How to make Bulletproof Coffee - Recipe

How to make Bulletproof Coffee - Recipe
This coffee doesn't just taste awesome; it will boost your brain like no other!

Last week, I started to experiment with "Bulletproof Coffee". It’s sort of a commercial product but you can actually make your own at home. This is what I did.

It’s a bit too early to draw conclusions but my first impression is that I’ve been running at 120% mental capacity since I started. And I’ve surely cranked out a lot of extra work that I had been procrastinating on for a while (including work on this blog).

It may also just be a placebo effect or just a temporary energy boost of myself subconsciously wanting to check off as many todos as possible before the summer holidays… or maybe it’s just switching from green tea to coffee… but I sure feel pretty darn good these days ;) I’ll post more when I have had the opportunity to run a couple of weeks on and off that stuff.

In the meantime, if you want to try it out yourself, here’s how I’m doing it at home…

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The power of the power button! (or eject key)

The power of the power button! (or eject key)
That on/off button at the top right of the keyboard can do more than on/off...

You might wonder what to do with that Eject key on your Mac keyboard, now that drives with ejectable media are gone... or you may not use your power key to its full potential...

Personally, I've been using Ctrl + Eject or Ctrl + Power (depending on what key you have at the top right of your keyboard) for quite some time now. It brings up a popup dialog with the following options:

  • Restart
  • Sleep
  • (Cancel)
  • Shut Down

But I always found a missing item here:

  • Lock Screen (or Login Screen would also do)

I accidentally stumbled on the right shortcut for that today: Ctrl + Shift + Eject or Ctrl + Shift + Power will put your display to sleep immediately, and if you have your security preferences set up to lock your screen when display goes to sleep, you're all set. Neat! This is the fastest way I know to lock a Mac when I don't want to put it to sleep.

By the way, if you want to put it to sleep, without confirmation, you can use Cmd + Option + Eject or Cmd + Option + Power .

Be careful though, there are also "deadly" restart and shutdown without confirmation shortcuts involving Cmd + Ctrl + ... A good way to lose some work... Thus I'd recommend to stay away from the Cmd key all together when trying out these shortcuts ;)

How to insert Tabs in a textarea (OS X)

How to insert Tabs in a textarea (OS X)

Whenever you're on a web page with Safari, Chrome or Firefox and want to type a code snippet (or maybe just align what you type) you might be tempted to use the tab key...

But no, luck it moves the browser focus instead of inserting a tab into your text.

In order to actually insert a tab you need to press the following key combination: ctrl + alt + tab.

Note: depending on your keyboard, the alt key is sometimes called the option key.

Screw it, let's reskin it!

Screw it, let's reskin it!

I think it was about time I re-skinned this site! 

Since my last post pledging to get rid of the ugliness, I feel I’ve made some significant progress on b2evolution.net (especially the home page) but this personal site you’re looking at right now was really starting to hurt my own eyes! (I can’t believe I actually used to be happy with my old design :p)

So today I just decided to “screw it and re-skin it“.

I’ve been procrastinating on this for maybe two years just because I didn’t have time (or the energy) to actually re-design it – meaning: polishing a new design for it. Making it responsive, etc.

So I finally decided to take a shortcut: use another skin I like and make it fit as fast as possible. And sometimes I actually forget how fast this can be done with b2evolution. Once I had uploaded the new skin, it took me about 30 minutes to set up all the menu/navigation widgets so the site navigation makes sense. And voilà.

Of course, there’s a million details in this skin that need fixing but I think the improvement is massive already! 30 minutes of work vs. 2 years of procrastination. What a shame! :/

Now, there’s a couple interesting thoughts down the road:

  • I just made the 20% of the effort that yields 80% of the benefits;
  • I still have 80% of the work to do to get the details right;
  • Some day this new deisgn will probably feel ugly again… :(
  • How do I prevent letting it slide into ugliness again next time? hum… it feels like I have so many gardens that need constant care… :p

Anyways, Dear Reader, I hope you’ll enjoy this site in its new form! :)

Did I abandon my sites?

Did I abandon my sites?

2014. Time to wake up, eh?

First off, why have I been blogging so little in the last couple of years?

I guess it's a combination of:

  • Too much work
  • Having a real life (which I might not have had a few years back...)
  • Google did a great job at scaring me off posting "non-useful" content (Shall we call it "Panda angst" ?)

All of these are lame excuses.

  • Blogging is part of my work
  • Don't even get me started on balancing work and real life - there has to be a solution!
  • Sharing ideas, no matter how mundane they might seem at first, has been the beginning of many great projects in my own experience. Plus: it definitely helps to structure a lot of thoughts that would otherwise just swirl around in my head, without ever leading to anything tangible. Moving forward, even small steps at a time is far more important than a particular Google algorythm might think of it... especially on my personal blog (I'm still debating this regarding some other sites :p)

2014. Time to get rid of the Ugly!

The most vexing part in this wake up call is that so many of my (many) websites are just plain ugly... compared to the current web-design state of the art.

I don't recall exactly what led me to this realization but part of it was comparing b2evolution.net to its competitors. Ironically, it's not that the competitors (Free CMS tools) look good. It's actually that those competitors look bad compared to commercial solutions.

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