| ||||||||
RefBan
Thursday, December 20, 2012
Top Stories from the last 24 hours
Back to the Basics: Learn to Use Keyboard Shortcuts Like a Ninja
December 20th, 2012Top StoryBack to the Basics: Learn to Use Keyboard Shortcuts Like a NinjaBy Thorin Klosowski
Why Keyboard Shortcuts Make You Faster at Everything
Keyboard shortcuts get a bad rap because they're hard to remember, and learning one keyboard shortcut doesn't seem like it saves you a lot of time. But once you learn the lot of them, you'll definitely notice a boost to productivity because you're not unnecessarily reaching for a mouse. That is, you'll never reach for that mouse or trackpad unless it actually makes sense to do so. This makes you a lot more efficient particularly on larger displays, and feels a lot better than moving your hands around a trackpad. Photo by Samat Jain. How to Force Yourself to Learn New Shortcuts
You have a few different ways you can approach this. The easiest is to grab an application that shows you the keyboard shortcut every time you perform an action with the mouse. For example, if you use your mouse to click Edit > Copy, these programs will pop up the shortcut (Ctrl+C for Windows or Cmd+C for Mac). For Windows, we like Keyrocket and on Mac we like Eve. Similarly, KeyRocket for Gmail is a Chrome extension that does the exact same thing in Gmail. Alternately, you can run yourself through some drills to teach yourself the muscle-memory required to remember these shortcuts with Shortcutfoo. With Shortcutfoo, you run through a training program that teaches you shortcuts for programs like Excel, Photoshop, Gmail, and more by having you repeatedly enter them. Finally, if you want a quick reference guide to a ton of different keyboard shortcuts in different apps, Ultimate Windows 8 Shortcuts and CheatSheet for Mac pull up all the keyboard shortcuts for an app on the spot so you can reference them quickly. The cheat sheets are very helpful when you're learning the ropes and you might be surprised at how much you can do with a keyboard. Advanced Keyboard Uses
Use app launchers to do just about everything with a keystroke: With software like Launchy for Windows or Quicksilver for Mac you can make your keyboard perform almost any action you want so you never have to reach for the mouse. YOu can also launch apps and perform actions with Windows and OS X's built-in search tools, but app launchers will give you even more options. Make your own shortcuts: Chances are you have a lot of unused keys on your keyboard. Maybe it's that totally useless Scroll Lock key, or the End key you never have a use for. On Windows we like to use AutoHotKey to customize these keys to your liking (as well as countless other great custom shortcuts). On a Mac you create custom shortcuts with built-in software. Use text expanders to save you hours of typing: Finally, if you really want to speed up your day with keyboard tricks, few things work as well as text expansion. On Windows we like PhaseExpress and on Mac we like TypeIt4Me for text expansion. In this case, think of text expansion like a word-based keyboard shortcut. Type out a couple letters, and the text expander replaces it with a whole word. It saves you a lot of time, especially if you're always copying and pasting the same text. Learn Your Favorite Program's ShortcutsOf course, you really don't need to go about learning every single keyboard shortcut for every application you use. It's more useful to learn all the shortcuts in the software you use the most, and don't worry about the rest. Here are a few different guides for doing just that.
The 20 Most Common Shortcuts Everyone Needs to KnowEven if you don't want to dig into the deeper recesses of keyboard shortcuts, and few of the most common shortcuts can still save you a ton of time. If you need to really learn these set the below image up as a desktop background, or print it and place it on your wall (click to expand or right-click to save): The trick with keyboard shortcuts is that you have to train your muscle memory to just automatically go for them instead of a mouse. It takes time, and it's not exactly a fun thing to do, but it's worth it in the end. Once you get the hang of it you feel like a cyborg ninja who can instantly jump to anywhere in a text document, launch a web browser and research a term, and then jump into a spreadsheet to quickly create a table without ever touching a mouse. You'll likely never ditch the mouse completely, but that's not the point. It's about making yourself faster with both.  |
|
![Ask Lifehacker Live on Google+ Hangouts: The Entire Lifehacker Staff Is In [UPDATE: DONE]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_uy6lYlN23VXFm8zN4ESYtwsIwtzdKTlpZSMAHGe7jXBpICiPldlBUve73Nq-kNLhY_Ri3dnihKYj8IPjyYrspzejPKtVZnGgPOqUfSc9aMnUHYG7Gw2MrGupeNjPQa=s0-d "Ask Lifehacker Live on Google+ Hangouts: The Entire Lifehacker Staff Is In [UPDATE: DONE]")
The Twitter Police Beat and the Tolerant Left
December 20th, 2012Top StoryThe Twitter Police Beat and the Tolerant LeftBy Mobutu Sese Seko
