually vomited on the page, but it’s new, so it looks cool. Sound in web pages is not cool, do not do it. Ever.

Flash

Did I sound a bit bitter back there? Thankfully flash is not that big a torn in my side. The great thing here is that flash can be a great tool if used right, so I wouldn’t actually ban using it. What someone shouldn’t do is have a flash page, as is. Aside from that being the stupidest decision from a search engine optimization point of view, it’s not really any good from a user’s standpoint either. I come to your site for information, not to view your fancy flash skills.

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I just read a really cool trick on Sizlopedia I didn’t know about, how to hide any file inside a picture file. This could come in handy if you have some naughty secrets on your hard drive, or if you just have some sensitive data. Apparently it’s very hard to trace and find these files, but I guess if someone really wants to it’s still not impossible. You will need Winrar to pull it off, so if you don’t have it, follow the link to download the trial (which you can actually use beyond the expiry date).

First of all, you need to put the file you want to hide and the image in the same folder. Select both files and create a rar file out of them. This is easiest if you select both files right click on one of them, and select the add to rar archive option. Now you will have to open the command promt. This is found in the Start Menu, under accessories.

You will need to navigate to the folder where the files are. You can go to the parent folder using “cd..” and enter a folder using “cd foldername”. When you’re in the correct folder type “copy /b yourimage.jpg + yourrarfile.rar newimagename.jpg”. As you can see the original image file is first, then the rar file you created, and then you can specify the filename which you want to get in the end.

Thanks to Sizlopedia for the article