Slife

February 23rd, 2007

Slife is the new awareness browser for the Mac OS X that lets you visualize your computer activities like never before.

Slife is a cool little Mac OS X time browser that tracks the apps you use and lets you get a historical view of your productivity. I’m giving Slife a try whilst I work on some client projects to check that I’m using my time wisely. They have an online service as well called SlifeShare – even though they go to lengths to protect your privacy (not taking an email address from you or a name), I’m not sure I can see the immediate value in uploading all my details to the web. I’m sure this would be a very good tool for creating a Nielsens type rating system for Mac software – taking a cross section of Mac users and their usage habits. It’s not that I necessarily think my data is going to be abused, it’s just I don’t see the value in uploading it at the moment.

The Slife interface is nice, quite clean and features a Menu Extra that allows you to choose which project you are currently working on and then track your usage habits whilst working on a certain project. One thing I don’t see at the moment is some funky visualisation of my data, no graphs/charts/stats that are interesting or pretty to look at, the main view shows little dots to indicate activity for a certain app over time but I can’t help think that there needs to be more than this in order for the app to be really useful.

All in all, well worth trying out.

I have created a TextMate scriptlet to grab the name and path of the current document in TextMate and log it to Slife. TextMate Scriptlet

Lovely Coffee

February 7th, 2007

One of the perks of working for yourself (and from home) has to be the fact you alone can decide on what drinks to stock for getting you through the working day.

I am a bit of a coffee freak, and ever since nabbing (read: loaning) a fantastic Siemens Coffee machine from my brother I have searched for the best coffee blends I can find to keep my morning drink interesting and refreshing.

Recently I’ve been drinking a lot of Lavazza Coffee – Wikipedia links to a quote from the Lavazza website:

16 out of the 20 million coffee purchasing families in Italy choose Lavazza

...and I can believe it – it’s really nice coffee.

Until recently I loved the Lavazza Club blend – it’s really really strong and has a very heavy flavour.

Favourite until this week, I discovered a new blend in my local supermarket – Tierra

It’s not as heavy as Lavazza Club but it has an interesting flavour and is very refreshing drink.

Anyway, enough ramblings about coffee – I thought that by posting this perhaps some other people might recommend some good coffee (or Tea) blends for me to try in my quest for a lovely morning drink.