“Life hack” is a goofy term, but there are a few PC tricks that work well for me and do save a lot of time. Many of them are ways to minimize using the mouse.

Mozilla/Firefox Custom Keywords/Quick Searches

Use Alt-D to move the cursor to the browser’s URL address field, then type the quick search keyword and whatever you’re searching for, and hit enter. Firefox will fill in the %s in the quicksearch bookmark URL with your search text, and then open the URL, taking you directly to the search results page. Some examples:

• Google: g AdMonsters
• Google Local: gl hardware — note that I’ve added my zip code into the stored URL
• LinkedIn: ln bowen dwelle
• Amazon: z age of winters
• there are a ton more of these listed here

AutoHotKey shortcuts

AutoHotKey is an awesome free keyboard macro program that you can use to automate all sorts of things. My AutoHotKey file has all sorts of things in it - whenever I find myself typing the same thing frequently, I make an entry in the file to save time in the future. Some of the things I have in there:

• Shorthand for commonly used words, e.g. “oppty” expands to “opportunity”, “regi” expands to “registration”, etc.
• Signautures, email addresses, phone numbers, URL’s
• type “euro” and get the € symbol
• Credit card numbers - I have a macro that pastes in my CC number, and then pops up a dialog that shows expiration date and security code, so I don’t have to look it up when filling out forms…
• F11: switch to Outlook and move focus to contact search field
• Ctrl F11: switch to Outlook, move focus to contact search field, paste selected name, and run the search
• F12: open selected URL
• Ctrl F12: Google search using selected text
• Win C: open Calculator
• Win V: open Volume Control
• and lots more…

Devices

PC card slot StashCard - Handy for exta SIM & SD cards.

Anagram

Anagram is a great little program that does one (or two) things really well.

• Select some text (like an email signature) and hit Ctrl C twice in quick succession fires up Anagram, which parses the text and creates and Outlook Contact record.
• Anagram also adds a “Copy As Text” button to Outlook, handy for pasting contact info from Outlook into emails and the like.

What’s missing? iTunes: sync between two machines

It’s way too hard to use iTunes with two machines. I have a laptop and a desktop PC, as well as a 4Gb Nano. Why doesn’t iTunes make it easy to manage a single music library across all three?

Download and import new music

1. download mp3
2. find download directory
3. download album art into new album directory
4. rename to folder.jpg
5. import new mp3(s) into iTunes
6. select newly imported songs/album
7. drag album art into iTunes

Copy to second machine

1. (keep track of new music directories)
2. copy album directory to other machine
3. import into iTunes on other machine

And song ratings, etc still aren’t syncronized at all. Argh!!! Any suggestions for improving that? Why can’t iTunes treat my laptop just like my iPod?