Results tagged “lifehack” from KPAO

The airlines are hurting. Everyone is in this economy, but it's particularly evident in the airline industry. I took a round trip United flight, and I was simply stunned by the sheer amount of upsell they try to do during check-in.

All checked bags are an additional fee now: $15 for the first, $25 for the second. And you have the option of upgrading to Economy Plus (i.e. the amount of leg room that all of our seats once had), and they even try to sell you more frequent flyer miles.

I was a bit peeved about the luggage fee. But the since flight was free (using up my frequent flyer miles, before United goes under for good), I suppose I got a pretty good deal overall. And on the trip, I did figure out how to check your bags for free. I plan on doing this in the future. I encourage you and your friends to do the same.

Since all airlines are now charging for all checked luggage, most people now bring "carry-ons"--and I use that word quite loosely. The vast majority of these bags are rolled, dragged or lugged on, but never carried. With so many travellers carrying on, the overhead bins are full before the plan is even halfway boarded. So now the rest of the passengers are getting on with their luggage, and there's no where to put it. Well, there is the space under the seat in front of them, but let's be honest; it would simply be too base, too inconvinient, to stow it there. As if that monstrosity would even fit.

These poor souls are now wandering up and down the aisle staring wide-eyed at the row of full bins. They absentmindedly open the closed bins, as if one of these will magically turn out to be empty. It never is.

At this point the flight attendants are doing everything they can to get the plane boarded and pushed back for an on-time departure. They're not going to charge you to check that bag. They don't have time to deal with processing credit cards and making change for a $50. They happily take your bag, slap a tag on it, then fling it out the door for the ground crew to deal with.

So that's the secret: Carry everything on, then check it at the gate. It's more limiting in that you have to abide by the TSA rules du jour, but hey, you'll save enough for a nice meal at one of the fine dining establishments at the airport.

Update: Seeqpod has been shut down, but the same technique works with Project Playlist.

As you may know from my previous post on the subject, I'm a huge fan of Seeqpod for finding and listening to music right now with minimal hassle.

Unfortunately Seeqpod is no more, but both GrooveShark and Project Playlist are worthy replacements. GrooveShark seems to have a broader catalog of music, and does a really great job of filtering out duplicate files. However Project Playlist has a killer feature: they download the music files into your browser's local cache, making it easy to grab the files for later listening.

Here's how to do it in Firefox:

1. Go to Project Playlist.
2. Find a song you want.
3. Play it, making sure the download progress bar goes all the way to the end.
4. Open a new Firefox tab and type about:cache in the location bar, then Enter
   
5. Navigate to the path shown for the Disk Cache Directory.
   
6. Sort by date, ignore the _CACHE_00#_ files, and add a .mp3 extension to the most recent file that is >1MB.
7. Open this file in your MP3 player to make sure you got it right. If so, rename the file.
   

For one of my work projects, I needed to edit the hosts file on my Parallels Windows XP VM (which I use to test IE 7 compatibility). I ended up creating a shortcut to it, and thought others might find it valuable.

1. Right-click on the Desktop
2. Click New -› Shortcut
3. Type: %SystemRoot%\system32\notepad.exe %SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
4. Click Next
5. Type: edit hosts file
6. Click Finish

Now just double-click on that shortcut on your desktop to edit your hosts file.

OK, this is admittedly a small issue. But I have an oven with digital controls. When you turn it on, you first have to set the temperature before it starts to warm up. What I end up doing is setting the temp. to 350° immediately to start it warming, then I go back and change it to the temp. I want.

What I don't understand is why the oven doesn't start warming up right away. Why not have it already defaulted to 350° when you turn it on, and let you change it from there? It's little things like this that separate a mediocre product design from a great one.

Time is our most valuable commodity simply because it is finite resource. But while you can't technically buy more time, you can optimize the things you do in your day to make more discretionary time available to you.

The number one thing to do is shorten your commute. I suppose this is one of those things ingrained in me from childhood. We lived literally 300 yards from where he worked. He walked to work every day. Now I haven't achieved that level of optimization, but for 11 years I've lived less than 10 miles from work. I currently live 3 miles away: a 6 minute drive or 12 minute bike ride. I've also been biking to work regularly since 2001: another optimization I've previously written about.