It's this odious censorship that's necessitated institutions like Regent and Liberty University. Otherwise, kids will never learn the facts about America revealed by angels to only the wisest of our Hebrew Prophets—like how Jesus wrote the Constitution himself in tiger blood. (America: #Winning!) But of course, after eliminating all their other enemies, liberals have turned on their own, blogger and University of Rhode Island Assistant Professor Erik Loomis. You may have read him by venturing to Lawyers, Guns & Money, thinking it was some Warren Zevon fansite. (Seriously? You have a Cafepress store, but you don't sell guitar picks, Chinese menus or piña coladas? Fuck you.) It's actually a liberal blog, and there Loomis says liberal things. Often. Where people can see it and everything. What got him in trouble was his Twitter feed. Reacting to the shootings of children at Sandy Hook Elementary, Loomis tweeted that he'd like to see NRA President Wayne LaPierre's "head on a stick." To some people, that equalled a call for a ritual beheading. Now it's Loomis' head potentially on the chopping block. Maybe he was angry. In fact, a lot of people have come away from his Twitter feed (since deleted) with that impression. But Loomis' Twitter feed was surprisingly frank. (Full disclosure: we exchanged tweets.) He admitted to being angry that a bartender told him he couldn't use his laptop in a bar, when all he wanted to do was get a beer and work. He admitted to having a few drinks to get through writer's block. He took an honest—and almost universal—snickering amusement in admitting that he got to relevantly use the word "dildo" in a class lecture on sexual history. To most people, this sounds like pretty human behavior. Politics makes them mad; beer makes them feel good; words like "dildo" still make them laugh inwardly, like teenagers. But you have to remember the character of the Twitter feeds of many big-time bloggers, journalists and politicos. They become so reflexively self-censored, high-minded and depersonalized that they call to mind that Mozart line about opera from Amadeus: people so lofty they sound like they shit marble. But Loomis shoots from the hip. In this context, perhaps it was easy to think of him as a renegade prof. Then again, compared to the average New York Times bureau chief's Twitter, a teen's feed would sound like the DNA of Attila the Hun, Dracula, Napoleon, Rasputin and all the members of Body Count assembled into one human playing the GWAR discography. So, Serpentor crossed with Ice-T, basically. Of course, liberals are always going on about context. The intent behind words, the atmosphere in which they were said, the audience to whom they were addressed. So it seems particularly galling that the President of the University of Rhode Island (contact info here) issued this statement about Loomis' tweets (emphasis mine):
Who said anything about acts of violence? Somewhere a silent whistle outside normal auditory range triggered Allen Iverson, who's stuck in a tiled guest bathroom, spinning in circles and saying, "We're talkin' about tweets." Tweets, the internet's equivalent of yelling at the television with your buddies on gameday. Even then, context is key. About the last famous time I can think of anybody's head being stuck on a stick, it was Oliver Cromwell's on London Bridge, and that got taken down in 1685. (I haven't even bothered to audit Heads on Sticks class, because it's not in the distribution requirements, because it doesn't matter.) Loomis' career is now at risk for a metaphor that had as good a chance of being put into effect as someone calling for Wayne LaPierre to be drawn and quartered like William Wallace, pressed to death with stones like Giles Corey or—Christ, I don't know—exiled to Cappadocia with his slaves to think about the nasty things he said about the Emperor. You'd think that some ivory tower university president would remember liberals' appeals to context to explain how Michelle Malkin's whitewashing of American concentration camps seemed dangerous amidst a climate of rising anti-Arab eliminationist rhetoric. Or perhaps he'd recall liberals' disgust at Rush Limbaugh saying, "Don't kill all the liberals, leave enough around so we can have two on every campus; living fossils, so we will never forget what these people stood for." They were disgusted not just because Rush echoed old Nazi jokes about preserving The Jew in a museum or zoo as an example, but because he addresses an audience that embraces visions of new revolutions and removing the liberal cancer eating away at the people. And maybe that college president could have recollected why Sarah Palin—a pro-gun enthusiast known for hunting things down via helicopter and adored by gun owners—marking Gabrielle Giffords and others Democrats' congressional seats with cross-hairs was a bad thing and claiming that she was "blood libeled" was worse. Or he might remember liberals' invoking the context of Gabrielle Giffords' shooting when denouncing NRA-fan favorite Allen West's statement that he'd like to take anti-war congressmen over to Afghanistan to "get shot at" a few times. Or he might remember leftist critics' belief that West's urging liberals to take their message to "the bottom of the sea" transcended mere rhetoric when considering a tendency toward violence that got him drummed of the army, after he told a detainee, "I'm going to kill you," and fired a gun a foot away from the man's head. But, no, no—no nuance from these people who hate vivid language, beer, metaphor and dildos. Not when it's time for heads to roll because of a little imagery. In fact, I can think of no one who summed up this phenomenon better than RedState's Erick Erickson:
Wait, sorry, I'm getting all messed up. He actually said that regarding this tweet by a RedState co-founder:
But you get my point. Way to be tolerant of all voices, academia. Some people are willing to do more to stand for others than circle the wagons just for their own. Anyway, these were just some things I was thinking. I gotta hop on BART and head over to Berkeley. I'm late for my Human Rights Law class with John Yoo. Image by Jim Cooke.  |
|
After Sandy Hook And Virginia Tech, I'm Done With Violent Video Games
December 20th, 2012Top StoryAfter Sandy Hook And Virginia Tech, I'm Done With Violent Video GamesBy By Jeremy Norman
