Tools for Thought

Some technologies we resist out of principle. Some we resist out of fear. Sometimes they’re just not that relevant, or we’re too lazy to engage with the perceived learning curve. Every now and then I feel the urge to reflect on the ones I resist as a reality check. I resisted cell phones for years, [...]

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Even in its alpha stage of growth, Ubiquity has demonstrated itself as a powerful extension to Firefox search and navigation, but it has one obvious limitation: its scope is limited to Firefox. It would be nice to have identical functionality offline, at the operating system level. Enter Enso Launcher, the offline equivalent of Ubiquity. Like [...]

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Since my last post, I’ve been testing some of the newer commands that the user community has been adding to Ubiquity at a furious rate. The first 15 I listed came from Ubiquity’s default installation. For a full list of the default commands, enter help in Ubiquity or type about:ubiquity in the Firefox address bar, [...]

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Yesterday Google released its new Chrome browser. I anxiously downloaded it, tried it, then uninstalled it after 15 minutes. I failed to come across anything that compensated for the lack of extension support. Firefox has too many extensions I’m simply not willing to give up. One of these is the previously discussed add-on for the [...]

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(Play Video) Most people who think they lack ideas might very well have the opposite problem. They may have so many ideas that they obscure each other. It’s not a problem of having ideas, but of seeing them. Once they’re visible, it becomes easier to see their relationships to each other, prioritize them if necessary, [...]

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I’m surprised by how many people still don’t “get” text messaging, at least among adults in the US. This week the New York Times ran an article noting the low percentage of US cell phone owners that use text messaging. Despite most of the article being about email usage on cell phones in South Korea [...]

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Last week I wrote about my recent experiences using the spaced repetition flashcard applications Mnemosyne. It’s now the only program I use for learning whatever material I want to maintain long term, but for almost a decade, my main tool for spaced repetition was SuperMemo for Palm OS, which was one of the first applications [...]

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For the last two weeks I’ve been using Mnemosyne as my primary spaced repetition flashcard system. As such, I don’t want to present myself as an expert on the app, but I’ve become familiar enough with it at this point that it’s become integral to my learning. Spaced repetition is an optimized approach to rote [...]

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A few weeks ago I wrote about my raw experiences with a used Alphasmart 3000 (AS3K) I picked up for a song on eBay. In theory, the AS3K is an ideal writing instrument: essentially a paperless typewriter with no network access or media player of any kind. It’s just under two pounds, has an LCD [...]

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If you’re the kind of Google user who’s constantly looking for new search techniques and features, YubNub might already be familiar to you. If not, you owe it to yourself to get acquainted with it. YubNub is usually described as a command line interface for the web, making it appealing for geeks and daunting for [...]

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