Time Savers

Don’t wait for help if you lock your keys in the car

In Car, Life, Time Savers, Tip on 9 October 2008 with no comments

I’ve locked my keys in my car a handful times. The first few times, I knew someone that had a “Slim Jim”. I’ve also had to call AAA – how embarrassing.

But, if you’re a AAA member, you can request a credit card key that’ll fit in your wallet¹.

Note: It can only be used to open your car door, which doesn’t matter because you’re just retrieving your locked keys inside the car.

Don’t forget to present your membership card. ↩

Speed up podcasts for free with foobar2000

In Podcasts, Software, Time Savers, Tip on 20 March 2008 with 2 comments

A commenter (Freddie) was struggling with speeding up podcasts with Audacity. (See my how-to on speeding up podcasts with Audacity, version 1 and version 2.) Then, he found this article:

“Time stretching [MP3s] and other audio” by Blake Tolbert

I haven’t tried foobar2000 — because I’ve only been into the Kevin and Bean’s podcast from KROQ lately — but it looks legit and much simpler.

Oh yeah, welcome the new blogger! He doesn’t have a contact page and his comment form is broken, so let’s send him some traffic so he could see a spike from my blog.

Lessons learned from a studying frenzy

In Life, School, Time Savers, Tip on 12 April 2007 with no comments

The past two days, I’ve been studying like crazy for the exam I took this morning. (How’d I do? I’ll be extremely happy if I got a 70. There was just so much reading!)

Yesterday, between 9am and 1am (16 hours), I studied ten hours, napped for one hour, and maybe three hours for meals. I gave myself other small breaks, checking email, going through feeds in Bloglines, etc.

Tuesday, I studied for 4 1/2 hours in the afternoon.

I gotta get this into my head: if you spread out your studying, you’ll make it so much easier on yourself (mentally and physically).

Please learn from me.

I need to say something positive about all this, because it’s not the end of the world.

I had probably 3-4 cups of coffee throughout the day. But, at least they were all from the comfort of home. If I bought four Caffé Mochas from Starbucks, it would’ve been almost 12 bucks! That’s a little over one bag of coffee beans!
I took notes from the reading using TiddlyWiki. The learning curve is small, and WikiBar helps with that. (see “How to install a TiddlyWiki plugin“)
I recorded myself reciting the 34 vocabulary words, which needed to be memorized word for word. Then, I sped up the tempo in Audacity (which doesn’t change its pitch), added a split-second Sine chirp between terms, then listened to it while washing dishes, lying in bed, on the way to school, and right before class. If you listen to a song enough times, you’ll have it memorized; in my opinion, the same logic applies here. You could take this further, but perhaps that should be a dedicated post.

Add to Any

In Blogging, Time Savers, Website, WordPress on 25 July 2006 with 3 comments

Have you heard of Add to Any? I just did, and I’m really excited about implementing it here.

I initially wrote a quick plea for someone to develop a WordPress plugin that’s a dropdown box for multiple feed reader services. You know, I’d hate to turn you away because I didn’t have a button to add my feed to your feed reader. Fortunately, I didn’t post that question because I wouldn’t have used it after finding Add to Any.

Basically, I want you to be able to:

subscribe to my feed with whatever feed reader you use, or
submit a post (or the whole site!) to your favorite bookmarking service

If you’ve got a site or blog, integrate this. I’ll be doing this soon. If a site doesn’t use Add to Any, you’re in luck – there’s a bookmarklet! Man, great job, MicroPat!

Update: Thanks to James, I’ll be using iFeedReaders.

Shorter emails

In Asides, Email, Time Savers on 10 August 2005 with 2 comments

I’m going to adapt the method of writing short emails by simply keeping the message within the subject and ending with (EOM). Some people might not understand me at first, but they’ll figure it out and see that they won’t have to open the entire email. I haven’t heard of EOM until today. (Golf clap: 43 Folders, despite the fact that the weblog post had to do with Quicksilver)

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