In my last post, I discussed how you can use AutoHotkey and SlickRun to quickly display useful text information. Although I’ve been using that technique for months to show me my credit card number, and often-called phone numbers, I recently decided that I wanted to do more. Specifically, I wanted to be able to quickly see a yearly calendar. You know, you’re thinking about something, and suddenly need to know exactly what day the 5th of October is?

My normal technique is to simply minimize everything on my desktop (Win + M key) to see my desktop background. That’s because I’ve got tiny calendars of the next three months sitting there, courtesy of Samurize (see my posts on my desktop for more details). But, really, that’s a pain to do. So I said to myself, why not a popup box with a calendar? And heck, go big, show the whole year at once!

So, using the Cygwin “cal” command, I created a text file, called year.txt, that contains the 2007 year in text. I’m including it here, in case you want to use it, but don’t have Cygwin installed.

Then, using the technique discussed previously, I set up an AutoHotkey script to read the file, and a SlickRun magic word to launch it with a couple of key strokes.

Unfortunately, when I use a message box with calendar information, the default proportional font looks absolutely awful. Unreadable really.

Changing Windows Default Font for Message Boxes

So, I decided to try switching the Windows default font for text boxes. You can get to this from the Control Panel’s “Display Properties”. Go to the Appearance tab, and then select the “Advanced” button. You want to change the Font value for the “Message Box” Item. I’m a big fan of Bitstream Vera Sans Mono. Here’s what your dialog would look like. You can pick any fixed-font for the font. Even if you’ve never installed any extra fonts on your machine, you could use Courier New.

Click OK, and then Apply on the Display Properties window. Now, all message boxes will use this fixed font. I figured that for how often I see a message box, it wouldn’t bug me too much to see a fixed-width font there.

Look at How Pretty It Is

Here is what my yearly calendar looks like now, using the Bitstream Vera Sans Mono font:

Isn’t that pretty? What a clever little solution I found. How easy was that?

Ugly Side Effect

Was I ever surprised when I looked at my FireFox next! Most of the fonts in the FireFox application seem to be based on the same font that the Windows message boxes use. Not the guts of a web page, but things like the address bar, search bar, bookmarks bar, tabs, and status bar. It looked bizarre, to say the least.

Here’s what FireFox used to look like:

And now here’s what it looks like:

I didn’t mind so much on the status bar, but I found the effect really distracting on the tabs, and even in the Extensions list.

Fixing FireFox Fonts

Given how much customization people do with their FireFoxes, I figured there had to be a way to fix this. And there is. You do have to modify your userChrome.css file, which actually isn’t as scary as it sounds.

One of the best sites I found discussing the userChrome.css file was here. The author tells you how to find the file if it already exists (and it might, if you’ve done some other customizations), or how to create it with a text editor. He’s also got several things to stick in there to make other changes to your FireFox.

However, I just used that page to make sure I was editing my file properly. The change that you want to make, to “undo” the font problems caused by changing the Windows default font for message boxes, is as follows:

You want to add the following code to your userChrome.css file:

/* Set font size and family for dialogs
* and other miscellaneous text
* http://www.mozilla.org/unix/customizing.html#usercss
*/

window, tooltip {
font-family: ‘Microsoft Sans Serif’ !important
}

I got the idea from the Mozilla.org Customizing Mozilla page. The example they have their changes the font of everything to Helvetica, with a size of 3.5. I didn’t want that (although you might); I just wanted to change it back to the default font, which is ‘Microsoft Sans Serif’. (Don’t forget the single quotes!)

So, add that little snippet to your userChrome.css file. Save the file. Close FF and reopen it. Now, your FireFox should look right, and you can still have nicely fixed font message boxes.

The example from the Mozilla page didn’t completely fix FireFox though - tooltips were still showing with the fixed font.

So, based on an example from here, I added in the “tooltip” to the code above. That fixed the tooltips, and “window” seems to take care of the rest. There’s probably something else I’ll need to fix, but I’ll just have to keep plugging away at it :)

Update [6 Aug 07]: Instead of using a fancy font like Bitstream Vera Sans Mono, you might be better off using one of the standard fonts that come with Windows, like Courier New. Although I love the look of the Bitstream Vera Sans Mono, I noticed that I was having trouble with other applications. For instance, my SnagIt window couldn’t show some of its menu choices. No idea why, but switching to Courier New fixed that. There may be other things that look hinky. Personally, I’m willing to take a bit of hinky to get the year calendar available with a couple of keystrokes. Your mileage may vary :)

I’d like to draw your attention to the fancy ad on the right side of my blog. Just over there —>. (Okay, those of you who are just reading the RSS feed, you’ll have to actually navigate to the blog to see the very fancy animated ad.)

