Tips

Towards being a more entertaining guest

Merlin — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 10:34:32 -0500

Joey’s condenses some great tips on going from wallﬂower to party panda. Number one has always stood me in good stead:

“1. Be more of a host and less of a guest. Make introductions and make people more comfortable.”

Totally. Not to get all Burning Man on you here, but any event will only be as good as the people who actively participate in it. People who arrive waiting to be entertained are dead weight, while those who do more than the minimum to make things happen can bring the place to life.

Good trick for house parties: deliberately leave off a few light party preparations so that early arrivers can hang out in the kitchen and help. Wouldn’t you rather cut up carrots than stare at the clam dip feeling like a choad? Exactly.

Also, an old tradition at our house is to give gifts to the ﬁrst 2 or 3 early arrivers. If you can go, “Hey! Here’s a cheap bottle of wine and ‘Travel Boggle!’” you make people feel more at ease. Then give ‘em a knife, and put ‘em to work.

”Towards being a more entertaining guest” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on January 24, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Philipp Lenssen's excellent AdSense tips

Merlin — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 18:06:52 -0500

Google AdSense Tips

Having noticed Google’s new “Newbie Central” site, Google Blogoscoped’s Philipp Lenssen posted a swell pile of his own best tips for improving AdSense performance on your site. Linked here because (at least IMHO) it’s depressingly rare to ﬁnd useful, non-douchey advice about making money with a website.

Typical of the sage stuff from PL:

Even if you get huge trafﬁc, the AdSense income from the site is more dependent on the site type and audience. Google targets AdSense ads automatically to the site content. Or at least, it does so ideally – but some types of content fare better than others with this targeting. I noticed for instance that AdSense does better on a games site than on a technology blog.

Totally true.

I haven’t tried every one of these, but I will say “hats off to Philipp” for sharing such sound and cheese-free insight on a noisy, hard-to-research topic. Figuring out how to make dough with your site can be a slow and painful journey, so if you’re trying to make a go of it with AdSense, I’d deﬁnitely give this one a read.

”Philipp Lenssen's excellent AdSense tips” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on January 02, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Adventures in $40 eyeglasses

mathowie — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 07:37:04 -0500

Last year, I stumbled upon a blog post about buying prescription eyeglasses online. It sounded too good to be true: you could get any frames you wanted quickly and cheaply, and the comments were ﬁlled with optometrists freaking out. Eventually, the author launched a dedicated blog for it called Glassy Eyes. When the site was recently mentioned on MetaFilter right around the time I was getting my 2-year exam, I decided to take the plunge myself and order some glasses online.

Why Buy Online?

As a lifelong near-sighted person, prescription eyeglasses and especially prescription sunglasses have long commanded a high premium due to the seemingly precise and scarce nature of creating them. Until a few years ago, I only had two options for eyewear: my optometrist (here’s an employee admitting they pay less than ten bucks per pair) or a 1-hour place like Lenscrafters (which is part of a multinational monopoly). About ten years ago, when I was fresh out of college and scraping by month to month with my ﬁrst real job, I broke my only glasses and had to pay $400 for an emergency pair (that were ugly and I hated and I wore for two more years before I paid off the old ones and could afford new ones). For far too long, glasses have been expensive.

Today things are different, with Coscto and Walmart bringing prices down to the $100-150 range for frames/lenses and they serve as a good economical option to the mainstays. With the advent of online sellers, it’s now possible to get a decent set of specs for anywhere between $20-$100. The online selection is phenomenal as well.

Get Your Measurements Right

First thing you need is an up-to-date prescription. Though people usually get one every 2+ years, most optometrists will only honor them for a up to a year afterwards. If you’re getting one soon, you’re in luck, because you can go in knowing a little more than the average patient. When you’re done with the standard exam, ask the eye doctor or an assistant if they can give you your pupil distance. It’s a simple matter of looking through a binoculars-like device that measures the distance between your pupils. It should be a number in millimeters and be sure to write it down either on the prescription or on a piece of paper (if you get two numbers, that’s right/left which you can add up to be the PD). If you forget to ask or already visited an eye doctor recently, you can measure the PD yourself, by simply printing out a ruler and looking in a mirror (or taking a photo of yourself with the ruler below your eyes).

Armed with your prescription and your PD, you’re all set for ordering any glasses you want online.

