Laptop Power Management

People always had a confusion between whether to buy a laptop or a desktop?... Now this confusion has taken some different form and choices are between a laptop or a tablet? addition to this competition is a large screen smart phone.

In fact, the reality is you can not replace the use of any of the device with one another. I always have one advice and that is buy as per your usage preference. One of my friend is a professional writer who travels places and writes, for him we bought a netbook which is easy to carry and performs as per his requirement. In a nutshell, if you just want to browse internet TAB would also suffice your requirement, if there is some core work you need laptop or netbook.

People prefer using internet with mobile devices which can be carried anywhere such as Laptop/Netbook. The major problem that people face is of power, there are some tips which might help you efficiently manage power and battery life.

• The biggest enemy of any mobile device is the Heat. Hardware designs are improving but still a lot of things are assembled in such a small space, thus heat generation is unavoidable. Use of good quality cooling pad helps to reduce heat.  

• Never use Laptops on spongy surface, it creates a problem in heat ventilation. Use it on hard flat surface. Heat impacts motherboard, hard drive. 
• Any kind of battery looses life with charge and discharge. Using a laptop on continuous power supply is also not advisable. Use power supply only for charging the battery, after full charge remove power supply. If you want to use laptop at a desk only. Remove the battery and use it on External power only.
• Use Sleep and Hibernate modes to save battery while not using. 
• Always set your power plans in control panel according to use, Helps battery to last longer.

How Constraints Make You Better: Why the Right Limitations Boost Performance

by James Clear | Read this article on JamesClear.com
 

In 1930, a 23-year-old teacher in Uruguay named Juan Carlos Ceriani created a new sport. Ceriani wanted to design a game that was similar to soccer, but that his students could play indoors throughout the year. His new game became known as futsal.

Futsal is very similar to soccer, but it has a few important differences. First, it is played in a much smaller area. (Ceriani designed the game so that it could be played on YMCA basketball courts.) Second, the ball is smaller and has less bounce than a regular soccer ball. Third, there are only five players per side rather than the typical eleven players per side in a soccer match.

This combination of factors—a tighter playing environment and a less bouncy ball—requires futsal players to develop more creative ball skills because they are constantly playing in crowded spaces. Additionally, because there are fewer players, each person touches the ball much more than they would in a standard soccer match. In fact, according to research quoted by Daniel Coyle in his book The Talent Code, futsalplayers get 600 percent more touches during a typical game than soccer players do. [1]

Throughout the 1930s and into the 1940s, futsal migrated from Uruguay to Brazil, where the Brazilians fell in love with the new game. (Even today, over 75 years later, more people play futsal in Brazil than soccer.) It’s hard to say why futsal became so popular in Brazil, but one thing is for sure: the young Brazilians who grew up playingfutsal throughout the 1940s and 1950s developed incredible ball handling and technical skills.

Eventually, these children grew into adults and made the transition from futsal to soccer. The athletic creativity they developed in those futsal games would help the Brazilians to shine on the world stage. During the 12-year span from 1958 to 1970, there were four World Cup championships. Brazil won three of them. [2]

Constraints Accelerate Skill Development

It is common to complain about the constraints in our lives: too little time, not enough money, too small of a network, barely enough resources. Certainly, some of these constraints do hold us back. However, there is also a positive side. The constraints in our lives often force us to make choices and cultivate talents that would otherwise go undeveloped. Constraints drive creativity and foster skill development.

Just as the constraints of futsal forced Brazilian children to develop creativity and better ball handling skills, constraints can also drive your own skill development. In many ways, reaching the next level of performance is simply a matter of choosing the right constraints.

How to Choose the Right Constraints

From what I can tell, there are three primary steps to follow when using constraints to improve your skills.

1. Decide what specific skill you want to develop. The more specific the skill, the easier it will be to design a good constraint. For example, futsal didn’t help players develop the skill of being good at soccer. That’s too general. It helped them develop creative ball handling skills, which turn out to be valuable in the game of soccer.

Similarly, you shouldn’t try to develop the skill of being “good at marketing”, for example. It’s too broad. Instead, focus on learning how to write compelling headlines or analyze website data—something specific and tangible.

2. Design a constraint that requires this specific skill to be used. There are three main options for designing a constraint: time, resources, and environment.

1. Time: Give yourself less time to accomplish a task or set a schedule that forces you to work on a skill more consistently.
2. Resources: Give yourself fewer resources (or different resources) to do a task.
3. Environment: According to one study, if you eat on 10-inch plates rather than 12-inch plates, you’ll consume 22 percent fewer calories over the course of a year. (More on this idea and other nutrition improvements here.) One simple change in environment can lead to significant results. In my opinion, environmental constraints are best because they impact your behavior without you realizing it.

3. Play the game. Constraints can accelerate skill development, but they aren’t a magic pill. You still need to put in your time. The greatest Brazilian soccer players were still playing futsal all the time. The best plan is useless without repeated action. What matters most is getting your reps in.

The Idea in Practice

I am currently experimenting with different constraints to boost my skills in certain areas. Here are a few skills I have been working to develop and the constraints I am placing on myself to make them happen:

Writing skills. I want to be a better writer, so I set a schedule where I have to publish a new article every Monday and Thursday. The schedule is my constraint. It doesn’t matter how good or how bad the article is. It doesn’t matter how long or how short it is. I have to get something out every Monday and Thursday. This forces me to be creative and to do the one thing that good writers do: write. I don’t always hit the mark, but I have stuck with this schedule for two years and I’ve written over 200,000 words.

