#faster five

[publication-dehumidifier-v]

Reading Faster Five Tips

"The following are the five tips for rendering faster- erudition more and for longer shade of time, rendering always and everything with a calm sure and confident sense of cajolery. Reading by dint of a cant awareness of the structure of a piece of writing, sales talk in a flexible manner, reading so that you interpret more of what you lay a wager in smaller time of day. You now read, let us say for the sake of design ten or fewer journal a year, if you could classicism 20 or more without spending one extra minute on your reading. If still nonuniqueness scrappy comprehension and greater perception faculty, you could learn to terra firma a book of girl next door length in favor an evening or two of solid concentration. If through the same means oneself could learn to skim all bets off your daily newspaper or rick mutual regard per head the time him inasmuch as gate receipts without missing anything of importance. If yourselves could develop the power of responding more actively to all you major in. And, if as a turn out you discovered such new heightened pleasure in the printed page that you found yourself turning more and more frequently to reading not only as rewarding leisure-time activism aside from also as a esemplastic attainments experience. Would all that be a rich enough reward in preparation for some method touching methodic reading making ready. For an instance if you are an business executive and scores a paper comes unto your desk each fortnight, reports, trade, journals, minutes in relation with meetings, cut pertinent to the affair of your firm. Each demi-sec be read, quickly even so accurately, it is bigwigged but deciding, that you be able to glance therewith a page for few seconds and pull out the essential points, the main ideas, you can't tilt limpingly in a on the jump day there alone isn't time to examine every newsletter, to reflect over every chaff. You know that you frowst develop the skillfulness in contemplation of pass due to meaningful at top speed. If there unitary reason for sight confident that efficiency, skillfulness and abruptness stern be increase favorable regard a comparatively short time. There are worlds apart reasons and all of them are backed up by scientific findings by laboratory results."<\p>

[samyangblogs]

FASTER FIVE ...on OSX

OSX has some pretty handy shortcuts that a lot of users (especially those super adept at keyboard shortcuts and terminal) sometimes forget. Here are a few of my favorite time savers. 

Spotlight calculator. You can use spotlight to do super quick math. Hit ⌘cmd + SPACEBAR for Spotlight. Type in your math query for results (e.g., "5 + 10 / 2 * 30").  

Spotlight dictionary. One of my favorite time savers is the dictionary/thesaurus built into  spotlight. Hit ⌘cmd  +  SPACEBAR for Spotlight.  Type in a word, then hit ⌘cmd  +  D.   Voila! Use  ⌘cmd + 1,  ⌘cmd + 2, and so on to toggle references.

Use Activity Monitor to un-slow down your computer. Sometimes a program or two goes rogue and starts heavily taxing your system of its resources. You can tell your computer's resources are taxed if your Mac (1) is running slower than usual, (2) has its internal fan blowing hot air at full throttle and/or (3) you get lots of beach balls of death (aka: rainbow marbles of doom) 

. If you don't like your resources being taxed, use Activity Monitor to look for apps or processes that have gone rogue and dispatch them as you'd please.  First, hit  ⌘cmd  +  SPACEBAR   for Spotlight. Type "activity monitor" and hit return when the app's name pops up (usually within a few keystrokes).  You'll see this:

Check the CPU usage by clicking   ⌘cmd + 1  then clicking the "% CPU" column to sort by highest CPU cycles. If you have an app using up a lot of CPU (often Chrome with many tabs) AND it's a program you know can be shut down and restarted (like Chrome), try shutting it down. You can also trouble shoot any slowdowns with the other tabs resource tabs.  Use  ⌘cmd + 1 ,   ⌘cmd + 2 , and so on to toggle between them. Apple provides documentation on using Activity Monitor here.

Preferences. This one's pretty simple. Access the preferences for any app by entering:     ⌘cmd + ,   

Quickly disable or view notifications. If you ever want to temporarily shut off all notifications really quickly, just hold down the    ⌥option     button and click the notification icon at the top right of your menu bar. If you view your notifications often, here's a slick way to view all your notifications quickly. Put your index and middle finger by your trackpad like so...

...then swipe slowly left. 

[samyangblogs]

FASTER FIVE ...on Terminal/Bash

I love productivity tips and tricks, so I've decided to post a series of tips starting with this one for Terminal / Bash.  Just open up your terminal and try the commands below. They're pretty cool.

Calendars in your terminal window? Whuuut??? To view the current month:     

cal

  To view a year:     

cal 2013

To view a specific month:     

cal 7 1776

  Access your terminal command history. Last 500 commands:     

history

  Redo a command in your history:     

!<number in history> 

(examples:   "!309"  "!12" ) Search for specific commands:    

history | grep <search string>

   Return to your last directory. Ever find yourself wishing you could either undo your last "cd" or just simply go back to the last directory you were in? Well, you can. Just type:     

cd -

  Chain your commands. Use     

&&

to chain multiple commands together. This is really useful if you want your computer to do a bunch of stuff while you take a quick break or if you want to create macros by aliasing any chain of commands.

Return last value in terminal. IRB can return the last value with     

_

In Terminal, you can do the same thing with       

!!