Have you ever tried mounting an .iso image? You need 3rd party software, you need to most likely reboot since it installs a driver, and you get a huge memory footprint compared to the task at hand. I just found a way to mount an .iso image using a 23K program, with a 9K sys file driver.

The best thing about this is that the files used were created by Microsoft, so there’s no danger of harmful bloatware being installed. The downside is that this file is actually not supported by Microsoft, meaning they are not developing it, and probably won’t accept any support requests for it. However, I am using 32bit Windows 7 and it works perfectly, here’s how.

First of all, download this file from the Microsoft servers. Extract the contents, and place the two files in a folder. On my end I placed them both in a folder in the Program Files folder, as if it were a normal app. Run the exe, click on Driver Control, the Install Driver. Navigate to the sys file, select it and press ok. Once done, press Start, then Ok, to go back to the previous page. Now click “Add Drive”, then select it in the menu on top, and select mount. Find the .iso file you want, and click ok, and that’s it, you should see pop up in My Computer, you can now use it as a drive.

You can close the application once you’ve done this, if you want to unmount, just start the exe again, click unmount, or stop the service in the device manager. That’s it, task done, no memory footprint, not bloatware, nothing, just a mounted disk, wonderful!

While it may seem more technical, I think this is much easier than using Daemon Tools or Power Iso or something like that. The light weight, the ease of use and effectiveness make this a great find, thank you Microsoft!

Opera has a much-promoted feature called speed dial, which basically showed a wall of your favorite/most visited websites. The same option is built right into Safari as well, but Firefox can also give you this functionality with a number of addons.

I tried a few, among them was the visually appealing  FoxTab which gives you 3D tab browsing and a nice looking speed dial, but it was buggy for me, and wasn’t customizable enough. In the end I arrived at the very simple looking, but extremely well customizable Fast Dial. The simpler looks were actually welcome, since the functionality of this should be for me to launch a site really quickly, not looking at it for ages.

Once installed the addon gave me exactly the options I wanted, and more. You can add sites by entering their URL directly, but you can also right click on any page to add it quickly. In the options you can choose how many sites you want to show, you can change the dimensions of the boxes to fit more, and of course you can completely customize the look. Apart from the 3D aspect, you can do anything with it, so you could make it much flashier than it is, but for me the simple elegance of the default look is fine.

More importantly, you can change the text of the windows (or leave them out altogether). This is a must for me, since I sometimes work with very similar sites, which are nevertheless totally different, like cPanels for different accounts, phpMyAdmin’s for different sites and so on. Here the text and the favicon would be almost the same. The addon gives you great options for customizing the favicon, which you can actually change to a different one from the web, or use your own, and you can also change the website preview to an image of your own.

This is one of the best speed dial addons since it seems no-frills, fulfilling the needs of those who just need launching power, but in reality it has the power to extensive customization easily.

A month or so back, I think I found the ultimate iPhone time waster, although the app (or apps) is pretty fun! The company is called Tapulous, and the app in question is Tap Tap Revenge 3. The experience is much better than you’d think, just like on Guitar Hero, you have a set of ribbons 3-5 with dot thingies coming at you, and you have to tap them on rhythm.

From all the suites available, I have purchased 3 actually, and they were my best purchases in terms of usage so far. You can check them all out at the top of the page in the previous link, I have bought the Metallica, the Lady Gaga, and the Dave Matthews Band version as well, all are extremely well done. Dave Matthews Band is one of my favorites, so I was very excited to play with it, but if you’re looking for a challenge, definitely go with the Metallica version.

In most of them (except the Metallica version, grrr) there is a multiplayer option to play on one phone, but the newer apps offer iphone to iphone challenges as well. You can also import content into Tap Tap Revenge 3, so that way you can also access the Metallica tracks for multiplayer use. The full suite, which is the aformentioned Tap Tap 3 allows you to download tons of free tracks as well as great paid ones. You can create an avatar, challenge people, and so on, it’s all very social.

The biggest strength of the app is the quality of the tapping action. I haven’t tried tons of free and paid songs in Tap Tap 3, but all the songs in the artist versions are extremely well thought out. More often than not, it does feel like you’re playing the song, either guitar parts, or in some cases the drum parts. The songs are also modular, you won’t be tapping something completely different in one chorus than in the next, but for some reason it doesn’t become repetitive, great job on that part.

