If you’ve only got two clamps because you live in an apartment – you can hack them into any length you need.
Tag Archives: Hacks
No Laptop
Shoutout to this cool person I met in the lounge at Heathrow.
We got talking while she was setting up. She explained – wherever she goes she has a full keyboard, 2 monitors and a powerful setup. She always left her laptop plugged in to external monitors at home and she had it plugged into external monitors at work, so why not just carry the tiniest part she needs.
I love it.
If you are looking at an apartment in a building with a gym, make sure someone uses the gym equipment while you are in the apartment. Are you ok with that noise during the hours the gym is available to use?
Unlockers
My new office is the nicest place I’ve ever worked. It’s gorgeous.
As part of a more intentional office strategy, not everyone comes in at the same time. For occasional “everyone in at the same time” events we have extra overflow space.
But since all the desks are shared, there’s a clean desk policy. Anything you don’t want to take home goes in a locker. You pick an empty locker, put your stuff in, set the code and lock it. When you return, unlock it with the code. Simple!
I love lockers because I can use them as dead drops. When I had to return a kiteboarding kite or send someone a present it’s more fun to put it in a locker and message them the combination. Sneaky fun!
But I just found a terrible hack:
The lockers unlock for any code.
I discovered it accidentally when I went to open the wrong locker and put in my code. It opened and I, a fool, thought “That’s so weird that they put in the address of our last office as the code!” Then I moved on, until I did it accidentally again. Then I went hog wild and tested that ANY four number opens it.
I’ve let the admin team know but I also feel the need to go put presents in every locked locker until they get it fixed.
Avoiding Dumbscrolling
Like you, I enjoy small bursts of dopamine delivered at irregular, unpredictable intervals and I’ll do nearly anything to keep getting them.
This doesn’t often align with my long term or medium term goals.
I’m trying to be conscious of how I’m spending my time, so I noticed a while ago that I was on Youtube Shorts for… hours. Just scrolling and scrolling. Sometimes laughing. It’s not really doomscrolling, just… dumb. I’m on Youtube shorts because I’m too old for instagram or tiktok.
One of the best hacks I did around that was:
- Enable Screentime on the iPhone
- Set a limit of 1 hour for youtube
- Forget my Screentime password
So now I get interrupted when I run out of time and have to go waste my life doing something else. I’m sure I could reset my screentime password and figure out how to get more, but this is just enough to stop me and get me to switch activities.
It also gives me a feeling that I don’t want to use up all my precious delicious time up early in the day, so I don’t zone out too long anyway.
Am I doing this right?
My Dad bought some clear practice locksmith toys and sent me one. I didn’t read the instructions but I think I figured out the secret. This is good right?
ShreddingÂ
No room for a shredder in the Sky Castle.
Doing a little scanning and shredding in my non-baby time.
​
A speech called “The Nontrepreneurial Spirit” about the benefits of working for companies, the crappy side of being an entrepreneur, and how to do what you want while getting paid vacations and not having to deal with accounting etc.
A prime-time sitcom where one of the minor characters is bitterly aware they are fictional but hides it from the others to not seem crazy.
A game where you hunt animals, then you hunt people, then you are hunted. For mobile phones.
Poison as a Service – firefox and chrome extensions that instead of hiding your actions on the web the perform more background noise type actions. Perhaps they swap your tracking ids with those of other users. For systems where there are insufficient penalties for putting in bad claims, make it much much easier to submit claims.
Key idea: When you are faced with an all consuming monster, you don’t fight it, you feed it more than it can handle. Let its strength become its weakness.
I was hacked.
Gross. You probably weren’t getting updates on RSS feeds. I figured out the full story, but my guess is that I didn’t update WordPress when there was a security update out there.
I feel dirty. When I saw all of the spamvertising hidden in my footer I felt like I helped make the world slightly worse. Sorry, folks.
Greasemonkey Hack: Adding tags and autosuggest to trunkly
The Backstory
del.icio.us was awesome. It was my first introduction to truly social software. It was my first introduction to tags and folksonomy vs. taxonomy – which blew my tiny mind.
And it was useful. Immediately, quickly, crazy useful. You could find the stuff you had seen! You didn’t have to be on the computer you had originally seen things on! You could bubble up lists of things you were interested in! I was struck with love.
Then Yahoo bought it and did the thing that Yahoo does to promising and interesting websites. It starves and kills them. So delicious is now getting bought by AVOS.
The New Thing
I’ve moved on and Trunkly looks like the best replacement so far. It is free, they will import all of your delicious bookmarks, scrape your twitter and facebook feeds, and one of the first things they built was a way to get your stuff back out of the site. I always like to have an exit strategy. I suggest trunkly as a delicious migration. The developers are really responsive and they have the freedom right now to do new and surprising improvements.
Not a small benefit: It is EARLY and short names on trunkly are available. So I was able to get http://trunk.ly/mk
Finally, the Point
The trunkly submit bookmark form is a bit crap though. I fixed it. See:
Turns into:
You need the Firefox browser and the excellent Greasemonkey addon. Got those installed?
Great – now click here to install Autosuggest Tagging for Trunkly.
. You can always see the source or file bugs on it at the UserScripts.org page.