Signal Eleven

I’ve already been on the subject before, and I had promised a post about RSS.

Well today is RSS awareness day, and RSS advocates should promote and raise the global awareness of RSS as a tool.

Not this time. Remember ODE? Well, it’s time to try again and this what is going to occupy my labour day afternoon.

Instead, I’m gonna link you to a very informative post on “Avventure Planetarie”, hoping Paolo will forgive me for the recent content piggybacking (Voyager, now RSS…)

It’s in Italian, (and I know a few readers will be pleased), but for you non-italian speakers, check out RSSday, the website promoting the event presenting RSS using a nice video. (with an awful audio, though)

Oh, and I expect to see a definite increase in RSS subscriptions in tomorrow stats,  mmkay? :-)

Stay tuned, more to come.

Share This

No Comments »

The curse of the tiny widescreen monitor strikes again. This might not be original, but I find it useful.

I created another script like Writing Room for Google Docs (<brag>featured script on LifeHacker!! </brag>).

This time is for iGoogle. Allows to get rid of the annoying (but pretty, with the right theme) header bar and the totally useless footer bar.

Should you need the header bar (e.g. for undo-ing a gadget removal), theres a convenient link on top, Writing Room style.

The default is NOT showing the headerbar, since I use iGoogle as a at-a-glance kickstart in the morning. (todo, agenda, mail….the usual)

Example? Sure, there you are.

Share This

No Comments »

My previously published script Writing Room for Google Documents became a Featured Greasemonkey Script in the Lifehacker weblog, by all means one of my favorite blogs.

Check it out! 

Stay tuned, more to come.

Share This

1 Comment »

(no time to read my ramblings? Jump to the script here)

Heh. When procrastination brings productivity. I was working in Google Documents on my thesis, and felt that something wasn’t quite right. The header was taking too much space and on my 13.3” widescreen every vertical pixel is precious.

So I came up with this tiny Greasemonkey script that allows to toggle the header bar in Google documents, providing more room for working. Plus I wasn’t really feeling like working on the thesis ;-)
Example after the jump

…from this…

…to this…

You can find the script here.

Share This

2 Comments »

Happy new year to my readers.

Things have been a little slow here at S11, but something’s coming up :)

In the mean time, as a filler I’ll show you this link

Year in Review: The 70 Best Lifehacks of 2007 - Lifehack.org

2007 has been a year of renovation for me. I managed to meet most of my NYE Resolutions (and that “most” in place of “all” is the reason why I do NOT have resolutions for 2008. Graduation is among the 2007 casualties…)

I worked on myself in the productivity and personal development area. It sounds stupid, I know, but I did enjoy trying to follow small pieces of advice that look nothing different than “common sense”, but when put all together give a nice perspective of what I do right and what I do wrong when it comes to deal with personal productivity. Plus, I love the term “lifhacking”.

Time flies. I feel old thinking about how fast last year flew by, but I can say that I’m pretty satisfied of my 2007 and eager to do even better in 2008. I rank pretty high in the motivational scale these days, and I’m full of projects…

Don’t worry, I’m not turning this blog into a personal diary or something, but…I don’t want to jinx it so, as usual…

…stay tuned, more to come.

Share This

No Comments »

I recently found myself using Safari, Apple’s web browser, quite often, because it’s WAY faster than Firefox in both rendering and starting up.

But, issues with Wordpress’ post editor aside, I came back to Firefox for one simple reason. Addons.

I use a lot of Addons for Firefox. Some in order to gain functionalities, some to tweak websites the way I want. For example, my Gmail, with a bunch of Greasemonkey scripts, has a few extra buttons and menus that I ended up consider part of Gmail itself. And missed on Safari!

So I’ve decided to prune some unused extensions and keep only what I felt really important. Here’s what I kept, in no particular order:

• Adblock: controversial addon that filters ads from web pages. Not that I’m particularly happy about depriving the pages I visit of their source of income, but some flashy ads are terrible. It’s very configurable so you can “switch off” only that pesky banner that has been bugging you. I also use Adblock to avoid loading the Shinystat counter on Signal Eleven, so I don’t get counted (DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME! ;-) )
• Greasemonkey: allows you to customize the way a webpage displays using JavaScript scripts. There are scripts for a lot of websites. For example, a script for hiding “related videos” “director videos” and “comments” on youtube. Sure you can have them appear anytime, but not having the temptation of clicking on a “related video” is going to save you hours :-). Important: you don’t need to know JavaScript! Plenty of scripts here.
• BBCodeXtra: this adds a few context-menu options to quickly enter BBcode and Html in a web form. Handy if you happen to write on an online forum, like I do.
• Better Gmail: this extension adds over 25 additional features to gmail. Mostly Greasemonkey scripts, useful stuff like a “mark as (un)read” button, options to hide the spam count (it is a source of distraction for me. Gives me those extra seconds of procrastination), or to hide the invite box. Adds a search for date, save searches you make often etc… The italian version (you get it if you have Firefox in italian) has a couple of misleading translations. My fault, I’m going to fix it when a new version comes out.(Lifehacker)
• Better Gcal: same as better gmail, but for Google Calendar. It allows to collapse the header (where the gcal logo and the search box are) and the sidebar, wraps the text on full day events making them actually readable. You can obtain the same functionalities by installing the appropriate Greasemonkey scripts
• Foxyproxy: if you, like me, are a mobile user, and find yourself using your laptop in different areas such as university, workplace, home, cafes, etc. this is probably going to be useful. It’s basically a proxy configuration switcher, allowing you to change the desired proxy from a list, but it’s even more powerful, allowing you to define which proxy to use (or none) based on regular expressions, url patterns, and so on. Useful if you’re setting up a proxy and need testing, or need to access some pages directly.

Believe it or not, I’ve got more extensions to promote, some goodies for digital-divided users. But I’m going to save those for another post. Until then…

Stay tuned, more to come.

Share This

2 Comments »

I want to share with you faithful readers this nice talk about Inbox Zero.

Inbox Zero is a 43Folders series focused on (quoting) “the skills, tools, and attitude needed to empty your email inbox — and then keep it that way”.I know it’s an hour long video, but you can safely stop before the Q&A section, although it offers some nice insights and I recommend you watching it. Plus I might return on the topic in the future, so even my lazy super busy readers can get a glimpse of the whole thing.

I’m sure that some of my “followers” deal with a definitely higher volume of emails that I do, and I shouldn’t be teaching anything to them on this topic, but bear with me :-)

Nonetheless, I sometimes (like in very active moments when starting a new project, such as my thesis work, or my involment with BEST) find myself on the verge of hitting the reasonable threshold of sustainability of email flow, and I developed “tricks” that resemble this kind of approach. It’s a pleasure to see an even better way of dealing with the information flowing daily in my inbox, explained in such a clear fashion.

If you prefer, an alternative to the video is the actual first issue of the series. Find it here.

http://www.43folders.com/2006/03/13/inbox-zero/

P.S. Gotta *luv* the way this guy (Merlin Mann) writes!

Stay tuned, more to come.

Share This

1 Comment »