Category Archives: Productivity

Using the terminal often? You need Terminitor

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Terminitor is a Ruby gem that automates your development workflow setup. Basically, it allows you to easily set different environments in your terminal. Defining which tabs to open and which commands to run in each.

Installation is as easy as:
gem install terminitor
terminitor init
(assuming you already have Ruby and Ruby gems installed)

Then you create your terminitor setups with terminitor edit [name]. Defining terminitor setup is very is. Here is mine for one of my projects:

No more keeping all those servers running in the background, just because I’m lazy to open them again. Now restarting my working environment is just a single command.

Make the Unread Items in Google Reader Disappear

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אין יותר מספרים מלחיצים

The Unread Items counter in Google Reader is putting you under pressure? Can’t sleep because of it? Well, you don’t have to see it any more. I’ve hacked a simple Greasemonkey script that hides the unread items counter in Google Reader. There’re two flavours of the script: one that hides only the all items counter and other one that hides all the counters.

To those of you who don’t know what Greasemonkey is:

Greasemonkey is a Mozilla Firefox extension that allows users to install scripts that make on-the-fly changes to most HTML-based web pages. [..]

Greasemonkey can be used for adding new functionality to web pages (for example, embedding price comparison in Amazon.com web pages), fixing rendering bugs, combining data from multiple webpages, and numerous other purposes.

(From Wikipedia entry on Greasemonkey)

You can find a lot more scripts on userscripts.org . Beware that some scripts become unstable/not working due to constant updates of the web sites (most of Gmail scripts break every version update).

I’ve also created three bookmarklets that allow you to unhide and hide the counters, but had trouble to embed them in the post. So if anyone interested in them, just leave here a comment.

Comments are mostly welcomed.

Enjoy.

Arik

GTD Two Minutes Timer for Free on any platform

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Today a friend of mine mentioned that you can find on David Allen’s web site a GTD utilty called “Two Minutes Timer”. As it name states it’s a two minutes timer, that will make a sound when the time ends and flashes “What is your next action?”. If you aren’t famililar with the GTD methodology – the 2 minute timer is intended to facilitate the 2 minute rule, which states that:

“If the Next Action can be done in 2 minutes or less, do it when you first pick the item up. Even if that item is not a “high priority”, because it takes longer to store and track any item than to deal with it the first time its in your head.”(p. 131, “Getting Things Done”)

While the GTD methology is a great thing, paying 10$ for a utility that I can write in half an hour seemed to be as too much. Making a quick google search for gtd + “two minutes timer” reveled to me that I wasn’t the only one who thought like that. 20 minutes later I’ve compiled a list replacement timers for PC, Mac, Google Widgets, Yahoo Widgets and more…

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