Focus and Track Time with Tomato Doer

Most of us spend our days trying to manage the time that we spend on different tasks, whether its work related or personal chores. Managing time and getting us to focus on whatever we are doing is one of the goals of the Pomodoro Technique, something that you should try if you want to improve your own time management and focus.

There are various tools that you can use to follow the Pomodoro technique, the most simplest being pen and paper. One application that I have found and am currently using is Tomato Doer. It’s portable, keeps a log of your completed sessions and mostly stays out of the way – which is good so that it does not in itself affect your productivity.

You can read more about the Pomodoro technique here first, then try out the tool by downloading it from Sourceforge. Tomato Doer requires Microsoft .NET 4.0 Framework.

Problem opening Maxthon Portable

Maxthon is a browser that uses both the Trident ( IE ) and Gecko ( Firefox ) browser engines. This browser is available in a portable version, and this quick tip is about how to resolve an issue when opening Maxthon Portable, and it gives you an error saying "Another instance of Portable Maxthon is starting. Please wait for it to start before launching again" ( it should also apply to most cases when you receive an error upon starting the program ).

To resolve the issue, go to the Portable Maxthon folder > Data and look for a file named PortableApps.comLauncherRuntimeData-MaxthonPortable.ini. Delete this file ( don't worry, it will be recreated once Maxthon has successfully opened ) and then try to start Portable Maxthon.

Resources:

1. Maxthon Site
2. Maxthon Portable from PortableApps

What is that  on top of my web page?

 is the BOM or Byte Order Mark of the Unicode standard. To solve issues where the BOM appears on top of your web page, simply open it in a note editor like notepad++ and change formatting to Unicode in UTF-8 without BOM and then save the file.

The BOM should not appear anymore when you view the page on a browser after doing this formatting change.

Resources:

1. Byte order mark ( Wikipedia )
2. Notepad++ is an open source text editor. You can download notepad++ here.

Disable Speed Dial in Opera

Opera's Speed Dial feature offers a quick way to access sites that you regularly visit, but in some cases, like in mine, you may just prefer a blank page and the address bar when you open a new tab. To disable Speed Dial in Opera:

1. In the Opera address bar, type in about:config or opera:config. This enables you to access Opera's Preferences Editor.

2. On the Preferences Editor, under User Prefs, look for Speed Dial State. Set the value to 0 ( values: 0 - folded, 1 - normal view, 2 - Read Only and 3 - disabled ).

   

3. Click Save under the User Prefs section for the setting change to take effect.

Video player for .dav files

Trying to view recorded CCTV footage, I had to find a player for playing the .dav format that the CCTV DVR system was recording to. I found 2, the first one was able to open the file but did not properly display the video while the second one actually was able to play it. If you are trying to open a .dvr file, you can also try using any of these 2 and see if it works for you.

1. DVR365 Player
2. Mace SQ and HQ File Player

Stop Simplenews from sending out a newsletter ( Drupal )

This tip is for people using Drupal and a module called Simplenews for maintaining and sending out newsletters to an email list.

There might come a time when you need to stop simplenews from sending newsletters - maybe because of issues with the module or the Drupal site, or you accidentally sent the wrong newsletter to a certain list of users. Whatever the reason, below is a quick way of stopping Simplenews.

1. Backup your database first. You can use a module called Backup and Migrate to do so.

2. Open phpMyAdmin, and look for under your Drupal site's database the simplenews_newsletter table.

3. Determine the node id of the newsletter you are sending ( going into the edit page would show you the node id on the url ). Look for that node id on the simplenews_newsletter table, and click on the edit button on the left of the row ( pencil icon ).

4. Change the s_status from 1 ( which means sending ) to either 0 ( unsent ) or 2 ( sent ).

5. Empty the simplenews_mail_spool table ( this is where all the email addresses and status per message is stored ).

   You can use TRUNCATE to do this, as in the code below:

   TRUNCATE TABLE simplenews_mail_spool

WinFF - Open Source Video Conversion Tool

WinFF is an open source GUI for the swiss army knife of video conversion - ffmpeg. Supports most of the codecs supported by ffmpeg including flv, avi, asf and wmv. Features a simple and easy to use interface, and can do multiple conversions at the same time.

Platforms

WinFF runs on Windows ( Windows 95, 98, NT, 2000, XP, Vista and 7 ) and Linux ( Ubuntu, Debian, Redhat and Suse ). There is also a portable version for Windows.

Resources

1. WinFF Home
2. WinFF Downloads
3. FFmpeg Home
4. FFmpeg General Documentation