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Tools (Business / Entrepreneurship)

Owned by Nathan Wailes
Last updated: Feb 07, 2018
3 min read

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The tools I use at work

Chrome extensions

  • LastPass
  • DisconnectMe
  • Vimium
  • AdBlock Plus
  • StayFocusd
  • RescueTime
  • Block Quora Login Popup
  • PixelBlock - Don't let people see when you've opened their emails.

SaaS Tools

  • Confluence
  • JIRA

Programming Tools

  • PyCharm
  • Gerrit
  • Jenkins

Amazon Associate Program

  • This is the program that lets you use a special link when linking to a book on Amazon, and when someone buys the book after clicking that link, they'll get some money (IIRC something like $0.50).
  • My associate ID is nathanwailes-20

How to get set up

Things to know

  • Your account will be closed if you don't make a referral within the first 180 days.
  • Weirdly, "If you put a link that you got from the Amazon link builder in [the Amazon link verifier], it will give you a 'fail.' It's not for those links." (Source)

Evernote

  • 2015.04.17 - Paul Minors - A Tour of My Evernote Account
    • He highly recommends a book called "Evernote Essentials" by Brett(?) Kelly(?), a former employee at Evernote.
    • It looks like a simpler version of Confluence. The main thing it seems to be missing is the ability to create complex hierarchies between pages ("notes" in Evernote).  Evernote's "Notebooks" can't contain content, so they seem most analogous to Confluence's "Spaces".
    • The general organization philosophy seems to be more "Gmail" than "Wikipedia".
    • You can create links between notes. Not sure if they update automatically if you rename a note.

Google Calendar

  • reminders only show up if you have the calendar page open

Laptops

My customizations

  • On my HP laptop I don't have an easy way to distinguish between the F keys when it's dark (e.g. when I'm in a room with the lights off), and so I took three small square pieces of paper, and on one of them I wrote "5", on another I wrote "8", and on another I wrote "12", and I taped each piece of paper above its corresponding F-key (F5, F8, F12). Those are the three F-keys I use the most often, and they are spaced fairly evenly apart, so it makes it easy to figure out where the other keys are (e.g. F4 is one to the left of F5).

Notepad++

Thoughts

Things I like

  • A huge downside to Notepad is that it doesn't save a copy of your draft (unsaved work), so if your computer crashes or gets restarted for some reason, you'll lose everything in your notepad file that wasn't saved. With Notepad++ it seems to keep a saved copy of your draft after every keypress.
  • Another problem with Notepad is it's extremely-limited 'Undo' functionality.
  • The main thing about Notepad++ that I think makes it better than Sublime Text for simple text notes is that it starts up instantly. Sublime Text has a surprisingly long start-up time.
  • Another big advantage that Notepad++ has over Sublime Text 2 is the speed with which regex find-and-replace operations are completed. They're significantly faster with Notepad++.

Things I don't like

  • The big problem I have with Notepad++ is that it's not as beautiful as Sublime Text 2: the default UI is packed full of icons and buttons and sidebars and too many colors, and the default file icons are too colorful / busy.
    • You can fix this fairly easily if you know what settings to change.
  • The scrollbar is slightly wider than the one on Notepad, which I don't like.

Recommended settings

  • The recommended settings below are for using Notepad++ as just a better version of Notepad (i.e. for keeping notes), and not as a code editor.

Windows settings

View menu

  • Enable "Word wrap".

Settings → Preferences → General

  • Select 'Hide menu bar'.
    • Press 'Alt' to have it show up when you need it.
  • Deselect 'Show status bar'.
  • Toolbar:
    • Enable the 'Hide' checkbox.
  • Tab bar:
    • Deselect 'Draw a coloured bar on active tab'

Settings → Preferences → Editing

  • Set caret 'Width' to 2.
  • Enable multi-editing
  • Set 'Line Wrap' to 'Indent'
  • Disable 'Display line number'
  • Disable 'Display bookmark'
  • Disable 'Enable current line highlighting'.
  • Set 'Border Width' to 'No edge'
  • Set 'Folder Margin Style' to 'None'

Settings → Preferences → Auto-Completion

Settings → Style Configurator

  • Change the font to Calibri (what Word uses) or Consolas (what Notepad uses) or Source Code Pro (what I use in PyCharm, which I think was the one Naveed told me to change it to).
    • The benefit of using Source Code Pro is that it's monospace, which is helpful when working on coding projects.

Find

  • Enable "Wrap around" so that it will search the entire document and not just the portion of the document that comes after where your cursor is located.

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