Low hanging fruit: Websites that significantly improve your life?
It suddenly occurred to me that not everyone uses a website I love. Of all the websites I browse if you asked me which one improves my standard of living in the largest, most concrete way, it would be slickdeals.
What it is: a community driven “hot deals” website with voting. By itself this is already useful, but the best feature is deal alerts. you never have to actually browse slickdeals. Just create an account, set up deal alerts for whatever strings interest you (I for example have a deal alert for “whey” to get alerted to deals on whey protein powder).
More than 50% of my belongings come from sales I’ve been alerted to via slickdeals. Any big ticket items I need, but don’t need immediately I just set alerts and wait. My laptop, desktop, tablet, smartphone, clothes, toiletries, books, games, even some food are all slightly better for the price I paid than they otherwise would have been.
So what other sites am I missing out on that would make my life a lot better?
A website I just discovered for habit building chains.cc seems cool, but I haven’t had time to evaluate its usefulness yet.
Down For Everyone Or Just Me does exactly what it sounds like it does.
Ninite.com has a list of excellent free software that you can install with one click. When setting up a new computer it can save you hours of time.
I use Chrome, Firefox, iTunes, VLC, Audacity, Spotify, GIMP, OpenOffice, CutePDF, AVG, Spybot, uTorrent, Dropbox, Steam, Everything search, ImgBurn, 7zip, Eclipse, and Python. All of these can be installed with practically zero effort and no extra crap, just waiting for the download and install to finish.
Sounds silly, and it’s not very hip, but Fly Lady has worked very well for my girlfriend. Basically, they send you messages giving you mostly short (like 3 minute) tidying and cleaning missions. Your place gets messy a minute at a time, so they keep you cleaning for short intervals to counteract that.
http://flylady.net/
When my girlfriend is participating, the difference is dramatic, and it stays that way for weeks at a time.
flylady does more than that, too.
A whole bunch of principles and habits for keeping the house in order. Also the products are good.
I’ll second flylady.
My mom’s used that too.
SNPedia.com
If you’ve had some of your genome sequenced, SNPedia can tell you, along with Promethease, what that might mean for you. I think the main value right now are the drug metabolism results.
Turns out I have a relatively nonfunctional enzyme, and it effects my metabolism of a whole class of drugs. The prevalence for this kind of issue is fairly high.
The caveat that the SNP-drug interaction literature is preliminary seems important to add; many such results fail to be replicated.
PubMed is my go to when I encounter a question about diet, exercise or medicine that isn’t easily answered by consulting a secondary source. The 2 most useful functions are “Titles with your search terms” and “X free full-text articles in PubMed Central”. There’s probably a way to input these into the search field, but I haven’t figured it out yet.
google scholar works well but you need to have a decent idea of specific terms used in the branch of research you’re interested in.
One site that was recommended to me is Trello. It’s a very flexible project management/to-do/brainstorming tool. It’s organized as a number of boards, each of which has one or more lists or cards. You can move these cards between lists and between boards.
The general workflow I’ve established is to create a board for each project I’m working on, and have three lists: to-do, doing, and done. As you might suspect, cards start out in the “to-do” list, move to the “doing” list when I start on them and go to the “done” list when I finish. However, the tool, as such, does not force you into any particular workflow. That’s an important consideration for me, because I’ve abandoned other task management software when its theoretical workflow model failed to match my real world needs. Trello is flexible enough to allow me to easily construct my own “pipeline” for tasks, with as many or as few steps as necessary, and have different pipelines for different projects.
Trello is a hosted application. However, they have a fairly easy-to-use export function that exports your boards and cards to a JSON document, so you’re free to walk away with your data at any time. They also have an API, which you can use to further automate your task management.
A similar thread, but one that’s more focused on information sources than day-to-day improvements: http://lesswrong.com/lw/6ls/other_useful_sites_lwers_read/
Thanks for the pointer, but that thread seems full of websites that would cause me to get worse at getting anything done with a couple exceptions. I find it funny that slickdeals was mentioned and downvoted for not being presented in the proper context.
Page2RSS will make a (slightly noisy) RSS feed of arbitrary pages.
http://www.kdnuggets.com/ practical, well curated machine learning from jobs to datasets to articles
torrentz.eu—indexes various torrent sites
http://mvnrepository.com/ - search for includes on maven sites
http://www.crunchbase.com/ evaluating startups etc
slickdeals is dope, that is for sure.
I have used chanis.cc and its pretty useful for me