Lifehacks Archives - Page 4 of 5

Jul 22

6 ways to pimp your del.icio.us

Lifehacks, Productivity, Tutorials 5 Comments »

Del.icio.us is great. Here’s six ideas on how to get more out of it:

Offline browsing of your “toRead” items – Many people have a toRead tag they use to flag pages they plan to review later. Realistically with the massive daily influx of new info, I rarely get a chance to come back to these items when I’m on the computer.
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However, when I’m away from the computer waiting in a restaurant, having news feeds in my phone is perfect for killing time. Rather than read random news though, why not read what you already bookmarked? While most mobile phones support web browsing and you could do it that way, surfing over your phone’s connection sucks and this isn’t time-sensitive info we’re talking about since it clearly wasn’t critical enough for you to read it at the time you bookmarked it. Instead, use an offline reader like Avantgo to cache these items each time you sync your phone. Create a free account, download and install their client to your phone, login and get the autochannel bookmarklet here and then navigate to your toRead page. Use the autochannel bookmarklet to add this to your phone, set the link depth to “1” and check the box to “follow off-site links.” This will grab your latest list of toRead items and cache them to your phone each time you sync.
Private saving for ubiquitous admin access – One of the advantages of using del.icio.us for your bookmarks is that you have access to them from any computer. You may have bookmarks to administrative features or sensitive info that you don’t want to share publicly though. Use the “private saving” feature in del.icio.us to conceal these bookmarks. You have to first enable it in under “settings > experimental > private saving.” Once you do this you’ll have a new checkbox on your posting interface in the upper-right that says “do not share” – this will make it so only when you’re logged into your account can you see these bookmarks.
Mind read your mentors – If you’re reading this then we already know you read blogs. And odds are that you have a few people you follow regularly who are consistently on-point with their thinking and what they explore and write about – your mentors. Unlike reading their blog though (the things they explicitly tell you) you can find their del.icio.us account and monitor it via RSS to follow their latest bookmarks. There’s a link at the bottom of every page on del.icio.us that allows you to get a feed of things that change. In this way, you know not just what these alphanerds are saying but also what they’re thinking about.
Expose yourself – The reciprocal thought to the above is that as an author of a blog yourself, you can expose your own bookmarks via your blog and make it easy for others to see what you’re thinking about. There are tons of options on how to pull this off. Personally I dislike the XML-RPC method of auto-posting del.icio.us links as blog entries – I prefer the linkroll javascript method of displaying the list in the nav as it keeps the most current ones on every page of your blog and doesn’t push them via RSS to people who just want to read what you write. They can always use the method above if they want to subscribe to your del.icio.us feed.
Watch the watchers – Be a bit of a “del.icio.us voyeur” and find out who has bookmarked things you’ve written and see what else these people are reading. You achieve this by finding an entry of yours that has been bookmarked by others and looking under the posting history column on the right to see the linked usernames. Clicking through theses user names will show you their account allow you to see other stuff they follow.
Create an open public dialogue on your site – Chris Pirillo proposed the idea of “freedbacking” recently whereby site owners encourage their visitors to tag their pages with the term “freedbacking” and make comments in the notes field to enable public feedback viewable to all. This is essentially what we’ve been doing on our Grid7 site since January via an iFrame on this page. You can do the same on your site and create this type of open public dialogue with your visitors. Keep in mind they may say bad things about you and it will appear on your site but doing it this way creates a “public whipping post” and forces you to deal with it immediately at risk of continued public embarrasment. Ultimately this creates an active community and more loyal following around your offering because people know you aren’t burying their criticisms and feedback.

It goes without saying that the Firefox extension for del.icio.us is a must if you post enough and as long as you’re at it, you might as well snag the FF Better Search extension so you have thumbnail images on all your del.icio.us links. If you’re new to del.icio.us and have a bunch of existing bookmarks from your web browser, you can use their nifty import feature to move all your bookmarks over and have it assign the most popular tags to the ones it already knows about. I don’t use their network feature because it doesn’t get me anything I can’t do via RSS. The people who I want to monitor I just follow individually via RSS by creating a “del.icio.us recon” folder in my bloglines and subscribing to each of their feeds. It’s better because they are now separated out by individual rather than being munged into one big list and they still have chronology.

If you have other ideas for how to get more out of del.icio.us, please share them in the comments section.

Jun 05

Free 411 calls

Lifehacks No Comments »

1-800-FREE-411 (or 1 800 373 3411).Â I don’t know how they’re making money with the service but I just used it and it’s all voice-activated and accurate for a local listing I just tried. No need to pay the $1 for 411 anymore… got it mapped to the “i” button in my treo now.

