Entries about lifehacks

Nov 24, 2006

How to cure traffic jams

Think traffic jams are an unbeatable force? Bill Beaty, an electrical engineer and “traffic physics” enthusiast, doesn’t think so. After conducting his own experiments, Bill’s discovered a simple trick anyone can do to relieve two common types of traffic jams: the “merging-traffic jam” and the “traffic wave” The strategy is to simply maintain a large [...]

Nov 21, 2006

The fast and easy way to pick and convert colors

Need a quick way to pick and convert color values without opening Photoshop? Check out the free widget with funny British spelling, ColourMod. This handy widget lets you pick colors and automatic convert their values into CYMK, RGB, HSV, and Hex. All at a glance. It’s available for both Dashboard (Mac) and Yahoo! Widget Engine, [...]

Nov 20, 2006

Instantly create zip archives with a keystroke

A convenient and often forgotten feature of Mac OS X is its built-in ability to create zip archives. Just select any file or folder, go to the File Menu and select Create Archive. Voila! Instant .zip archive. No third-party software needed. Make this even better by attaching a custom keyboard shortcut to the menu item–another [...]

Nov 6, 2006

Pick perfect colors for your home

You’ve been there. Paralyzed in front of a giant display of neverending color swatches at Home Depot. With so many color possibilities, it’s ironically impossible to choose. How do you decide which white do use? Or if Pepper Grass goes with Hot Pink? Fortunately, there’s help with Behr’s ColorSmart tool. ColorSmart lets you preview colors [...]

Nov 1, 2006

The Apple Blog: Access any Mac menu with Quicksilver

Quicksilver, the miracle shortcut tool for the Mac, should have its own Marvel Comics movie. It just has too many features and mutant abilities to ignore. Yasser Dehab of The Apple Blog adds to this neverending list by showing you how to use Quicksilver to access every menu item in any Mac application. He explains [...]

Oct 24, 2006

Give your résumé a face lift

After avoiding the 7 deadly sins of résumé design, you may be asking, “If I can’t use crazy colors, clip art, and other types of decoration, how do I make my résumé stand out from the crowd?” Like many things, the answer lies in the details. Even if you can’t hire a fancy designer and [...]

Oct 18, 2006

Kiss your boring dry erase markers goodbye!

If you’re embarassed by mundane office supplies, check out [TUL Dry Erase Markers.](http://www.tul.com “TUL home) Part of OfficeMax’s new brand of affordable designer writing tools, these markers are surprisingly cute and clever. Each marker has a magnetic body that sticks to most whiteboards, a comfort grip, and a built-in eraser cap. I get weirdly excited [...]

Oct 3, 2006

Are you getting paid what you’re worth?

Indeed.com has just unwrapped a salary search engine to help you navigate the nebulous world of estimating your salary worth. Its premise is based on the familiar saying, “something’s only worth what others are willing to pay.” So instead of relying on traditional salary surveys, Indeed combs over 50 million job listings looking for actual [...]

Sep 21, 2006

How to choose an easy-to-read typeface

Imagine yourself picking a typeface for your next resumé, book, newsletter, or other text-heavy project. With the dizzying array of typefaces in the world, how do you choose when you simply want one that’s clear and readable? Thankfully, Before & After magazine’s short tutorial, What’s the Right Typeface for Text?, can help you make this [...]

Sep 20, 2006

Get great deals, coupons, and money-saving tips with Trezr

What do you get when you mix bargain hunting with a Digg-style voting system and a cute Web 2.0 design? You get Trezr, a brand spanking new entry into the ever-growing crowd of niche social-bookmarking sites. Trezr’s founder, Artia Moghbel, has essentially expanded on the concept of Digg to create a system with a real [...]

Sep 15, 2006

One-click downloads on VersionTracker

My poor MacBook is still in the shop, but I wanted to end the week with a little tip for you: Being a lover of exciting new software, I’m often trolling VersionTracker for the latest applications to download and try. What’s most irritating, though, is the number of clicks it takes to download a file. [...]

Sep 7, 2006

How to dress like a Mac

I love Apple’s latest television ads in which Justin Long is the cool and casual personification of the Mac. His look can easily be summarized as: Smart, but approachable Informal and casual but not slovenly A simple color palette of cool blues and greys Minimal, with no visible logos or slogans If you want to [...]

Sep 6, 2006

The perfect bed for Getting Things Done

Itching to join the cult of productivity but can’t find the space for filing cabinets in your tiny apartment? You might want to check out the apartment Tobias Wong lived in from 1998 to 2003. Being an ever clever designer and artist, Tobias combined the spacial constraints of New York living and a desire for [...]

Sep 4, 2006

No time for news? Get it at a glance on your desktop

If you’re feeling guilty for not keeping up with the news, try Newsmap. The site varies headlines by size and color depending on how much coverage a news item gets. This lets you quickly see top news items as well as biases and trends in news coverage. You can see Newsmap with a flick of [...]

Aug 30, 2006

Midnight Inbox: An easy-to-understand GTD system for the Mac?

If you haven’t gotten around to implementing David Allen’s Getting Things Done, system, because of a lack of clear and easy-to-use programs, you may now be in luck. Midnight Beep has just released a public beta of Midnight Inbox, a new GTD application for the Mac. I have been using another system, Kinkless GTD, for [...]

Aug 24, 2006

FlexTime + Growl: A gentle way to end procrastination

Daniel Jalkut has just released the final version of FlexTime, a fantastic little Mac timer deftly suited for the (10+2)*5 procrastination hack. It still has no out-of-the-box support for Growl’s nifty notification system. Luckily, FlexTime now has robust support for AppleScript, allowing a backdoor into the Growl system. With a little tinkering, I’ve put together [...]

LifeClever is Chanpory Rith's website on how to live and work better as a designer. You can check out the archives, grab the RSS feed, or send me a love letter. ;-)