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?

Update Time

I've had a busy time of things lately with my youngest daughter now reaching the grand old age of two, so I thought this would be an interesting time to review a few prior posts.

A Few Personal Lifehacks
Ah, backups... I've changed again! Remember how I started with weekly backups stored locally, and then advanced to daily backups? Well now I've gone a step further, and have finally started backing up some items online with Amazon Web Services. This is because I've had failures with both internal and external drives, and so therefore I opted for a third level of backup. Some photos - especially those of the kids - are too valuable not to be kept elsewhere.

Backups as a whole are an area I tend to think about a lot and consider a great deal. I know I consider my data too valuable not to back it up and keep those backups up to date.

The Problem With Joan Harris
We've now had five series of Mad Men, and I'm still not overly keen on the character as a person. Great series to show the acting talents of Christina Hendricks though. I have a new respect for her as an actress, although I still think no actress matches Elisabeth Moss on the show (Kiernan Shipka might get there one day, but not just yet).

I found season five of Mad Men quite odd. Brilliant at times, frustrating at others. I've seen some reviews which felt the whole series was brilliant, and yet I felt a little bit disappointed by it. And yet I'm still wondering where it ends up going in season six, and who'll feature, how they'll feature and even what year it will begin in. If it is 1968 that augurs well in my book.

vBulletin's Venture Into Blogging
Seems a bit odd to me that this continues to be the most popular post I've written, and by some distance. I haven't written about vBulletin for a while but I think as a whole the vBulletin team have lost their way. What was a simple forum software is now a massively bloated content management system. The overall package, which used to weigh in at a manageable 10Mb, now hovers at the 30Mb mark (which does matter for some of us). Where products like Wordpress will update quickly and simply through a wizard that even downloads the software package for you, the vBulletin upgrade is somewhat more laborious in comparison.

I still don't trust it as a stand-alone blogging platform (duh, I'm blogging here after all) but I can see how it makes sense when used with a forum (as I've tested myself over at Braves-Nation.com). Unfortunately the implementation isn't great, there is no uniformity in regard to tags that might see more linking between posts written by separate users, and once again, there's a mammoth amount of bloat there. Pity, it could be so much better and leaner. Unfortunately the way vBulletin has been going recently I can't say I'm hopeful of improvement, and I've even been considering switching to Xenforo.

My Top Three Twitter Peeves
Can I add one to this? People asking celebrities to retweet their causes, all... the... time. But you know what's great? Whereas another site (that won't be mentioned by name) consistently does things to annoy their users Twitter seems to find ways to make things better. However it wasn't until recently that I discovered that you can turn off retweets by anyone you're following. It's a game-changer, something else which enables you to get Twitter working the way you want it to.

A Time To Review

Far too often I'm spending time talking about things on this blog, and they get left there and never mentioned again, so on this occasion I thought it would be nice to review some of the things I've posted and what I've learnt since I posted them.

March 2010 - Backups

Yep, just a matter of days after posting about requiring a backup plan I needed to refer to it. It also led to me discovering some flaws with it, and that a weekly backup wasn't enough.

Due to a problem on my hard drive which began on the Thursday evening I had a backup which was nearly a week old. Fortunately it has been a quiet week, but I saw that just backing up weekly wasn't often enough. I needed a daily backup too. Not one which caught up everything, but one which would get anything important I had worked on in the past week.

So I added a daily profile to SyncBack, set it to only back up my documents and settings (as the main user on the computer), skip over large files like music files and video clips (which can usually be replaced easily, especially if burned from a CD) and again add the settings from the original weekly backup profile. This has ended up leaving me with an additional backup which comes in at around 5Gb and hopefully meets my needs. If you don't mind though, hopefully I won't need it too soon.

April 2009 - PS3 Games

Just needed to update this, especially as I've taken a bit of time this week to catch up with some time on what I would say are now my two favourite games: Madden NFL 10 & NHL 10. These are just two awesome games, with NHL 10 narrowly edging Madden as my favourite due to the fantastic feature where you can add in your own music for special points at the game. Of course I've not really done much with this, and certainly haven't added this in when Palace, er, the Ducks score.

April 2008 - Nurses Pay

My wife got paid today, her lowest pay in about eighteen months. Can I figure out why she got paid what she did? Absolutely not. In the words of Toyah Wilcox, "It's a Mystery".

May 2007 - Must See TV

Okay, that's a really tenuous link. Anyway, here's the point. Mad Men is fantastic, and I cannot wait until series 4 beings.

A Few Personal Lifehacks

I love Lifehacker. I can't remember when I first discovered it, but once it led me to Google Reader it became the first thing I read through it and it became the first feed I subscribed to there. They are always posting useful tips from around the internet.

So in honour of their from the tips box section I thought I'd follow in due course. I was going to make this a list of my favourite shortcuts, but then I thought that would be a) Not expansive enough, and b) Incredibly dull. So anyway, here goes nothing.

Lifehack 1: "You own your phone, your phone does not own you."

Discovered many years ago in a book called Clutter Control this is very simple. Basically you pick and choose when you answer your phone, don't feel obligated to pick it up just because you're there.

This is a great way to eliminate needless phone calls, especially when there are so many junk callers out there. They can't get to speak to you if you don't pick up the phone. And don't recommend the Telephone Preference Service, not when so many companies work internationally and consequently out of their jurisdiction.

(N.B. This is also why I ask most friends to call my mobile first. I'd get them to call the house phone, but I'm not paying the £600-£800 that BT want each month to show a caller's ID.)

So if you call me and you get no answer, don't take it personally. I'm at home, not working. Or failing that, call my mobile. I'm still friendly to my friends.

Lifehack 2: Keyboard shortcuts

Very, very handy time saver in all kinds of computer programs. Here are my top five:

1. Open Windows Explorer: Windows key + E.
2. Open a new Firefox tab: CTRL + T.
3. Copy...: CTRL + C.
4. and Paste...: CTRL + V.
5. Switch programs: ALT + TAB.

I think most people know these already, but they are every day timesavers for me.

Lifehack 3: A backup plan

I pulled this originally from a Lifehacker post, but here's my current backup plan.

Using SyncBack, I get the data from my Documents and Settings folder and copy that over to my external hard drive. To limit possible clashes I eliminate the following data:

• .lnk files
• *ntuser.dat* files
• *parent.lock* files
• *UsrClass.dat* files
• thumbs.db files
• Any directories named Cache or Temp

I presently run this once a week. In addition to that once a month I move these to a monthly folder and allow the backup to recreate itself from fresh (which has been handy in regard to making sure that I've got old copies of files on some occasions).

At some point I suspect I'll incorporate an online element to this, but that's presently a wait and see option.

If you like these posts let me know and I'll consider another one in future, thanks.