Productivity – Tech, writing, and tech writing

Is this email spam?

I get a lot of spam. In some cases, I’ve provided an address to a site/service I genuinely want to use, and not been careful about opting out of their helpful add-on email offerings. In some cases, my address has been scraped or guessed by someone who doesn’t give two hoots about my email preferences.

Replying or clicking unsubscribe can be a bad idea if you get a one-off piece of spam, as it verifies to the sender that the scraped/guessed address is live: this may result in your address being prioritised in future campaigns, and potentially shared with or sold to other spammers. The safest approach in this case is to delete the mail without clicking any links. If you get repeat messages from the same source, or in the same style, either blacklist the address, or set up keyword-based filtering to avoid seeing the same kinds of mail in your inbox again. Check your mail client’s documentation for information on how to do this. If you’re getting unwanted messages from a legit service you really did subscribe to, feel free to click the “unsubscribe” or “mail preferences” link in their signature and change the categories/frequency of the messages they send you.

Too many tabs

Sometimes I need to have a lot of tabs open when I work. Things can get messy and slow. I have a few different strategies to manage them all. Here’s my top three.

In some cases, I’ll use different browsers to ringfence the tabs/bookmarks related to a particular job, and use the browser’s memory/history to re-open the tabs I need for that project when I resume.
I use OneTab, so that if I’m doing research and have a number of interesting tabs open that I’d like to come back to later, I can create a date-based list of just the useful stuff (rather than my browser history, which would show everything). A nice touch is that OneTab doesn’t include my pinned tabs when it makes its list.
A colleague recommended Tab Suspender, a Firefox plugin that puts individual tabs in your browser to sleep if you haven’t looked for them for a bit so that the resources on that page (including adverts) stop chewing your CPU making other tasks slow. It’s made a world of difference. There seem to be a wide range of similar plugins available.

Have you found other handy ways to bookmark/archive/manage your browser tabs? Comment below!

Doc tools: Overleaf

I’ve been working a lot with LaTeX this year. On my laptop, my preferred toolset is WinEdt and MikTeX, but I’m intrigued by the more portable looking solution of Overleaf.

Overleaf is a web-based LaTeX editor that allows you to store and edit your content in the cloud. You can sign up for a free account if you won’t be using it much, or a monthly subscription to add more projects plus a few extra features.

The site has a good catalog of existing templates you can choose from to start a document, article, presentation, CV, or whatever. They even provide an interactive tutorial to get you up to speed if you’re not too familiar with LaTeX. More advanced users can upload whatever custom/specialised templates and resources they need.

The split-view, web-based editor shows your editable markup on the left hand side, and a dynamic preview of the results on the right hand side. As I’m writing this, there’s a beta RichText view of the sources which shows a bit of a mashup of WYSIWYG and source content depending on which document I’m looking at – I guess it renders what it can parse sufficiently and leaves the rest in its raw format.

The free plan has a limited number of files per project (60), and an overall space limit of 1GB, but you can have as many projects as you like within those constraints, and get almost all the bells and whistles. Also, as seems to be a trend with many cloud-based services, they offer bonus space and features in return for social media interactions, inviting friends, and the like.

If you’re looking for a collaborative/cloud-based solution for your LaTeX project, you’ve little to lose by taking Overleaf for a test drive.

Pinning tabs in browsers

Chrome and Firefox let you “pin” content you want to appear in your browser all the time. (Other browsers may do this too – IE doesn’t seem to.)

To do this:

Go to the URL for the content you want to pin.
Right-click the tab and click Pin tab.

You’re done!

Your pinned tabs:

Open automatically when you open the browser.
Are shrunk down to show the favicon for the URL only, not the page title.
Don’t change focus/close if you click a link in them – the link opens in a separate tab.

I’ve found pinned tabs particularly useful for keeping a Google inbox and calendar open, plus the web interface(s) for whatever communication tool(s) is/are flavour of the month with the team(s) I’m working with.

Fun with Skype

Here are a few “fun” things I’ve discovered you can (sometimes) do with Skype.

Disclaimer: Some of them seem to work intermittently, or only in certain versions of the software.

Use the s/old/new/ regex for text substitution to replace a word or words in your previous message. This only seems to work up until the other chat participant “interacts” with the conversation in some way, though, and it’s not clear what counts as an interaction (typing something, definintely; clicking or scrolling in their Skype window, possibly).
On Windows, right-click and select Edit message on any message you’ve entered in the past hour.
Hit the up arrow to go back and edit the last line/block you sent.
Enter /showplaces and hit return to see a list of places you’re currently logged in with this Skype account. This seems to work for me, showing me as logged in from my desktop and iPhone.
Enter /remotelogout to log out all sessions except the current one (where you’re typing the command). This particular command seems a bit flakey, and may be dependent on the platform(s), Skype version(s), and alignment of the stars. Worth trying if you’re stuck. Run /showplaces again after to see whether the other sessions terminated or not.