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Happy New Year!
Welcome to 2008! Here’s to another great year for the Slaw community!!
I’m wondering if we can start this new year by sharing a recommendation or experience that would benefit others? Something that has made your life easier, or something that you wished you’d done a long time ago?
Let me start:
And I hate to admit it took me this long! … I installed my first Wi-Fi network at home in 2007. It was easily the best tech-lifestyle improvement change I could make. Laptops connecting, easier backups, the ability to watch the kids while working — it’s just easier. I wouldn’t recommend working at home without it.
On the non-techie front, quitting my day-job wasn’t a bad call either. ;-)
Anyone else?
One thing that made my life easier was using del.icio.us to tag things on the web. I used to use my linkblog for that purpose. With its bookmarklets (applets?) del.icio.us is so easy to use. When I am at work and I come across something I want to read later, I just bookmark it on del.icio.us and have it there for reading later.
I only started using it because I needed to teach it to others in my social networking tools course. It was in my first class where someone else was talking about how much she loved del.icio.us that the lightbulb went off in my head.
Happy New Year to everyone!
Your idea’s really good, Steve, and I’ve been thinking about whether there’s one particular thing that stands out. If I had to choose today I’d say that using a text editor for pretty much everything to do with words was my big revelation. Like the rest of the world, I used word processors exclusively, until coding html helped me reaiize that for 99% of what I do, a plain text editor is a whole lot faster and never never crashes. If I want to fancy things up — usually a huge time waster (what font should I use? should I bold this or use italics? etc.) — I can always open up the text file in Word and do just that. It’s a little like realizing that it’s faster and better to walk from A to B and to leave the car at home.
It may sound silly but I just bought a robust paper shredder (16 pages at a time) and spent part of my holidays finally getting to backlogs of various old papers and financial documents. It was very satisfying doing this and would encourage readers to not delay in getting a good shredder if it is something you have been putting off.
Hi Ted:
That is a good point! I have a mediocre shredder at home that takes 2 or 3 pages at a time. That doesn’t sound too life-shattering, but I could spend hours shredding the little bag of documents I have, so I have been putting it off. It is worth the money to buy a more powerful one that takes more pages. Also, having the cross-cutting feature (that makes sort of “confetti” instead of strips) is more secure.
My suggestion is rather simple – make sure you have the right printing tools available. I have an inexpensive laser printer (two actually) and an inkjet that is a scanner, colour copier and colour printer. Because I only use laptops at home, I had to buy some wireless print servers, but now I can use my laptop anywhere in the house and print as required.
The purchase of a quality digital camera. No more battery issues, can view the pictures through a number of interfaces easily (including TV), movies etc. Digital photography is no longer a chore.