Editor’s note: The following except on "Memory Aids" comes from Increasing Personal Efficiency (1925) by Donald A. Laird. Some re-formatting and condensation have been applied to the original chapter.
The strength of your memory depends upon the way in which you memorize rather than upon how much it is used. What you want to do is to learn the best ways of memorizing. After you have learned these, follow them rigorously until you have them ingrained as habitual ways of memorizing that you use without th...
Seaton Dubman
Posted on November 1st, 2017
Partition managers aren’t at the top of many people’s app list, but they’re an essential part of modern computing. Even if you don’t think you’ll ever use it, it’s worth keeping at least one Windows partition manager installed. It can help you do everything from solving boot issues to fixing corrupt USB drives. Windows comes with a native disk partition manager. Creatively called Disk Management, it’s functional but uninspiring. Furthermore, it lacks some the features of some of the best third-party apps...
Seaton Dubman
Posted on October 31st, 2017
If you’re a tech enthusiast of a certain age, you can still recall the following: "Wait, I can check my email in a browser?" We’ve been enjoying the benefits of web-based applications for many years now, and they’ve only grown more sophisticated over time. But as our lives have migrated online, it has raised many privacy concerns. Furthermore, many providers start by offering free services to consumers, only to introduce paid or "freemium" models later. Some of these still can’t find their footing, and e...
Seaton Dubman
Posted on October 30th, 2017
Few figures in history have had as powerful an impact on American masculinity as the cowboy. While the mythologization of the cowboy began all the way back in the late 1800s with dime novels and Wild West shows, it wasn’t until the advent of twentieth century cinema that the cowboy cemented his place as an icon of manliness. In the same may the myths of the Greeks and the legends of the Vikings espoused certain ideals and inspired men of the past, Western films contain lessons in heroism, epic adventure,...
Seaton Dubman
Posted on October 27th, 2017
Believe it or not, some people still print documents on physical pieces of paper. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software takes those printed documents and converts them right back into machine-readable text. We’ve found some of the best free OCR tools and compared them for you here. No OCR program is perfect, so you’ll have to check the results and fix a few problems. Still, it’s a lot faster than typing the entire document back into the computer. Each of these free OCR software tools has its own s...
Seaton Dubman
Posted on October 27th, 2017
Anyone can write code. But good code? That’s where it gets tough. We’ve all heard horror stories about spaghetti code, massive if-else chains, entire programs that can break just by changing one variable, functions that look like they were obfuscated, and so on. That’s what happens when you try to make a shippable product with only a semester of programming experience under your belt. Don’t settle for writing code that works. Aim to write code that can be maintained — not only by yourself, but by anyone ...
Seaton Dubman
Posted on October 26th, 2017
When you first start scripting in PowerShell, it can be tempting to package up a series of commands. However, if your script fails you will not know where to start troubleshooting. To save yourself from wasting time trying to guess why your script failed, you should use error handling. There are four parts to PowerShell error handling: the Error Action parameter, Try/Catch blocks, the Error Variable parameter, and logging. PowerShell Error Handling the Easy Way The first time you want to handle errors is...
Seaton Dubman
Posted on October 26th, 2017
If you use Google’s two-step authentication system to protect your Google accounts, you could accidentally get locked out. It’s one of the biggest risks of two-factor authentication. And if you can’t get a mobile signal, then you can’t get the needed SMS messages in time. What can you do? You fall back on one of the oldest storage systems known to man: paper. Backup Codes (Can) Come to Your Rescue I recently asked a few of my tech-savvy friends if they knew about backup codes for when Authenticator fails...
Seaton Dubman
Posted on October 26th, 2017