Now I understand the appeal of living in SF or the East Bay (or even Marin or Auburn). But I assert the total costs outweigh the benefits. Spending 2 hours in the car 5 days a week is not worth the coolness of living in the city, or the cost savings of living on the rural fringe. Really that cost savings is negligible when you now factor in the high price of commuting today.

I probably could have saved $300k buying a comparable house in Alameda county. But my commute would have been 1.5 hours/day longer. At 180 commute-days/year over the course of a 30-year career, that works out to $37/hour.

So the question is, would you pay $37 for an extra hour in your day?

(You might be interested in my more recent post on this, which has an easier way to get big Flickr photos.)

So you've been browsing through Flickr's Interestingness feature and found the perfect photo for your new desktop background. The only problem is, Flickr makes it hard for you to actually get the photo. Right-click on it and save, and you'll end up with spaceball.gif. Annoying. So here's how you get the real picture downloaded.

View Source for the page with the photo on it. The search for the term photoImgDiv. Immediately following this term is an <IMG> tag with a src value that looks something like this:

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/1234/1234567890_a1b2c3d4e5.jpg?v=0

That is the link to the medium-sized image.  Select it, copy it, paste it into your browser's address field and go to it. (Select, Cmd T, Cmd L, Cmd V, Enter on Mac Firefox.) Note the question mark and everything after it is irrelevant. You only need the part up to and ending with .jpg.

Now comes the magic. In the address field at the end of the link, just before the .jpg, add _o which is an underscore and a lowercase o. Here's what the link will look like:

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/1234/1234567890_a1b2c3d4e5_o.jpg

Press Enter to open it, and that will get you the original size of the picture. Now you can save it out to your computer.

This won't work for some pictures. In that case, try _b instead. This will get you the large (aka big) version of the picture. If neither of those work, then the medium size is the best you can do. _s is square, _t is thumbnail, and _m is small. But let's be honest here. What you're really after is the high resolution, no?

Now I just need someone to write a basic web service that takes a Flickr URL and returns the biggest version of the image. Any web hackers want to take this one on?

Of course doing a 2 minute web search turned up these existing instructions and this tool. Ah well, if it was new and useful to me, perhaps it will be to a few of you all as well.

The Police were my favorite band in high school.  I saw them twice in the '80s, both times from far reaches of cavernous stadiums, because there's no way I could have afforded the rich kid seats.

Twenty-five years later, when they came through the Bay Area on their reunion tour, my wife and I splurged.   As established Yuppies, we could now afford the rich kid seats.  The concert was an exorbitant, decadent delight.  We sat a few rows back from Sting, and had enough lunch money left over for beers.

Still, the excess of it all made me feel uneasy.  I'd never spent so much on two hours of entertainment, and didn't think I was the type to do so.  Humble beginnings, and all that.

To assuage my guilt, my wife and I came up with a system that lets us temper our consumptive ways, without having to renounce the pleasure altogether.  It also encourages the positive habit of cooking at home.

A sticky note on the fridge lists the next decadent pleasures we want but don't need, and the cost of each.  Every night we cook at home, we draw a tick mark beside the next un-purchased toy.  Each tick is worth $20, which is about how much we save on average by not going out.

Once we've earned enough ticks to pay for the gadget, we get to buy it, guilt free.  The gadget is essentially monetarily free too, because the money we pay is money we didn't spend at restaurants.  It's even better than free because cooking at home is healthier and yummier anyway.

Later, we tweaked the system to have it pay off our parking tickets, which happen to be part of the cost of living in San Francisco.   This greatly lessens the sting of the ticket: instead of being a complete waste of forty dollars, it becomes the trivial penance of putting off the next fun purchase by a couple more days.  (As the photo above shows, the system also covers moving violations.)

Do try this at home, folks, and please, always remember our two mottos:

1. "Happiness Through Gadgetry."
2. "You don't have to put on a red light."

Sunday nights are generally pretty crazy at the airport; All the weekend travellers maximizing their away time are getting home just before the start of another work week.

I was at SFO last night around 11:00pm picking up my wife and a friend. The arrivals area was a mess. Both lanes of cars had backed well down the approach road. So I veered right and went up to the departures level. What a difference. Hardly any cars. Hardly any people. Plenty of places to park and wait. No pseudo-cops milking their Hoarace Small uniforms for all the authority they can muster.

