Who wants to be a designer? Part 1.

Posted February 18th, 2012 by Marta Spendowska with No Comments

You're so not perfect by Marta Spendowska
This is Part One of “Should you hire a designer or do it yourself?” series.
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Every month I meet with my dear photographer friend Jamie from Modern Tog and we talk business. She shoots weddings and blogs for amateur photographers giving them free and paid advice. She says that today everyone is or wants to be a photographer. I say today everyone is or wants to be a designer. There is actually nothing to complain about. Internet opened up the door for all of us, we can do whatever’s our heart desire. It’s awesome. You, the client, can choose whomever you want to work with. If you’re a Midwestern and you’ve just decided to marry ...

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Spirited Away — hide inactive apps.

Posted February 16th, 2012 by Marta Spendowska with No Comments

First of all — I love Spirited Away movie! Don’t you? I guess it’s time to watch it again. But that’s not what I want to talk about today. Just recently I found this app that would do things for me for free. Free is awesome so I’ve decided to try it. It’s called Spirited Away and, as the developer says, it’s purpose is to
check each running application’s activity, and if an application isn’t active for a certain fixed time, Spirited Away hides the application automatically. It is, in effect, Spirited Away
Watch the video below to see it in action and make sure to try it yourself. And btw, if you’re not convinced yet, but you still don’t know how to hide inactive ...

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Clean up your email—Inbox Zero by Cloud Coach + Giveaway.

Posted February 13th, 2012 by Marta Spendowska with No Comments

My email box looks like a modern, stylish swedish designed storage. Clean and purposeful — it’s a joy to open it up every day. It has never been like that before. Before I met Ethan Waldman from Claud Coach.
Who’s Ethan. Ethan is technology coach, mac fanatic, and multi instrumentalist. We both like hot yoga (sometimes called Power), cycling and WordPress. Ethan’s work spans between email marketing and cycling. I consider him, first and foremost, Inbox Zero guy. He is responsible for my flourishing relationship with gmail.
Background story : my love-hate relationship with Gmail. I’ve had gmail account for quite few years. I’ve never really learnt to love it. When I started Rawfoodtip, I knew I’d rather communicate with people professionally, using  my own rawfoodtip domain for that. ...

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Internet goes on strike. Stop SOPA and PIPA.

Posted January 18th, 2012 by Marta Spendowska with 1 Comment

Internet giants like Wikipedia, Reddit and BoingBoing, as well as many other sites, go on strike against SOPA. The sites will be blacked out, inaccessible, between the hours of 8AM and 8PM EST. If you’re unfamiliar with these two pieces of pending legislation, please take a minute to read a piece on Problogger.
This is where you can find instructions about the way for contacting your senators.

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.
I have to say, what’s happening reminds me of the time in Poland when you were not able to trust your neighbors. Is this really the America I came to visit and stayed seeing the freedoms and abundance? It’s terrifying, where it’s all ...

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I split my website. Should you do the same?

Posted November 5th, 2011 by Marta Spendowska with 1 Comment

After good few weeks and quite a handful of emails to my beloved clients, I’ve decided to split my main website  into two seperate ones : www.martaspendowska.com and www.polishlab.com.
Before I tell you, why you could or should do the same, let me explain the reasoning behind my decission.
PolishLab was established few years back with the thought in mind it’s going to be my business hub. I coded it with Expression Engine instead of WordPress just because I wanted to learn its semantics. The other website, martaspendowska.com, has been redesigned multiple times and I never knew, how to approach it. I wanted to work under my name and establish some cohesive brand, which I did, but after certain time a very obvious problem occurred. ...

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HOW TO : Sync iCal calendars.

Posted August 24th, 2011 by Marta Spendowska with 8 Comments

Syncing iCal calendars between computers with Dropbox is so easy I can hardly keep myself from jumping right into the tutorial. Let me, though, introduce you to why I’ve decided to look for solution in the first place.
Before we’ll get happy and comfortable with iCloud, we can figure out the way to sync calendars between devices. Personally, I use three machines that let me work remotely ; iMac (for work at home), MacbookPro 15 (for working at coffe shops & while traveling), iPad (for various productivity apps and general browsing). After trying MobileMe, I’ve decided not to sign up, because it didn’t give me enough features for $99/year.
As of now, apps for keeping track of what’s happening are :
Dropbox iCal (on every device) 2Do on ...

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How To : Convert videos to mp4 and make them smaller.

Posted July 23rd, 2011 by Marta Spendowska with 3 Comments

Many people have no idea where to start with converting videos to mp4 for making sure they are smaller and of high quality. If you are one of them, this tutorial will help you tremendously.   There are few ways for converting movies to mp4 for online viewing and quite an ocean of tools. Today I’d like to share with you one tool, that will take care of this problem for you. It’s called HandBrake and it’s totally free. Watch the video below (7 minutes), take a look at my settings on the screenshots, and download the correct version of HandBrake  (Mac, Windows, Linux). I hope it rocks your world, takes away all the worries, and improves the quality and the size of your ...

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How to be productive and create your workflow.

Posted July 9th, 2011 by Marta Spendowska with 3 Comments

I confess, I’m a terrible app junkie. With apps I can usually accomplish whatever I want faster, easier and maybe even better.
Apps that help with productivity and workflow are my biggest friends. I’ve tried.. too many (sorry Hubby!).
I found the perfect solution for myself and I want to share it with you.
(I’m working on iOS, so my advice is mostly for Mac users, but not all of it is based on computer, so stay atuned)
IDEA GENERATORS First and foremost, I shuffled away my notebook that would lie next to my computer with some to-dos in it.
To open it, find the latest important scribble was simply too time consuming.
Some time ago, I’m not sure when I’ve heard this advice exactly, Dyana Valentine was ...

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HOW TO : edit posts in WordPress

Posted July 6th, 2011 by Marta Spendowska with No Comments

 
When you’re about to edit your post on your WordPress blog, you are probably going to your Dashboard, then Posts, then Edit Posts, and finally you choose the post that needs to be modified.
Did you know you can speed up this workflow and get rid of all unnecessary steps to edit your posts, pages, and comments?
It’s really easy, requires just a snippet of a code, super simple actions like copy + paste, and after accomplishing this task, you’re going to have much more easier access to editing.
Watch the tutorial below, share it with others, and, as I say in the video, if you have trouble with implementing this strategy, make a comment below and I’ll answer that for you.
Notes are ...

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HOW TO : customize short url

Posted June 2nd, 2011 by Marta Spendowska with 2 Comments

Ever wonder how you can customize short url into something more memorable? Well, I’m here to show you! (more…)

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