A series of discussions about what people are using to maximize their productivity.

We spend a lot of time researching, trying, and reading about methods, processes, tools, and techniques to make us more productive and efficient. The problem is that many of these tools and processes work well in theory, but don’t integrate well into our real-world workflow.

I began to wonder what other people use in their own systems. Not what they liked, thought was cool, or blogged about, but actually used. Day-in, day-out, what was their real trial by fire tools and processes.

So this podcast is going to be a regular series here at lifehack. I’m going to talk with others about their own tools and systems that have held up to the trial by fire test...

http://www.lifehack....ty-introduction.html

This post is your reminder that you may be sitting on a gold mine of non-interest bearing donationcredit just waiting for you to give out.

When you donate to this site, your donation is "credited" back to your account, for you to give out as you see fit.

We hope you will give some of it to the general site account, which helps pay our substantial server fees and expenses, and then give some of your credits to people on the forum whose work you want to support.

• If you are a fan of one or more of our software programs, we hope you will donate to the author of those programs.   If you like the Coding Snacks section of our forum, we hope you will donate to the coders who participate there.  If someone makes a post that helps you, or writes a review you like, send them a little as a way of saying thank you.
• Sometimes someone on our forum might even ask for a little help to afford something to help them keep creating stuff.  In a world where business vultures are securing multi-million dollar investments from venture capitalists, we hope you can spare a few nickels to help a teenager buy a $25 copy of a programming tool, as wreckedcarzz recently asked for help to do here.  I hope you'll look on such requests favorably.  Again, you don't have to donate a lot -- I hope we all can get into the habit of just sending a tiny bit here and there and work as a team to support deserving projects.

You can donate as little as 1 cent, and often you'll find that it's not the amount that matters to the recipient, but simply the gesture.

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Whenever you see a gold coin next to a user on our forum, just click on it to give them some credits.  You can read more about DonationCredits here -- DonationCoder.com is one of only a handfull of micro-donation supported sites in the world.

Thought-provoking and self-critical article on Open Source developments..

This editorial is an experiment. It was originally written by Radu-Cristian Fotescu for his blog, but he offered us the chance to publish it here on The Jem Report as well. It is extremely long, and divided up into separate pages, which is something I don't usually do with articles. So the format in which this is published is the first experiment. The second experiment is a matter of this article's content. I don't agree with everything Radu-Cristian says in his article, but I very much agree with what he is doing, which is to take a brutally honest look at the failures of the open source community and demand that we begin to recognize them instead of continuing to ignore the parts that aren't working correctly. This is the first step in fixing some of the problems that frustrate us all as GNU/Linux and *BSD users. Maybe it's time for a great re-examination of our processes and attitudes, and think about what needs to be done to create great software instead of continuing to perpetuate old mistakes on the basis that tradition, politics, rhetoric, and dogma are more important than critical thinking.

http://www.thejemrep...bo/content/view/309/

If you are an indie game dev company or have any interest at all in indie game development, check out the Indievelopment episodes from GameSpot which follow the progress of four game developers as they quit their jobs and attempt to launch their indie game development studio.

Watch the video episodes here:
http://www.gamespot....velopment/index.html

PhotoWipe is quite an interesting image tool. It can be used to "removes unwanted objects" from your photos..

PhotoWipe
• PhotoWipe is a revolutionary image processing tool that magically removes unwanted objects from your photos. Just paint over them in black, and click go! Uncovers hidden details in your photos. Sit back and watch as cage bars disappear from the zoo, and your old girlfriend or boyfriend fades away. It removes wrinkles, or it can remove entire facial features.
• PhotoWipe uses a modified version of the greycstoration image processing library do its work.
• Freeware, donations accepted.

Haven't tried this yet but it looks promising if you have need of some of these features:

1- TaskBar Arranger
TaskBar Sorter allows you to re-arrange the programs appear in the taskbar the order you like, without being bound with the default windows arrangement.

2- Show / Hide Windows
XNeat adds extra Show/Hide windows menu item to the windows taskbar context menu saving you some desktop space while providing access to them. Very Handy with programs like OutLook and others.

3- Show / Hide Tray Icons
Show / Hide Tray icons menu item added by XNeat allows you to show and hide icons from your taskbar's system tray area.

4- Stay On Top Windows
Stay On Top added by XNeat allows you to keep any windows on top of other windows, so that it can’t be hidden by other windows... Very handy if you want to have fast access to a certain program like (windows calculator,excel, notepad ...etc)

5- Taskbar Apperance
Taskbar Apperance menu item added by XNeat gives you the ability to show any item in your taskbar ( Start menu button, Taskbar buttons, System tray, clock ).

5- Middle Button Close
Actually the mouse middle button is totally forget by microsoft team, now you can use it to close any window found in your desktop.

http://www.xneat.com/windows_manager/