Hackszine.com: Life Archives

Archive: Life

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July 9, 2007

Gethuman: quickly bypass automated customer service

Here's a good idea. Gethuman is a huge database of customer service numbers and the touch-tone combinations that will get you speaking with a real human being. Not only is it quicker than trying to dig up customer service contact information, it helps you avoid that belabored trip through voice prompt hell.

The Gethuman team also created a standard for ranking corporations from A-F. Grades are based on users' wait time experiences, the complexity of the menu system, density of inane "your call is important to us" messages, and level of patronization in the system's prompts. Curious who made the grade? Hertz, Commerce Bank, Dillard's, Lands End, LL Bean, Comfort Inn, Days Inn, Hyatt, and Walt Disney World all skip the annoyances and connect you immediately with a real person. Thanks guys.

The Gethuman Customer Service Database - Link

July 8, 2007

Elevator express mode hack: truth or myth?

There's an urban legend that claims you can put most elevators into "express mode," causing the car to sweep directly to your floor without stopping. Supposedly, all it takes is holding down the "door close" button in combination with the desired floor number (and, perhaps, a slight lack of scruples).

Is this fact or fiction? The hack is rumored to work with most Otis elevators and some other manufacturers' equipment as well. Testing would require one person to operate an elevator and a second to attempt to interrupt the elevator from another floor. Try this out in a few buildings this week and comment on your results. You don't have to worry about the scruples -- this is purely for research purposes.

June 3, 2007

Is it better to invest or pay off your mortgage early?

There's a huge discussion happening both on Lifehacker and Get Rich Slowly regarding the pros and cons of paying off a mortgage early. Contrary to my own assumptions, the numbers (assuming current interest rates around 6%) seem to strongly encourage investing your money instead of paying toward your mortgage's principal.

On the one hand, you get a guaranteed outcome with paying down your mortgage. On the other, a conservative rate of return on an index fund should have no problem beating a 6% rate over the next 30 years. With the variability in people's risk-comfortability, there is no right answer here, but it's informative to hear the personal finance hackers weigh in with their opinions.

Are there any economists in the room that can explain how it's currently cheaper to borrow money and invest it elsewhere rather than to pay off debts? Why would a mortgage company ever lend money in this scenario?

Ask the Readers: Is It Better to Invest or to Prepay a Mortgage? - Link
Pay off your mortgage more quickly to save money - Link
DIY Mortgage Acceleration - Link

May 17, 2007

Use bread to remove crayon marks from the wall

Hackszine reader Keith Hanshaw sent in a tip for a safe way to remove scribble marks from your walls. Just grab a piece of bread, roll it into a tight ball, and start rubbing. It looks like it takes a bit of elbow grease, but it's a cheap and chemical free way to clean up after the kids - Link.

May 7, 2007

Gmaps pedometer - keep track where you run

Make 618
To track running/jogging distances I've tried all the wrist based GPS units and I'm not really that interested in the iTunes Nike product yet - So for now, I'm using the (free) Gmaps pedometer. You usually know where you start and where you turn around, so it's as accurate as it needs to be for now, but it of course doesn't do pace/heart rate. Here's a sample, oh - it also does calories burned calculations - Link.

May 2, 2007

Humans hot, sweaty, natural-born runners

Salt Lake Marathon Start
I'm back to running a few miles a day, I've always wondered why it not only felt "normal" but why our species evolved this ability, here's an article from Physorg that explores this...

Hairless, clawless, and largely weaponless, ancient humans used the unlikely combination of sweatiness and relentlessness to gain the upper hand over their faster, stronger, generally more dangerous animal prey, Harvard Anthropology Professor Daniel Lieberman said Thursday (April 12).
Just days before Monday’s 111th running of the Boston Marathon, Lieberman presented his theories of the importance of running to ancestral humans to explain why we’re the only species that voluntarily runs extraordinarily long distances, such as the 26.2 miles in the marathon.

The talk, “Why Humans Run: The Biology and Evolution of Marathon Running,” was delivered at the Geological Lecture Hall as part of the Harvard Museum of Natural History’s spring lecture series, “Evolution Matters.”

Humans hot, sweaty, natural-born runners - [via] Link.

Pictured here, Salt Lake city Marathon.

April 24, 2007

Post office hacking...

Sssssssspostal
Ha! This is neat, good ole' Canada -

Many USA ecommerce shops don’t send their goods to Russia or to the countries of the Ex-USSR.
Some shops send but delivery costs differ greatly from the homeland ones, they are usually much bigger.

So what did some Russians invented? They got a way to fool the delivery.

It’s no secret that many bigger shops use electronic systems processing orders. So in order to see if this address is in USA or Canada it uses ZIP code, state or province name and words "USA" or "CANADA".

So what was possible to do is to put totally Russian address in the order delivery form, like: Moscow, Lenin St. 20, Russia in the address fields, usually there is a plenty of space to enter long things like this, and in the field country they put Canada in the field ZIP code Canadian zip code.

What happens next? The parcel travels to Canada, to the area to which the specified ZIP code belongs and there postal workers just see it’s not a Canadian address but Russian. They consider it to be some sort of mistake and forward it further, to Russia.

English Russia » Postal Trick - [via] Link.

March 23, 2007

iConcertCal - Track Upcoming Concerts in iTunes

iConcertCal is an iTunes plugin that pulls concert data for artists that you have in your music library and it will automatically generate a personal calendar of upcoming shows in your city.

We wrote this plug-in in our spare time because we were tired of missing concerts for our favorite bands and we figured other people probably are too.

