Hacks

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29
Sep 08

Reminder – Productivity Seminar this Friday

Just a reminder – this Friday we’ll be hosting a productivity seminar in 208 Manning Hall, from 10-11:30AM (Before CRADLE).  All students, faculty and friends are invited.

To find out more information or to propose a 10-minute talk, visit the website:  http://academicproductivity.pbwiki.com/ (password: SILS)

Sessions include:

  • 10:10 – 10:20 – Inbox Zero – Erin White
  • 10:20 – 10:30 – Your Computer’s Desktop is Not a To-Do List – Mike Brown
  • 10:30 – 10:40 – Literature alerts and push-button citations – Fred Stutzman

FULL INFO:

What: Open seminar (unconference style) on academic productivity–methods, tools, tips and tricks

Where: 208 Manning Hall, UNC-Chapel Hill

When: Friday 10/3 from 10 – 11:30am

Are you struggling with information overload, focus and concentration, or the quiet chaos of an unstructured, unscheduled “job” (despite all that ILS training)?  We feel your pain.  Join us to share your ideas
and learn from others.  We’ll discuss productivity methods and systems, tech tips, the latest tools… and just vent.

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15
Sep 08

Hacking Unit Structures: Google Suggest and iTunes 8

Two tips that have made my life better in the past day:

I can’t stand Google suggest.  Even though I’ve set the preference to make it go away 1,000 times, it keeps returning.  I think something with Firefox and new tabs makes Google forget your preference.  To fix this permanently, set your Google bookmark as follows:

http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=0&hl=en

Every time you load Google in a new tab, you’ll reset the preference with your bookmark.  If you call up Google by actually typing in the URL – then you’re out of luck (unless, of course, you want to type the preceding URL).

Next, the new iTunes (8) has removed the preference setting that allows you to remove the pesky “link to iTunes store” arrows that appear next to songs.  To remove, follow Tech-recipe’s formula: open up a terminal and paste in the preference as follows:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes show-store-arrow-links -bool FALSE

Restart iTunes, and the links go away.

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29
Aug 08

Firefox 3 Tweaks

I’ve recently moved to Firefox 3, and I’m pretty pleased with the performance.  Firefox 3 feels snappy, seems to handle JS and memory leaks well, and is all-around pretty impressive. Here are my tweaks:

I’m not a fan of the awesome bar – I simply don’t like interfaces (like Google Suggest) that create a lot of activity while I’m typing.  To disable the URL bar, set browser.urlbar.maxRichResults to -1.

Also worth noting is that the malware and phishing protection that come default in Firefox 3 do send your browsing history to Google.  This is not new from Firefox 2, but it is worth mentioning, as you are uniquely identified and correlated in the data.  To turn this off, de-select the two “Tell me…” options under Firefox’s Security settings.  I ran packet traces and verified this does stop Google data collection.

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22
Aug 08

On hacking your (Brother) printer

Slate has published an article about one of my favorite topics – how to hack your printer. This fascination of mine started a few years ago, when during the middle of exams, my printer decided to stop printing because it was “low on toner.” Up until that point the pages were fine – crisp and black – so I decided to do some research. As reported in the article, many printers come with ink-level monitors, little lasers or light beams that monitor remaining ink supplies. My printer, it turns out, is particularly draconian, refusing to print if it senses low toner. I’ll make that decision, thank you!

Hacking a Brother HL-5150 DNThe hack for my Brother HL-5150 is quite simple. The printer shoots a light beam through the laser cartridge. If the printer can’t see through the beam, it assumes everything is OK.  With a little tape or a sharpie, I can cover the window on the toner and fake my printer out. Recently, I decided to “permanently” fix my printer by covering the onboard LED with electrical tape. For the exact location, you’ll need to click through to the Flickr picture and see my note.

I’ve found that this hack gives me anywhere from 300-500 extra pages of good-quality printing after the printer has declared itself “dead.” You’ll know you need to swap toner when the pages start graying out – i.e., when everyone else in the world decides to install new toner. It’s infuriating to imagine how much Brother has padded its bottom line with this stupid feature, so it feels great to fight back.

Hacks / Software — 103 Comments
18
Apr 08

Productive Unit Structures: Introducing Freedom

A few years ago, I used to judge the quality of a coffeeshop by the speed of its wireless network. Now that I’m working on my dissertation, I find myself desperately searching out places where I can be network-free. In this college town, it is difficult to find a work or study place where you can avoid clouds of wireless internet.

In an attempt to resist the encroachment of network into the spaces of productivity, I’ve created Freedom. Freedom is a Mac application that disables your computer’s networking capabilities for a selected time interval. Some of you may turn off your network when you need to be productive; I’ve done that, but always found myself popping the network on at my next break (and losing 20 minutes to YouTube/Wikipedia/etc). Freedom takes this approach a step further, locking you out of your network for your selected time interval; Freedom enforces freedom.

To download freedom, visit the project’s page.   After you download, simply mount the disk, and drag Freedom.app to your application folder. To run Freedom, double-click the application, provide your password and time interval, and Freedom will do all the rest.

Once Freedom’s time interval completes, it will display a friendly message and enable your network interfaces. A reboot is the only circumvention of the time limits you choose. The hassle of rebooting means you’re less likely to cheat, and you’ll be more productive. Simply closing the application will not return your network interfaces. When first getting used to Freedom, I suggest using the software for short periods of time.

For those who may worry, Freedom is non-destructive. It uses simple POSIX functions for the management of network interfaces. Therefore, if you’re a sysadmin, you can circumvent Freedom. However, for the rest of us, Freedom is technical enough to enforce downtime. With Freedom, you can be network-free to write, code, design, arrange or just GTD.

