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I guess we can all confidently say that we hate early mornings. Hate, hate, hate them. Unfortunately, unless you’re self-employed or one of the (un)lucky ones to have a night job, you cannot avoid them.

Eventhough I keep on hating losing my sleep in the mornings, I’ve found that these 5 things get me started every morning. Yes, even Mondays.

1. Set your alarm clock to go off a quarter of an hour earlier than usual. That’s not new, but it cannot be stressed out enough. I know it helped me - alot.
2. When that damn thing rings, open your eyes. Do it. Then spend some time to mourn over your lost sleep, but only for 2 minutes maximum. Be as grumpy and negative as you want, but keep it short to 2 minutes. Then get up.
3. Find your morning ritual and stick to it religiously. Most people already do that, but there is a black sheep every now and then.
4. While doing something boring (for example, wait for the coffee machine to finish) take the time and think about something creative, but fun. For example, your next blog post. Or your next session in WoW. Or the next best thing, whatever. Anything to get your creativity flow before work obliges you to be creative.
5. Eat something light but nutritious. I don’t eat anything when I wake up, I admit. But I almost always get a mini-breakfast at about 10. Eating can help a lot with mornings, it’s a huge energy boost, especially when you’re recovering from a bad wake up.

Do you have to get up early? What’s your morning rituals and hacks?

productivity, wakeup, morning

Call me insane, but I’ve never used anything widget-y to do my everyday currency conversions. It’s a no-brainer: launch browser and hit xe.com.

Eventhough with the amount of conversions I do every day I’ve almost learned the conversion rate from US dollars to Euros by heart, I always need a converter to help me decide if a book from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk is a more profitable purchase.

Parenthesis closed. As I saw yesterday, xe.com decided to revamp a little its oh-so-1999 design. Beware, it still keeps some of its old school features, but hey, light blue and zebra rows (well, columns) are a change.

So, xe.com redesigns, yes or no?

xe.com, currency, conversion, conversion rate, redesign

• You must always hit “pause” and buffer YouTube videos before you can play them decently.
• Your top BitTorrent download speeds are in the 30 or 40kbps, even when you’re supposed to have a 768k line.
• Network outages become an annoying everyday trend.
• You experience lag in World of Warcraft even when you’re in the middle of the most deserted area.
• You cannot do two things at a time. Download & surf simultaneously? What are you, mad?

There’s an alarmingly fast pace of Internet downgrade where I live. Sure, it may be that many people in the neighbourhood have also aDSL lines, but why should I care? I pay for my 768k line, month by month, and I want a fluid Internet experience.

Of course, Internet providers are not always to blame. That monster of telecommunications, our beloved OTE, sure knows how to handle so-called broadband.

I’m all for supporting my country. But Greece is pathetic as far as Internet goes, I’ll never cease to say that.

greece, hellas, internet, ote, sucks

That’s the one movie I’m most looking forward this year.

Having adored the comic book by Frank Miller (it is my favourite comic, anyway), I’ve fallen in love with the trailers that so far surfaced and I can’t stop fandom from creeping in.

NIN messing with the soundtrack didn’t help either.

Beware, as far as 300 is concerned, I’m not objective - at all.

P.S. *girlish sigh* Oh, King Leonidas…

300, frank miller, sparta, gerald butler, king leonidas

…Well I’d be damned!

I’ve already propagandised this app to anyone close that showed even the remotest interest in the rantings of an app-loving Sugar (ask anyone: I can be pretty weird when I’ve discovered an interesting new app). 9 times out of 10, this app is a MacOS one, so everyone just keeps on ignoring me. This time, Jono, Aza, Atul and Andrew helped me get my revenge.

These guys started a series of apps that intends to make your Windows life easier. They offer Enso Launcher and Enso Words, two apps based on the same framework that can help you never reach for your mouse again. I can only review Enso Launcher, the trial version of which I’ve already installed both at home and work Windows machines and plan to buy when this trial ends.

Enso Launcher is a Windows application similar to Quicksilver for Mac. It’s intuitive and easy to use and has a less steep learning curve than Quicksilver (I know I’ve not even scratched the surface of this app). It involves typing commands that the computer can understand while holding down the Caps Lock key (or any other command key, it’s configurable). It may seem hard at first but believe me, after some times it’s completely intuitive and straightforward and you’ll wonder how you lived without it.

Looking for an app but tired to look for it in all the cascading menus of the dreaded Start menu button? Try it. Just hold down Caps Lock and write “open firefox”. Boom, your favourite browser is there. You don’t even have to remember the exact name: just type some characters that you think are there and Enso will present you with a list of the apps that fit. Use the arrow keys to select the app that you want, leave the Caps Lock and the application of your choice launches.

Apart from its strong launching abilities, Encho Launcher can also help you quickly calculate a sum, uppercase a string of letters, or google some search terms. What’s more is that since it’s based in Python, it’s extendable, and with some help from the Enso guys we’re bound to see some cool stuff floating around in the next months.

What’s great is that these apps have been created by 4 guys with a passion for simplicity and usability. They’ve put together a nice website and an extremely well done demo video (I strongly recommend it, check it just to know what this is all about, it’s very fun to see and the guys are great. Fav moment: “Soon!” by Jono). With the success of the app, they even decreased the price from $39.95 to $19.95, offering even a money refund to all buyers. Now that’s what I call play-it-nice marketing.

Oh come on, what’s not to love about these guys?

All in all, Enso offers an attractive interface, a simple mechanism and a relatively low number of bugs that will be soon squashed. If you’re a Quicksilver fan and you don’t really like Launchy like me, you’ll surely find it interesting.

enso, humanized, enso launcher, enso words