Via Twitter I found today the following article: al3x’s Rules for Computing Happiness which I found quite interesting.
In the end al3x writes that other people should put up their rules for Computing Happiness as well. But instead of doing this, I will comment on some of his rules where I disagree because I agree with most. Therefore you should read al3x’s rules first.
- Use a password manager. You shouldn’t know any of your passwords save the one to your primary email account and the one to your password manager.
Think about a few good standard-passwords and use those for sites you regular log on. If you are using a smartphone with which you regularly go online, you usually do not have access to your password manager and therefore you can only log on to pages you know the password of. For any other page a password manager is a good choice.
- Do not buy a desktop computer unless your daily computing needs include video/audio editing, 3D rendering, or some other hugely processor-intensive computing task. Buy a portable computer instead.
If you have the ressources available buy a desktop computer for your daily work at home and an ultraportable machine for the road. With ultraportable I mean a netbook or something like a Macbook Air or IBM Thinkpad X300. Preferably something that will run Mac OS X.
With that you have a good display, a keyboard that isn’t getting warm and relative fast hardware available while you’re working at your desk and something very lightweight while you’re on the road. Most ultraportables you do not want to use as your main computer and therefore a second machine is necessary while a desktop is not portable and you’ll need something for the road.
A laptop is nice but when you have/want to take it with you on a regular basis, you want to have as less weight as possible with you.
A rule to add:
- For correspondence use a word processor, for scientific work use TeX.