I got a call on my cell phone just as they were getting off the plane. I told them to come upstairs, then simply pulled around and picked them up. We were gone in 3 minutes.

A couple of months ago I bought two licenses of BusySync from BusyMac. This product works perfectly and invisibly -- which is just how it should. It makes me happy. Let me explain a bit -- My wife and I each have a Mac at home, and each have our own busy schedules. There are many appointments that we need to share (especially related to the kids). We each use Mac OS X iSync to synchronize our calendars to our phones (both Nokia S60). At work, I use Linux.

This little bit of Javascript demonstrates a clever hack using Unicode characters to generate upside-down renditions of your text.

¡spuǝıɹɟ ɹnoʎ ǝsnɟuoɔ oʇ ʎɐʍ unɟ ɐ sı ʇı ʇnq 'lnɟǝsn ooʇ s,ʇı ʇɐɥʇ ǝɹns ʇou ɯ,ı

To the person who added the following paragraph to the Wikipedia article on hiccups: thank you.

"... Additionally, another respiratory remedy appears to be one of the most effective in treating persistent hiccups. One breathes out all the air that he is able to in one long exhalation then breathes in all the air he feels he possibly can in one continuous inhalation. The person then attempts to breathe in even more air in a series of short powerful puffs, until his lungs cannot hold any more. The person remains in this state for as long as he feels a small gas bubble coming at the very base of the throat, ready to be burped. Although the success rate is not 100%, many people find this method consistently works."

100% of the people in my family that have tried this method (i.e. 3 people) have found it to be immediately effective, every time.

(*) and yes, I know that title can be interpreted at least two ways. I meant "it's better than an old wives' tale."

If you still have a fax line at home it's time to move on. For the last three or four years we have been using maxemail. For $24 per year (yes year) you get a phone number that receives faxes and sends you a copy as a PDF via email. We just use our regular land line to send faxes, since that's still pretty convenient. It's been rock solid the whole time, and easily paid for itself in a couple of months, since we disconnected the second land-line.

I know that faxes are going the way of the dinosaur, but I suspect they will remain a valuable tool for another few years (especially when dealing with medical insurance, doctors, mortgage companies -- i.e. life).

Is there a really good use case for the Caps Lock key? Was there ever a good reason to have it on a computer keyboard? The only use case I can think of is when using a typewriter and wanting to have titles or section headers appear in a different “typeface”, so you use ALL CAPS to poorly emulate true small caps. So really it's a vestige left over from a long-obsolete technology.

So what can you do about it? Well, turn it off for starters. You can find several ways to disable the caps lock key out there. My preference is by using AutoHotKey. I use this for other keyboard re-mapping functions, so adding another line to my script is easy. Here's the code:

*CapsLock::SetCapslockState AlwaysOff

Translated into English: “whenever I press the Caps Lock key, regardless of if any modifier keys are held down, turn off Caps Lock”.

Another reason to not disable the key entirely at the system level is because you can use this key for fun and profit—or as another useful modifier key. Stay tuned for the post on how to do that.

I have been using Windows XP (I upgraded from Vista) as my primary OS for the past 3 years. One thing I've always missed from my Mac days are keyboard shortcuts for handling windows, like the ubiquitous Cmd+W. OK, so Windows does have Alt+F4, but this was designed by a sadist. There's no way to do this with one hand that won't result in carpal tunnel.

So I got a copy of AutoHotKey and started to fix it. Here are the three essential commands in my script:

#Esc::Send !{F4}
#!Esc::Send !{n}
!Esc::WinMinimize,A

The first rmaps Windows+Escape to Alt+F4. I use this all the time. The second maps Windows+Alt+Esc to Alt+N, which lets me dismiss those “do you want to save?” dialogs. And the final one, Alt+Windows now minimizes the front window.

And this topic reminds me of one of my little-known claims to fame. I was the guy who designed the Cmd+`shortcut for cycling among the windows within an application back when I worked on Mac Outlook Express. The shortcut was picked up by Mac IE and Entourage, and then someone from the Mac OS team saw it and liked it so much, he aded it to the OS. Yay!

