Now only hours away (I post the first media here today and go public Monday) of a major new release of Rainbow Feather with widget support and several languages I decided to change the license accommodating my work to the Creative Commons License BY-NC-SA, which means you are of course allowed to remix, modify, exchange, distribute, host my themes and material. However two parts of the license remain intact: you need to attribute my work, which I believe is fair since I spent numerous (literally) of hours working on my themes. It is good karma and a nice thing to not remove my attribution; then also, except with written permission, you are not allowed to use my work commercially, which means resell my themes, add your link to add ‘because you are some theme hosting site’ or similar. Again, for specifics, please drop me a line. And now get active, get busy, get remixing!

1. Make Firefox remember open tabs after reboot/shutdown the QUICK way
2. Use Torpark to surf ‘really’ anonymous
3. Chill-out with soothing music
4. Work in blocks of 30 minutes
5. Sketch, map and scribble

Click those links above to get directly to the tip you are interested in.

1. Save open Firefox tabs the easy way (brain hack)

Sometimes it is just too much hassle saving (and later on deleting*) all the Tabs (sites) you have currently open
if you are either in a hurry (got to go due to phone call) or are just shit-house tired. So why not leave on the PC and use it when you are back? While nothing speaks against doing it for a short break (an hour or so), it might turn you nuts if you sleep in the same room. After all you are tired and don’t want any humming noise… so in rage you just rip out the power cable to silence your pc.
Of course this is not the best treatment for your hard drive, but the effect you will experience the next morning after booting your PC and clicking Firefox will be the same as I will describe you can achive without wasting your PC:

Of course you will want to restore your tabs, because this way you get them all back, don’t have to waste time deleting them from bookmarks and can continue your work where you left the evening before.
Now here is where the ‘what I call’

Brain hack

comes into play:

just be nice to your PC and hard drive, shut it down,
but make Firefox think your "system crashed"
by "killing the process firefox.exe".

Press CTRL + ALT + DEL at the same time,
you will then get an Windows Screen with various options,
press Task Manager (or T)
then press F till you arrive at "firefox.exe",
press "End Process". Voila!

Firefox is simply superior to Internet Explorer when it comes to tabs.
The new Internet Explorer 7.0 does also feature tabs, but in order to install it you have to run through loads of hassle such as Windows validation (got genuine?), downloading through ‘web-downloader’ etc.

So do me a favor and get Firefox, don’t surf with Internet Explorer, it’s evil and smells, also I get 1$ from Google for each installed Firefox from the below link (redirects to Google owned Firefox site).

*because then later on you will have to delete the ones you don’t need and this again will cost some time again =7

2. Use Torpark to surf ‘really’ anonymous

Torpark is a free program for windows which allows you to surf the internet anonymously. It requires no installation, leaves no track, is small, portable and does even fit on an USB-Stick.
It is partly based on Firefox and somewhat idiot safe to use. Nothing (unless you want) required to configure, just out of the box ready to surf with a different IP-address. It blocks cookies, javascript and other stuff that could eventually identify your PC and thus you. Torpark got build in routines that connect your browser to other PCs, proxies or whatever these ‘circuits’ are.
Some additional information from the Torpark website itself:

To run Torpark, just double click on the Torpark program. First you will see a notice about how Torpark should be used. It is important for your security that you understand the scope and limitations. Then you see a splash screen which shows you the version information and credits. It will display for a few seconds then disappear. Then Torpark will display a throbber in the form of a progress bar as Torpark begins to establish some tor circuits.

It may take a little longer if you are running Torpark from a USB flash drive or using a slow internet connection because Torpark has to download directory information from the Tor network. After it has established at least one circuit, it will start the browser.

Source: http://www.torrify.com

3. Chill-out with soothing music

While working silence can be nice, but I found out that some chill-out soothing music really helps concentrating.
Opinions are controversial concerning this issue, but why not listen to the short excerpt below. It’s 1 minute long and encoded at 160kbps (certainly good quality).

[audio:http://mp3.trancin.com/chill-out.mp3]

4. Work in blocks of 30 minutes

After the results this semester I had quite some free time. Too much free time can eat you up,
so basically I tried working in 30 minutes blocks, concretely this means 30 minutes of work, 30 minutes of either reading on the web, chilling with music, watching The Simpsons, spinning a record or whatever just came handy.
It works similar to the rewarding method mentions on other sites. By rewarding yourself with something of your own choice you subliminally train yourself to work consequently and straight to the point. Of course again this is subject to contrary discussion.

5. Sketch, map and scribble

Often the easiest things are made too complicated: googling for mind mapping tools, downloading them, eventually applying a crack here and there (so I was told), then reading the manual and still after 30 minutes you don’t have a solution, a sketch to your problem.

So why not just draw a map yourself and scribble?!

It doesn’t take an artist to do a mind map or a sketch, just do it, you will be surprised by the effectiveness of this method.
Keep it simple, simplify your daily life.

I hope you enjoyed reading these tips and comment plenty