Category Archives: Lifehacks

Lifehacks

Using Google Notebook as a Lab Notebook

I love Moleskine notebooks, first of all. I have used them as lab notebooks for the last 2-3 years, and they are excellent all around. However, they suffer from the main drawbacks of hard copy anything:

  1. They only exist in one place at a time.
  2. They are not searchable in any modern sense of the word.
  3. Sometimes I can’t read my own writing [not a drawback for everyone].

Before Moleskines I kept my logs on our lab wiki, but that was a bit cumbersome.

Enter Google Notebook. I’ve written about other reasons to use Google Notebook before, and around the time I made that post I started using it as a lab notebook as well, but I wanted to give it a trial run for a couple of months before posting about it.

A couple of months have passed, and here I am. I’ve settled on the following format:

  1. One notebook per month: Each month, I create a new dedicated monthly notebook.
  2. Old notebooks are moved to Google Docs: It is possible to export a notebook directly to Google Docs. This is a more appropriate place for a long-term, large collection of documents, and it keeps the Notebook uncluttered.
  3. One entry per day: I started off with each logged item in its own entry. This became cumbersome. Now, I use one entry per day, with timestamps throughout the entry whenever a new item is added.

In contrast to the Moleskine, or other paper journals, this one is present everywhere that I have internet access, and is completely searchable with Google juice. I’ll post on it again after another few months’ use if I have any further insights or enlightening experiences.

“Blink” Technology in my Credit Card – No Thanks

UPDATE 2007-11-11:
De-Blinked Chase Freedom Card
Card de-Blinked. Original post below:

My wife and I recently signed up for our first joint credit card. This will allow us to do things like buying plane tickets to see each other and dinners out without having to constantly update our Karma spreadsheet. The Karma spreadsheet (thanks Google) will remain in use for non-credit purchases.

That’s not what this post is about.

What it is about is the plastic cards that come with the account. When I arrived here in New Orleans today, I opened up the envelope and dutifully read the documentation that came with the credit cards. I noticed a mention of the cards having “Blink” contact-less checkout ability. I felt a lurch in my stomach. Sure enough, a quick inspection of the card and some googling revealed that this “Blink” thing is nothing more than a nice name for RFID.

RFID is insecure as used in this application. Your credit card number can be read from afar (up to 69 feet) while sitting in your wallet in your pocket or purse, without your knowledge. As detailed in the linked article, it is then trivial to create a duplicate card.

Of course, our government is also keen on RFID in passports. In the case of Chase, it turns out you can simply request new cards or get creative with a drill. I was going to do the latter, but ended up doing the former, because I want it to register with Chase that I don’t want RFID in my credit cards. It was no problem getting new cards ordered — for all my quibbles with Chase, their customer service on the phone is generally both helpful and English-speaking.

If you want to de-RFID your passport, I believe the recommended method is by hammer blow, but here are instructions for making an RFID-fryer from a disposable camera. Apparently tampering with passports is punishable by up to 25 years in prison, so tamper at your own risk.

My system is almost ready

Sorry I’ve been posting so little. Things were going so well, several posts a day, then silence.

Why?

I’ve been obsessed. Fixated. For the last 6 days, every spare moment I’ve been working on The Perfect System for managing GTD Next Actions. It has (or will soon have) everything I’ve ever wanted in a GTD system. Usable project filtering. Dependent tasks (on an individual basis)! A usable mobile interface. Calendar exporting for items with due dates. Requires only PHP and MySQL. Alas, it doesn’t include any fancy AJAX, only a little javascript.

I moved all of my tasks into it today. I’m still finding quirks. Once I stop finding quirks (and clean up some crufty code — I just learned PHP, MySQL, and the little bit of javascript this weekend, as I went), I’ll set up accounts for a few people to try.

I’ve already got three people interested. Let me know by commenting here if you want to be in on the alpha release.

Here’s a screenshot to tease you with.
phpMyGTD teaser

The Insidious Power of Marketing

I’ve started reading a blog called Get Rich Slowly. I’m not typically in a tight financial spot most of the time these days, but I’m trying to be more aggressive about (a) cutting costs and (b) actively saving more, in a savings account. In that vein, I posted a little while ago about my view that ads are often mental poison.

Today, I read a great post from Get Rich Slowly, entitled “Beware the Insidious Power of Marketing“. In it, he highlights a book called The Consumer Trap, which discusses product management techniques such as planned obsolescence, and talks about tricks retailers use to get us to buy more. In particular, he points out an example of how displays are placed to slow us down in grocery stores (from Why We Buy).

Supermarkets are just rife with tricks designed to get you to buy stuff that you don’t need or even want. As I mentioned in my last post on the subject, Fravia’s Anti-Advertisement and Reality Cracking pages detail a number of these. In particular, see Supermarket Enslavement Secrets. Essayists on Fravia’s site tend to use over-the-top titles, partly intended (I think) to “reverse” the benign views we tend to have of people’s attempts to trick us into buying their crap. The Supermarket page dates back to 1997.