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Top 10 Pervasive Tech Myths That Are Only Wasting Your Time The Positivity Blog says there’s a simple but forgotten method of building rapport, or establishing a good connection, before you start off on any important conversation: Just before the meeting, you just think that you’ll be meeting a good friend. Then you’ll naturally slip into a more comfortable, confident and enjoyable emotional state and frame of mind. This also helps you and the other people to set a good frame for the interaction … The thing is that the frame that is set in the beginning of the conversation is often one that may stay on for a while. First impressions last.
Of course, you may not always want to pretend you’re meeting with Cousin Steve when you’re heading into, say, a job interview, so the author suggests imagining how a previous, successful meeting went just before stepping in. Have your own mental reassurance hacks for striking up chatter? Share ‘em in the comments. Photo by polandeze.
How to Have Less Awkward Conversations: Assuming Rapport [The Positivity Blog]The web has democratised a lot of things since its birth, including the learning previously available only with a hefty tuition cheque. College site Education Portal has a handy list of the colleges that offer the most comprehensive course material online, including open-course trailblazers like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Tufts University, and programs like Stanford’s lecture podcasts on iTunes U. You can’t get a sheepskin for free, but you can further your knowledge and training for less than even the cost of a book. For way more college-based free learning, check out Wendy’s comprehensive guide to the .edu underground.
Universities With the Best Free Online Courses [via Wyome Blog's del.icio.us]Windows only: Look through, and repeat, your recent searches on Google, Yahoo and MSN with MyLastSearch, a free, tiny application that makes your browser histories more useful. The program supports Mozilla products and Internet Explorer (Opera and, presumably, Safari for Windows are left out), lets you search through your, er, searches, and can re-open queries in the same browser they were made in. Those who set their browsers to wipe clean their history on exit are, of course, not going to get much here, but it’s an otherwise useful tool to help find that great link you can’t remember how you got to before. MyLastSearch is a free download for Windows systems only, and can be run easily from a portable drive.
MyLastSearch [via Download Squad]Tired of forking over too much cash for gift cards for last-minute gifts? The Zen Habits blog points out more than two dozen life-hack-friendly, GTD-ish gifts that can be had for less than $10 and show a bit more thought than a Home Depot voucher. Amongst the goods suggested are a Moleskine notebook (likely not name brand at that price), pedometers, and a self-made cookbook. I’m sure our readers have far more great suggestions, however—what have you all given when time and money aren’t abundant? Spread the spirit of productive giving in the comments!
Two years ago, we brought you Lifehacker’s best apps of 2005, and many of them are still top-notch.
Now that Leopard’s long since dropped and the masses have seen the simple power of Time Machine, it might be a good time to take another look at similar solutions for other systems. Luckily, the Howto Forge has posted a helpful step-by-step through installing and configuring TimeVault, an integrated backup solution for Ubuntu and Debian-based Linux distributions. The tutorial walks through the process on an Ubuntu system, but would likely help other GNOME-based systems get most of the way there. If you’re more the DIY, terminal-hacking type, you can always use cross-platform solution rsync to get the job done.
Creating Snapshot Backups Of Your Desktop With Timevault On Ubuntu 7.10 [via The Linux Tutorial]
