Focusing my attention

StayFocusd is cruel:

During my Bachelor thesis I used LeechBlock to stop me from spending to much time on my favorite webpages, but as I am not using Firefox anymore (I only have 4GB of memory in this machine) StayFocusd does the job just as well for chrome.

Keep Outlook quiet during a pomodoro

At the moment I’m using the excellent Pomodoro application on my Mac for tracking all my pomodoros during the day. While it already supports changing your Adium/Skype status to DND with a custom message during a pomodoro I also wanted to suppress Outlook “new mail” notifications.

Fortunately Pomodoro supports executing AppleScript scripts for certain events so I used the following snippets to enable/disable these Outlook notifications:

Disable on start/resume:

tell application "Microsoft Outlook"
  set display alerts to false
  set play sound on new message to false
end tell

Enable on end/reset:

tell application "Microsoft Outlook"
  set display alerts to true
  set play sound on new message to true
end tell

It’s working great so far.

HowTo: Export Excel Charts as PDF to include in LaTeX document

[Update]

I’ve written an updated post for Mac and Excel 2011 users.

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For the evaluation part of my thesis I had to include a lot of charts. The scientific approach proably would have been to use gnuplot, but my tool of choice for any kind of charts is Microsoft Excel 2007. However, I found no simple and easy way to directly include Excel charts into my LaTeX thesis document. After a lot of experimenting and looking at other people’s solutions I came up with the following:

1. Create chart in Excel as usual

Control your environment

As Tim Ferris said, control your environment rather than your behaviour. So no instant messaging in my work account anymore.