Obvious Ideas » Productivity http://www.arikfr.com/blog From the desk of a Software Developer Mon, 05 Sep 2011 08:05:33 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Using the terminal often? You need Terminitor http://www.arikfr.com/blog/using-the-terminal-often-you-need-terminitor.html http://www.arikfr.com/blog/using-the-terminal-often-you-need-terminitor.html#comments Fri, 11 Mar 2011 19:01:19 +0000 Arik http://www.arikfr.com/blog/?p=140 Continue reading →]]> 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.

]]> http://www.arikfr.com/blog/using-the-terminal-often-you-need-terminitor.html/feed 2 Make the Unread Items in Google Reader Disappear http://www.arikfr.com/blog/make-the-unread-items-in-google-reader-disappear.html http://www.arikfr.com/blog/make-the-unread-items-in-google-reader-disappear.html#comments Thu, 17 Jul 2008 06:39:00 +0000 Arik http://www.arikfr.com/blog/make-the-unread-items-in-google-reader-disappear.html Continue reading →]]> 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

]]> http://www.arikfr.com/blog/make-the-unread-items-in-google-reader-disappear.html/feed 2 GTD Two Minutes Timer for Free on any platform http://www.arikfr.com/blog/gtd-ten-minutes-timer-for-free-on-any-platform.html http://www.arikfr.com/blog/gtd-ten-minutes-timer-for-free-on-any-platform.html#comments Thu, 14 Dec 2006 21:02:09 +0000 Arik http://www.arikfr.com/blog/gtd-ten-minutes-timer-for-free-on-any-platform.html Continue reading →]]> 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…


Really valuable resource was the LifeHack post about one of this apps (for PC – third in the list) – in the post comments I found most of the other links.

Some of this utilities are even handier than the original one by David Allen, as they offer more features such as -

  • Setting the timer for then two minutes – while the 2 minutes rule is cool, sometimes you want to set a limited period of time for a certain task, which is longer than two minues.
    This is very useful on meetings – see rule #6 – “Stick to the clock” on Business Week‘s article on How to Run a Meeting Like Google.
  • Counting below zero – ideal for seeing how you exceed your original estimaiton of time (helps you to realize how much time the different task you do take).

PC

Two Minutes Timer GTD

  • Minute Timer 1.1 – Freeware general timer, that can be used for keeping up with the 2 minutes rule.

Mini Timer

Mac

Dan Messsing from Stuntblog wrote a Two Minutes Timer for Mac – you can find it here.

As a PC user I didn’t really looked into, and I don’t know what other alternatives exist. If you like something else, you’re more than welcome to leave a comment with a link.

Web Based

http://www.lumisoft.net/teatimer.htm?2

Google Widgets
(can be used on your Google Homepage or any other webpage)

Yahoo Widget

Tea Timer – simple countdown clock originally designed to be used as a cooking/tea timer. Can be configured to display topmost after the alert is triggered. Also it continues to countdown below zero.

Easiest way

Among the comments on LifeHacker I saw another possible solution for keeping up with the two minutes rule – “Even cheaper – LOOK AT A CLOCK”. :-)

Hope it was useful for you,

Arik

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