I came across a rather interesting extension for Chrome called Turn Off The Lights. The premise is really straight forward, with just one click on a little lamp icon, the page you’re on will go dark, the point being about focusing on something – for example, when watching a video, the rest of the page will go dark so you can focus on it, like so:

There are a number of other features:

1. Supports YouTube, HTML5 videos and more.
2. Supports sites such as Picasa.
3. There are some easter eggs you can look for.
4. Shortcut keys.
5. Flash detection.

Grab it here: click here (make sure you’re using Chrome).

Woweeee, so how hot was last week? I’m really struggling in the heat, even when I’m sitting on the couch, let alone business meetings in offices that don’t have aircon – it’s somewhat cruel of the powers above!

So the good news is that the weather’s going to get a little cooler, but the bad news is by not much..

Don’t get me wrong, summer in Cape Town is awesome, it’s just the continual heat that is exhausting.

I started looking for a watch that I would fall in love with about 3 or so years ago and the only one I came across was a CK watch, which was well out of my price range, so instead I resorted to a Guess watch as a temporary measure. It was quite trendy and professional, but it never sat on my wrist as I would have liked it to have and after 2 years the thing finally died and it was an opportunity to find something new.

I wasn’t expecting to have to by a watch, so I opened up my budget and looked at my personal/gadget expense columns and because the columns were much lower than usual for November, December and January, I decided to spoil myself despite. I looked at my projections, decided what I was able to afford and started looking. Amazingly, I stumbled across a watch on an overseas website, one which literally fulfilled this image I’ve had in my head for all these years. The problem was now whether I’d take the chance of ordering it online and praying that it would make it to South Africa, or would I go into Hugo Boss and see if they could source it. Century City wasn’t too helpful, so I went through to the Waterfront and decided to go to the ladies store, as the women in these stores are often far less arrogant and more helpful, which was the case. The lady there explained how I could go about it, but she said I should cruise past the gents store and it was apparently quite a good one, so I did just that.

She was right. The watch that I wanted was sitting right there in the front counter, I couldn’t believe it! The sales guy, who was incredibly nice told me (after I’d purchased it) that they were very popular and that I was lucky to get one as he’d sold 3 last week alone. I was thrilled with my purchase and really think it’s going to fit into my style perfectly :)

Here’s what it looks like:

Quite a nice one hey?

I’ve picked up that a lot of people don’t actually understand what SOPA is, and the concept isn’t as complicated as it has been conveyed on a lot of websites. I’ve come across a really excellent video that breaks it down nicely and definitely gets the point across.

If you’re still uncertain, take a watch:

This heat wave has been absolutely killing me! I’ve always been a winter person, but over the past couple of years I’ve started to enjoy summer more, well, that was until this week. I’m not too good with really hot weather, my brain slows down, I get irritable and I’m just not nearly as productive as I usually am, that’s why I’m sitting here past 23h00 writing blog posts because I can sit outside and actually concentrate!

I was hoping that we’d experience a thunder storm with evening in Cape Town, but alas, it seems like that’s not going to be the case and it also seems like the weather’s not going to change any time soon either, it’s going to be hot this weekend:

Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t rather have an entire weekend of rain, but I wouldn’t mind a thunder storm or a slight drizzle, for my own sanity, but also for my bonsai’s! I find that the bonsai’s grow so much better with rain water rather than tap water.

So this weekend’s all about getting up early and doing things, being close to a pool in the afternoons and being sure to have sunscreen around at all times!

Facebook Timeline has been around for a while now and I’ve noticed that most people have activated it and in general are enjoying it. Well, Facebook obviously wants to try and get more people using it and those who are using it, using it more and they’re trying to achieve this through adding some new applications into the mix:

Here are some of the applications they’ve added:

• Foodspotting
• Foodily
• Ticketmaster
• Pinterest
• Rotten Tomatoes
• Pose
• Kobo
• Gogobot
• TripAdvisor

The whole idea behind these applications is to make your Timeline more interesting. To get started with some brand new Timeline applications or to learn a little more about what’s available, click here.

Here are some examples:

If you’ve ever built a website before you’ll more than likely know something about CSS, well at least I hope you do otherwise you might have been using tables ;) Naturally, when you make a change to the CSS files on your website, you need to refresh the browser to see the changes, right? Well, I’ve stumbled across something pretty cool, read on..

