Learn to touch-type
If you’re a fan of life hacks of any kind and you can’t touch-type, you’re wasting your time. Just like the best current upgrade you can give your computer in terms of overall speed improvement is a solid-state drive, the best overall speed improvement you can give yourself when it comes to the time you spend on a computer is the ability to touch-type. I’m not kidding, and if you’re skeptical I intend to convince you.
I wrote a post over at Download Squad extolling the virtues of learning to touch-type. I feel very strongly that it is something that anyone can do that will provide them with a life-long skill that will make life easier for them.
Teaching kids the value of practice
My recommendation is to introduce eight-ball into school curricula, but in a specific way. Each kid would be required to keep a log of hours spent practicing on his own time, and there would be no minimum requirement. Some kids could practice zero hours if they had no interest or access to a pool table. At the end of the school year, the entire class would compete in a tournament, and they would compare their results with how many hours they spent practicing. I think that would make real the connection between practice and results, in a way that regular schoolwork and sports do not. That would teach them that winning happens before the game starts.
It’s amazing to me that Scott Adams was a banker before he became a famous cartoonist. He thinks like an economist. And by the way, this idea is brilliant.
Searching your Gmail more quickly
Earlier this week I wrote up a post at Download Squad about a new browser plugin called CloudMagic that can speed up your already pretty speedy email searches in Gmail:
CloudMagic is a Google Chrome and Firefox extension which indexes your email locally on your computer, and provides ridiculously fast results when you search. The extension provides a CloudMagic search field right in Gmail with a shortcut key of Ctrl-/ (rather than just / for Gmail’s regular search field). It features search-as-you-type that seems to react instantly to your keystrokes, and uses many of the same search operators that Gmail already uses, so you don’t need to re-learn how to search.
On a large email archive it can take a few days to complete indexing, but the search speed it offers will be worth it for some people.
Read MoreRacing video game controls real R/C car
This combines my childhood fascinations with remote-controlled cars and racing video games in an amazing way. I’d just love to see multiple cars, and a wider, more realistic track.
Complicated things made simple
This example animation is of a rotary engine, which I found particularly hard to envision when it was explained to me, and even when looking at diagrams in a book. But animated like this, it seems so simple and elegant. The others are just as interesting.
