Paper Ruler

Need a quick way to measure an object, but have no ruler handy? Try this:

Fold a piece of 8.5×11 paper from either top corner down to the side, being careful to line everything up straight.

A little bit of trigonometry tells us that the resulting diagonal edge is 12.02 inches, which is close enough for most uses.

Via Lifehacker

Fan-freaking-tastic

A few years back, I was forced to endure a several day seminar on Stephen Covey’s “Seven Habits of Highly Successful People”. This man has made millions by preaching the obvious. (To be fair, I suppose he did invent bullshit names for all of his suggestions - “Sharpen the Saw”, “Synergize”, etc…). It was definitely one of the biggest wastes of my time ever.

That’s why this McSweeney’s list is so damn funny.

How to cancel AOL

AOL puts their fast talkers in the cancellation department. They wheel and deal, offer you more free months, espouse the virtues of AOL, and generally make it really difficult to cancel.

I was ready for this, and managed to cancel my account in an eye-poppingly fast 7 minutes. How, you may ask? Here are some tips to remember:

• When they ask you why you’re cancelling, don’t say “I’m switching to DSL” or that “the price was too high”. These give them openings to try other sales pitches. Just say “I didn’t like it. When asked to elaborate, continue to say firmly “I just didn’t like it”.
• Similarly, when they offer you free anti-virus protection, just keep saying “I don’t need it”.
• Be firm and grumpy. They’ll try to get you into some friendly banter before they move in for the sale. Don’t let them waste your time.

I’m back on a high speed connection and combined with the new computer, everything feels zippy and responsive. I’m happy once again.

ICE

No, not ice of the variety that could keep me cool here in Houston. This ICE stands for In Case of Emergency. It’s a campaign being launched by some people in the UK that encourages you to list emergency contact numbers in your cell phone. Simply enter the number, give it the name ICE, and you’re in an accident, paramedics or other responders can contact the appropriate people.

I just put my parents’ info in my phone under the ICE heading. It’s a good idea that will only work if this reaches a critical mass of people, so spread the word.

via Lifehacker

Tadalists Greased Up

I really love Tadalist, which lets me keep a to-do list online. A few annoyances are fixed by installing Rich Manalang’s Ta-da List Enhancements Greasemonkey script. It adds all of your lists to the sidebar, so you can switch back and forth easily, which was probably the major problem with the web app

Another thing that always annoyed me was that all of your completed items appeared at the bottom of your list. Sure, they were greyed out and smaller, but I like to forget about things once they’re completed. So, I tweaked the script to hide all of those annoying reminders of past duties. In the future, I may add a box to toggle this ability, but for now, this suits my purposes just fine.

The script is released under the terms of the GPL, and is available here: Ta-da List Enhancements Enhancement

Be More Productive

In the spirit of Lifehacker and MarkTAW, I’m compiling a list of tools that I use to get things done faster, more efficiently, and to make myself more productive.

It’s important to remember that no tool will ever be able to make you get up off of your ass and get working, but they can certainly remind of things that you need to do. If used correctly, they can even make you happier about doing things that you need to.

First on my list is my Tada list. This site makes it easy to keep an online to-do list. There are other, more complex solutions, ala Palm Pilots or Outlook schedules, but I feel like adding an event, time, category, due date, etc. takes far too much time. I want to jot things down quick, order them easily, and be able to check my list from anywhere. Tada list makes that happen for me.

Another tool that I use daily is Metapad. It’s a replacement for MS Notepad that is a bit more full-featured but still free of bloat. When I’m doing research online, jotting down notes, or copying snippets from the web, I fire this up from my Quick Launch bar and go. It allows you to set font options easily, do some coding, and allows you to save in Win or *nix formats. (No more carriage return problems!)

For email, I use Mozilla Thunderbird in conjunction with Hotmail Popper. This allows me to pull my mail from 5 different accounts into one easy to manage interface. the spam filter is pretty good too - after a month or so of training, it ships all my spam to a Junk Mail folder, so that I don’t have to deal with it.

This is edition one of my recommendations. Leave a comment and weigh in on what you use, and check back soon for more tips.