April 2005

Apparently I’m a productivity guru now:

“I really need to spend a day sitting down doing the Chris Metcalf lifehacks thing, and organizing all my projects into folders and such…” - A friend of a friend in a forwarded email.

Whenever people take an interest in the nerdy little hacks I post, I’m quite surprised and flattered. So I’ve decided to start posting more Lifehacks. If this kind of stuff interests you, please leave me a comment and let me know how you feel.

So stay tuned for more fun hacks.

Update: By the way, I’m not the only desperate, productivity-challenged geek out there doing this stuff. By no means did I start this, I’m just another hipster with a stack of 3×5 cards. There are lots of other great resources for Lifehacks and Lifehacks-compatible ideas:

• 43folders - Merlin didn’t start it all, but he sure has done a good job of bringing lots of good ideas together. The site is a bit Mac-bigoted, but then again everybody is these days. Also home to a great wiki where a lot of folks have posted great ideas.
• Lifehacker - Way too many ads, but the RSS feed leaves those out. Lifehacker tends to aggregate ideas from a lot of other sites so its a good one to watch for ideas.
• Working Smart - A great productivity blog for managers or wanna-be-managers.
• Slacker Manager - Also with a management focus, but a little more easy-going.
• Flickr - Surprisingly, there are a lot of good tags with some great Lifehacks and GTD-compatible ideas.

Oh, and pick up a copy of David Allen’s Getting Things Done. Right now.

The Mountain Goats new EP, Dilaudid, is available for digital download in DRM-free AAC or MP3 format for about $5.72 (3 GBP).

A great album for a great price. We really should encourage this method of distribution, so I encourage you to go check it out.

It also includes “This Year,” which is a freaking awesome song. Go get it. Now.

I’ve been bad. Until recently I haven’t been backing up my MySQL database. Bad things could have happened.

Today I finally hacked up a simple script to run from cron that will automatically dump, zip, and mail backups of my MySQL tables to an email address I specify. I set up a Gmail account to send the dumps to because they’re about 8 meg each. The dumps are also encrypted using my PGP 1024-bit public key to give me a bit of security.

Since I didn’t manage to find anything similar in my Googling, I decided to post it.

#!/bin/sh # Performs a backup of MySQL, encrypts it using PGP, and mails it to a particular user # The user to mail the backup to. Should have a public key in the above user's keyring... MAIL_TO="your-backup-account@gmail.com" MAIL_TO_KEY="Your PGP key ID" # Subject of the mail. A date stamp will be appended to it MAIL_SUBJECT="[mysqldump] MySQL Backup for ” ###################################### DATESTAMP=`date %Y-%m-%d` FILENAME=”/tmp/mysqldump-$DATESTAMP.gz” # Generate the dump mysqldump –all-databases | gzip > “$FILENAME” # Encrypt it gpg –encrypt –recipient “$MAIL_TO_KEY” “$FILENAME” # Mail it! mpack -s “$MAIL_SUBJECT $DATESTAMP” -c application/octet-stream $FILENAME.gpg” “$MAIL_TO” # Remove the backups rm -f $FILENAME $FILENAME.gpg

I put up a few of the photos I took this weekend at Carnegie Mellon’s “Spring Carnival“

Mobile File Cabinet Hack: Folders

Another Lifehack:

I keep track of my projects and assignments for school using clear folders. I stick color-coded 3×5 cards in the front of the folders to label them, so they’re all reusable.

It might look like overkill, but its actually pretty compact when its all put together. And it keeps me from carting around old papers I don’t need anymore, as well as from having to constantly reprint things I’ve lost.

You can see more of this hack in my Lifehacks set on Flickr.