January 2, 2012
Do you spend many hours in front of a computer screen? If you do, you’re probably familiar with the inescapable eye strain that comes with it. Headaches, burning eyes, itchiness and just being tired, are all symptoms of long hours of staring at a screen. I will be the first one to tell you that the ultimate solution is to spend less time at the computer.
December 17, 2011
With If This Then That (ifttt) and SMS I can teach my dumb phone all kinds of smart tricks, from updating social networks to adding events to my calendar. What makes ifttt so good at educating your dumb phone is SMS messaging. Here are a few ways you can use it to your advantage from your dumb phone.
December 9, 2011
When it comes to writing and manipulating text on a computer, I think we can never have enough tools to simplify all the tasks involved . Three relatively new applications you might consider adding to your arsenal are Mou and MarkdownMail, for working in Markdown language; and a seriously magical Mac application, FormatMatch, for automatically reformatting copied and pasted text.
December 9, 2011
To-do lists are not necessarily the most exciting applications ever, and the UI for most Android apps is often on the bland side. That’s the starting point for Any.DO, and it takes these two dull facts, shakes them up, and turns Android to-do lists into something compelling, fun, and dare I say, sexy. If you want to see how a humble to-do list app can get over 1,100 Market reviews with a 4.5-star average within a short while after launching, just keep reading.
December 6, 2011
They tell me touchscreens are taking over the world, and Windows 8 is going to be composed mainly of huge brightly colored tiles, easy to hit with a fat finger (or your nose). Until that happens, I’ll stick to my trusty keyboard (and Colemak, my layout of choice). But having a keyboard (and even a nice layout) is just not going to cut it – if you use a computer for a living, you need to type like a pro.
December 2, 2011
Sometimes, the fastest way to accomplish a task such as sorting files or editing text documents is to use quick command line tools. there is a really cool tool called Swiss File Knife (sfk), which extends the sort of scripting set we’ve all become accustomed to.
December 1, 2011
One of the most difficult aspects of having so many projects going at once – between being a writer, blog owner, engineer and programmer – is keeping everything sorted and organized. The one thing that consumes a lot of my time is not so much tracking the tasks that I need to do, but re-locating the text files and word documents where I kept notes or created my to-do lists.
November 29, 2011
Household chores is something very few people enjoy, yet all of us must face sooner or later. And if “later” is your usual preference, that might lead to some unpleasant conflicts with your significant other, parents, or housemates. So how can we harness the power of technology to help us actually get to these chores on time, and do them before anyone thinks we don’t care?
November 24, 2011
Increased productivity is hard to appreciate until we attain it. The average person wastes lots of time each day typing the same word, switching between confusing tabs, not to mention drowning in an overwhelming amount of tabs they can never make sense of. This happens to all of us at least some of the time. But there are actually some easy solutions.
November 17, 2011
By training your unconscious mind, you can influence and potentially change your behavior. You can for example do this by repeating affirmative statements to yourself. A much more subtle method is to use subliminal messages, that you pick up unconsciously. Wouldn’t you like to find out whether this zero effort technique can be used to train your unconscious mind?