Tagged with: suppressrevivepost

Mar 26

Pluralistic Ignorance

Lifehacks, Psychology 5 Comments »

is a fancy term for the phenomenon that explains the bystander effect. I first learned about it a year ago when I read a book written by a local ASU professor called Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. Of all the interesting ideas in that book, I’ve seen this one confirmed at least weekly in my own life and as recently as yesterday. In an emergency situation, understanding the concept of pluralistic ignorance, the bystander effect and how to slice through them could prove life-saving.

The extreme example that illustrates the concept of pluralistic ignorance (PI) is the 1964 murder of a woman in NYC. This lady was stabbed to death in broad daylight over the course of two hours and the act was witnessed by no less than forty bystanders, yet nobody did a thing to intervene. Understandably, there was a huge stink in the media following the murder- "how could forty people let a gruesome event like this occur in plain view?" The conclusion at the time was that clearly society was in decline and people were simply becoming apathetic to others’ problems (?!?). Subsequent research, however, supported the PI theory that in situations where one is confronted with uncertainty, he/she checks the reactions of peers for cues on how to respond. When other bystanders exhibit calmness, the observer that thinks he/she is the only one who finds the situation disturbing reserves those doubts internally and expresses false calmness to fit in. Strange self-feeding anomalies like the NYC murder can occur because this "groupthink" pseudo-acceptability perpetuates itself amongst observers and actually strengthens the effect as more people join in.

Just yesterday in boarding a SWA flight on my way home from Lake Tahoe I experienced this effect firsthand. I was engrossed in the final pages of the latest Michael Crichton thriller and had missed the announcement for my section to board the plane. It was a full flight and when I looked up there was still a ton of people directly in front of me and I couldn’t be sure if my section had boarded already. I grabbed my gear and rushed to the group of people in front of me if they had already called the "A’s." About eight people must have turned around and just stared at me- not one person responded. It was an awkward moment returning the blank stares of these folks. Remembering the PI effet I raced over to a different line and singled out one guy and asked the same question. The people with him turned first towards me and then towards him and he immediately responded that they had in fact called the A group already. While this was clearly not a life-and-death situation, it does demonstrate an important lesson:

My Takeaway If you ever find yourself in an emergency situation and need immediate help from a bystander, resist the temptation to call blindly on a group of people for assistance and instead meet the gaze of one person, single that person out and call upon them for assistance within earshot of the others. Intuitively it would seem that the shotgun approach of calling on a larger group would yield more likelihood of grabbing someone’s attention, however, it has the opposite effect of setting stage for this abdication of responsibility to occur. By singling one person out publicly, you put the PI effect to work for you and create a situation where that person is now center stage in front of the others and at the very least will respond with concern and consequently generate more concern in the observers. This causes a self-feeding positive spiral that you want to occur. What’s interesting is that there is this focal point that is the reaction of observer #1 that is the fine line between a downward spiral towards complete apathy of the other bystanders vs. an upward spiral of a convergence of many people trying to help. If there’s a side you want to err upon in a crisis it’s clearly the latter and understanding the PI effect can be critical towards creating that response.

Feb 04

lifehack: whiteboard dot-size priority trick

Lifehacks, Productivity 3 Comments »

So the challenge is this: given the design constraints of a whiteboard (where the ink can’t be moved but can be erased), what is the best way to show priority of items on a todo list?

The idea of reordering the items isn’t very practical because it involves completely erasing everything when priorities change and rewriting the list every time. Likewise, using numbering doesn’t work well either because let’s say you have:

Fix plumbing problem on sink
Buy wedding gift for best friend
Mow the lawn
Return DVD rental

…and for whatever reason your friend decides to call it off last minute, you now have either a list that says, "1 3 4" or you have to erase and rewrite all the numbers for each item (not to mention it’s impossible to glance across the room at a long list and see the highest priority items without discerning all the numbers).

The solution is simple: make a dot next to each item of a size that is proportionate to it’s priority (larger meaning higher priority). This way you can enlarge a dot when it grows in importance and shave off a bit if its priority drops. Erase the items as you complete them and add new ones in their place as necessary. I’ve used this method for about a year now and while it may be old hat to some, it could be new hat (?) to others. My friend David just showed me a screenshot of a 37 Signal’s Writeboard that has started using the dot size of items to represent priority so it seems there is some validation to this method and that others are thinking along these same lines too. Try it out for yourself.
(and if you find it useful Digg it!)

