existence, refactored

I had to log my hourly effort in my last gig (stupid policy IMO; what am I, a factory worker?) but since I’m not working on Windows, I couldn’t use ManicTime to do the tracking for me.

Taking a cue from oDesk, I decided to make a simple script that takes screenshots of my desktop every few minutes so that I could just review them at the end of the day. For this I used scrot for taking the screenshots and cron for the scheduling.

First install scrot:

$ sudo apt-get install scrot

Then write a script, say /path/to/home/scrot.sh:

#!/bin/sh
LOCATION="$(date +/path/to/home/Pictures/shots/%Y/%m/%d)"
mkdir -p $LOCATION
cd $LOCATION
DISPLAY=:0 scrot '%Y-%m-%d-%H%M.jpg' -q 20

This script will take a low quality screenshot of the desktop and put it in the Pictures/shots folder separated by date.

Set the permissions with chmod:

$ chmod u+x /path/to/home/scrot.sh

You can now test this by running:

$ /path/to/home/scrot.sh

Now time to add the script as a cron job. There are a lot of cron tutorials out there, but to summarize what you need to do, here are the basic steps:

Run crontab -e to edit the cron table file for your current user.

Add a line that will execute scrot.sh whenever you want it to run. For example, here’s the entry for running the script every three minutes on Monday to Friday:

*/3 * * * 1-5 /path/to/home/scrot.sh

Changing your desktop background in Ubuntu (and practically any desktop OS) is trivially easy.

Changing your login background picture in Ubuntu will take a bit of Google-ing, but it’s still pretty easy to do.

Changing the background of the lock screen, however, is a different thing altogether.

If you do some digging around, you’ll find out that this lock screen is defined in /usr/share/gnome-screensaver/lock-dialog-default.ui. In other words, it uses Glade for its design. On one hand, that means you could design funky lock screens like the NSA Lock Screen. On the other hand, simple tasks like changing the background can be a pain to do.

To spare you the effort in studying Glade just to change your lock screen’s background, I’ve created a Github project to point you at the right direction.

As shown in the relevant commit, changing the background requires 3 things present in your /usr/share/gnome-screensaver/:

• a background image (the source of the quote should be pretty obvious),
• a gtkrc file to add theming to the UI, and
• the updated .ui file

This customization assumes you’re using a 1366×768 monitor. Modifying it to suit your monitor resolution shouldn’t be hard to do.

And the finished product:

Was invited to talk at today’s Freelancing for WebGeeks event. I may not be your usual freelancer, given that the venue’s not a hassle for me (Exist TechBar Manila, my current gig’s with Exist) so I obliged.

Anyway, here are my slides. As usual, they don’t make sense without me talking.

While I own an active Facebook account, I don’t “use” as much as other people use it. Heck, its been almost a year since I last scrolled down my feed.

For the interest of those who find it preposterous not to have Facebook always open in a browser tab, here are my reasons why I stopped using Facebook:

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It’s been over a year and a half since I left my previous full-time job and I still don’t have a new one.

It’s not that I don’t have the skills needed to be employed; it’s actually the opposite: even though I’m not actively looking for a job, people still come to me asking if I could work for them. My part time teaching and Rails “consultancy” gigs fall under this (i.e. I never “applied” for them formally), and I’m getting emails requesting for interviews from local companies once in a while.

The reason I’m not taking any full-time job offers is different:

It’s been over a year and a half since I left my previous full-time job and I still haven’t fully recovered from burnout. I’m not confident that I’d be able to do software development “grunt-work” at peak performance for more than a few weeks on end.

After a year’s hiatus, I guess it’s safe to say that I’ve suffered permanent damage from my burnout.

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Looking back, the main turning point of my career was on January 2006.

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It’s been a very busy week so I wasn’t able to write a post last Thursday. I’m still pretty busy with a bunch of stuff so this will just be a quick post.

Here’s a TED talk about what happens when you announce your goals to the world:

This has happened way too many times earlier in my life, back when I was still a hyperactive (yet introverted) loudmouth. Fortunately I learned to shut up about my goals about the time I got into college.

One good example: in my past job, there was a gym fad going around a few years back. Those who were actively announcing that they were to lose weight didn’t follow through with their gym plans, while those who just kept quiet about the whole thing (e.g. me) had the most visible results.

And that’s why I’m not talking about the stuff that’s keeping me busy these days.

I’ve finally found some time in my busy schedule to post something about the recent changes in this site.

As part of making my “freelance” status semi-official, I’m currently migrating stuff from www.bryanbibat.com to this site, www.bryanbibat.net. You might have noticed that I’ve already merged my old blogs to this single blog as well as modified the links in my portfolio pages to point to here.

Another change is the shift from using my Gmail/Yahoo Mail account to bry@bryanbibat.net, and this is what I’ll be talking about today.

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To mark the start of the new year, I’ll be posting simple suggestions to improve your life this year for each of the major categories in this blog.

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Install and set up My Weekly Browsing Schedule on Firefox.

(This, of course, assumes that your main browser is Firefox.)

My Weekly Browsing Schedule is a Firefox extension that automatically opens websites according to the schedule you provide it. Setting this up on your browser can boost your productivity in two ways:

1. It saves you the burden of manually going through your bookmarks.

People normally use bookmarks to open regularly visited websites at certain times in a day. They open mail, news, and social networking sites at the start of the day and at regular intervals throughout the day. Some sites like webcomics and stock market news only need to be visited once a day. Other sites require less visiting frequency, maybe just once or twice a week.

The problem with the bookmark approach is that your browsing efficiency is dependent on whether you’re disciplined enough to develop a good browsing habit e.g. you don’t visit certain sites too often (see the next reason below) and you don’t forget to go to the rarely visited sites.

My Weekly Browsing Schedule can help resolve that problem. You can define which sites open at startup. You can define which sites open at certain hours and the days of the week. You can even tell the extension to catch up with certain sites in case the browser wasn’t open when they were scheduled.

2. It helps cut down on distractions.

When you’re working and have internet access, it can be tempting to check your mail, your social networking sites, and news sites once in a while to keep up with things.

Studies show that this habit can kill your productivity. Don’t believe them? Install ManicTime and see for yourself how many hours a day you waste on those sites.

The most common suggestion to deal with this problem is to learn to “batch” these sites at certain times (I personally use 4 hour intervals). Now while I’ve written against batching previously, the scenario is different in this case because of the conversational nature of e-mail and social networking sites. The more you visit and participate in these sites, the more you’re compelled to post new stuff and initiate conversations.

When you limit yourself to certain times during the day, you get more work done while still keeping up with the updates in your social network (preventing you from becoming a soulless zombie/corporate slave). The extension can help you with this, though you’ll still have to learn to close the sites when you’re done to keep yourself from refreshing/checking on them.

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The downside to this extension is that the UI is clunky at the moment. Setting up a schedule will eat up a bit of your time, especially if you visit a lot of sites regularly.

Finally decided to take the StrengthsFinder quiz after months of buying the book. My top 5 strengths according to the site below the cut:

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Just some quick tips when to use JPEG and PNG files.

We’ll be using GIMP as our image editing software for this post.

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