Measure What You Have, Know What You Want

It helps if you have two things: a bit of fashion sense and a measuring tape. I personally loved my last pair of eyeglasses (paid $500 at a fashion eyewear store two years ago), but they were a bit too short in the lens height department which became annoying as I could often “see” below my lenses during common everyday tasks. The glasses ﬁt well otherwise and armed with my wife’s soft sewing measuring tape, I took millimeter measurements of all aspects of my old glasses: lens height, lens width, length of bridge (distance between lenses), total width of lenses plus bridge, and the length of the side arms.

Now that I had my prescription (with PD), and my frame measurements, I copied it into a text ﬁle and kept it open as I shopped online. I knew I needed lenses around 53mm wide, about 20mm apart, and the arms needed to be at least 135mm long. My old too-short lenses were only 26mm tall, so I was looking to get something with around 30mm of lens height. Some online shops let you plug all these numbers in and specify what you want to search on as the most important (I did “lens height must be at least 28mm” search), but most all online shops will display the measurements below each frame, which should help narrow down your searches.

In terms of frame design, I knew I wanted a half-rim frame (metal/plastic top and arms, clear lens below) or a full plastic frame, and most every online shop categorizes frames for sale by their construction in this way. Knowing that you want frameless glasses or nerdy plastic retro glasses deﬁnitely helps making shopping online easier because some online shops can offer 500+ different varieties of just one style of eyewear. If you’re not quite sure what you want, you might want to browse a real eyeglasses store for a bit to narrow down your desires.

Ordering Up, Playing the Waiting Game

Once you ﬁnd something you like and it’s about the right size, it’s time to order. Plug in your prescription details (if you can’t make them all out, most sites have helpful tips on deciphering a prescription) and pick out your options. The one option that will turn a $20 pair of glasses into an $80 pair is the lens choice. Be careful when picking out a lens because there are plenty of add-ons you might or might not want. Generally I pay for the highest level of non-glare coatings and I usually pick the middle of the thin-lens options (my personal prescription rules out the thinnest, lightest lenses). Most of my online glasses have run about $50 or so.

Shipment and fulﬁllment is generally pretty good. I ordered ﬁve pairs of glasses total, from four different retailers and started receiving pairs about a week later. The longest one was maybe three weeks, which is about normal for most optometrists, so in general ordering online was faster than higher cost traditional options.

The Verdict?

I used to wear the same glasses for 3-4 years between changes so I’m ﬁnding it incredibly liberating to pick from ﬁve different sets of glasses each morning. I have a couple fashionable pairs for going out, a couple understated ones for working and I can even take a chance with a wacky retro frame if I’m in the mood. All told, my glasses cost me from a low of $26 to a high of $84 per pair, mostly depending on the options I picked for lenses. If I had to come up with any criticisms, the only (very) minor issue I had was one pair’s lenses (with identical prescriptions on both sides) were cut slightly different, so that when the light hits them, you can see a bit more of border on one lens over the other (like I said, it’s minor). I purchased frames from four different companies mentioned on the GlassyEyes site and every pair showed up intact and the prescriptions all seemed identical.

I’ve had such good success with it that I recently ordered some higher priced specialized sports glasses online, saving about 35% over what an optometrist ofﬁce would charge. Overall, I couldn’t be happier with the process of buying glasses online. I’m happy to have several backup pairs and different styles to ﬁt my mood. About the only drawback is that there is almost too much selection online. Picking out each frame took me about an hour, after wading through 150-200 results and checking measurements on the ones that caught my eye.

I encourage anyone looking to save some money and get a bigger selection to search online. Glasses are no longer a scarce resource costing many hundreds of dollars, they can be as simple as buying a DVD or book online, and cost about the same.

”Adventures in $40 eyeglasses” was written by Matthew Haughey for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on November 29, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Toward a hygienic credit card

Merlin — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 10:06:06 -0400

You’ve probably heard the advice to photocopy your wallet’s contents; in the event that you lose your wallet, this makes it easy to know what you need to cancel and replace. Smart.

I recently received a new credit card and had forgotten what a hassle it is to change the info across all my various online accounts. Here’s a few suggestions based on things I did this time around that should make it easier (or at least more interesting) the next time this happens.

Write it down now

Create an OmniOutliner (or text or Excel or Google Docs) document, and capture the name of every account, site, or other location where you needed to update your credit card information. Also, create a second column where you paste the exact URL for the page you had to visit to make your change. (I’m already up to about 15 of these).

I really wish I’d already done this one of the other times I’ve gone through this; feels like it’ll really be handy for the next time.

Related: consider also creating columns where you paste in URLs, email addresses, or phone numbers for each company’s customer service department – particularly in case you need to escalate your updating to a live human.