If you ever needed a good example for how the Internet, digital media and Web 2.0 are working in concert to build a richer landscape for musicians and audiences, this is it.

iConcertCal: A Personalized Concert Calendar Built For iTunes -Link.

March 14, 2007

Google for Music

Google Napster DJ Danger Mouse

The Amazon Web Services Blog reveals a simple search syntax to turn Google into your own personal (free) Napster:

-inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:"index of" +"last modified" +"parent directory" +description +size +(wma|mp3) "Nirvana"

Just replace Nirvana with a song or artist of your choice to display a results page of indexes that contain downloadable MP3s.

P.S. Don't steal music.

Update:

In the comments, JLOCK84 adds:

The folks from I-hacked made a little site that does this for you, G2P.org. Finds music files, as well as ebooks, and can also work as a proxy.

Related:

Google Hacks, 2E

March 8, 2007

Scanning and Whiteboard Archive Via Cell Phone

scanR is a free service that transforms phonecam photos of documents, business cards, or whiteboards into cleaned-up PDFs that it will then fax or email on your behalf.

Documents are placed through an OCR process, so the text is selectable and searchable (though I'd probably rather have my documents converted to plain text or html). For whiteboards, you don't even need to take the shot head on. The software will take cues from the whiteboard's edge to transform the image into proper alignment.

Save a trip to the fax machine, and never write "Do Not Erase" again -Link.

March 7, 2007

Simplify Blogging Tasks with TextExpander

TextExpander for Amazon Affiliate Links

Over at the SmileOnMyMac Blog, Gordon Meyer (author of Smart Home Hacks) offers a great tip for speeding up tedious blogging tasks with TextExpander (Mac only):

Here's a great tip for bloggers and the like. I use TextExpander to create a handy macro for creating Amazon Affiliate links. It's much easier than using Amazon's web interface.

After defining a shortcut in TextExpander, adding an Amazon product link to his blog with his unique Amazon Affiliate information is as easy as copying the product's ISBN or ASIN the clipboard and activating the defined trigger, a task that could be repurposed for a variety of other repetitive processes.

Related:

Merlin Mann's TextExpander video tutorial for MacBreak

March 6, 2007

Three Solid Gmail Productivity Tips

Gmail Productivity

Matt Cutts shares three solid Gmail productivity tips to help keep your inbox under control, including keeping mailing lists out of there (using filters), prioritizing messages (using Greasemonkey and persistent searches), and excluding messages from certain accounts (using filters and labels).

Teach via IM with One-Way Video Chat

Click To Play

Over at O'Reilly's Mac DevCenter, Erica Sadun points out a little-known (at least to me) feature in the current version of iChat:

By control-clicking (right-clicking) a buddy's name, a contextual menu pops up offering the option to invite that person to a one-way video chat. This means that they can watch your video but will not send video back to you in return.

How have I missed this option for so long? Though Erica wants to use this feature to iPodcast (stream via IM) movies and TV shows to her friends, I see this as a great opportunity for "hands-on" instruction you normally don't have access to when you're not physically in the same room with someone.

For example, crafts like knitting are notoriously hard to teach without visual cues, and even the most detailed books often suffer from their lack of moving pictures. When I learned to knit, I used books as a crutch, but actually learning required sitting next to my mother-in-law to see how it was done. Even now, when I hit a roadblock with a new technique, I need to wait till the next time we're together. But if we had a feature like this, we likely wouldn't have to wait. I could just "look over her shoulder" as she described what she was doing.

The most obvious benefit of one-way video is that it doesn't require the recipient to have a video camera on their end, but as Erica notes, for instructional content as with streaming movies, one-way video has another notable advantage over two-way video conferencing:

you don't have to watch the other person watching your video. You don't have to see them adjusting their hair, performing nasal maintenance, or any of the other unconscious things people do when they get involved in watching TV as opposed to engaging actively in a social situation.

The pedagogical opportunities for this feature are virtually limitless, and it will add a whole new dimension to tech support with the release of Mac OS X Leopard, when we finally get iChat Screen Sharing. - Link to video download.

March 2, 2007

DIY Social Networking Sites

Westford Network on Ning

Everyone's favorite DIY Web 2.0 site builder, Ning, just relaunched with new features that make setting up your own social networking site easy as pie.

Thanks to Gina's handy walk-through, I was able to whip up a community site for my own hometown in just about no time at all. The initial features in my almost-instant setup include the ability to add photos (imported from your Flickr account, sent via email or phone, or uploaded from your computer desktop), share videos, start discussions, and basically just connect with your neighbors. I've been looking for something like this as a more community-driven add-on to my local placeblog, and this was just the ticket.

March 1, 2007

Pass the Ly Detector

Ly Detector

Writing wonks and anal editors rejoice! Gina Trapani just released her Ly Detector as a Greasemonkey script!

If you're at all familiar with Strunk and White, you know that excessive use of adverbs - words that end in -ly - isn't a sign of strong writing. All of us writers struggle with sentence-weakening generally's and relatively's at times, but now there's a Greasemonkey script that highlights adverbial transgressions on the web automatically. (Whoops!)

Once it's installed, The Ly Detector Greasemonkey script takes a yellow highlighter to adverbs, like obviously and previously to help web writers stay on their non-adverbial toes. The Ly Detector's great for bloggers who are trying to improve their skills with the quill - or just those who want to make fun of them. After the jump, the script download, and some more details of how this works.

I've been a longtime fan of Gina's Ly Detector, from way back (before Greasemonkey existed) when it was published as a bookmarklet to her (now defunct) personal site, so I'm incredibly thrilled to see it so amazingly updated (transgressions intentional, to throw off the yellow flag for readers putting me to the test).

Related: