Posts Tagged: productivity

Computing — 1 Comment
6
Feb 07

UI modifications

I have generally been busy lately, but I was able to do a bit of tinkering with my relatively fresh system:

  1. Desktop wallpaper. I recently realized that bright desktop wallpapers actually make me happy, so I replaced the plain dark-blue background I have been with for quite some time already to the wallpaper that I used and loved two or three years ago.
  2. IceWM theme. I tweaked my IceWM settings to have things close to how my Gnome user interface was before. The theme is not yet done, but I have a screenshot uploaded for those who want a little peek.
  3. xterm and Unicode. Because I read from this page that, apparently:

    The xterm version that comes with XFree86 4.0 or higher (maintained by Thomas Dickey) includes UTF-8 support.

  4. imagemagick and Print Screen key. I set up xbindkeys so I can grab a screenshot by just pressing the Print Screen key.

Back to work.

Computing — No Comments
14
Sep 06

TODO list syntax-highlighting for nano

Until a couple of weeks ago, I never used nano except to make minor modifications to files. I was setting up the new server for CERSA from the base Debian system, and since nano was among the few more friendly text editors already included, it occurred to me to try the program out.

The first thing that I had to do for migration from the current server to the new server was to, of course, prepare a detailed TODO list. To keep this list from looking cluttered, I put together a simple syntax-highlighting system. Below is a bit from the nanorc file I worked with:

syntax "todo" "^TODO"
color brightblack "^[^ <>tn]+"
color brightcyan start="^[ t]*>[ t]*" end="$"
color cyan start="^[ t]*<[ t]*" end="$"
color brightgreen start="^[ t]*-[ t]*" end="$"
color green start="^[ t]*+[ t]*" end="$"
color red "TODO"

nano is pretty straight-forward, and that makes it really cool too.

Personal — No Comments
20
May 06

A whiteboard for productivity

Finally! A couple of hours ago, I decided to treat myself to an 18″ x 24″ whiteboard. This ought to up my productivity a couple of notches.

Computing — No Comments
19
Mar 06

Bookmarks to local directories

I learned this afternoon that, in Mozilla Firefox, a bookmark leading to a local directory is actually expanded in bookmark menu itself.

I find this feature very useful especially in handling documentation I store locally. I have, for instance, copies of Roman Catholic documents in a folder. All I have in this particular directory are regular files that are independent of each other, that is, there are no secondary files for these documents in the same directory. If I create a bookmark leading to this directory, the folder will be expended in the bookmark menu, such that I will be able to select a specific document in the bookmark menu itself. Using a keyword that is bound to this folder returns the default directory browser.

Although this feature is very useful in cases like the example above, it does not really help in cases where a directory has too many secondary files. In such cases, the browser just ends up generating a long list of the directory contents for the submenu.