I am on the train right now, writing posts, and I just lost my last post (rewritten since) because of some saving stupidity. When on a train I’m less at home, mostly because I don’t have a mouse handy, which means I’m more prone to mistakes. This has happened to me more than once now, so if you’re in a similar situation, I have a tip which could save you some time.

If you’re writing posts, write all of them in the same file and save it regularly. This will mean that you only have to handle one file, you won’t loose the contents so easily. Also, if you work in Notepad, not a more resource hungry app like Word, you can probably prolong your battery life too.

I actually hate writing posts in Notepad, or anything else that is not code for that matter, but it beats having to rewrite it from scratch, especially since I always feel that the second edition isn’t as good.

Notepad++ is one of my favorite applications, it is lightweight, flexible, and has all the tools I need to do my job. One of the great options it offers is a built in macro recorded, which among other things, allows you to create easily insertable text snippets into your files. Let’s take a look at how to insert an HTML comment (”<!–   –>”) with the push of a key combination.

First of all, open notepad and click the record button, which can be found toward the end of the toolbar, a big red circle. Once you clicked it, the app will start recording, so it’s time to type what you need, in our case: “<!– –>” (without the quotes). Once done, press the save button, which is the right most icon in that group and give it a title (eg. HTML Comment) and add a keyboard shortcut, in my case this was ctr + shift + c. Once saved you can press that combination any time to paste an HTML comment.

There are two things to watch out for when recording. First of all, don’t copy paste, since the copy paste action will be recorded, not the actual clipboard contents, so next time you invoke the action, the actual clipboard will be pasted. Secondly, your actions are all recorded, so pressing the arrow, or backspace and so on. This way you can record the same comment by pressing back 4 times after you typed it, and saving like that. This will place your cursor between the two dashes, which is where you will write your comment, saving your the time of pressing back every time you insert a comment.

This allows for a lot a fancy macros, but for now you can create simple text snippets. I’ll be covering a lot more advanced macros a bit later though.

I rarely cover the same app on two blogs, but having recently reviewed PrtScr on gHacks, I thought I’d let Hack Your Day readers in on this awesome tool as well. PrtScr is a screenshot tool which takes the process to a whole new level, mostly by looking really good and handling really well.

Once you install it, you can use the print screen button to evoke it, it will drop a gray canvas over your screen and you can select any area of the screen. Pressing print screen again will take a shot of the whole screen, but you can also draw a freehand shape, or a rectangle.

The shot taken will hover to the right of the screen while you can choose options on the left. This part looks extremely impressive by the way, it is a joy to look at when I take a screenshot, seriously. You can choose to copy to the clipboard (you can also choose to do this automatically in the settings), you can choose to edit it, or save it to the desktop.

The coolest thing is that the hovering image can be drag and dropped, so if you want to edit it in Photoshop, just drag it onto the Photoshop taskbar entry, and then onto the canvas. You can also save it like this, dragging it onto the desktop, or any other folder.

There are a number of options available, but really this is a just an extremely new and cool way to take screenshots, and if you do this regularly, you will find PrtScr a joy to work with.

If you’re an avid DIY builder, a builder of gadgets, or a soldering master you could use a Moleskine to catch your thoughts, but there is a specialized notebook out there for you guys called the Maker’s Notebook.

It contains 150 pages of engineering graph paper which you can use to jot down ideas, notes or whole wiring diagrams if you need to. The really cool thing is how the notebook is printed to help organize. It has page numbers which is quite rare, a two page, pre-ruled table of contents, and also blank fields on each page for project names and so on. This makes it really easy to find everything later on, which is a part of note taking many people overlook.

Apparently this notebook is pretty populer with DIY project people, like Tom Igoe, creator of the popular Arduino board. Customizing the front end is also a big deal, a lot of people use stickers and other items to mod theirs.

It’s a tad pricier that the Moleskine, but since it is a highly specialized notebook, and quite thick with 150 pages, the price seems well worth it to me, a Moleskine in Europe would probably be priced the same.

If you’re working on the web, you know that you need to conserve bandwidth and make your site as lightweight as possible so it will pop up fast. One of the best things you can do is to optimize your images, which, in most cases, will not degrade their quality noticeably, but will halve the size.

A great freeware tool I found which will help you optimize your images is RIOT (Radical Image Optimization Tool). It shows the original and the optimized image side-by-side, so you can decide when your image is starting to degrade, and when it still looks good, allowing you to upload the smallest possible image to your site.

You can choose different formats and change settings for a lot of values, like color reduction, which will help you reduce size without affecting quality. The only problem I see with RIOT is that it doesn’t allow for batch optimization. As a blogger it is a good tool for me since I write posts one at a time and search for images when I’m done. However, as a web developer it is easier to build a site and optimize at the end, which might mean a lot of images.

I’ve found that organizing things actually is the hardest thing I do. Not because it’s particularly taxing or hard, but simply because for me it’s very hard to do something I don’t want to do, and for some reason organization is one of theoose tasks that I can only do when I’m at 100%. I would recommend that everyone should organize at 100% because getting something right in it goes a long way to making your life easier.

If each morning you can designate your daily tasks well, you will probably get them done and be able to either work more, or spend your excess time resting. You can also spend 30 minutes each morning trying to find better applications for your work, I find that this is fun, and is quite useful in the long and short run as well.

I think morning organization works best because it is done with optimism, in the sense that you are orgasnizing so you can get everything done, as opposed to the evening where you might be organizing because you didn’t get everything done. This will lower your morale and make your organization less effective.

So, if you have time start organizing when you wake up, you can even get up a bit earlier to do so. I am az my peak when I get up at around 6:00 and do my morning rituals and organize until about 7:30 - 8:00.