Anyway, I just wanted to draw your attention to the CompanionLink trial that is currently being offered. The advertisement is about to run out, and before it does, I wanted to let you know that I’m using CompanionLink to sync my Google calendar with my Palm Zire 72, and it is *nice*.

You may remember that I tried out CompanionLink a few months ago, but didn’t have any joy. Even after a second attempt, I still couldn’t get it to work.

Well, this time, I had the undivided attention of one of their tech gurus (thanks Andy!). Between my sending in error logs, and their excellent support, we were able to get my system to work. And do you know what the problem was?

It turns out that I use a custom date format. Have for years. All of my hand-rolled backup batch files are tied to it. The custom format showed, for instance, “Tue 03 Jul 07″. For whatever reason, the combination of this custom format, combined with Google Calendar and a synchronization app (such as CompanionLink and probably gSyncIt and SyncMyCal as well) caused a major melt-down. The easy solution? Change my custom date format to a standard one.

Okay, it wasn’t a perfectly easy transition. Since I’ve been using my palm for years, and have alternated between using Outlook and the Palm Desktop as my conduit, I had a bit more trouble. It turned out that I had some strange recurring appointments that I couldn’t see at all, even when I tried using the Palm Desktop again. They weren’t even visible on the Palm. But CompanionLink would sync them to the Google Calendar, which would then proceed to throw a hissy fit. I ended up reinstalling the Palm Desktop, using a blank calendar to overwrite my Palm a couple of times, dancing around dressed in paint and waving a chicken bone. And then, things worked perfectly.

Conclusion

In my opinion, the best thing about CompanionLink was the customer service. And I’m a big proponent of good customer service.

The next best thing? It lets me sync to either Outlook (and then to Palm), or to the Palm Desktop, or to the Palm itself. It also offers support to other applications, such as Lotus Notes (which I hope to use one day), Windows Mobile, and even the Blackberry.

If you’re using Google Calendar, and want to hook it into your other calendar apps or hardware, check out CompanionLink.

I received an email a couple of months ago, asking what kind of tools did I use for different parts of my process. I’m finally getting around to answering those questions, mostly because part of my answer depends on information you didn’t have until I added recent posts :)

So, in answer to Fox’s questions, here’s what I use: (And sorry for such a long delay Fox!)

1) Email, do you use only web gmail interface or outlook with gmail pop3 ?

I use Gmail and I do all of my serious email work in the web interface. I have added a few extensions in order to make gmailing that much better, but to be honest, Gmail rocks right out of the box.

• Attachment icons, so I can what kind of attachment is with an email.
• Attachment reminder, to remind me that I said I would attach something, but forgot.
• Date Search, to make it easier to find emails from a particular date.
• Saved Searches, to save custom searches. I like this extension, but I don’t think I use it enough.
• Spam-count Hide, one of the first extensions I added. I *hate* seeing my spam count. I don’t care how big it is. Don’t want to know.
• And most importantly, GTD Inbox. This extension brings GTD in my email, with the addition of labels such as S:Next Action, S:Waiting, contexts, projects, etc. The thing I like best about it is that it offers a few shortcuts in my inbox so that I can jump directly to my Next Actions, etc. Actually, no, the think I like best is that when I’m reading an email, I can quickly label it with a status, context, and/or project. Very cool.

Note: all except GTDInbox are Greasemonkey scripts, which you can install one by one. However, if you’re not into Greasemonkey, you can use the new LifeHacker Better Gmail extension, which has combined these scripts (and more) into one easy-to-use extension. Better Gmail for everyone! As of writing, Better Gmail was at version 0.3 (3 versions in 3 days).

As for using pop3 with Gmail, I do use it, but for one very specific reason. I import my primary Gmail account into Outlook, just so that I can send the important mail straight to EverNote. I could do copy and paste from the Gmail web page, but it turns out ugly. Clipping from Outlook gives me pretty notes, and they’re time-stamped properly.

2) Contacts ? How do you keep them synced ?

