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Archive: Lifehacker

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February 9, 2007

Everyday Stoicism or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Enjoy the Show

Everyday Stoicism

Contrary to what you might think, based on the focus of most of the posts on this site, we don't necessarily believe there's always a technological solution to every problem. In fact, for many areas in life, I've often found the right life hack for my particular need may be discovered at perhaps the opposite end of the spectrum: philosophy.

In particular, the Ancients really knew how to live well and started hacking great ways to deal with the effects of technology from the moment Prometheus gave us fire. For example, I don't make it to the theater as much as I'd like anymore, but whenever I do, I take a page from Epictetus:

When you are going about any action, remind yourself what nature the action is. If you are going to bathe, picture to yourself the things which usually happen in the bath: some people splash the water, some push, some use abusive language, and others steal. Thus you will more safely go about this action if you say to yourself, "I will now go bathe, and keep my own mind in a state conformable to nature." And in the same manner with regard to every other action. For thus, if any hindrance arises in bathing, you will have it ready to say, "It was not only to bathe that I desired, but to keep my mind in a state conformable to nature; and I will not keep it if I am bothered at things that happen."

Okay, so we don't have public baths anymore, but this technique works well in movie theaters, lines at amusement parks, restaurants, or pretty much anywhere you intend to enjoy yourself around other people. Seriously, I consider this passage with many deep breaths at almost every movie I attend. It works.

February 1, 2007

Show All Messages and Events in Google Notifier

Google Notifier

If you use Google Notifier on your Mac to keep tabs on your Gmail messages and Google Calendar events but are disappointed by the limit of messages/events the Notifier shows before banishing the rest to a "View more..." submenu, this hack's for you. MacInformant points to this useful Easter egg divulged by David Phillip Oster, one of the official Mac Software Engineers at Google, to change the limit to any number you'd like:

Pull down the Notifier menu (either Calendar or Gmail), hold down Command and Option, and click Preferences on the menu. You'll see a hidden settings editor.
Enter MaxMessagesOnMainMenu in the Key field (upper and lower case must be entered as shown) and 20 in the Value field, then click Set.
Quit Notifier and start it up again.

Now, when you pull down the Notifier menus, you'll see all of your messages and events at a glance, without submenus. If you want to change the limit again, perhaps back to the default, just open the hidden settings editor and change the value to whatever you want.

Like the folks at MacInformant, I'm on a Mac too, so I don't know if this works under Windows. Windows users, does Command-Ctrl do the trick?

Related:

Google Hacks, 3E

Life Hacking News: Mann to Stikkit

Merlin Mann

In life hacking news, I just learned that Merlin Mann (life hacking pioneer and one-person productivity guru behind 43 Folders) is now an adviser for Values of n (founded by former Hacks series editor Rael Dornfest), the company behind the impressive new Stikkit productivity app. I'm looking forward to seeing some great results from this collaboration between two of my favorite life hackers. If you haven't tried out Stikkit yet, do so now. It's a great life hack in itself, which is just getting better and better as it develops, but will also likely be the source of great productivity hacks in the future (note: some power users are already hacking it).

As a bit of an aside, there's a hack to be found in the links from the Values of n announcement too, a hack in which I have some personal involvement in the telling. Though Merlin was kind enough to leave my name out of his 43 Folders podcast on "the perfect apostrophe," I am, in fact, the "very nice man whose life [he] temporarily ruined." While he overstates the damage done by just a tad, his depiction of me as "a character out a 30s screwball comedy" is uncanny:

The link to Merlin's hilarious podcast isn't simply gratuitous or intended to feed my own vanity. If you listen carefully, you'll find a valuable life hack in there, a perhaps more nuanced and intereresting way to "not sweat the small stuff" or, more accurately, to recognize the right stuff to sweat and just get it done. Beyond my obvious involvement as a character in his story, it resonated with me on a number of other levels as well, which I explained in a bit more detail a while back on my personal blog (note: this link, unlike the previous links, is indeed intentionally gratuitous).

January 26, 2007

Personalize Your Flickr Replies

Personalized Flickr Reply
Serious Flickr users who regularly respond to multiple comments on their photos might be looking for something a little more personal and functional than the de facto @username: convention for specific replies. For this specialized task, Flickr user doc18's Flickr Buddy Icon Reply Greasemonkey script might be just what such hardcore Flickerers are looking for:

It adds name_reply and icon_reply links at each of the comments under your photo. When you click on the link, the buddy icon html code will be added into the Add your comment box, where you can show nicely who your replies are directed at.

The enhancement does more than just drop in a thumbnail of the user's buddy icon into your post. The HTML for the inserted icon provides all the contextual features of the user's full profile icon, including links to the user's profile, photos, tags, sets, archives, and favorites:

Flickr Reply with Profile

This is just one of many Greasemonkey scripts I now use regularly with Flickr, so much so that I end up taking them for granted as features of the service, forgetting that they're add-ons. Check out the Flickr Hacks group for tons of great user scripts and other Flickr-specific hacks.

