principle to stay as the master instead of the slave of my computers
You computer is a danger to you: it will eat your time, with so many fancy eye candies and the gateway to internet which is ever tempting your inner laziness.
It’s no news. People in the world are aware of that but most of them are still just one click away from being distracted, including me. And because I’m often unable to hold my basic instinct to try out all kinds of digital trash in my computer, I spend loads of time to reinstall it.
It’s probably a shame for a computer science major, since i have the knowledge to make things simple. Yeah. It’s a matter of principle for me. And in order to make this principle more established I decide to publish it here, spending 20 minutes more in distraction.
principle to stay as the master instead of the slave of my computers:
keep a *nix server whenever possible.(everyone should have their own server in a few years) and keep all the data that means something to you on it with a version control system.
if you have a working/secure system already, don’t change it until things break.
if you can do something online, don’t bother to install a software in your computer.
if you can use public computers with secure access to your server, don’t bother to carry laptop/pda with you.
on your computer, stick to the command line whenever possible. to hell, gui
linux for your server and windows/mac/any os the hardware you carry is intended for on your laptop/pda. it’s not that i like windows. the reason is to avoid dealing with hardware drivers yourself whenever possible. but 2 notions on windows: never use ie. have at least one malware detector.
keep a minimum set of software
install the software on your *nix instead of your laptop/pda/desktop whenever possible.
no themes, no eye candies. if you ever feel a need of change to the default desktop background, set it to grey. the user interface colors/themes are meant to be clear in logic and dump&humble in everything else.
avoid the radiation of the screen whenever possible.
if the work flow shaped by above principles are sub-optimum for quite a while(several days), spend sometime to think carefully how it can be improved the most while violating the above the least. and then stick to it.
above all, the aim is to spend the least amount of time dealing with the computer, or even looking at it.