Heheheh. This is one part of my system that I have not messed with in years. I’ve probably only got a hundred contacts or so, and the main reason for using them is to send a parcel or Christmas cards in the mail. My contacts are kept in Outlook, and synced to my Palm. That’s it. I have a few phone numbers input into my cell, but only the ones I’m likely to use.

3) Calendar? What do you use for it?

As I discussed in a recent post about my Super Duper Personalized Productivity Desktop Background Series, I use the Remind application for my calendar. It’s pure text. It’s geeky. It’s oh-so cool for me to play with. It’s possible for me to sync it (one-way right now) to my Palm, by first sending it to my Google Calendar. (Note: two-way syncing between Google Calendar and my Palm is possible, but right now, I’m not able to get from Google Calendar back into Remind format. I believe it is possible, but since it’s not an issue for me, I’ve not looked into it.)

4) Reminders ?

Reminders. That’s pretty open ended. I’m going to assume that this doesn’t mean things like next actions (for which I use a text system), but actual reminders, say with a date/time attached.

Well, that’s an interesting question. Let’s say I’ve got something I want to do every couple of weeks, but not necessarily on a specific day. (Of course, if it was a specific day, I would put the reminder on my calendar, i.e., hard landscape.) But I’m talking about things like housework, that needs to get done, but doesn’t need to be scheduled into a specific date. Until recently, I’ve been using recurring next actions in my text system. When the start date rolled around, the NA would become visible in my system, and stay visible, and annoying, until I did it.

However, I’ve recently started playing with a different method. I was finding that my NA lists were getting cluttered with houseworky things, that caused me to lose focus from the work I really needed to get done. So, I played around with Remind a bit more, and found a way to have recurring reminders that are only visible when they come due. They don’t show up in my monthly calendar view. But as soon as a reminder becomes viable, or doable, it starts showing up in my Today view, with a note of how many days until my self-imposed deadline. (That lets me see how slack I’ve been with my housework.)

There’s another kind of reminder though - an alarm. Let’s say I need to make sure that I leave the house by a certain time, but I know I’m going to be working up until then. I don’t want to be late because I forgot what time it was, but I don’t want to avoid working so I can just watch the clock. For these cases, I just use an alarm in my Yahoo clock widget. I could also keep Outlook running and make an appointment with an alarm. Or do the same thing with my Palm. The key here being that there’s some piece of software that will ding at a certain time, telling me to get my ass in gear.

So, that’s it. The other tools in my toolbox. Thanks for the question Fox, it was quite interesting to write all this out :)

Well, this is it! The very very last post in a very very long, drawn-out series on my Super-Duper Productivity Desktop Background. It’s been quite a while in coming, but we’ve finally reached the end.

All I want to do here is summarize what the series has covered. First, the point of this series was to explain, with plenty of small words and big pictures, what my desktop background looks like. I’ve basically tweaked it to get the most of out it in terms of productivity. What does this mean? Well, my desktop holds a couple of views of my calendar (monthly and daily), as well as quick calendars showing the next couple of months. I keep a list of my GTD contexts on the desktop, with counts as to how many next actions I have remaining. I keep a little list of important things on my radar, plus a list of things that I want to accomplish today (not pure GTD, but useful for me). I even have a little scratch file, a stack for coding reminders, a TV guide, and even an output of the progress I’ve made on my thesis so far. This is what my desktop looks like:

With the exception of the task bar and two Yahoo widgets (weather, and the big neon green clock) everything you see on my desktop background has been placed there by a nifty piece of Windows software called Samurize, which outputs information right to my desktop. That information is a combination of pure text files, and the output of commands that are available through Cygwin. The calendar output is courtesy of an application called Remind.

