If you haven’t visited in a while due to our inactivity, you’ll notice a new theme, and some new articles rolling in. I managed to put together a better theme and we are slowly going through all the old posts adding images, so while full reconstruction is still in the works, most of it is done.

Feel free to browse around, everything should work well now, but if you do see an error, please let us know at daniel[at sign]hackyourday[dot here]com. We are re-categorizing articles (very bad SEO move, but we want everything to be nice and ordered), so the category browser and application browser is only marginally useful now. When we’re done, you should be able to browse through categories and applications we’ve written about very easily, using the top bar.

Also, if you are thinking of buying things through Amazon and you like the blog, please consider using our shop. It doesn’t have a lot of things in it, but if you search for a product in there, or buy a related product, we still get some referrals. You won’t need to spend extra money, but you are helping us out, so if you can, please make the purchase there.

We’ll try to keep some steady, high quality content coming in, if you’re interested in writing some posts, drop us a line at the email address above. We hope you like the new theme and the general looks, please visit us often (or subscribe to our feed, or follow us on Twitter)

If you want to do some coding on your website, modify your Wordpress template, etc., chances are that you’ll need to use PHP to do it. There are a lot of places offering snippets of code, but if you want some more complete sites about PHP, take a look at this list, and you’ll be a PHP whizz in no time.

W3Schools

A pretty obvious one, but useful nevertheless. The W3C is responsible for a lot of web standards, and their site, W3Schools is an encyclopedia of coding knowledge, written in an easily understandable, tutorial format. This is a great place to start because the order of the “lessons” is easy to follow, you’ll learn something new in each one, but hopefully won’t get overwhelmed.

The 15 basic lessons cover almost every major aspect of PHP, apart from the newer object oriented stuff, if you can learn to comfortably use what’s in these tutorials, you should be well on your way to becoming a proficient programmer.

Tizag

Tizag is similar to W3Schools in that it has a lot of different language tutorials. I used to visit this site quote often because in some cases it has better tutorials than W3Schools. The basic section covers much the same topics, albeit in twenty-something lessons. The most helpful part however, is the tutorial on handling files, strings, and an introduction to cookies.

There is a whole 10-parter on file handling, opening them, reading data, modifying data, etc, which could well come in handy at some point. There is also a 6 part series on string functions, although I would have included the function substr() myself, which can shorten a string easily. If you’re taking a look, be sure to look into the functions implode() and explode() because they sound cool, and are also pretty useful.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m not sure that this tip works, and even if it does, only a few people can do it, but I guess its worth sharing nonetheless. I had 5-6 days when I knew I was going to be at home without actually going anywhere. I wanted to get a lot of work done, although it was not absolutely essential that I do. Since right at the start I was pretty tired, I decided I’d try a new way of working, going to bed whenever I wanted to, and felt tired.

The problem with this is, that after lunch I always feel sleepy, and if I go to bed, I rarely wake up after an hour, I usually sleep 3-5 if left alone. Also, if I go to bed after 11pm, I am well capable of sleeping until noon, although this may be because I never sleep more than 7 hours, while I think my natural need is around 8-9. In any case, I decided to give this a go to see what happens.

I tried it for about 5 days, so this is by no means a definitive study no the effects, but the results where surprisingly positive. In a nutshell, I spent much more time in bed, I even played some games, which I haven’t done in ages, but I still managed to get a lot of work done. I’m not saying I actually got more done than if I would’ve concentrated only on work, but it wasn’t much less.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you are in the habit of working on more than one computers you probably know about portable applications. These are the same as your usual app, but instead of storing settings in Windows (in the application data folder for example), they store it in their own folder. This means that if you move that one folder to another machine, it should work, act and look the same there as well.

If you only work on one PC/Laptop, I would still advise you to use this technique. My main reason for doing this is that it is extremely easy to back up your applications this way. Instead of having a thumb-drive for these apps, I have a separate partition of 5Gb. Every week I just backup the whole thing onto my external drive. This way if I want to reinstall Windows, something goes horribly wrong, or I really must use someone else’s laptop, I can just take all my apps and settings with me.

It also gives me some security that I know exactly where my apps are and what files they use. If I want to just try out the new build of Notepad++, I can do so without any system clashes (same goes for nightly and preview builds of Firefox), I can also use two builds at the same time. In the case of Firefox, this makes it extremely simple to debug which of your extensions is breaking it.

Do you have some different ways of working with portable apps? I’d love to hear your methods, please leave a comment below. If you’re looking for portable apps, be sure to check out portableapps.com which has most of the common apps available out there.

I’ve written about how I love wallpaper before, but never have I found so many things I like on one site. Vladstudio contains designs by one person only I think, and the wallpapers, the site itself and the quality is absolutely stunning. This is not just an example of great desktop backgrounds, but also of how to create a wonderful website.

You can download lower quality (still great for most people) for free, and you’ll need to register to get to the multiple screen backgrounds, or widescreen backgrounds. Considering that the site costs $10 for 3 months, or $30 for your life, this is not a huge expense. Some people may not be too happy about the price, but there are two things you might want to consider.

First of all, if you register, you can download the designs without the signature, so you can have a distraction free experience. Also, these truly are works of art, and giving a little something to the creator is definitely worth it in this case.

Incidentally, Vladstudio has a cool iphone app which creates puzzles from the images on the site. It costs $2 for all the puzzles, and upcoming ones, so again, very worth it. We usually go head to head with my girlfriend, its pretty entertaining.

Without going into much comparative detail about the pros and cons of cloud computing, I just foun one of the biggest advantages on my end, and it actually has nothing to do with the cloud aspect. I bought an iPhone a week or so ago, and I just had a look at mobileMe, which is great for syncing your iPhone with your laptop and the mobileMe we app and so on.

I am a big fan of having everything in one place, but the only way I can do this properly, is if I organize myself well. I have to have all my contacts nicely in Outlook, I need to have all my bookmarks in IE, etc. You can use different apps, the point is, you can’t go about switching them all the time (or rather you can, but it’s a pain). This forces me (in a good way), to remember to keep my stuff organized, because with cloud computing, everything I do pays off threefold.

When I organize my bookmarks, they sync to my iPhone and the cloud, so I have done 3 separate organization tasks all at once. This makes me much more likely to do it properly, and then, consistently following the same “rules” every day.

Hence I do get more organized because of the fact that all my stuff is in one place, but also because cloud computing eliminates so many tedious and monotonous tasks, I look forward to my organizational tasks.