Archive for March, 2008

Over the weekend I had some serious fun, so I didn’t even write posts, and it seems I missed out on an important bit of news, Wordpress has secretly released 2.5 behind my back. I’m glad to say that it was released on my birthday, possibly as a present to me, I was waiting for the release for quite some time, so nice one Wordpress!

I will be installing it on the blog soon and will tell you guys what I think, from what I’ve seen it looks pretty awesome. From what I could tell without actually trying, version 2.5 mainly increases the admin’s ability to monitor and manage the blog by providing a better, more productive interface. It also makes the dashboard a widget page, much like you would see on Netvibes, I’m looking forward to taking it for a spin.

An application that is among the first 5 install is actually an extension for Firefox. FireFTP is a simple ftp client for Firefox, but is probably one of the main applications for my productivity. It enables me to upload and download files like pics for my blog easily, without having to leave my browser.

This means I don’t need to open an extra program, and I can just open it in a tab anytime, even open up multiple instances if I want. The application doesn’t provide as many features as SmartFTP, a standalone program, but if simple file transfer is all you need I can heartily recommend it.

A great feature I use is that you can set default locations for your local machine and for the ftp site. Just navigate to a location on your PC and a location on the server, go to manage accounts – edit, click on the connection tab and click on the use current button for both locations. If you backup a lot you can also sync locations, going between directories simultaneously.

In Windows Vista and Xp I love the way the user accounts are handled with music, documents, pics all available in an easily understandable structure. However, I find that data and disk management wise it is much better to have all these on either a separate drive, or a separate partition.

You can change the default location of user folders which means that the data in them will be accessible through the original location, but also in a new location you specify. The data will actually be stored in a new location, the old location will serve as a short cut to them.

In Vista, all you need to do is right-click the Documents folder for example and choose properties. Click on the location tab on the top left and using the move button, select a new location for your files. Click yes to move all your files to the new location and from then on, whenever you click on Documents in the start menu, or choose it from a save dialog you will actually be going to the new location. In XP the method is pretty much the same, except for maybe a button difference in the end, I can’t remember, but you should be able to get along fine.

Using this method you can backup your data much more easily, especially if you choose a location on a different hard drive. In this case you can just reinstall windows keeping your folder structures in tact easily.

Do you use some tool like Photoshop or an online color picker to choose your HTML colors? We use things like #ffffcc and #454545, who knows what these are and what they are doing here eh? Well as you will see hexadecimal is not that complicated at all, let’s take a look.

I bet many more of you know RGB notation, since the name says it all, Red, Green, Blue. The three numbers in an RGB value (ranging from 0 – 255) represent the intensity of these three colors, with 255 being the most intense. For example, (0, 0, 255) would be as blue as it gets, since red and green values are set to 0, while blue is set to 255.

Actually hexadecimal notation is exactly the same, with different ranges. If you group a hex value the same way as you do with RGB, for example #00 00 ff, you would get the same result as with the RGB(0, 0, 255). As you can see, hex ranges from 0 to f, with f being the most intense.

Knowing how these colors work enable you to change colors quickly on your website because you will roughly know what it will look like. If you want to get the exact same blue but in a lighter shade, you know you need to bump up all other values as well (to get it closer to white), for example #4455ff will be a lighter shade of blue.

As a side note, you can actually obtain the number of colors that your system can display with this information. Color values can go from 0 – 255, that means 256 colors overall for one channel. If you want all the combination of colors, use a bit of math and you will come up with 256 x 256 x 256 = 16, 777,212.

You’d be surprised at how a software essentially geared toward a game can give you a lot in productivity. Lego Digital Designer is also unique because it is fun, it can be considered a game, while it can also be an important tool for Lego fans, designers and artists.

A quick download of the application will enable you to build any Lego model you want, with more than 700 brick types to choose from I’m sure you can think of something to build.This tool could bring Lego more into the lives of today’s digital generation, no matter how great games become, Lego is still my favorite. Heck, I still play with Lego today, although nowadays I buy Technic almost exclusively, but I am aiming for some Lego creator soon!

A great feature is that you can check the price of your model, which you can subsequently order. I don’t understand why so many pieces are left out of this, you will see that when placing some elements the application will tell you that this will disable price checking. I hope they fix this soon, since I think this deters many people.

Otherwise the software is great, it allows for great accuracy and many placement combinations, with even Mindstorms designs being available you can design very advanced stuff. You can create from scratch, or you can enhance base models, the later is a great way to teach kids and to get to know the program. This is one fun piece of software!

In many cases in my own life I find that I am either productive or comfortable. By this I don’t mean that I have to sleep on the floor after a productive day, what I mean is that many times you need to trade your personal freedom to work productively according to GTD and other task management theories.

The reason is mostly scheduling. I have three projects and I could schedule each subtask for a day next week but I won’t. The reason for this is that if I don’t complete my schedule on a given day I’ll feel bad, and the whole project will suffer overall.

If you have projects which do not have a very strict deadline I would advise against scheduling them daily because it will cause you discomfort. Writing a to-do list for the week is fine, or doing 4 day to do list is perhaps even better, this way if you don’t complete a task you can bump it to next time.

The advantage of scheduling flexibly like this is that you can make use of your personal highs and lows. When you feel you don’t want to work just don’t, take the time to relax, and when you do feel like it, you will be able to complete twice as much.

The obvious drawback is that this method is not for those who can not discipline themselves. If you are looking for a cheap way to bump your tasks and not do anything then this is not for you, you will only get set back more.