Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking

The Keyboard Shortcut that Rocks My World

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I spend a lot of time on the internet, opening up new tabs. It’s an occupational hazard for writers and anyone who works at the Queensland Writers Centre, so I’m always happy to learn things that save me time and help me rock my job a little better. This post is about one that I learned a year or so back, which is proving to be a lifesaver on a day-to-day front.

Ready? Here we go.

Control-Shift-T 

Or Command-Shift-T for you Mac people, scourge of the earth that you are with your fancy-pants non-standard keyboards.

If you’ve never used it before, Control-Shift-T is the shortcut that tells your browser to re-open the last tab you just closed. For someone who frequently has twenty-plus tabs open, sorting through them as I construct the steady stream of links I run through the twitter feeds for @Petermball and @AMWonline, it gets used on a daily basis. It lets me backtrack like a backtracking ninja, saves on anguish when I accidentally close the wrong tab, and generally ranks up there with unicorns, beer, and coffee in terms of things that make my life better with their existence.

Whoever came up with the shortcut get mad props, and I honestly can’t remember how I got by without it. It’s a simple thing, but it totally changed the way I engaged with the internet. Control T (for a new tab) gets a little bit of a workout too, but it’s generally just a quick-and-easy time saver – it’s when you throw the Shift key into the mix that you’re actually saved from moments of your own stupidity.

So, yeah. Control-Shift-T. It’s a thing of beauty. Learn it. Use it. Love it.

That’s mine, so how ’bout you guys? What quick-and-easy keyboard shortcuts make your life easier? Have at it in the comments, peeps, and lets make all our lives a little easier.

Dear Google: Thank You

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I try to be pretty sanguine about changes to the tools I use to access the internet. A lot of them are free, for certain values of free that translate to “we make money by getting you to come here and generate data,” which means I’m generally pretty low-key in my responses to, say, Facebook changing the layout of its feed.

Various Google tools have always been the exception to this. For a few years there I worked from a suite of Google apps that pretty much ran my life: Gmail; Reader; iGoogle; GoogleDocs; Calendar; etc. They pretty much let me run my online life like a ninja, filtering everything I wanted to see through a single iGoogle page that was there when I loaded up my computer.

Then the Gmail layout changed, and it bothered me. Fortunately, this was back when I was working for the dreaded day-job where I didn’t actually do anything, so I had the spare time to Google a work-around and put together an interface that more-or-less did what I wanted it to do. Google tools are frequently handy like that – they’re stripped down, but if you take the time, you can pretty much add in the features you’re looking for.

Then the news came down that iGoogle was going away, and that bummed me out a whole lot. That customized home-page was pretty freakin’ sweet, even if the vast majority of the information I got through it was now available on my phone. There were few irritated hours following the update, but I rolled with it.

I pretty much lost my shit when they announced the death of Google Reader through. I soak up a shit-load of information through RSS feeds; they’re one of the most valuable resources I have in both my day-job and my time spent online away from work. It always struck me as surprising when other people didn’t use them, in that what do you mean you *still go to the website to check out updates* kind of way. When I heard Google Reader was going away (via twitter, which is, oddly enough, probably the reason RSS has lost its importance), I got angry for a good long time.

Now, I pretty much want to kiss whoever killed off Google Reader, ’cause the act of having to migrate to a new RSS reader and actually engage with my feeds in an active way has been kinda awesome. I finally got around to organizing my feed into categories, so the stuff I want to read carefully is all segregated off from the stuff I usually breeze through looking for interesting stuff. I’ve added all my work feeds (previously handled by Outlook RSS) into the same reader, since the set-up was easy enough and there’s a lot of cross-over in the stuff I read for work and the stuff I read for home.

It’s not that the current reader is superior to Google – it’s different, but I’m kinda digging the differences – but Reader was one of those tools I’d grown complacent about. My tangle list of feeds had grown in fits and starts, mostly in the days after everyone abandoned livejournal and started blogs instead; I’d always read the feed in exactly the same way, from start to finish, ’cause that’s the way it showed up on my iGoogle page and there wasn’t an impetus to do anything different; I never bothered learning how to use the damn thing beyond the most basic level, because there was never a reason to do so.
It’s easy to get so familiar with one particular aspect of a tool that you forget about it’s other aspects. Kinda how I’d owned a hammer for about six years before I figured out what the claw-thing on the other side of the hammer was used for (really, given how often I hammer stuff, I’m surprised it only took me that long). Being forced to engage with my RSS feeds in a new way has streamlined the process of getting through them considerably – it used to take me about four hours to get through streams of data on a bad day. Now, I can pretty much knock it over in a hour.
I owe someone at Google a thank-you. And an apology for the many bad things I said about them when I first heard the news.

 

 

 

One of the reasons I like the future

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Being a single bloke who lives alone, I have a certain blindspot when it comes to shopping. Actually, I have several, but the one I speak of here primarily kicks in when browsing through the area marked “fruit and vegetables.”  I have my staples – there’s usually a spanish onion or two in the house, plus some potato and sweet potato if I’m splashing out- but I generally stick with a few vegetables and rarely touch the fruit at all. If ever there were a guy who steps forth to challenge the statement that “man cannot live on curry and pizza alone,” it’d probably be me.

I’ve mostly arrived at this situation through habit, laziness, and the tendency towards belt-tightening when one lives alone and doesn’t get to share around the general costs of living. I’m also aware that it’s not a good state of affairs, especially since I’m taking the easy route of take-away food far more often than I used too (which, yes, contradicts the belt-tightening logic above, but the other part of living alone is *keeping yourself sane* so it pays not to examine my logic too deeply). So last week I contacted one of those organic famer-direct delivery services the internet has on offer, and this afternoon a nice chap has delivered the first box of randomly-assorted in-season fruit and veg to my door.

It’s a veritable cornacopia of tastiness. I know, because I’ve already devoured the first of the nectarines. This is not the bit where the future is awesome.

No, the bit where the future is awesome came after about thirty minutes of searching for the doobie-do that connects my digital camera to my computer and failing. “Woe,” said I, “for now there will be no visuals to accompany the blog post.”

“Hey dumbarse,” said the spokesbear, “you dear realise that your new computer came with a SDHC drive that’ll fit the data thingy from your camera, right?”

And lo, he was correct, and the future corrected my problem before I even realised such things were possible. Freaking awesome. *This* is why it’s good to be a luddite sometimes.

Also, I finished rebuilding a story that’s been sitting around in parts for the last three months, waiting for me to revise it and fix it and sent it out in the world. Productivity FTW!

Also, I have peaches. They are delicious. The fruit half of that box is so not lasting the weekend.

And since today is Friday, and I’m certain of this because I’ve double-checked this time, I’ll be heading off to celebrate the launch of the Tangled Bank anthology where a bunch of fine authors (including Chris Green and Ben Francisco) have been rocking Darwinian Evolution, SF-Short-Story Style.

Current Project: Getting Back to Basics
Number of Stories Submitted in February: 0 of 8
Rejections Accrued in 2010: 0
Consecutive Productive Writing Days: 1
Days without chocolate: 9
Today the Spokesbear is: OM-NOM-NOM-NOM.