{"id":286,"date":"2007-11-07T04:01:17","date_gmt":"2007-11-07T08:01:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/2007\/11\/07\/tech-tricks\/"},"modified":"2007-11-07T04:01:17","modified_gmt":"2007-11-07T08:01:17","slug":"tech-tricks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/2007\/11\/07\/tech-tricks\/","title":{"rendered":"Tech Tricks"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Here are a few low-tech computer tricks I&#8217;ve started doing lately:<\/p>\n<ul>\n    <li>I&#8217;ll periodically bump the wrong keys and find keyboard shortcuts that I didn&#8217;t know existed for sending an e-mail mid-sentence. It&#8217;s one thing when you&#8217;re e-mailing a friend ramblings about cheese (they may even be glad the e-mail got cut short?), but when you start e-mailing important people, it becomes a bigger deal. The last thing you want to do is e-mail the chief of police and say, &#8220;I&#8217;m working on an article and I&#8217;d like to mee&#8221;&#8230; The simple &#8216;fix&#8217; is to not let your e-mail program dictate how you compose a message. The &#8220;To:&#8221; line comes first. Do it last, so you can&#8217;t mess up.<\/li>\n    <li>When attaching files, do it<em> before<\/em> you write the e-mail. I can&#8217;t believe how often people (myself <em>very much<\/em> included) send e-mails referring to attachments, but forget to add the attachment. If you can get in the habit of making attaching the file first, it&#8217;s a lot harder to mess up.<\/li>\n    <li>When downloading things from the Internet, <em>always, always, always<\/em> click &#8220;Save&#8221; instead of &#8220;Open.&#8221; I tend to do Open instead, because it seems like a needless step to save it to the Desktop and then open it. But in the past week I&#8217;ve lost <em>two<\/em> files because I click &#8220;Open&#8221; on a draft someone sends me. I spend a long time revising it, and hit Save every minute or so. But it gets saved to a temp directory that&#8217;s virtually impossible to find. Today I spent considerable time poking around the directories, and found that what&#8217;s stored is VERY limited. If you&#8217;ve visited any sites after you last saved the file, it&#8217;s practically assured that your file is 100% gone, because the cache will get purged. As I&#8217;ve said before, I&#8217;d consider this a <strong>fatal design flaw<\/strong>, and I can&#8217;t believe more people don&#8217;t have problems with this. So always, always, always save to your Desktop and <em>then<\/em> open. And, if you&#8217;re working on a file and about to close, don&#8217;t close it unless you&#8217;re positive you know where the file is being saved.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>All of these are things that take some time getting used to. But I think they&#8217;re like, say, using a PDA: you have to commit to doing it 100%, or it&#8217;s utterly useless. If your calendar doesn&#8217;t contain everything you&#8217;re doing, it&#8217;s worse than having no calendar at all. I need to work on automatically clicking that &#8220;Save&#8221; box when downloading a file, and I need to work on re-ordering, into a non-intuitive way, the way I write e-mails. But if I can get the habit down right, the first time, in mid-sentence, I get an error that I can&#8217;t send an e-mail with no recipient named, it&#8217;s paid off. And the first time I don&#8217;t lose an hour&#8217;s worth of revisions and additions, it&#8217;s paid off.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Here are a few low-tech computer tricks I&#8217;ve started doing lately: I&#8217;ll periodically bump the wrong keys and find keyboard shortcuts that I didn&#8217;t know existed for sending an e-mail mid-sentence. It&#8217;s one thing when you&#8217;re e-mailing a friend ramblings &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/2007\/11\/07\/tech-tricks\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,10,14,15,18,22,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-286","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computers","category-ideas","category-lists","category-living","category-ocd","category-programming","category-rants-raves"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=286"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}