I was called a post-privacy person this week because I don’t care about encrypting my hard disk and oftentimes even have no passwords or pretty unsecure ones. I don’t agree. I think if the data you have on your disks isn’t worth stealing for anyone and cannot be used to compromise me, I just don’t see why I need to lock it down. You’re not important enough to justify securing your data – so stop worrying and enjoy life.
Leave the first comment ▶How to synch iCal, iCloud and iOS
Set up iCloud on the Mac using the system options pane. Setup iCloud on your iOS device using the iCloud preferences.
Then you’ll need to add a new iCloud account in your Mail, Calendar and Contacts preferences in both Mac and iOS preferences. On the Mac this means adding an account, activating the iCloud accounts calendars and deactivating the local ones.
Leave the first comment ▶Inbox Gravity Zero
I listen to a podcast the inventor of the INBOX ZERO meme speaks on (and that I can highly recommend!), and often times he said he hates when the meme is just thrown around and not understood after someone just dugg through 500 emails for 4 hours. I would like to propose a different meme, that should do a better job of actually reducing the email induced problems you face.
The word gravity has two different meanings that both suit the needs of my proposed meme “Inbox Gravity Zero“. Both are bad, and both need to be reduced. Yeah, even if the phrase isn’t that catchy.
photo credit: Hammonton Photography
Grave-ity
First there’s the meaning “grave”-ity, as in “How bad is it? Grave consequences!” This means, that an email that you get could cause stress because it might mean that you’re required to act upon it. When such an email arrives and your email client goes ‘ping!’, it might cause stress, because you feel you need to look for it.
To reduce this sort of gravity, you absolutely must use multiple e-mail adresses. In my opinion, you’ll need one work e-mail, and that’s the most grave-ity laden one. One trusted private personal e-mail is needed, where you just have a bit of grave-ity, as you give it only to friends and family and your most trusted webservices like your own blog and as you actually might want to see the mail. At last, one spammy e-mail that you can use for everything else is needed, which you can use as your open ID and to register and login in all the webservices that you use. This email has no grave-ity, as it will mostly be something spammy like or facebook notifications and the like.
When you have done this, you still need to sort out what emails you get when. I propose you set your email-catch-rate at 25 minutes. This means you’ll be notified when it’s time for a short break anyways. If you can set it up that way, just get the work and trusted email when you’re at work, if you have a smartphone you could even set only your work email at work and let the trusted email get delivered to your smartphone. This way you can easily see if you need to check the email or if it’s just a distraction.
Generally, you shouldn’t catch work-emails on your smartphone unless you get paid for reacting anytime. You should also not set your smartphone to collect the spammy email adress, as otherwise you become someone whose phone pings all the time and who can’t put that thing away.
Your home computer should get all of your email in my opinion, but I would set the catch rate to once an hour or deactivate the sound when an email arrives, so that you don’t go nuts.
Physical Gravity
Secondly, there’s the physical meaning of gravity, which means that an object draws in other objects. The higher the gravity of your inbox, the more mails will be drawn into it, causing work, stress and a sawtooth effect that effectively hinders your productivity. Reducing this sort of gravity can be done with the following ways:
- The separation of emails as just described will help, because the email clients on your systems usually only attract emails you want to see when you’re around the systems. What could help here too is using IMAP in all the systems, as this marks mails as read that you have read on another device so you won’t get pinged multiple times.
- Don’t receive newsletters and spam. Be very picky about what you sign up for. When you receive a newsletter that you cannot live without, keep it, but if you can just click the link in the email that gets you unsubscribed. If such a link is not in the mail, just set it as spam in you client, and make sure you don’t get notified if you receive spam mails. The few newsletters I want to get I also set to spam, so I can have a look at them when I want it, and not when they arrive in my inbox.
photo credit: underminingme
- Secure your spammy email adress. Be sure that there’s some kind of spamfilter that sorts out spam, as when you’re putting that email adress everywhere on the web, it’s only a matter of time until the spambots find it and add it to their catalog of adresses to send spam to. My spammy adress is at http://www.gmx.net, who are not very good per sé, but who have a very good spam filter built in.
When you have reduced your inbox gravity the best way possible, you won’t scream “INBOX ZERO” at Twitter anymore, but that’s because of the fact that it won’t be such a pain to do email anymore. Comments?
Leave the first comment ▶Deus Ex – Human Revolution Hints, Tips and Tricks
When I began playing this game, I could hardly find any hints for playing this game. Therefore I want to put out some. I’ll present which augmentations really count and which are worthless (in my opinion) and give some general tips for the game – I try not to spoiler anything.
Tips and Hints
- Link: How does hacking work?
- Each clinic has two praxis kits for sale for 5000 credits each. When you know where a weapons dealer is, it’s not really hard to get the money by taking single guns from your opponents to the dealer. Always make sure you buy them.
- Overall you will get all useful augmentations in the game, if you explore a lot. Exploring a lot gives you not only what you find, but a lot of XP bonuses too.
- Not killing enemies gives you more XP and is more silent, so use an appropriate weapon and knock people out instead of killing them. Hide them, as when they get found they can wake up again.
- Have a rocket launcher with you and save rockets for situations you can’t solve otherwise. The rocket launcher can solve every hard situation.
