Use Rescuetime with Firefox Aurora or Beta

If you use Rescuetime and the beta channels of firefox (aurora or beta), you may have noticed that it only logs the first tab that you open. Even with the rescuetime extension installed, if the browser is not called "Firefox" it won't detect multiple documents and it will log the first tab for hours.  Until they fix this, the easiest solution I've found is to change the name that FirefoxAurora reports to OSX.

rescuetime aurora

To do it, close FirefoxAurora and run this command in the terminal. It will copy one file from Firefox to FirefoxAurora.:

cp /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/Resources/en.lproj/InfoPlist.strings /Applications/FirefoxAurora.app/Contents/Resources/en.lproj/InfoPlist.strings

You will need to do it everytime that you update FirefoxAurora so it's convenient to make an alias. Put this on your ~/.bash_rc

alias aurora='cp /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/Resources/en.lproj/InfoPlist.strings /Applications/FirefoxAurora.app/Contents/Resources/en.lproj/InfoPlist.strings'

Improve your GTD capture process; jailbreak your iPhone

On the episode "Capture" from  Home Work ( see tech podcasts )  the hosts were discussing devices for capturing actions in GTD. Aaron and Dave both say that they use index cards and complained that it's slow to capture with omnifocus for iPhone. You have to slide to unlock the phone, close the active app, search and click on omnifocus, and then press the Plus sign before you can even start writing.

activator short hold

I agree with them, but luckily we have a much faster way of doing it that justifies jailbreaking your iphone; Activator. It's a small free app in cydia that allows you to define the behaviour of system events and configure them to launch apps. If you use any GTD app it will make it much more useful giving you instant access to it.

My favorite action to configure is "Home button - Short hold" assigned to launch omnifocus. Now you just have to keep the home button pressed for half a second and you are inside omnifocus. No unlocking the phone, closing apps, searching the icon, etc. Anytime you have your phone in your hand, you are a second away from OF. As fast as using index cards.

Tech podcasts

The last couple of weeks I've been listening to more music at work than usual. What you can read in Workers, Put those headphones On it's mostly true for me too. At my workplace, we have an open plan office and I'm sitting in the middle of it. If I stay with the headphones on the whole morning, it's easy to maintain focus, without headphones my reddit use multiplies by 2 or 3.

Since I have the headphones on for about 7hours, I wanted some ebook or podcast, after searching a bit  I found some nice ones about productivity, tech, etc that I would like to share here.

Home Work

It as a podcast for people who work from home. Even if you don't, It's  perfect if you are thinking about maybe doing it in the future, since it can help a lot with some issues that almost every freelancer or telecommuter will find.

Generational

Another podcast from the 70decibels network, This one is about living with technology, Being the IT Help Center, Preparing for the worst-case scenario or managing tech and kids.  

ZenandTech

Hosted by a therapist and a product marketing director, both of them are very geeky and have interesting conversations about general stuff interesting to us. Working from home, focus, public presentation, parenting, bucket lists, handling stress

Mac  Power Users

David sparks produces this really good podcast for mac users. The series with Merlin Mann about GTD (with a focus on omnifocus) its very interesting to hear merlin rambling about GTD.

Moving to Squarespace

At FrozenLabs, we have always hosted our own websites (see about us) but for the first time in almost 10 years we are using an external service for our site and blog.  We have chosen Squarespace as a host/platform. It's  an awesome product to make websites and blogs, some sort of really good CMS that's effective and designed beautifully.  It also allows us to have an offsite page to report status of services, keep in contact, share our projects, etc..

squarespace developer center

squarespace developer center

You can use and admin panel and ipad/iphone apps to edit and create new posts. Almost every aspect of the site can be modified without touching any code but if you need to do something complex, the developer center gives you total control over everything throught a git repo. We are  starting with a basic template, but we plan on doing some custom pages in the future. 

After more than 10 years working as a sysadmin on an ISP and hosting and developing my own websites, I've come to try and work with a lot of CMS, blogs and web frameworks.  I've also had to work with lots of different admin panels for those systems, including lots of custom sites based on frameworks as RoR, joomla, in-house messes, etc.. Squarespace is without any doubt the best CMS and platform to publish a website. It's not too expensive and if you plan on starting a website you should definetly try them for free at squarespace.com  I know that this sounds like an ad, but seriously, they are that good. I met them because they sponsor one of my favourite podcasts: Home Work 

If you need some help hosting your own site, you can check out our virtual machines and sysadmin services too :D