Get cheap

Feeling like trimming back your lifestyle? Try hanging back a day or two or ten, and just wait for vendors to contact you about your “invalid card.” It can be astounding how many accounts you have set to run or renew automatically, and, believe me, merchants will let you know when they can’t run your card for some reason. This gives you a nice opportunity to verify for yourself that you really want all that stuff people are running your card to buy. Hell, I’m feeling tempted to “lose” my card every six months, just for the personal audit it provides.

Obviously, you don’t want to get critical services accidentally cancelled, but, at least in my experience, merchants are accustomed to users with multiple cards that sometimes just stop working for non-nefarious (if sometimes seemingly incompetent) reasons. Still, use this one with care.

One card for online

I’m tempted by the idea of using one credit card just for online purchases. I’m not sure this buys me any particular protection over mixing usage, but I’m attracted to the idea of making it a little easier to track down where abuse might have occurred, and “life” versus “the internet” seems like a satisfying taxonomy to start with.

I suppose if you’re some kind of mogul, you could get really granular, although I’d stop at the point where you have, say, a dedicated “Thai food card,” or the like.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a big fan of “Be Prepared” ideas like The Sick Box and The Blackout Box, but what do you think?

The Question to You

What’s your best practice for safe and convenient credit card hygiene? If you’ve had to go through updating your accounts tomorrow, what would you do differently from the last time?

”Toward a hygienic credit card” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on October 11, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Break out of "phone jail" with GetHuman

Merlin — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 15:49:01 -0400

In yesterday’s post about putting customer service numbers onto your mobile phone, commenter Joe suggested checking out Paul English’s wonderful GetHuman, a website that diligently collects and updates the phone numbers (and key punches) necessary to get you straight through to a human being at 500 well-known companies.

I realize this site is ancient news to a lot of you, but I couldn’t believe I’d never featured it in its own post here; I’ve been loving and using the crap out of GH (and the preceding IVR) for years now. Consider the oversight rectiﬁed.

Paul also shares some smart tips for intrepid information seekers (Hint: that fast “0” mashing tip has worked great for me):

Interrupt. Press 0 (or 0# or #0 or 0* or *0) repeatedly, sometimes quickly. Unfortunately the same keystroke does not always work for each company. Many IVRs will connect to a human after a few “invalid entries”, although some IVRs will hangup. :-(

Talk. Say “get human” (or “agent” or “representative”) or raise your voice, or just mumble. :) The IVR might connect you to a human after one of these key or unknown phrases.

Just hold, pretending you have only an old rotary phone….

A propos of nothing

I seem to recall mathowie once telling me that if you repeatedly scream obscenities at a voice robot, you sometimes get straight through. I’m not sure if it actually ever works, but it just feels great to scream the f-word into a phone sometimes.

Also new to me: here’s a list of the 500 companies and their secret knocks that’s suitable for printing at teeny-tiny size and sticking into your notebook or backpack. Or – if you’re feeling particularly ambitious – one imagines it wouldn’t be too hard to convert the HTML table into a CSV ﬁle that could pretty easily be munged into an importable list. Just if you’re feeling ambitious.

Conﬁdential to Paul: If it’s not a programmatic nightmare for you, I suspect that exporting your list to a downloadable vCard (with the secret code in “Notes”) would make you a hero. Also? You need you a prominent PayPal link, my friend. :) Great work, and thanks.

Update 2007-10-06 17:27:12 PDT

cshneid and dansays have each done us the honor of mashing up a vCard version of the GetHuman 500. So now you can get all 500 numbers into Address Book (and onto your iPhone) with a nice, easy import. Worked great for me!

See post comments for more info. – mdm

Update 2007-10-07 07:06:26 PDT

Paul has added a tab-separated ﬁle and a vCard version of the gethuman database on his site. Whenever the database is updated, you can grab a new copy for your Address Book. Thanks for the fast response, Paul. more »

”Break out of "phone jail" with GetHuman” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on October 06, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Dansays: Put all your customer service numbers into Address Book

Merlin — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 18:26:27 -0400

This morning, like a lot of other people, I was locked out of using my PayPal debit card while the site (and apparently its glass-jawed transaction processing network) took a total dirtnap. So it goes. That’s only indirectly the point of this post (although I did kind of feel like opening a “Can of Cory” on The Pal).

Point is, my pal dansays left a great comment on my whiny Flickr post laying out why he’s put all the customer service numbers of products and sites he uses right into his Apple Address Book. Great advice that I’ll be taking this weekend:

The number syncs to my iPhone, so it’s handy when I need it.

