Five things that made my computing better
Between work, school and my own time I spend at least ten hours a day in front of a computer. I’d sometimes find myself frustrated without really knowing why. After a lot of consideration I’ve figured out a few ways to get rid of the irritations and put the joy back into computing. Here’s some suggestions based on what worked for me, even if they aren’t suited to your habits they’ll spur some thinking.
1. Tweak the hell out of your browser interface. I had to dedicate half of a day to understanding my browsing habits and my frustrations before I could really get this down. I decided that I mostly use my browser maximized and I’d like to increase vertical space. I accomplished this by moving the URL bar to the menu bar, bookmarks to the icon bar, and getting rid of the bookmark bar. I also switched to small icons and installed the Whitehart theme to reduce border space on my tabs.
After that I identified my biggest timewasters. To accommodate them I’ve added the del.icio.us and Adblock Plus extensions. (If you get Adblock Plus, be sure to also subscribe to the ElementBlock list to get rid of all those empty spaces.) Now I no longer get those damnable floating ads. Between all these tweaks browsing is once again a pleasure.
2. Get a keyboard that feels good. Ignore the fancy buttons and macro support if you’ve never used them like most people I know. I invested $69 in a Model M with USB connectivity from Unicomp at pckeyboard.com (pckeyboards.com is an entirely different company). I missed the springy action of a model M and this keyboard has it perfectly done. Unicomp bought the patent from Lexxmark so they do make real model Ms, as well as sell originals for the purist. Mine is unlabeled, similar to Das Keyboard II, to keep me from looking down all the time. I’m a touch typist but I’d still look down occasionally and this is curing me of the habit slowly.
3. Install a desktop search tool and a run bar. This is easy with gnome’s deskbar applet which lets me run applications, search my del.icio.us bookmarks, or search through my desktop’s beagle index. Running applications this way is a lot faster than starting the terminal and typing an application name, it’s great to have a search for del.icio.us, and searching beagle is much faster than grepping through find output.
Beagle is the closest thing that linux users have to Google Desktop. It indexes all your files in the background and front end applications can pull that out. Gnome Deskbar groups results into different categories like Conversations for anything said in Gaim or Thunderbird, Documents for any document files, or News Articles for any RSS feeds you subscribe to. And it’s fast!
4. Stop checking five different email accounts! Filter, filter, filter! I’ve phased out my webmail accounts that don’t allow for POP3, the ones that do get checked by Gmail, and my Gmail is automatically pushed to my phone as well as downloaded to Thunderbird at home. (This is also a handy way to get rid of spam.) I use filters based on the beginning of the subject line to separate email lists and I have several profiles set up so I can change my From address easily from a pulldown menu.
5. Unclutter your program bar. Most people keep their desktop clean but comparatively few tidy their program bar. In Windows you can do this by right clicking on the Start menu and clicking Explore. Create new folders to organize different programs and drag them in there. Be sure to do this for your username’s start menu and the All Users start menu. In Gnome, right click on Applications and click Edit Menu.
That’s all for tonight. Happy tweaking!