Here are the posts (major and minor) in this series:

• Introducing Samurize: As the title states, it introduces you to the Samurize program, and what you can do with it for your desktop background.
• My Super-Duper Personalized Productivity Desktop Background: Here I talk about the various easy parts of my background, i.e., text files. I show you how to configure Samurize to show these lovely things.
• Check Out My Stack! (Or, My Super-Duper Personalized Productivity Background, Part Deux): This post has a high geek quotient. I wax poetic about the beauty of a stack for keeping track of where you are (as opposed to a queue) and regale you with various batch files and SlickRun magic word goodness.
• Introducing Remind - A Text-based Calendar: A meaty post, dedicated to introducing you to perhaps the best UNIX application I’ve ever met. Remind is a calendar program that reads text files and output simple, yet highly functional, calendars. Keep this post as a pointer to all other places on the web that explain Remind.
• My Remind Calendar: After introducing you to Remind in general, I show you what my calendar looks like. Not the nitty-gritty detail that you can get from other sites, but how to output a four-week and one-day calendar, the latter one divided by type of reminder.
• Super-Duper blah blah blah, Part 3 - The Calendars: Back to the Samurize side of things, I show you how to get your beautiful text calendars onto your desktop.
• Super-Duper blah blah blah, Part 4 - Tiny Calendars: More calendar goodness; this time not from Remind, but straight from Cygwin - outputting tiny calendars (this month, next month, etc.) onto your desktop.
• Second Last Post on Super-Duper Personalized Productivity Background - TV guide: Finally, a bit of frivolity - making use of this heavy productivity software to keep track of Survivor and The Apprentice.

As a final note, when I first started out, I was only keeping information on one monitor - the one right in front of me. However, that one’s normally covered by open applications. So, since I now have a three-monitor system going on, I decided to stretch out my desktop background a bit to the left and right. I now duplicate some information so that I can see my calendar, without having to minimize what I’m working on right now. I duplicated instead of moving because I still want to have everything visible if I’m just on the laptop, without external monitor support. All this to say that it is possible to stretch Samurize to fit an extended (very extended) desktop.

I hope you enjoyed this series - I didn’t think it would take such a long time to work through all of the stuff. Perhaps I’ll just focus on some short posts for a while now ;)

Second last post on my Super-Duper Personalized Productivity Background series (see end of this post for a list of other posts in this series). Again, I’m talking about getting a wickedly cool productivity desktop background for your computer, using such lovely things as: Cygwin, Remind, Samurize.

But today, we’re not focussing so much on productivity, as on keeping your TV schedule straight. Of course, you could always modify this to keep some other schedule straight - work outs, kids’ soccer games, etc. The point being is that you have some things that you want to keep track of, but not necessarily on your main calendar.

Let’s say that I watch TV and that I have a few favourite shows, but I never remember what’s on when. So, I create a little text file with information about the regular dates and times for these shows. It looks like this:

rem wed at 21:00 msg Criminal Minds %b
rem sun at 21:00 msg The Apprentice %b
rem tue at 20:00 msg NCIS %b
rem thur at 20:00 msg Survivor: Fiji %b

The %b tells Remind that in addition to seeing the date/time of the reminder, I’d like to know in how many days time it will happen.

What I’d like to be able to see, on my desktop, is a list telling me when my shows are on next. I just want to know that Survivor is going to be on in less than a week, but before then, I can watch the Apprentice. This will make more sense with an example. What I want to see is output that looks like this:

See how it tells me the date and time of the next episode of each show? And even easier for me, it says in how many days time. If the Apprentice was on today, it would say “today”, etc. And, it’s even sorted in order the next episode.

How is this magic accomplished? More console program meter goodness in Samurize. In this case, the command line is simply

f:\todo\bin\tv.bat

But what is tv.bat? Well, I couldn’t get Samurize to do exactly what I wanted just from the command line (I couldn’t figure out how to pipe the output from a remding command to the sort command), so I just made a simple batch file that calls on remind to output the information, and then pipes it to sort, so that I see it in the order I want. The guts of the tv.bat file are:

f:\todo\remind-03.00.24\src\remind.exe -n f:\todo\tv.txt | sort

The -n argument to remind “causes Remind to print only the next occurrence of each reminder in a simple calendar format” (source: Remind man pages). The | is the pipe command (beautiful, takes the output from one command and feeds it as input to the next command), and the sort just, well, sorts it. Because each line starts with the date, it’s easy to sort it by next viewable episode.

And that’s it. Quick and dirty little list to show you the next occurrence of your special reminders.

Other Posts in this Series

• Introducing Samurize
• My Super-Duper Personalized Productivity Desktop Background
• Check Out My Stack! (Or, My Super-Duper Personalized Productivity Background, Part Deux)
• Introducing Remind - A Text-based Calendar
• My Remind Calendar
• Super-Duper blah blah blah, Part 3 - The Calendars
• Super-Duper blah blah blah, Part 4 - Tiny Calendars