Related:

Auto-Correct Typos in Your Address Bar

URL Fixer

Tired of typos in your URLs? URL Fixer is an extension for Firefox (and other Mozilla-based browsers, such as Flock) that fixes common mistakes in your address bar caused by careless keystrokes. For example, typing hackszine.con will redirect to hackszine.com. The current version:

will correct common misspellings of .com, .net, .org, .edu, .gov, and .mil, as well as the protocol (http:, https:). It will also correct errors in country code TLDS such as .com.XX, .net.XX, and .org.XX. By right-clicking on the address bar, you can set it to auto-correct your errors, or you can have it ask you before making any corrections.

Note that the confirmation message shown in the screenshot here is the result of configuration. By default, URL Fixer auto-corrects errors, quickly and seamlessly, which I've found quite handy.

Related:

Firefox Hacks

January 25, 2007

Return to "Classic" Google Image Search

New Image Search.jpg

As reported by Google Operating System, a couple days ago, Google gave its Image Search a "cleaner look." The new design uses JavaScript to hide much of the information (such as the domain, type, dimensions, and size of the file) that used to appear below each image (as shown in the screenshot at the beginning of this post, this information appears when you mouseover a particular image). Understandably, this change had its critics, with reasonable concerns such as this one from cenoxo:

The "classic" Google Images results are far better, show more information in a quick glance, and you don't have to mouse over each image individually.

Thankfully, it's pretty easy to get back the "classic" version of Google Image Search. Since the new version relies upon JavaScript, simply disabling JavaScript in your browser will return the same search with the old look, like so:

Classic Image Search.jpg

But chances are, you do want to enable JavaScript for other pages, so an across-the-browser solution likely won't cut it for you. To respond to this need, Google Operating System provides a hack to disable JavaScript on Google Image Search only in a variety of browsers.

Related:

Google Hacks, 3E

NetFlix "Instant Watching" in Firefox

NetFlix Instant Watching in Firefox.jpg

For all lucky NetFlix users who see the "Watch Now" tab at NetFlix.com (indicating early access to the new Instant Watching feature) but are disappointed that the feature is IE only, Hacking NetFlix has uncovered a fix for watching NetFlix streaming movies within Firefox:

Install the IE Tab Add-on, and in the IE Tab options (Tools menu, IE Tab Options) add "http://www.netflix.com" to the sites filter.

As noted at the end of the post, all we need now is a hack for Mac support (actually, more of us still need the Instant Watching feature too). ... Well, anyone?

Related:

Breaking: Netflix Launches "Watch Now" Downloads (Hacking NetFlix)
Demo: Netflix "Watch Now" Movie Downloads (Hacking NetFlix)
NetFlix Offers Subscribers the Option of Instantly Watching Movies on their PCs (NetFlix Press Release)

January 24, 2007

Chart Your Route with Virtual Pedometers

WalkRunJog

To prepare routes of varying lengths while training for her first marathon, The Marathon Mama (a.k.a. Kristina Pinto, my wife) used to simply drive from the house and clock distances using her car's trip odometer. But training for her second marathon, this time as a mother, she began to realize:

It can get tedious to drive around with a toddler in the back seat asking, "Where we going?" as we pass our house several times to measure various routes. Besides, I often forget the mileage of my routes.

In the past, she'd used a rolling "pen" to calculate mileage on a printed map (the roller increments as it rolls along the route, with calculations needing to be made for scale), but she always doubted its accuracy. Thankfully, her training partners (she'll be running the Boston Marathon for charity, as part of the Dana-Farber Marathon Challenge) turned her on to some much more efficient and practical solutions, provided by third-party Google Maps mashups:

For city runners who jog on a lot of one-way streets, or any of you who walk or run and are looking to chart out the mileage on a new route: you don't need to get in your car to clock the miles anymore. There are several free websites that will help you out and determine the miles of a path anywhere in the country.
You can calculate your own route or check out other people's preferred paths at WalkJogRun.

Another DFMC runner recommended Gmaps Pedometer, which offers similar services.

She concludes, "Now you don't have to get off your seat to count your miles, but you still have to get off the chair to actually run them."

Related:

January 11, 2007

Make Shorter iTunes Podcast Links

Podcast URL

Anyone who's had to share a link to a podcast in the iTunes Store knows the painfully long URLs you're forced to deal with (in this case, for the Make Magazine Podcast):

http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=74069835

Well, over at the O'Reilly Network, Digital Media blogger David Battino uncovers a quick hack to chop it down to its essentials, based on the podcast ID at the end of the string, turning it into this:

http://www.itunes.com/podcast?id=74069835

You can, of course, also use a service like SnipURL to create something even smaller, as well as a bit more recognizable and memorable:

http://snipurl.com/makezine

Finally, for the most sophisticated and useful URL, David adds:

If you own your own domain, you could simply set up a page with a meta refresh, name it index.html, and place it in an appropriate subdirectory like myshow. Then your link would be http://www.yoursite.com/myshow.

Check out his article for the details.

Related: