The Amorphonet Blog

This is an interesting technique for waking up without feeling tired. The basics are to set two alarms. One playing music softly that will wake you up only if you are in a “light” sleep where you’ll feel refreshed if you wake up. This alarm should be set somewhere between 30 and 90 minutes before you have to get up. The second alarm should be a normal volume failsafe alarm set to the latest time you can get up. Hopefully you will be awakened by the soft alarm sometime during your light sleep cycle when you’ll feel refreshed, but if not, at least you’ll be awakened on time without being late. Give the full article a read.

Alarm clocks are bad - How to wake up

This is really scary. It seems that the US government has convinced major printer makers to embed secret information in color printouts. This is like a digital license plate on your color printouts that tells those who know how to crack the code the serial number of the printer and the date the document was printed. These secret codes can only be seen under blue light with a magnifying glass. The EFF has cracked the code used on Xerox printers, but it seems that other major makers like HP are also embedding these codes into their printers. Big brother claims that this is to help crack down on counterfeiting, but it’s still pretty scary to say the least.

Happy printing.

Sleuths Crack Tracking Code Discovered in Color Printers

Recently on Popular Delicious there has been a link to the Firefox Help site with instructions on how to make the active tab easier to distinguish from the non-active tabs. While the tweak is helpful, I thought I could take it a little further. Using the Mozilla article as a starter, you can insert my code below into your userChrome.css file to make your active tab stand out even more.

/* Change color of active tab */
tab[selected="true"] {
color: black !important;
}

/* Change color and size of normal tabs */
tab:not([selected="true"]) {
color: gray !important;
font-size: 90%;
}

/* Kill all tab icons, no matter what */
tab .tab-icon {
display: none;
}

/* Show icons when tab is selected */
tab[selected="true"] .tab-icon {
display: -moz-box;
}

/* Show tab loading indicator while the tab is loading */
tab[busy] .tab-icon {
display: -moz-box;
}

Firefox Help: Tips & Tricks

I ran across the latest “Web 2.0″ tool this morning called Remember the Milk. This tool provides functionality very similar the to-do lists in BackPack from 37signals complete with email and SMS reminders.

Overall, the tool is very well put together, and the interface is well designed. However, a few things struck me as odd. Probably the most annoying is that when I check off an item is complete, it disappears from the page completely. I then have to click a link to view my “completed” tasks in order to see the item again. Once I do that though I can’t see the items that are left to do. I found this annoying. I was expecting a single view similar to the 37signals version. That style seems to make a little more sense to me.

All in all, I think it is well worth a test drive. I’m sure the folks over at 37signals are test driving it right now.

[Update:] I just noticed that the fine folks over at 37signals have lifted their 10 list limit on Ta-Da Lists. I wonder if that has anything to do with this new competition!?

Give it a spin, it’s free: Remember The Milk