CSS Refresh is a really small and unobtrusive JavaScript file that monitors your CSS files, when you make a change, the JavaScript file automatically implements the changes and you need not refresh your browser – think of how much time that could save you! If I had a dollar for every time I’d pressed F5, I’d be writing this from my villa in France!

Getting started is really easy, you just need to follow 3 really easy steps which you find here: http://cssrefresh.frebsite.nl/#how

It’s a really useful little tool, give it a go!

I would kill to give this a go!

I received a very interesting email from a client. He asked me whether if he has a duty to maintain his wife post-divorce to the same standard of living that she had become accustomed to during the course of the marriage, whether his ex-wife still had a duty, assuming he was still single, to cook, clean, iron and wash clothes for him as she had done during the course of the marriage.

The unfortunate reality of the matter is that there is never a duty on any person when married, single or divorced to cook, clean, iron and wash clothes for another person. You cannot force somebody to do that.

In many households there is a mutual understanding between the parties that the one party will be the bread-winner and earn the money while the other party will attend to the household duties. Post-divorce in a divorce order you could never have a clause stating that one person must carry on with these domestic duties.

Traditionally the lady in the marriage was seen to be the party who would stay home, with the children, and cook and clean. Times are now changing. In fact in my practise I see more and more ladies being the breadwinners as opposed to the men.

In a few of my cases I have in fact encountered “stay-at-home-dads” as opposed to “stay-at-home-moms”. In these situations, while the woman goes out to work, the man stays at home looking after the children, and attending to the cooking and cleaning. This is still however in the minority of cases.

In today’s poor economic climate, it is becoming important and essential for both parties to go out and work these days. Couples can simply no longer afford for one spouse to stay at home anymore while the other works.

Children are going to crèche from an early age these days, sometimes when they are only four to six months old. A couple can no longer financially afford for the mother to stay at home looking after baby and attending to the household duties.

These days the duty to clean, cook, wash clothes and iron very often falls on the domestic worker. Domestic workers are playing a bigger role than they did in the past as when both spouses work, neither has time to attend to the household duties anymore.

To answer the query I received, the duty to pay maintenance post-divorce is not linked in any way to any duty to cook, clean, iron and wash clothes. The man would therefore unfortunately for him still have to pay maintenance to his ex-wife but she would not be obliged in any way to do anything for him.

Is this fair? In my opinion yes. Nobody is anybody else’s personal servant. A divorce should result in a clean break between the parties. If post-divorce the ex-wife would continue to attend to the household duties, there would be no clean break.

The best solution in that situation may be for the newly divorced man to engage the services of a domestic worker if he is not able to attend to the household duties himself. It was never really and still is not unfortunately for him the duty of his ex-wife to cook, clean, iron and wash clothes for him.

Having a TWEET button on your blog posts is an excellent way to get people to share your posts with their followers and this has proven to be one of the best methods available for attracting new visitors. I’ve setup an Advanced Segment in Analytics for many websites that I’ve worked on to determine which social streams (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+) bring in the most traffic and so forth, and Twitter definitely leads on the properties I manage.

For those of you who aren’t familiar, a TWEET button is a button that once clicked, allows you to send a blog post out to your followers, so if you’ve found a blog post you like and you want to tweet it to your followers, the TWEET button will do all the work for you. This is what I’m talking about:

Now, there’s one step further that you can take – At the moment the person sends a tweet out as and when the TWEET button is clicked, but what if you could ensure that the tweet they send out is sent out a the best possible time on that person’s account? What I mean is, every Twitter account has certain times throughout the day that are best for sending out tweets that get seen by the most eyeballs. Well, I have a cool trick for this!

Lately I’ve been raving about Buffer; Buffer makes your life easier with a smarter way to schedule tweets. Work out all your tweets at one point in time during the day. Then fill up your Buffer with your tweets and Buffer schedules them for you. Simply keep that Buffer topped up and you will then be tweeting consistently all day round, all week long.

Buffer have released a Buffer button (yes, what an incredible idea, wish I thought of it), much like the Twitter button above, you click the Buffer button, the blog post is added to your buffer and scheduled for delivery at an ideal time. For the user it stands them more chance of sending out the great article they’ve found at a time which might get them more ReTweets, and to the website owner, it means their blog post link will be sent out at a time that it will get more clicks – it really is a win win scenario and as a website owner you’re doing very little and the other person is doing all the work for you.

I think it’s brilliant and we should all be placing a Buffer button on our website!