I have a record of the number, should the website decide to, ahem, “streamline” their customer service department by removing all traces of their phone number from their website and forcing all communications through email. This happened to me just last week.

I have a central place to keep all notes related to customer service conversations. Whenever resolving disputes, I switch into hyper-documentation mode. Who I talked with, when I talked with them, and what they promised me.

Smart fella, that Dan. 1 and 2 may seem obvious, but 3 is super-clever. If you’ve ever had to throw down with a dopey company, you know the importance of the paper trail. I really like the idea of having that with me on my Mac and on my iPhone.

”Dansays: Put all your customer service numbers into Address Book” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on October 05, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

"Perfect" iTunes equalizer setting

Merlin — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 07:18:34 -0400

Perfect

I noticed a lot of people are favoriting this screen grab of the “Perfect” iTunes equalizer setting (I posted it to Flickr, so I won’t keep forgetting it when I need it).

Ever since I saw this in that Mac OS X Hints article, I’ve used it as my default equalizer in iTunes – it seems to give a nice pop to MP3 tracks in particular.

HOWTO and speciﬁc settings from the original article:

Open the equalizer, and from the pop-up menu, select “Make Preset.” Call it “Perfect,” because it is, and set the following levels, from left to right (skip the Preamp section):

db +3, +6, +9, +7, +6, +5, +7, +9, +11, +8 db

”"Perfect" iTunes equalizer setting” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on August 27, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Quicksilver proxies for fast, easy printing

Merlin — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 06:29:53 -0400

Faster Printing with Quicksilver

Mark Fisher shares terriﬁc tips on how to use Quicksilver Proxies for faster printing:

Use this method when you want to print ﬁles that are on the Desktop or are all in the same folder.

Select the ﬁles that you wish to print by Command clicking them.
Invoke Quicksilver (by default, ?–SPACE)
Type the name of your printer until QS displays its name e.g. “Lexmark”
Hit the TAB key to select the next pane.
Type “open” and select “Open File”. >
- I recommend making “Open File” the default action for when you type “open”. You can do this by Ctrl clicking “Open File” and selecting ‘Set as Default for “OPEN”.’
>
Hit TAB to select the next pane.
Type “current” until QS displays ‘Current Selection’.
Hit ENTER.
Your ﬁles should start printing.

Also check out how to use the “comma trick” to print multiple ﬁles. Great stuff.

After the jump is the video for the episode of The Merlin Show where I talked about using proxies to access application menus.

Click To Play

Finally, don’t miss Robert’s tutorial on setting up proxies if this topic is new to you.

”Quicksilver proxies for fast, easy printing” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on July 23, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

MacBreak Minute: LiteSwitch X

Merlin — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 07:56:26 -0400

Proteron - LiteSwitch X

In the latest episode of MacBreak Minutes (subscribe), I talked about a favorite PreferencePane of mine called LiteSwitch.

LiteSwitch takes the basic app-switching functionality of OS X and adds some handy features, such as the ability to quit (or force-quit), relaunch, hide, reveal, Get Info, and more. Once you get used to this new power under your ﬁngers, you’ll never go back.

”MacBreak Minute: LiteSwitch X” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on July 16, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Still awesome, still works: Request library books from Amazon pages

Merlin — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 06:44:58 -0400

Jon Udell: The LibraryLookup Bookmarklet Generator

I covered this one back in the bronze age of 43 Folders, but I wanted to highlight the awesomeness again today for those who might not have seen it the ﬁrst time around.

As described in September, 2004:

I still can’t get over how cool this is. Jon Udell’s little wizard [direct link] lets you generate a bookmarklet for requesting a library book—based on the Amazon page you’re currently viewing. It’s clearly a ﬂawless lifehack.

You just need to know your library’s URL and which system your own city uses (which Jon makes simple by providing preview links to see which style your system seems to follow). San Francisco folks, use “http://sﬂib1.sfpl.org/” and leave the default system of “Innovative” selected.

At some point over the years, Jon’s bookmarklet fell out of my favorites bar (J’accuse, Amazon Prime). But today I was able to recreate my bookmarklet in about ten seconds, and now Bobos in Paradise is en route to the Parkside Library.

To modernize the tip just a bit, I’ll mention that this (and many other browser tasks involving entering passwords) gets so much easier with the amazing 1Passwd. In this case, you can tell the app to remember your library card number and PIN and autoﬁll the library login page automagically.

”Still awesome, still works: Request library books from Amazon pages” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on July 10, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"