Life Hacks

TAINT -- Like Justin Mason, I am not an alpha geek. I'm a little anal in keeping A5 journals and I'm infected with my mom's packrat gene type. As part of my on-going therapy, I enjoy looking over the shoulders of Danny O'Brien, the ironman of alpha geeks. I've learned some very valuable things while reading Danny's thoughts. He shared some of them to listeners at "the best session of ETCON 2004, by far" (Cory Doctorow's review containing the term "intercomation"). Next year, I hope to experience some of these eureka moments in person at ETCON 2005.

• Use a todo.txt file because anything else requires more work to do.
• Channel as much as possible through email. Danny depends on e-mail for everything. I would overtax my mobile mail clients and burst my bank account for the phone charges if I did this. Justin pulls his newsfeed through rss2email and "couldn't be bothered with another desktop app."
• Hack scripts for every repetitive task.
• Sync instead of backing up.
• Make a CVS repository on a remote server, even your home dir.
• Web-scrape data then put it into data cylinders. I use askSam for my simple scraping tasks and rely on Electric Search for the heavy scraping.

To hack your way through life, you need to spend hours slicing and dicing Perl and Python scripts.

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Justin Mason -- "Life Hacks"
Danny O'Brien -- "Running Notes from Life Hacks"
Aaron Swartz -- "rss2mail"
SiteScooper -- great for the Palm OS
Simon Cozens -- info for the Friends of O'Reilly Camp
Life Hacks -- still isn't ready for publication but if you want an e-mail notification, tell danny AT spesh.com with the subject "life hacks" in the mail message.
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