If you have some time to kill at an airport, on the train, etc,  just hook up your earphones and off you go into musicland.

Wordpress 3.0 is about 2 months away, and we will see the addition of the single feature that kept Wordpress from being a full blown CMS, post types! This comes in handy when you’re building a blog with a few different sections, for example a personal blog, with a section about movies you’ve seen.

You could separate the posts using categories, it would work, but it wouldn’t be the best way to do things. Also, a normal post isn’t necessarily the best medium through which to convey a movie you’ve seen. With Wordpress 3.0 you can create different post types, meaning that below the “Posts” menu in your backend, you will also see a “Movies” menu if you’ve created the post type. You can enable comments, categories, tags and so on for these, and what makes it even more powerful is the custom taxonomy you can bind to them.

For example, when writing your personal posts you may have categories like “Daily awesomeness”, “Food”, “School”, “Work”, and so on. Movies on the other hand require a different set of categories, and if you would also like to catalog recipes you’ve cooked, you would again need a different set of categories. You could of course just keep all of them in the categories box, but with Wordpress 3.0 (actually this is also available in the current version), you can create new taxonomy types.

In the above case, you could have “Personal Categories”, “Movie Categories”, “Recipe Types”. These would all act in the same way as your usual category box, but only categories belonging to that taxonomy will be seen.

The extent of how awesome this is may not be that apparent if you’re not a developer, since the above blog could be accomplished with other methods, but the new platform offers extremely good options, and much more logical ones too, no hacking. In addition, the features I mentioned mean that you can now use Wordpress to manage any type of content more easily. Create a catalog, use it as a business card database, use it as a calendar, so on and so forth. I think we will be seeing a lot of websites spring up running Wordpress which are not blogs, and hooray for that since the new 3.0 Wordpress is truly awesome.

If you visit many sites often, chances are you either don’t use the bookmark toolbar because it would get crowded, or you have a bulging toolbar. To save a load of space, and make the toolbar look better, you can force it to show only the website favicons with a simple tweak to Firefox, read on!

A lot of what you see in Firefox can be changed (this is why themes are possible), and molding your browser to your own needs is not that hard. The first thing to do is find the location of your userChrome.css file. If you’re in Windows you can open any folder and type “%appdata%\Mozilla\” in the url bar (without quotes) and you should be transported to the folder where your application data is held. In most cases this is located in “C:\Users\Your-Windows-Username\AppData\Roaming\”. If you’re on Linux you can find this folder in “~/.mozilla/” and if you’re on a Mac, you’ll see it in “~/Library/Mozilla/”.

Once there, you should go in to the Firefox folder, then the Profiles folder. Here you will see directories for all your profiles. If you have more than one you have to take one extra step to determine which one you’re using. I actually don’t know a simple answer to this off by heart, if you do, please do let us know! If you need to know, go to Tools and Error Console in Firefox, and enter the following in the code line:


alert(Components.classes["@mozilla.org/file/directory_service;1"].getService(Components.interfaces.nsIProperties).get("ProfD", Components.interfaces.nsIFile).path);

Upon evaluation this will show the full location of your current profile. This is the directory you need.

Inside the directory you will find folder named “chrome”. If you don’t see it, simply create it. Create a file called “userChrome.css” if it isn’t already there, and use a text editor to edit it. Simply add in the following line to make the text disappear from your bookmarks toolbar:

#personal-bookmarks .toolbarbutton-text {display:none!important}

When you restart Firefox, all the text should be gone. You can get them back by deleting the above line in the userChrome.css file. Happy browsing!

I was thinking about my next meal last morning, and when I have no idea what to eat, I just cook something by starting it, end seeing what happens. Completely by chance, I managed to make sauce which tasted pretty much like pesto. It is not pesto, it doesn’t look like it, and won’t taste 100% like it, but if you generally like the yummyness of pesto sauce, here’s a quick way to mimic it.

All you will need is sour cream, cheese and basil, some salt and pepper and ground garlic, although this last one is not that important. I started by emptying around 250 grams (about 1.5 cups) of sour cream into a pan. I waited until it was almost boiling and I then dropped in a pinch of salt, a pinch of pepper, a tiny bit of ground garlic and a big dose of basil. I actually used something called “garlic pepper”, which is a mix of the two, and for the basil, if I would have to put a number on it, I would say, put in about 2-3 big spoons of it, don’t hold back. Normal pesto is made up of a LOT of basil, so you can’t really go overboard here.

