Life Clerks

Exercise can protect against everything from heart attacks and cancer to depression and erectile dysfunction, but the New York Times focuses on how working out also helps with ailments you’re already suffering from—even those that make exercise difficult.

Perhaps the most immediate benefits are reaped by people with joint and neuromuscular disorders. Without exercise, those at risk of osteoarthritis become crippled by stiff, deteriorated joints. But exercise that increases strength and aerobic capacity can reduce pain, depression and anxiety and improve function, balance and quality of life.

The key, of course, is knowing what kind of workouts counter your ailment. If you’ve used exercise to address health issues in the past, let’s hear what worked best for you in the comments.

Original post by Adam Pash

The Official Gmail blog points out a small new feature update in Gmail that allows you to edit contact information on-the-fly directly from your chat list. In short, when you hover your mouse over a contact in chat (or an email), the name in the pop-up details window is now editable. Since the chat pane is really the quickest way to search and access your contacts, it’s a great way to quickly add meaningful names to your contacts—especially since Gmail’s contact management tools are still a little unwieldy. Small improvements like that could go a long way in boosting Gmail’s status as a top 5 contact management tool.

Original post by Adam Pash

Web site Boolify makes advanced web searches easy through a simple drag-and-drop interface. Intended as an educational tool, Boolify teaches users how to create boolean searches in Google using operators like OR and NOT (-) to get very specific search results. Boolean searching isn’t new by any means, but if you’ve never gotten the hang of it or you just prefer a more visual approach, Boolify is worth a look. If you’re way past this, then our top 10 obscure Google search tricks may be more up your alley.

Original post by Adam Pash

Blogger Ron Brinkman doesn’t want to buy an overpriced laptop stand or build his own DIY laptop stand. Instead, he takes the cheap and easy route and uses a $6 hot water bottle as a water-cooled laptop stand. Brinkman says:

Yup, buy a hot water bottle, fill it up with tap-water (room-temperature is fine) and insert strategically between laptop and lap. It’s comfy, acts as a nice heat-sink, and as a bonus it probably blocks a fair bit of the dangerous ‘electronic rays’ that are shooting out of the bottom of the computer straight at your important bits.

Brinkman claims the water bottle works great on the table as well—just lean your laptop on the water bottle and the rubber surface grips the table and keeps your propped up laptop in place. Nothing beats this cheap and simple, and the cooling effect of the water bottle means no more burning laps.

Original post by Adam Pash

The previously mentioned PC Decrapifier utility, which cleans pre-installed bloatware that ships with new Windows laptops, sees an update today and detects more applications than ever, like Norton 360, the Microsoft Office 2007 Trial and Activation Assistant, and Symantic LiveUpdate. [via]

Original post by Gina Trapani

Men’s Health magazine online offers four free workout videos that you can download, drag into iTunes, and sync directly to your iPod. The routines range in intensity from the at-home muscle plan—which suggests a circuit of exercises you can do at home—to more gym-focused workouts like the “Ultimate Strength-Boosting” workout. The videos are short and serve more as reminders for how to correctly do the exercises rather than 30-minute as-you-go walkthroughs. For even more free iPod video workouts, check out previously mentioned iPod Gym. The Men’s Health videos require a free registration with the site (or quickly stopping the page load before it hides the direct video links).

Original post by Adam Pash

Writing things down, on paper or on-screen, is the best way to make sure you remember important info and tasks, but sometimes you’ve got to rely on your plain old brain to keep essential data sorted and handy. Whether it’s a client’s name, a password or combination you want stored only in your head, or answers for an upcoming test, there are plenty of techniques and tools to help you lock in important stuff and pull it out when needed. After the jump, we round up some memorable memory-boosting hacks. Photo by furryscaly.

10. Nap to improve memory and learning

It may not seem like you’re learning anything when you close your eyes and doze off, but taking a daytime nap can help you reduce interference—the brain’s resistance to learning new material, rather than what it already learned earlier—and help your recall, as suggested in the journal Nature Neuroscience. The key number in a study on nap-learning was 90 minutes, but it seems like general how-to knowledge sinks in better whenever you take any kind of siesta. Photo by cell105.

9. Boost learning power with strategic “distractions”

This doesn’t mean switching from your GRE prep to Nintendo Wii, but switching up your studying from one subject to a slightly different one—moving, say, from one CSS function and then back—forces your brain to try and hold onto the first thing you were focusing on, according to researchers. The momentary distraction might also help reduce your stress level, helping your concentration even further. (Original post). Photo by Sam Pullara.