Good Augmentations
- Hacking power, and the augmentation to lower the chance of getting found while hacking. Important to get a lot of XP early on and also later in the game. Later in the game, hacking turrets is nice. I also bought the hack robot thingy, but there was no chance to use it so far.
- Raise carrying strength (there’s always more stuff you want, and the place in your inventory is very small – helps getting stuff to weapon’s dealers and helps having the rocket launcher with you when you approach boss fights)
- Raise lifting strength (with crates you can often get to higher places, use big crates to block line of sight or push away big things that stand in front of passages needed for stealthy actions)
- Social Optimizer (you get more XP if you persuade people and at least one level can be done without fighting just because of the optimizer). When you have it, just look for the weakest area of the person can choose the appropriate way of persuasion.
- Break though walls (at least 2 praxis kits and a lot of stuff are hidden behind breakable walls and some stealthy approaches are benefitted highly by this).
- Augmented reflexes (in many places two guards talk to each other and can be knocked unconscious simultaneously)
- The skin armor is the only really good augmentation when it comes to fighting.
Mediocre augmentations
- The Taifun looks cool, but I only used it once in a boss fight. Maybe I should just play this in hard mode. Again multiple enemies it’s hard to use, as they will have you killed before you get in the middle of them. Maybe good with a lot of battery and the cloaking augmentation, but there are rarely so many enemies in one place, and for those you also have the rocket launcher or grenades.
- The cloaking augmentation. If you hide well you should need this very rarely, though there are some few scenes where I just couldn’t fulfill all side-quests silently (police station) and it might have helped.
- Therefore the battery stuff might be useful if you use the Taifun and the cloaking, but I don’t like that battery only reloads to one battery automatically and everything else needs recharging by power items.
- The shooting thing is maybe good for players using a mouse, I played this game on a playstation and didn’t use and aggressive play-through. I didn’t use it.
- The jumping augmentation is okay, but not really necessary when you have lifting power and crates. But later in the game you will want to buy it anyways.
Worthless augmentations
- All stealth augmentations. Crouching towards enemies and keeping out of line-of-sight is always enough.
- All vision enhancements, maybe besides the look through walls thingy, that’s just handy from time to time, but not really necessary as you can always look around corners and have your basic radar.
- I bought the augmentation to fall down slower, but it seldom actives in the game, and I so far didn’t find even one chance to use the aggressive mode of this thing. Looks cool though.
- Breathing gas. Bought this in a situation where I didn’t see the thing that could close the gas vent behind a breakable wall. Did need it once, when an enemy threw a gas grenade at me, and once where it was easier to save a worker who was about to die from gas, but I don’t think you really need this.
- The vision timer and flash immunity… flash immunity is rarely worth it and the vision timer doesn’t shorten the time needed till enemies will become less hostile.
- Running speed and duration. What for? To play the game in 5 minutes less overall?
Buy augmentations in this order
- Hacking 3
- Silent hacking 2
- Lifting strength
- Social optimizer
- Break though walls
- Silent Hacking 3
- Reflexes
- Carrying strength
- Hacking 5
- Skin armor 3
- The stuff you want but don’t really need.
Hope this helps you a bit with your decisions. Have fun playing the best game I’ve played in my whole life. If you disagree or have any more hints to share, post a comment.
3 comments so far, add yours ▶The “Move The Content” Paradigm, Criticism And The Future Of Mac OSX
With Mac OSX Lion, the default setting for scrolling in Lion is that you don’t move the scrollbar, but instead you’re moving the content. This means the scrolling direction is inverted. Many people said they didn’t like this, but I guess they’re not using the touchpad – I grew completely accustomed to it within about three days, because it really feels more natural, especially when the scrollbars are hidden. Touching the webpage and moving it around feels more as if you’re in control.
photo credit: Andrea Costa Photography
The Future
But Apple won’t stop here. If you’re looking at Safari’s new way of moving back in the history by moving the active page to the right (effectively scrolling to the left further than possible) so that the last page in the navigation history appears below the active page shows where this could lead. If you try this left and right-scrolling in iCal and do it really slowly, you get an effect like in iBooks where a new calendar page slowly flips over. This kinda semantic way of moving things is also followed with mission control, where you push everything away from you (four-finger-swipe up) to get an overview of everything running and do the opposite to get back close to the windows. I believe this kind of semantic movement of windows and content will sooner or later work in a lot of menus, the finder, the AppStore and anywhere else where “back” usually would be a button.
Criticism
If this is the course of the OS, I wonder why Apple didn’t go further with this. In the new iCal, you can move forward and backwards with this new side-scrolling. So, if you move the content (for example the month August on a sheet of ‘paper’) to the left, on the right side ‘September’ slides in. In my opinion, this is exactly the natural way it should work. Why then, if you use three fingers and make the same gesture (three finger swipe to the left) it moves the other way round, back to July? Because three finger swipe left is defined as ‘back’. Putting the ‘back’-command on three-finger-swipe right sounds silly, but I think this is the way it should work as you’re always moving the content to the right when you’re going backwards, and vice versa. This would also give a sign to third party applications like Twitter, where in a conversation the same confusing three-finger-swipe to the left actually moves the content to the right side to return to the stream.
What I would like additionally is a three-finger-down gesture for minimizing or closing a window, or better some way to define gestures as triggers for actions in programs, as possible in BetterTouchTool (with that you can remap and define new gestures for touchpads and magic mouses).
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