Once those are mixed in I start adding some cheese, which I quickly grated, so it would melt in better. I have no idea how much cheese I used, I think it was close to 200 grams, which is a bit under a half a pound I think. Once that was all melted in, I deemed it done, and poured it on some pasta. Now, when I did this the first time, it was very thin, it didn’t feel viscous enough, so I though my spontaneous recipe wasn’t that good. However, the pasta sucked in a lot of the moisture, so what happened in the end was that the pasta itself tasted of the sauce, plus the sauce took on a nice viscous feel, like sauce should have. Oh, and it tastes pretty much like pesto sauce, but nor quite as strong.

So there you go Hack Your Day’s first cooking productivity recipe which you can use when you only have 5 minutes to whip up something nice. Let me know if you have some sauce recopies like that, I’m a sauce maniac and would thank you kindly for such advice!

Semantics are all the rage these days, to make sure we include a lot of information about information in our website code for example, but what the heck are we talking about, what is syntax, what is semantics, and why do we need them?

Both are in fact basics of informatics, and are related to information (no surprise there). Syntax is the form the information is seen in, while semantics refers to what it is about. I am in now way a professor in this subject, so my terminology might not be up to par, but here is a short example, so you can see the distinction better. Take the following piece of info: “10011″. What does this mean? It could be the answer to a true or false series of questions. Question 1 was true, the second and third were false, and the fourth and fifth were also true. However, this series could have a different meaning as well.

It could also be a number in the binary format, in which case “10011″ would actually mean “19″ because 1×16 and 1×2 and 1×1 is 19. So if I send you this sequence alone, you know the syntax, but because there is no semantic meaning coded in, you have absolutely no idea what I really want to say. This is why semantics are so important, they give you some information about information, may seem redundant when written down like this, but in reality, it is absolutely necessary to be able to understand the information in question.

This is why it is such a great step that in the HTML 5 specification they have tags like <header> and <article>, these don’t just represent an element, they include in themselves information about what that element is. A search engine can therefore conclude some important things about the data in these sections. It is probably that text in the <article> section on your page is more important than text in your <aside> section, or <header> section. It is also probable that links in your <aside> and <header> section are navigation links, or at least more probable than the ones in the <article> section.

Finally, data semantics can be derived from the context in which the data is set. In these cases, if not explicitly stated, there is always a chance that the meaning will be derived incorrectly. This article is about basic informatics, so I could have added “Informatics 101″. No one would think that this means “informatics True False True”, or “Informatics 5″, because from context you can see that it means “Informatics one on one”. However, this information does not mean that in Hungarian, so if people in Budapest see this, they will have no idea what you’re talking about. This is the danger of implied semantics, but if used correctly it is a safe method.

Whenever I criticize something, I always take some time to take a look at weather I’m the one who is wrong and I am never aggressive when commenting, since that would make me just as bad. I find the following situation just so incomprehensible.

I was reading some local news, and I saw a video at the bottom of female circumcision, which I just heard about a few months back, so I had a look. It has some graphic scenes, but nothing direct, a little blood, if you’re very sensitive though, just read on. The point of the video is, that certain tribes practice quite brutal circumcision, think razors and 2 year old babies. Also, it’s quite obvious that female parts are quite a bit more prone to infection, so this is way more unsafe than doing it with boys, and of course these “operations” are not done in hospitals.

Anyway, one of the comments (translated) was this, which is a perfectly sensible one, just so I start on a good note here.

“This is really heavy, but you have to notice that the guy who speaks fluent English would never do such a thing, this says a lot about the importance of education and enlightenment”.

Here is the one (like many others) which I think just shows that being barbaric is not a factor of where you live, if you live in a tribe or a city (sorry about the strong imagery in there).

“Do these have hearts? And the idiot in the car is explaining that this is a good thing because otherwise parts would just stick out. And, her mother is laughing proudly. These are animals, or actually, animals would never do such a thing. To the stake with the old witch and all their followers”

The real question here is, which commenter, in your eyes, has the more gravitas? How can we preach to these people that our ways are better, if many of us think like the second commenter? I just find it so oxymoronic (did I just make that word up?) that someone would so harshly condemn these people, when his views are actually much more severe.

