Friday 27 July 2012

A Peculiar Personal Lifehack

This is another lifehack for you, although one which I'll admit is strange and personal to myself.

When it comes to internet browsing I'm still a Firefox person, but that doesn't mean there aren't things I would change. My worst habit at the moment is to keep lots of tabs open, which increases memory usage and also bloats (and sometimes even corrupts) a file called sessionstore.js. Therefore every once in a while I'll copy and paste all the addresses I've got in tabs into a Notepad document and then start a new Firefox session, clearing both memory and the sessionstore.js file.

Of course what you really don't want to happen is for Windows to apply an update and restart your computer. Bad times. Really bad times. I could blame Microsoft, and when I'm being irrational I do, but it is something I can change myself, and indeed have now done. I have done so in the following manner:

1) Stop relying on Notepad. It offers no form of autosave. It does odd things with line breaks. Frankly it's a woeful piece of software, which I've become too dependent upon because it is quick and handy to use to keep notes on. I know other options are available, but I have chosen to rely more on Wikidpad for keeping simple notes on. It too is simple to use, but features an autosave feature. I only have one page setup on the wiki on my laptop, as it is only meant for short-term use.

2) Keep a backup of sessionstore.js separate. This is simpler, I use SyncBack to sync a copy of this file once a day over to Dropbox. This means that if necessary I can pull this back to my main Firefox profile directory, fire up Firefox again and load up the tabs I did have open. Hopefully I won't need this again, but it isn't a large file to sync over to Dropbox and is a small price to pay for a bit of extra security.

3) Use online tools to effectively bookmark articles. For too long I've kept notes of addresses I've found interesting or wanted to look back on later. I didn't like when Diigo took over Furl, but after using their service for a while it still effectively does the same thing and if I had used Diigo before I used Furl I suspect I wouldn't have missed it. What I now need to do is to move my presently unsaved bookmarks to Diigo. It isn't even a service I need to worry about shutting down, as the bookmarks are effectively backed up by RSS to my own inbox.

So that's a personal quirk of mine, and how I'm working around it. Do you have any odd lifehacks, or a way to make this lifehack better?

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