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?

What I'm Running

Somewhat inspired by this Lifehacker post I thought I'd have a run-down on what I'm running at the moment. Now that I'm back online at home (hurrah!) everything is back up and running at full speed, and I'm back working as I should be.

Software

N.B. I install and check out loads of programs. Rather than give you a full and boring comprehensive list I've decided to cut this down to the programs I use most.

Firefox - My web browser of choice, mainly because it is so easy to customise it with extensions and themes.

Thunderbird - The Mozilla e-mail program, which finally saw me move away from trusty old Pegasus Mail. Again easy to customise and with superb support for multiple mailboxes, including access to Gmail though IMAP, which is fantastic (and somewhere where Yahoo! Mail lags well behind - they presently don't even offer this to paid customers).

Filezilla - Free and it works. Absolutely doddle to use for FTP. Love it.

Adobe Photoshop - I'm still learning with this really, but I love the power of it and the results it can produce. At the moment it is proving useful for things like birthday presents, re-touching photos and basic web work, but I want to extend my knowledge far beyond that.

Wikidpad - I'll admit, I'm a compulsive note-taker. However too often when I started taking notes in notepad I wouldn't save it, and then I'd lose my notes thanks to the beast that is Windows Automatic Update restarting my machine while I sleep (thanks for that, Mr Gates).

And so I tried Wikidpad, found it automatically saved what you typed effectively as you went along, and have used it happily ever since.

iTunes - I fought this for a long time, then gave in and began to use the Apple application. And to be fair I've come to love it. Plays music, check. Can be a one-stop shop to buy music, check. Has the power to generate playlists automatically, check. Downloads my podcasts while I'm asleep, check. Makes a cup of tea when I get up... oh, it can't do that.

PHP Designer - Ok, I should probably re-think this as although it is free the version I am using is two years old. However when it comes to editing PHP files I find this the easiest program to work with (at least among those I've tried to date). I periodically look for something better, but to date I've yet to find something I think I would prefer.

Microsoft Excel - I'm laughing a bit to myself in typing this, because when I first used Microsoft Office I probably used everything but Excel. I typed letters in Word, stored addresses in Outlook and went "Ooh!" at the catalogue of effects you could put in Powerpoint.

Then I moved away from home and real life took over. Excel has been vital for years, from wedding costs, to nursery plans and even Fantasy Baseball draft lists (there's the reason I learnt to develop outputting PHP to a .csv file!). I have my day-to-day expenses held in a password-protected Excel file. On an everyday basis I couldn't be without a program like Excel (and don't recommend Open Office, because I've seen people use it at work and to put it mildly, I'm not a fan).

Hardware

Office PC
- PC, built from barebone unit bought from Novatech. Runs Windows XP Home. 1 x 80Gb hard drive + 1 x 20Gb hard drive, backed up via SyncBack to a 500Gb external hard drive. 1 x CD writer drive and 1 x DVD dual layer writer. Five USB ports, two in the front and three in the back (insert your own Hector Brocklebank impression here).
- 1 standard keyboard, 1 Microsoft optical mouse (had for five years - never had a problem with it).
- 1 Kyocera 3600+ printer (still going!) & 1 HP printer/scanner.
- 1 x LG 17" LCD monitor.

Laptop
- Toshiba Satellite Pro. Runs Windows XP Professional. As a matter of personal preference I also bought a small optical mouse to use with it, as I'm not a fan of touchpads.

I sync my e-mail in what most people would say is a pretty odd way. I setup Thunderbird on both my laptop and desktop, and on my laptop I set the accounts up to leave messages on the server. I setup the same accounts on the desktop and set the accounts up to leave messages on the server for a day before deleting them. To date this has worked pretty well.

I also run all my e-mail accounts through Gmail, so I hopefully don't miss anything important if I'm away from either my laptop or desktop.