Well, it's already happened. I was aiming to write a post every day, and I've already missed a couple of days. According to Jerry Seinfeld, the way to do something every day is to visualize it on a large calendar. You X out each day as you accomplish it, and the fact that you get an unbroken chain that stares you in the face all day every day motivates you not to break the chain. I really should try that out. Maybe tomorrow…

Original article

Like it or not, much of my life is online. I have the usual collection of accounts and passwords with banks, credit card companies, email services, phone companies, etc. Since we tend to be a bit on the techie side here at KPAO, I also have about 100 other user name and password combinations for various other services. Sometimes these passwords are for "real" world items like bicycle locks, but usually it's just another website password.

I worked for a while on the other end of the password game -- at a company that offered a service via a website, and asked people to register and remember a password. In other words I was part of the problem. I was recently chatting with a colleague about this system, and he reminded me of this fact of life: people hate passwords, and repeatedly use the same (poor) ones. If you need to guess someone's password, "password" would be a decent first try. "none" would be a very good second guess. If you get a hold of someones password for a low security site (say a photo sharing web site), odds are good that the same password will work for their bank account.

Do you ever reuse a password? If you do, do you trust the people at sillyphotosofmydog.com to securely store your personal information to the same level as bigbankwithlotsofmoney.com? If you use the same password for both accounts (or closely related passwords), then you are implicitly trusting the customer service representative at the puppy photo web site not to steal your bank account. So what to do?

First, you really need use a good password, and you need to change them every few month. It's very, very easy to crack poorly chosen passwords (even ones like "bobby76", which probably resembles one you are using right now). A long time ago, we were taught not to write passwords down. That advice came from the days of one or two passwords, and was probably even wrong then. It's simply unfeasible to remember even a small number high quality passwords that change every few months. So don't try. Here's what I do, based on advice from very reasonable sources:

1. Get a USB thumb drive. Small capacity ones are essentially free these days, and you don't need much space for this recipe -- 512MB is plenty. Pick one based on brand, appearance, etc. Mine has a key chain loop.
   
2. Use KeePass and KeePassX -- two version of essentially the same software. This software securely stores your passwords in an encrypted file. The only password you need to remember is the one to unlock the password safe itself. Install the Mac OS X, Linux, or even Windows version of this software on the USB thumb drive. You can even install all three version, and they can share the same password file.
3. Plug the USB drive into your main computer, and start using the password safe. Be sure to save your changes. KeePass isn't the most intuitive program to use, but it's not that bad. You can figure it out. When you're done, unplug the drive, and put it on your physical key chain. Take it to work and use it there too.
   
4. Just as important as using a password store is using it to generate new passwords. Don't make up passwords -- generate them. Trust me -- your passwords suck. Store the generated ones in the password safe. You probably have a hundred online account too -- don't be overwhelmed by having to change everything at once. Just generate and save a new password the next time you log into a website. You'll hit the most important ones sooner.
5. Set a three month time limit on the passwords (it's an option in the KeePass software). When the time is up, generate a new one.
   
6. Profit!

OK so maybe the last step is not quite right, but you get the idea.

A friend recently gave me a invitation to GrandCentral.com. It's basically a call forwarding service; they give you a phone number and tools to manage your incoming calls. I'm not 100% signed up for the concept yet, but if I do start using it seriously, I wanted a phone number that had some meaning. So I turned to phonespell.com during the sign-up process to find a number with a good mnemonic.

You can type a phone number mnemonic into soft phones like Yahoo! Messenger or Skype and it will automatically call the right number. I wouldn't be surprised if mobile phones let you do that too, either now or in the near future. So there may come a day when no one needs to know your number—just the mnemonic.

For every number that could potentially spell something (i.e. it does not have a 0 or 1 in it which is only 26.2% of all possible phone numbers), I copied & pasted it into phonespell. There are a lot of garbage numbers out there that don't spell anything. I ended up looking at 100 or so phone number in three different area codes before I finally hit upon 787-4733. It has a simple, neutral, one word menmonic – striped.

So next time you sign up for a phone number, be sure to have the phonespell site handy. It can help you get a phone number that's easy for you and your friends to remember.

This is a purely tactical move when buying something online. As I go through the checkout process, when I come across the field for a coupon code, I immediately open up another browser tab and do a search for ›name of web site‹ coupon code (or whatever terms they use to refer to it, like promo, discount…) I just bought a CD from yesasia.com, so I searched for yesasia.com coupon code. The first site in the results has an extensive list of codes including WGASIA5 which saved me $5 on my order.

It doesn’t always work, but it works often enough to make it worth the small effort each time you buy something.