Simon Willison’s Weblog

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5 items tagged “lifehacks”

2013

What’s the best use in the office for my old Macbook Pro?

Set it up to display metrics or KPIs—by running http://www.geckoboard.com/ on it for example.

[... 35 words]

What do you do when you passionately believe in what you’re doing and have been seeing strong customer validation, but people around you constantly diss it? How do you persevere without a support system?

This is one of the reasons it’s a good idea to build a circle if trust with other entrepreneurs—or potentially even move to a “startup hub” region where more people are doing startups.

[... 110 words]

I want to write a short summary for every article I read online for future use. What is the best tool to do this?

http://pinboard.in is well suited to this. It’s a bookmarking service (like the old Delicious) with a bookmarklet that lets you quickly annotate and add tags to a link, privately or in public. For an extra fee the site will archive copies of the pages you are linking to as well in case they vanish in the future.

[... 89 words]

2011

Public Speaking: How can I control my stress during my presentations?

Make sure you have run through your talk, in full, out loud in the privacy of your home or hotel room at least twice.

[... 185 words]

2010

What are your best backpacking (world travel) tips?

If you take an iPhone, Dropbox + Instapaper are an amazing combination. Every time I book a hotel I drop the confirmation in to Dropbox (using “Print -> Save as PDF”), then sync it on to my iPhone. I’ve recently taken to grabbing screenshots of Google Maps and putting those in to Dropbox as well. I use Instapaper to grab offline copies of Wikipedia and WikiTravel pages about the places we are going to.

[... 88 words]