Dieter Rams' 10 principles of good design inspired my desktop design. I have reduced noise, clutter and distraction to minimum similar to many of Rams designs for Braun.

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Are you able to imagine our future? Chris Martenson questions our vision after our recent economical crisis, our upcoming climate crisis and current innovation in technology. His video presentation is worth every minute.

Note

If wish to watch all episodes on YouTube, just head over to Chris' Playlist

Three Beliefs

Dr. Martenson states his three beliefs: massive change is upon us, that change may overwhelm our ability to respond, and that we do not lack the technology or understanding necessary to build a better future. The next 20 years are not going to be anything like the past 20 years.

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This is a quick and dirty bash script to relaunch a process under Linux. If the query term php is not found within the list of processes running, the script starts the process. Please spend a couple of minutes to add a logging method to this script to track failures.

#!/bin/sh
QUERY='php'

if ps ax | grep -v grep | grep $QUERY > /dev/null
then
    echo "$QUERY service running, everything is fine"
else
    echo "$QUERY is not running"
    php /root/init.php
fi

One of Dieter Rams Design Principles states to design as little as possible to create a good design. As a fan of keyboard shortcuts in Firefox, I hardly used any of the visual interfaces to Firefox' functions and so I started to remove element by element from the user interface. As the browser creates less visual noise, the web applications feels more like a desktop application. The experience is very similar to Fluid App for OSX.

Update

The addon Hide GUI bar for Firefox adds a keyboard shortcut (Ctrl-Shift-A) to hide Firefox' menu, bookmarks, status bar etc.

Remember the Milk is great service to increase your productivity by using action lists. The service does not currently support a possibility to bookmark a list for quick access from your browser. Yet there is a little trick.

You can access the web interface of Remember the Milk from: rememberthemilk.com/home/thomasrstegelmann/. To open a list directly, you need to append the list's identifier to this link. Open the print version of your list and you will find the identifier in the address bar of your browser (green): rememberthemilk.com/print/thomasrstegelmann/11000372/. Replace print with home or append the number to the web interface url and you are ready to go: rememberthemilk.com/home/thomasrstegelmann/11000372/.

A simple tick to improve your productivity a little bit further.