Dec 22

lifehack: scanning and storing vital travel docs in gmail

Lifehacks, Travels 10 Comments »

Here’s a simple solution for the traveler who needs to ensure he/she has access to important docs while on the road. If you’re traveleing outside the US for any decent length of time it’s advisable to keep a copy of your passport in a separate place from your original in the event that you lose your wallet. So I’m standing in front of the fax/copier combo-machine trying to make a copy of my passport in preparation for a trip to Cancun tomorrow. I realize there’s no way I can run my passport through the fax machine to make a copy and decide that rather than making a trip to Kinko’s, I’ll scan it on the flatbed and print it out. Then I think "duhhh… if I’m gonna scan it why not just post a digital copy on my server and password-protect that directory?" Then the more I think about it, I realize "why not just scan every critical document I have and store them remotely?" Seriously, how many unforseen occasions could arise in which you need a copy of your health insurance card, or your driver’s license or whatever… and then I finally realize I might as well not even mess with my server/ftp/iis and instead email each jpg to my gmail account. I scanned and emailed each one separatley tagging the subject lines with "vitaldoc: passport" and "vitaldoc: birth certificate." With 2.5GB of free storage and near-perfect uptime, there’s really no reason not to store these critical docs in a gmail acct (assuming you trust the gmail security and are careful about how and where you access your account). And with the prevalence of internet cafes in most foreign cities, finding web access and a printer is a trivial task. If you have a secure USB jumpdrive you could store them there as well.

On that note, as far as the issue of security when accessing your email account from a public terminal- how have people handled this? I’ve just made a point of typing a bunch of random characters in notepad and then cutting/pasting my password from that instead of typing it in verbatim. I guess it’s possible that keyloggers have the potential to record cut/paste operations as well to reverse engineer the password but it seems like one of those scenarios (like using a CLUB on your vehicle) where an attacker probably has easier targets and would pass over this more-difficult-to-reverse-engineer password in favor of snagging just the plaintext passwords.

A completely unrelated tangent- Skype came through large for us again. My friend Benny and I are headed down to Cancun (actually Playa del Carmen) for the holidays for a 2wk adventure. After booking the plane tix we discovered that ALL THE HOTELS down there were sold out on every travel site we tried. Apparently they were hit pretty hard by hurricane Wilma and a bunch of the rooms are actually being used by construction workers. Fortunately we googled around and found this web site where you can sub the citycode in the URL and find local phone numbers of hotels in Mexico. I fired up Skype and we used some of my remaining skypeout minutes to bypass the travelsites and make international calls to the hotel managers directly. After about eight failed attempts we found one that had a vacancy which did not appear online and the owner was completely cool to us. Knowing Spanish, knowing about Skype and figuring out the pattern for the new areacodes in Mexico were the key pieces that facilitated this lucky break. I’ll be without email and phone for a few days. Happy Holidays everyone and Feliz Ano Nuevo.

sean

Nov 14

lifehack: techniques for getting cheap airfare during the holidays

Lifehacks 4 Comments »

First off, Southwest Rapid Rewards are transferable which means that if you are traveling to a city that is serviced by their airline, you should never pay more for a roundtrip ticket than the current ebay price for a rapid rewards voucher (which is generally about $300). Even though RR vouchers come imprinted with your name, according to their Terms of Service they are fully-transferable. I have actually been in the situation where I had booked a flight and was relying upon receiving an RR voucher from SWA in the mail which never came. The morning of my flight, the mailbox was still empty but I was able to run downtown to a ticket broker and snag an RR credit for $270 and then sell back my voucher when it arrived later the next week for $230 (flying essentially for $40 which was not bad considering the alternative at that point which was to purchase a same-day ticket at the counter from Phx to Dallas for $600+).

So next time you are facing absurd airfare…

check and see if SW flies to your intended destination
make sure your travel days do not fall on any of the blackout dates
and run a search on ebay and yahoo auctions for “rapid rewards.”

If you’ve got time to play with, a better strategy is to setup a persistent ebay search using FreeBiddingTools.com and then use your favorite RSS reader to monitor the results over a few days. Don’t forget local ticket brokers will have these too so if you are in a time crunch like I was, that’s an option. Lastly, below is a quick compilation of the various travel services I use to check for plane tix. A neat trick if you use Firefox as your browser is to put them all in a bookmark folder called “Travel” and then right-click on that folder from within FF and choose “Open in Tabs.” This allows you to quickly pull up all travel sites and run your flight search against each to find price discrepancies.