8. Visualize reminders with the Palace Technique

Whether it’s your home, an office, or some other place, there’s a space most of us can walk through in our minds. Turn that mental space into a list organizer by using the “Palace Technique.” The LiteMind Blog has a good overview of the technique, which has you associating each thing you need to remember with objects you’d see in a walk-through—milk at the front door, printer paper on the floor mat, paper towels on the kitchen table, etc. When you need to remember, just stroll through your (mental) home, and you should recall the associations. (Original post)

7. Draw a name map

Got a meeting with the higher-ups and want to make a positive impression? Bring a notepad or just an index card and map out the players’ names, or just seating positions, as soon as you sit down, along with some identifiers (”Jim/beard, #4/glasses,” and the like). From covering my fair share of board meetings for newspapers, I can attest to the benefits of writing notes and quotes from mapped numbers and later follow-up, rather than hoping your overwhelmed mind can juggle it all at once. (Original post)

6. Recall lists using dramatic imagery

You’re heading out the door, and you’re absolutely sure you’re going to forget to drop off the mail, or buy the milk, or both. Blogger Bert Webb might suggest focusing on an image of dropping letters into a mailbox that looks like a giant milk jug, or perhaps a mailman made entirely of liquid milk. In other words, anything that pushes your list items pass your brain’s boring/mundane filter is far likelier to stick (Original post).

5. Never have to write down countless, unique passwords with a single master pattern

The safest place to store your passwords is in your head, and you don’t want to use one password for all your logins. This isn’t so much a “memory” hack as an efficiency tip, but it only forces your noggin to come up with one really great password system rather than lots of highly forgettable variations. Choose a base password, like an abbreviated or acronym version of a favorite phrase or song, then create a system for changing it up site to site, like using the first three letters of the site name, the first four consonants or first two vowels, whatever fits for you. Clicking “Forgot your password?” and waiting on verification emails will be a distant memory, one you can feel just fine about forgetting.

4. Remember names with repetition techniques

Networking does you no good if you can’t remember what to call the person you’ve already schmoozed the next time you meet them. How-to website eHow recommends simply saying the person’s name multiple times after you’re introduced, as in: “Hi, Bob, it’s nice to meet you. So, Bob, where do you ….” But other tips from CareerBuilder/CNN might work better with the visual-learning crowd, such as writing the person’s name on their forehead in your mind or associating them with a linked image, like imagining someone named Leonard as, say, Leonard Nimoy. (Original posts).

3. Convert long numbers to words

Whether it’s a hardcore software password or your car’s VIN, long strings of numbers are hard to keep straight. Using a technique like the Major system or its modified cousin, the Red Table, the long string of disconnected digits become a lot easier to grok. Check out this conversion helper, which even has its own convenient Firefox extension. (Original post).

2. Make your own memory devices with mnemonics

Many of the tips and techniques we’ve posted stem from the science of mnemonics, which utilizes all the senses to aid learning. If number-to-word methods or vivid images don’t work for you, browse this great introduction and learn how to use three-dimensional images, symbols, and your own sense of humor to encode must-not-forget items and happenings. The most important tip? Make your memory device something funny or positive—we all have enough negative reminders, and have gotten pretty good at channeling them out. (Original post).

1. Train your brain with SuperMemo

Free Windows application SuperMemo helps you remember concepts using spaced repetition. SuperMemo is based on years of research by learning expert Piotr Wozniak, who sought to find the exact moments when one is just about to forget something they just learned. Available in several versions for Windows, Pocket PC and Ye Olde Palm Pilots, SuperMemo is a serious tool for super remembrance. (Original post).

What methods or tricks do you use to make sure you can’t forget the important stuff? How do you augment your paper and program lists with mental training? Which ingenious techniques are we missing? Share your experiences and pointers in the comments.

Original post by Kevin Purdy

Make it seem like you’re sending email when you’re really playing hooky with Outlook’s built-in “defer delivery” rule. Tech blogger Dennis O’Reilly runs down how to set up Outlook to delay sending messages for a certain amount of time (like half an hour) automatically. You can also set individual messages to be sent on certain days at certain times in Outlook—good for scheduling future messages ahead of time.

Original post by Gina Trapani

FLVto is a web app with three buttons, one input box, and one simple-but-great function of converting YouTube and other Flash-based videos to MP3 audio files. We’ve shared a reader-submitted download-and-convert method, but FLVto makes the process pretty foolproof. Paste a YouTube or other video link (or upload an FLV file), hit “OK,” then wait for your download prompt. The sound quality is only as good as the video’s (as in mono sound, 60 kbps on one sample download), but with more videos going up in higher-resolution, stereo-sound formats, that could improve—assuming this app stays up and running. FLVto is free to use and doesn’t require a sign-up.

Original post by Kevin Purdy

Mac OS X only: Back in the non-Stacks days of Tiger, you could add a folder to the Dock and expand it into a hierarchical menu. Now with Stacks you can’t easily navigate subfolders from a folder on the Dock, but small utility AppMenuBoy aims to change that—for your Applications folder, that is. Start up AppMenuBoy and expand your Applications folder into a Tiger-style hierarchical menu, as shown after the jump.

AppMenuBoy is a free download for Mac OS X only.

Original post by Gina Trapani