In our eyes these people are barbaric, but don’t forget, that they love their children just as much as you do, and in their opinion they are doing this for the child, they think this is necessary and good. I would bet a fair amount that tribes like these in general are better people than many of us here in the “enlightened” World, just because some of their traditions are barbaric, does not mean the people themselves are a lost cause.

In any case, I urge anyone who has views like this to stop commenting in this manner. If not for the sake of being civil, then for the sake of being heard. As long as one extreme view is countered by another extreme view, the people who can do something about it (more often than not moderates), won’t give a damn, because they hate extremism. Even if you have extreme views, you can get much further in a civil fashion.

If you’re a freelancer, or you have billable side-jobs, your organization and productivity can benefit a lot from a project management and billing application, and today’s offering, Project Bubble, won’t take anything out of your pockets since it’s free.

Project Bubble is an online hosted solution and works like AJAX-heavy applications should (but many fail nevertheless). Data input forms are big, user friends, easy to use, they work quickly and efficiently. If you click in a date field, a calendar pops out unobtrusively, so you can easily choose a date, while also being able to view all other fields. Overall the application is a joy to use, it’s built up in a logical fashion and can actually be used to work, as opposed to just input info and then find it to cumbersome to continue with.

Projects, tasks and to-dos

Project List in Project Bubble

The basis of inputting data into Project Bubble is the project-task-todo method. You add a task, which can have any number of tasks linked to it. Each task in turn can have any number of to-do items linked to it. This structure enables the app to scale pretty well, you will be able to use it with small and large projects alike. In reality you can also add separate to-do items to projects which can be useful sometimes, although I would prefer not to, for clarity’s sake. The way all this information is presented is great from a visual, UX and workflow point of view. A project’s page lists all the tasks, and viewing to-do items is optional. This is ideal, since your workspace won’t be cluttered, but you can zoom in to see the fine detail if needed.

Billing and time tracking

The most important thing for a freelancer is to get paid (and to do quality work), and having good billing options, as well as good tracking is essential in an application. Project Bubble delivers in this respect as well. The interface allows you to add your hourly rate, but also allows for daily rates, which is something I don’t often see. You can also add estimates to compare with how much you really work, which is really important for your own data needs.

You can also start and stop timers for tasks, meaning that the app will tick away for you, no need to enter time entries separately, although you can if you want. The level of detail allows you to add these billing details to individual tasks as well, so you can fine tune each project, make better estimates, and bill more percisely.

Invoicing

Adding a Project in Project Bubble

Generating consistent invoices has always been something I liked to see in companies, and Project Bubble will give you pretty good options here. You won’t be able to completely customize everything, but I think the offered settings are still great for a free app. You can create invoices from projects, input your own reference number, allow for PayPal paymnets, select to generate a PDF version, and so on.

The generated invoices are clean and clear, the only two things that are important for invoices. You can grab the PDF and apply some visual stuff in Photoshop (might be a bit slow for each invoice) if you need to, or you can grab the code and use some HTML and CSS magic to add things on after the fact.

Verdict

I put off trying this application for a while and I’m sorry I did, It is one of the best I’ve seen so far. I’ve tried many free apps, and while many were good enough, somehow Project Bubble is the only one that I feel I could use on an ongoing basis. It could improve here and there (multiple users to track task times for more than one task at once, complete invoice customization), but for 95% of the people who need this, I think most of them will be very happy with this application, I know I am. Definitely take a look at this one, I haven’t even touched on things like notes, comments, estimates and so on!

Have you ever tried to reserve a lunch reservation and a dinner reservation in a different city, wishing you could find something to do in between? Have you ever gone out to play some bowling, had so much fun you decided to go to a Korean restaurant, but had no idea where to start looking? An app for the iPhone, Siri, is here to help, and judging by the previews, it looks like the next generation of automated personal assistants.

You just open it up and talk to it, ask for restaurant listings, show times, and so on. The great thing about it is that you can build upon a previous reservation (which it can automatically create for you with OpenTable), so it knows it has just reserved a table, and you don’t want to see movie show times at that time, since you will be sitting in the restaurant. Anyway, take a look below, and thanks to Lifehacker for the tip.