The Coding Horror blog has written up “Computer Display Calibration 101″.
“If you’ve invested in a quality monitor for your computer, you owe it to yourself– and your eyes– to spend 15 minutes setting it up properly for your viewing environment.”
It also points out that Microsoft Media Center has a decent display calibration wizard built in. That I did not know.
Unfortunately since the DVI input on my monitor went south for no reason that I can discern, I’m back in VGA hell, but reading this post has given me a boot up the bum to actually get that fixed.
Computer Display Calibration 101 [Coding Horror]
Zen Habits had a thought provoking post on the differences between habits and tasks, and how and when you might include habits (or tasks-you-want-to-become-habits) on your to do list. The thing I really appreciated about this post was the idea of identifying or choosing ‘triggers’ for habitual behaviour:
“I wake up at 4 a.m., after being triggered by an alarm clock. My getting up triggers my habit of starting my coffee and drinking water. Now, I’m using the drinking water as a trigger to exercise.”
That gave me a “lightbulb over the head” moment, and an idea for training myself to exercise every day, rather than just three days a week. Yay!
Filter all of your RSS feeds through web application FeedHub for a single, customised RSS feed that only delivers content that best matches your preferences. Just upload your OPML file (the file that holds all of your feeds) to FeedHub and then subscribe to your new FeedHub RSS feed. You can add or remove feeds to FeedHub at any time and select favourite content categories through a snazzy drag-and-drop interface. FeedHub dynamically adjusts what content you receive based on your reading preferences so that hopefully—in time—your feed will deliver all the content you want and very little of what you don’t. While there are probably those sites from which you’ll always want the full content, FeedHub could come in particularly handy for those feeds that have a low signal-to-noise ratio.
FeedHubWe’ve all got our methods of cutting through distraction—whether at home, the workplace, or your email inbox—but sometimes we need to surpass conventional distraction-filtering methods and get a bit more creative. Weblog 43 Folders rounds up six guerrilla office tactics that can help you avoid common distractions. For example: Smoking the bacn – Similar to my “no press releases” trick, filter any email that contains the string “to unsubscribe.” Although many of these certainly will be valuable (sign-ups, Google lists), that string means there’s a good chance they’re also bulk messages that are being generated automatically.
If you’ve got your own set of unique guerrilla office tactics for email or anything else, let’s hear them in the comments.
Field Reports: Guerilla Office Tactics [43 Folders]Windows only: Clean up and organise your Windows Start menu with free, open source application SMOz (Start Menu Organizer). With SMOz you can arrange your Start menu content by category through a simple, Windows Explorer-like interface. If you’re not sure where to get started, try using one of the automated templates, which will move recognised applications (like iTunes) into pre-defined categories (like Multimedia). Granted, fewer and fewer of us still rely on the Start menu since the proliferation of application launchers like Launchy, but if you still prefer the old point and click of the Start menu, SMOz is an excellent tool to clean up the mess. SMOz is a free application, Windows only.
SMOz [SourceForge via Inspect My Gadget]If you’ve ever scratched your head at dress code jargon for interviews or business meetings and still don’t know the difference between “business casual” and “semi-formal,” worry no longer: web site Dress Code Guide recommends all the appropriate articles of clothing for different situations. For example, if you’re a male and need to know what counts as “business casual” garb, the site suggests a collared shirt with an optional jacket or tie, high quality pants and dark leather shoes. The guide suggests women wear pressed white blouses, knee-length skirts or slacks and closed-toe shoes (does this seem a touch archaic?). Dress codes can be difficult to nail down since they’re ultimately very subjective, so share your interpretations of the casual to formal gamut in the comments.
Dress Code GuideIf you work in a job where you have to estimate work—whether you’re a freelance worker, consultant, or regular Joe or Jane Q. Worker who needs to let your boss know how long it’ll take to finish a project—you know that a poor estimate can lead to lots of undue stress. The Web Worker Daily weblog offers an introduction to making appropriate and realistic work estimates so you don’t end up with this kind of last-minute stress.
Estimate in inch-pebbles, not milestones. When you’re faced with a large piece of work to estimate, don’t try to come up with a single number to cover the entire job all at once. Break it down into pieces, and then break those pieces down into pieces until the pieces are small enough that you can see how you would do each one and put a number on them. As a general rule of thumb, if the pieces take more than 4 to 8 hours, they’re not small enough yet. Most people have trouble guessing their time to perform any job that will take longer than that.
Share the estimation tips and tricks that keep you stress-free and productive in the comments.
Web Worker 101: Estimating Basics [Web Worker Daily]Ever have to crop or resize a picture to fit it better on a web site but end up disappointed with the content you have to lose from the photo? Using a method called liquid rescaling, your pics can be rescaled while retaining almost all of the pertinent content, so you can get the best of both worlds—a smaller image that retains everything you want. If it still sounds a little unclear, check out the video to see this brilliant idea in action.
If you’re a fan of the open source image editor GIMP, you can download and install the Liquid Rescale GIMP plug-in to get liquid rescaling results (after you install it by moving the downloaded files into your GIMP directory, you’ll see the Liquid Rescale option under the Layer menu). If you don’t feel like installing anything, you should try out the Rsizr webapp, which does the rescaling from the comfort of your browser. Both tools are a good deal slower than what you see in the very cool video above, and neither are implemented to the full extent of what you’re seeing in the video, but the results are still promising.
Liquid Rescale GIMP pluginRsizr [via Photojojo]If you built your media centre powerhouse on the cheap but didn’t quite understand how to set up the free Web Guide software (which lets you schedule and stream recordings from your browser), CyberNet has detailed setup instructions.
Windows/Mac: Freeware streaming television application Joost has released the 1.0 beta of their snappy, attractive on-demand video player. We took you on a tour of Joost a while back, but since then Joost has seen significant interface upgrades, more content deals, and—most importantly—has dropped the invite-only requirement. If you’re looking for a high-quality television experience on your desktop without building your own DVR or rolling your own BitTorrent season pass, Joost is currently the best solution out there. If you’ve been putting Joost through the paces since we last mentioned it, let’s hear how it’s been working for you in the comments.
Joost