For nearly 30 years I have squashed anthropomorphic mushrooms, cleaved zombies, and eviscerated the avatars of faceless gamers from around the world. I have no interest in any of that now. Not after Friday. I was in college during Columbine. I remember sitting in my dorm room watching kids, just a few years younger than me, running for their lives as police descended upon their high school. I remember thinking how nightmarish it must have been for all involved—then turning on my N64 for a round of GoldenEye with my hall-mates. Unfortunately, less than 10 years later, I would witness that nightmare first hand here at Virginia Tech. I was a journalist for a local newspaper, and being familiar with the campus as a recent alum, I was sent to cover the reports of a shooting on campus. Little did I know what I was walking into. The horror of the day's events, as well as my personal connection with the campus, wrecked me emotionally. I thought I was going in to report on a double homicide. Something along the lines of a domestic dispute. Truth be told, I wouldn't have even covered it had our primary reporter not been sick. As I drove into the north end of campus (purely by happenstance, because I knew I could sneak my car into a lot and not be ticketed), I began to count the number of ambulances speeding away from campus—I stopped when I hit double digits. That is when I knew something horrible had happened. Once on campus the silence—broken only by sirens and a pre-recorded safety alerts shouting from outdoor speakers—was haunting. First responders carrying victims. Students looking shell-shocked. A police officer nearly drew a gun on me because I couldn't get my press pass out in time and I was (apparently) somewhere I shouldn't have been. What I remember most was how God-awful cold and windy it was that day. Wind so bad it felt like it could cut through you. The horror of the day's events, as well as my personal connection with the campus, wrecked me emotionally. Before April 16, games were an escape for me. As someone with social anxiety disorder (nothing horrible, just requires a little Paxil and some fresh air), I have always felt more comfortable by myself, so video games have always been something I have turned to for better or worse. But after the shooting, there was no escape for me. My feelings about what happened, what I saw, heard, had to report, would not leave me. They became a part of me. A part of my history. I fell in love with this hobby from the moment I set foot on campus in 1997, and now that memory is scarred. I don't want to explain to my son why daddy is shooting the guys on the television. Why that's okay, but when it happens in real life, people cry. My final class, ever, at Tech was on 2nd floor of Norris Hall, where the massacre took place. Not to sound over dramatic, but it is like a better part of my teens and 20s died that day. After that day, I went through a period, six months or so, where I hardly played anything. Slowly, my world returned to "normal," and eventually I was able to again enjoy the release my favorite hobby provided. Unfortunately, there is no going back now. Not this time. Everything's different. First of all, I'm 33, and the time I have to game has been drastically cut in recent years. Suddenly, the thought of staying up for some online exploits in Call of Duty falls a distant second to getting some much-needed sleep. But second, and most importantly, is my almost-two-year-old son. The children killed in Newtown were only a few years older than him. 20 little kids, no different than my own, are gone. All because some very disturbed individual was doing his own, real life perversion of what we do online every day. What those parents must have been feeling as they slowly realized their child would never be coming home paralyzes me with sadness. To think that could have been my son… I don't want to explain to my son why daddy is shooting the guys on the television. Why that's okay, but when it happens in real life, people cry. I have never played a violent game in front of him, but he already sees and hears and imitates more than I could ever realize (including, to my chagrin, some of my saltier language), so I don't want to have that conversation. Not yet. Black Ops II has already been traded in. Assassin's Creed III will follow. Sniper Elite 2, which I have been itching to play since picking it up on Black Friday, interests me no longer. No longer does a game provide an entertaining release. Instead it simply opens old wounds. I just don't want to do it anymore. I don't want to disassociate myself, saying it's just a game. I imagine that Cho disassociated himself from the horror he was committing just as we disassociate ourselves when we play "No Russian" on Call of Duty. Thankfully, most of us see the difference, but that doesn't make it any less uncomfortable. Please understand that I am not, in any way shape or form, saying that violent video games had anything to do with this or any other tragedy which has become all too familiar. I have long held the belief that adults should be able to choose their entertainment of choice, and that parents should be allowed to make informed decisions when buying games for their child. Information, not censorship, has always been my opinion. My decision to give up violent gaming is based upon self-preservation. No longer does a game provide an entertaining release. Instead it simply opens old wounds. When my son reaches his late teens, I pray that he is able to find simple entertainment in whatever the newest iteration there is of Call of Duty, Assassin's Creed, and the like. Entertainment, and nothing more. Jeremy Norman is a former newspaper editor currently working at his alma mater, Virginia Tech. Jeremy lives with his wife, son, and two dogs in Southwest Virginia.  |
|
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)