3. Back up your work. [...]

10. Don’t be scared. So many people have a guttural fear of technology—a fear of doing something wrong and messing up the whole computer or phone in the process. The truth is that it’s pretty hard to do anything that would permanently damage a computer or phone. Don’t be afraid to play around with things, make mistakes, and then figure out how to fix them. That’s how you learn. [...]

Check out and follow all Pam’s “Top 10 Things I’ve Learned from Living with a Nerd”!

Happy 2012!

I didn’t make any New Year’s resolutions. Why should the calendar decide when I’m supposed to improve my life in some way or another? However, once I was back from the holidays, ready to dig into work again, I thought about what I wanted to change. Along the lines of “life practice” that I recently read about. There are two things, I am trying to add to my routine: regular exercise and practicing the flute.

In 2010, I did manage for a few weeks to get up really early in the morning to go rowing even before breakfast. The reasons this ever worked for me were strong peer pressure (7 other rowers, cox and coach would not be happy if you were late) and knowing that this would be over in just a few weeks after Summer Eights. When I’m on my own, the nice, warm, cuddly bed is irresistible compared to going outside for a run.

I also picked up the flute again a few months ago, after years of not having practiced at all. My dear, did that sound horrible at first. Luckily, my college has this nicely sound isolated music room that all students can use, so my neighbours don’t hate me. On the other hand, that means I can only practice when the music room is free. If I remember correctly, there’s about 700 students in my college …

The solution was to swap exercise and flute practice. I get up a bit earlier in the morning to practice the flute. Nobody else ever wanted to use the music room at that time. It makes me happy because it’s fun and I already have something accomplished before breakfast. A perfect start of the day! In the evening, I do at least some small exercise as soon as I get back from the office. I wouldn’t want to do anything that involves thinking anyway. So far this routine is working well for me. Unfortunately the early flute practice likely won’t be sustainable when I leave college.

What do or would you get out of bed for just a little earlier?

Indian Summer (Wikipedia)

Altweibersommer (Wikipedia)

It’s warm! We’re in the middle of “Altweibersommer” (German: old women’s summer). The phrase probably comes from the word “Weiben” for weaving or cobwebs, and not “Weib”, that is wife or woman. In either case, it’s related to the silks, which some spiders use to fly to a new place, particularly this time of the year. They do look a bit like the hairs of old women, don’t you agree?

If you want to know more about Altweibersommer, you can check out the German Wikipedia, or look for the equivalent phenomenon called “Indian Summer” in English.

And don’t forget to enjoy the sunshine!

Roasted coffee beans (Wikipedia)

I really should have learned this by now, but I seem to still need this reminder: When I’m tired and unmotivated, coffee will not increase my productivity. It does make me more awake and alert, but not necessarily in a good way. I also get jittery, less focussed and more easily distractible. Small and ultimately unimportant things keep popping up in my mind, when they should be buried in the subconsciousness for the time being. They are usually tasks that can wait until the evening, the next day or whenever I have scheduled them. Coffee seems to be an ally to these small tasks against me and my big goals, such as my DPhil.

So, no coffee whatsoever for the next two weeks! I have just stocked up on tea bags, so I should be fine.

Thank you, WordPress.com, for the idea and the challenge! Maybe, I’ll try again next time. To anyone who is still on the Post A Day/Week challenge, keep up the good work and enjoy!

You can admire the result here not anymore, unfortunately.

I like the ReadItLater add-on for Firefox. It is so convenient to add the open site via a little button in the address bar and mark it as read in the same way. And with another button you can either open your reading list in a little pop-up or go directly to the next unread item, depending on which setting you prefer. Furthermore, ReadItLater allows you to download all the content of your reading list onto your computer, so that you can still read when offline.

Instapaper offers a bookmarklet to add the current site to the reading list, but to read or mark a site as read you have to visit the instapaper website and find that site in the list first. I do have hope that there soon will be a full Instapaper add-on for Firefox, though, as a full API has just been released.

I am also not quite sure which reading view I prefer. ReadItLater has more options to change the layout. But it strips out all pictures and delivers pure text. I like having the pictures belonging to the main text in there as well, though. In some cases, bits of the text were even missing in the ReadItLater reading view, in other cases, Instapaper would not be able to produce the reading view at all, whereas ReadItLater was perfectly fine.

Finally, Instapaper has native support for eReader formats such as epub and the one for the kindle, whereas you need separate applications to transfer ReadItLater content. This might eventually be a deciding feature, but without an eReader, I cannot try this out yet. So I will continue switching and trying for a while, and hoping that the two people behind Instapaper and ReadItLater get together and merge their services soon.

So my paper notebook won’t become an organizer. It was originally meant as a diary. Later I started using it to prepare texts, such as emails, for my touch typing practice. Now, I do the same with some of my blog posts, when I’m not near a computer. Typing the stuff afterwards already acts as a first or second editing step.

And for this purpose, I picked up one of the tricks from the first link, PigPogPDA, from the list mentioned above: Using Post-It tags to mark the current “collection point”, that is the page where I want to continue writing, and the “processing point”, meaning everything before this has been processed, i.e. typed, already.

Here is my interpretation:

My Notebook Hack

from Wikipedia

Since I’ve seen a Kindle in real life, I have pretty much made up my mind, that I want an eReader at some point. Not quite yet, but when I graduate, get a real job and will have to commute everyday, then I want one. I haven’t decided yet which one I’ll get. So far it looks as if the Kindle is superior to the competition, especially given the price range I’d consider. However that might all change in a few months. And I will need to properly evaluate, which features I want and which costs might be associated with that.

My main reading these days consists of various blogs rather than books. From what I’ve read, the official way to get blogs onto the Kindle is rather expensive, given a monthly fee of 1-2 dollars per blog, and currently 59 feed subscriptions in my Google Reader. There are some free or at least cheaper ways to do that. The most naïve one is using the built-in experimental web browser to visit the blogs, read posts in Google Reader as described here or here, or use one of the special online RSS readers for eReaders, such as G:RSS-Web or on the kindleuserforum. But the internet connection is supposedly rather slow, so I’m not sure whether this is feasible. The other options are services that automatically make the content eReader friendly for you to download or email. Examples are kindlefeeder and instapaper together with instascriber.

Apple Green

Burgundy Red

If I do get a Kindle in the end, at least I already know which cover I want. Only have to decide on the colour.

Update 2011-05-12: The twitter widget has moved to the left and might move again with another change of theme. In either case, you can find my twitter feed at www.twitter.com/almutei.