saulrosenbaum.com / hacks

I’ve been using Backpack for a few months, it’s clean, fast and simple - it epitomizes the 37 signals philosophy, which I generally agree with, but they’ve made a few interface decisions that irk me. The inability to show/hide completed items is at the top of that list, luckily in Firefox it’s easy to fix;

Step one: install Stylish

Step two: add the following rule:

@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);
@-moz-document domain("YOUR BACKPACK ADDRESS") {
body.page div.done{
display: none;
}
}

So I’ve decided to sacrifice one of my vintage video cameras to convert it into a totally cool webcam (I’ll also be sacrificing an existing webcam - my goal is to minimally impact the vintage camera (at least that’s the plan)), maybe one of the plastic vintage cameras would be a better choice (the one pictured is solid metal). I’ll keep you posted on my progress / success / failure.

Tagged: cameras

I’m not pro-diet, I think diets suck, and in general any weight you DO lose, you gain back two-fold, the reason is simple, the concept of a diet is to eat less and burn more until you reach a certain goal, that first part is good - the second part is the problem. A diet is a temporary state - 99.9% of the time when a dieter reaches their goal weight they stop dieting, they return to their original eating patterns, and Bam! they’ve gained all the weight back, plus a little more poundage just to add insult. In order to loose weight and keep it off, you need to modify your eating patterns permanently - hopefully learn a bit more about what you’re eating, and find solutions that work for you, it’s a difficult process, and a professional nutritionist can certainly help, but here are a few helpful diet hacks I can recommend:
Read More »

It’s been one of those weeks, 16+ hour days, nose to the grindstone, no time to think about anything but the work that’s due RIGHT NOW kind of weeks, but thankfully it’s Friday - I think I’ve discovered one of those personal productivity gem that only surfaces when you’re busy.

All week I’ve whittled away at a list of (micro-) tasks that are easily accomplished in 10 minutes or less; the majority of them highly repetitive, and somewhat mindless, e.g. - cropping a group of 100 photos, transcribing written notes into a textfile, or tagging asset files according to project. And MUCH to my surprise I’m actually making headway, I based my approach on Merlin’s (10+2)*5 procrastination hack

Whereas Merlin’s approach gives you a two minute reward for each ten minute burst of productivity, my approach applies those two minutes towards the aforementioned small tasks - so an hour of my time now looks like:

• 45 minutes of project work
• 10 minutes of micro-tasks
• 5 minutes reward time (usually spent reading RSS feeds or email)

I’ve been amazed at how much is doable in 2 minutes - wait… is that light up ahead?

So aggravating, I had a fellow illustrator do some artwork for a project, and he sent it over as a password-protected PDF, and of course, neglected to provide me the password, to further piss me off, he wasn’t reachable by either email or phone from 9am to 7pm - so in a deadline induced frenzy - I had to somehow get around the password, it was actually really easy. Read More »

So now that I kind of have a decent playlist, I decided to ‘kick it up’ a little bit, by eliminating the annoying gaps between the songs — of course Itunes can do this automatically, just switch on ‘crossfade between tracks’ & ‘gapless playback’ and you’re all set, but sadly this seemingly obvious feature isn’t available once you move your playlists to your my ipod [I realize the new ipods CAN play gapless - but NOT cross-fading].

I could have burned my playlist to a CD and then re-imported it back into itunes, but that seemed so analog — I chose instead to use Read More »

I’m writing a how-to-hack-yourself-famous handbook, here’s idea number one.

Produce eight 80 x 80 canvases of flat colors that represent the original eight colors of a box of crayons. Sign them hugely in Black sharpie and hang them in a trendy NYC gallery each with a 20k price-tag, name the whole show ‘Chroma of Youth’. Capitalizing on the concept that any painting as long as it’s BIG will sell.