NOTICE: For Freedom support, please go to Freedom’s new website, http://macfreedom.com

Hacks / Software / Thoughts — 13 Comments
28
Mar 08

Fixing Information Overload in Twitter

As someone who has started or run a few web projects, I’m used to the complaining blogger. And because of that, I try to stay away from being the complaining blogger. But I think that Twitter is about to drive me crazy with information overload, and I think I know how to solve the problem. So here’s a go.

Increasingly, Twitter has begin to feel like a collection of RSS feeds. My Twitter home screen is my personal newsreader. Unfortunately, it is completely dysfunctional. Some people I follow for personal reasons, some people I follow for work. Some people post often, some people once a week. I want to read every single message written by some people, and others can float by. Sort of like any other inbox, I guess.

If you’ve used Twitter, however, you know that all your messages go into the same place. Everyone is treated equal. There’s no method to deal with the information overload inherent in the system, there’s no way to mute over-Tweeters, there’s no way to have any control over the information space.

This may have worked in the early days of Twitter, where the interaction was supposed to be ephemeral – some messages you caught, some float by, who cares. Unfortunately, Twitter has grown up as it became more mainstream. People are saying “Did you see my Tweet” just as they would say “Did you get my email.”

We know how to deal with this: Folders, labels, mute buttons, regular expressions, etc. We need Tweetboxes, we need Tweetfolders to separate contexts, we need better strategies to deal with the information overload. And this is just in regards to incoming information – the multiple-audiences problem is another, more difficult problem.

Looking around at Twitter clients, I don’t see any that support such functionality. But I’m not really interested in using a Twitter client – I just want Twitter’s web interface to work. Let me create some folders, or tag my contact into a few different bins, so I could sort my incoming messages. A mute button would be nice as well, but right now folders (or labels, if you want to be Gmail-y) would really help. Look at the existing patterns that work with RSS and inboxes, and give us that. Because this current all-or-nothing isn’t the right answer.

Hacks — 9 Comments
19
Mar 08

Practical Unit Structures: BibDesk Importing and Templates

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been organizing my citations in preparation for proposal writing. I’m really terrible at the citation-management process; I just let pdf’s pile up in folders on my desktop, putting them into a citation manager every few months. The reason I put this off is the process is so tedious – hand-entering citations is about the last thing I ever want to do.

Today I’m going to share some tips that may make your citation-management process less painful. If you’re a grizzled academic you probably know all this stuff, but fellow grad students may benefit from this. First and foremost, I use BibDesk as my citation manager. BibDesk is for the Mac, it is free, and it is one of the best pieces of academic software I’ve ever encountered. I highly recommend it if you’re looking for a citation manager.

The first bit of advice is with regards to the citation-import process. This is fairly general advice and not specific to BibDesk. If you’re tired of hand-entering citations, many times publishers will provide downloadable citations from their websites. For example, if one of your papers is hosted by Sage, Sage’s site will allow you to download a citation directly into your citation manager. Generally these sites will provide the citations in various formats; the good news is that BibDesk will import almost anything. As an example, here’s a link to a paper. To download the citation, simply click on the “Download to citation manager” button and you’re set.

Different publishers have different approaches and techniques, so you’ll have to sift through the sites to find the option for downloadable citations. ScienceDirect is particularly stupid, requiring you to be logged in to download citations. Other sites spit out invalid files, so you’ll have to touch some stuff up by hand. Its somewhat incredible to think that publishers haven’t got citation exporting right, but I’ve learned not to be surprised by academic publishing.

Now, if you can’t find citation exporting on the publishers site, the academic search engines Google Scholar and Microsoft’s Live Academic provide downloadable citations. To turn on citation downloads in Google scholar, open the preferences and select “Show links to import citations into [your bibliography manager].” A link will appear next to all search results allowing you to export the citation directly into your citation manager. Beware, however – the results are often incomplete, incorrect or referring outdated versions of the paper. However, I’ve saved more time than I’ve lost with Google Scholar, so it might be useful to you as well.

The previous tips will work with any citation manager; my next tips are BibDesk-specific. BibDesk is built for integration with LaTeX, which works fine for some of my papers (but not all). Sometimes I just need to export a list of APA citations which I tack onto the end of Word file. Unfortunately BibDesk makes this difficult by default. To solve this problem, you need to use Templates.

With export templates, you can define a custom format for exporting citations that can be included in a document. Unfortunately, there’s no built-in for exporting to APA (or any other format that might be useful). I was able to find some APA-like examples, but none that fit APA exactly. So I went and hacked on a template, and now I’ll share it here. Linked here are two templates, that you can import into BibDesk. The first is APAInlineTemplate.txt, which will generate the (Lastname, year) inline citations you can include in your document. The second is APAFullCiteTemplate.txt, which will generate full citations to include at the end of the document. Download them both as a zip file here.

To install these in BibDesk, open up Preferences->Templates, and then click the plus button. To install, give them names (“APA Inline Citation” and “APA Full Citation” work for me), then select the files (you’ll first want to move them to ~/Library/Application Support/BibDesk/Templates). Use txt as the type. Once you’ve got them installed, right click on citation in BibDesk, select the “Copy Using Template” dialogue, and then select an APA style. You’ll now be able to copy APA-standard citations directly out of BibDesk for inclusion into your document.

I should also note that I am only responsible for hacking these templates – I believe I downloaded the originals from the BibDesk site and modified them. I’ve added conditionals to make them more forgiving (say, you don’t have the Address of the publisher) but there may be weirdness if you’ve got funky data. And the template doesn’t address every style of publication – but it covered most of what I had in my library. To find out more about templates, read the BibDesk wiki page here, and here’s a link to the manual.

This stuff is pretty dense – it took me a while to figure it out, but I’m glad I spent the time. BibDesk is now much more useful to me, and I hope I’ve saved some time for you as well.

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