Storytelling skills. I have some friends who are amazing storytellers. I’ve never been great at it, but I’d like to get better. The constraint I’ve placed on myself is scheduling talks without the use of slides. My last five speaking engagements have used no slides or a few basic images. Without text to rely on, I have designed a constraint that has forces me to tell better stories so that I don’t embarrass myself in front of the audience.

Strength skills. I only lift three days per week. To someone who doesn’t workout, this might sound like a lot. However, many strength athletes train four to six days per week, sometimes twice per day. With restricted training time, I have to be very deliberate with my workouts if I want to make progress. Right now, I’m prioritizing foundational strength over all else. I’ll move on to in-depth technique development once my strength levels are higher.

What do you want to become great at? What skills do you want to develop? Most important, what constraints can you place upon yourself to get there?

Key to Relationships

Awesome Read!!

Relationships can either take the form of strength or weakness depending on the mind. If the mind is strong then relationships can be like a gift to us, but if the mind is weak and not in control, then relationships can feel like bondage.

How would you like to see yourself - happy and bubbling with enthusiasm or dull and difficult to please?

Often you like to be pleased, appeased and cajoled. So you put up a tough, upset face and act difficult to please. If a person has to appease and please ten people all the time, it will be so tiring. People who keep a long face and expect others to cajole and appease them make others run away.

Lovers often do this. They expend a lot of energy in cajoling and this brings down the joy and celebration of the moment. It is okay for you to show your upset mood or tendency once in a while, but doing it over and over again is taxing for you and the people you love.

If you feel low, appease and please yourself. Your need to be appeased by someone else is the sign of grossness. This is the root of ignorance. If you want attention, all you get is tension.

There is a secret about relationships. Women should never make their husband feel small.

If you tell your husband, ‘You are like a vegetable, good for nothing. You are a lazy goose!’ his self esteem goes down and he really becomes good for nothing. However, hopeless or weak he is, you should always tell him that he is the best. You should pump his ego.

The whole world may say that he has no brains, but you should not say that. As a spouse you should say, ‘You have the best brains in the world.

Just because you don’t use it, it doesn’t mean that you don’t have any.’ In the same way, men should never pour cold water on women’s emotions. For women, emotional bonding is very important.

You should never complain about her parents, her father or her mother or sisters or brothers. If she herself complains, you keep quiet, don’t say anything.

If you oppose her parents, you will be in trouble and if you side with them, she will feel left out. Either way you are in trouble, so keep quiet. Simply move away from there or change the topic.

If in the relationship, both come from a sense of giving then there will be no problem. But if both want to take, there will be fights for sure. ‘I am here to contribute, what I can do for you?’ - your relationship will last longer with this attitude.

Similarly, don’t be feverish about a relationship, just relax and you will find your relationship with people will improve and become better. If you are like a leech, clinging on to somebody and bugging them, even though you say all nice words, that person will run away from you because they can’t handle it. One aspect is to give love, and another is to know how to handle love, receive love as well.

It needs only a centered, enlightened person. You have to be very much at ease with yourself. If you are at ease with yourself, everyone will be at ease with you.

Just be yourself. Be natural and simple. Relationships develop naturally. If you try to build a relationship that is when you become a little artificial and unnatural.

You like someone to be very honest, open, natural, unassuming with you. That is exactly what others also want from you. If you are a boss, what type of assistants or subordinates would you like? Someone who is open. And that is also what your boss wants. Don’t try hard to impress your boss, or impress your girlfriend or boyfriend. That is when everything goes wrong.

The best is to be yourself, natural, to be forgiving and to be in the present moment. It makes a big difference.

Amplify Your Productivity on Windows Using Mouse Gestures

While working on Windows there are several ways by which you can increase your productivity, like using keyboard shortcuts, having dual monitor setup for more screen real estate or using autohotkey scripts to automate the repetitive tasks. Using mouse gestures is yet another way by which you can increase your productivity, though may not be as fast as keyboard shortcuts.

Mouse gestures has been around here for quite some time now, however Windows still doesn’t support mouse gestures out of the box like Mac OS X Lion coupled with Apple’s trackpad or mighty mouse to quickly perform gestures. But that doesn’t mean you cannot have mouse gestures on Windows. Thanks to StrokesPlus free desktop app, not only you can have predefined gestures but also create your own new gestures and quickly automate and perform different actions.

StrokesPlus is a mouse gesture recognition program that allows you to automate repetitive tasks by simply drawing a gesture with your mouse or performing mouse and/or keyboard modifiers to fire off an action sequence. StrokesPlus not only supports your traditional three button mouse but also keyboard keys such as control, alt key.

After you download and install StrokesPlus, you can access different options from StrokesPlus system tray icon. Right click on StrokesPlus icon and quickly enable/ disable features or open preferences menu to access advance and experimental options.

Using training mode you can train StrokesPlus to recognize your gestures, it is also helpful when you want to add your own gestures and want to test it how it’s working. While adding new gestures action you can either use existing set of gestures or create new gesture by drawing pattern on small window provided by StrokesPlus.

There may be circumstances like playing games where there is high probability that you might accidentally hit mouse gestures, in order to prevent that from happening; you can add those applications to Ignored Windows list, there by disabling mouse gestures specific to those applications.

For nerds and geeks, StrokesPlus uses Lua scripts and if you have programming skills then you may create your own custom & complex scripts to take Mouse gestures to next level.

Download StrokesPlus for Windows 32-bit.

Download StrokesPlus for Windows 64-bit.

Bye Bye Google Reader

Google announced that, they are going to shut down their RSS service Google Reader on July 1st, 2013. It was introduced by Google in 2005 and one of the best RSS readers available on the web. Google has mentioned in their blog that, the usage of Google Reader has reduced tremendously so we have planned to shut down the service in July. People who subscribe to other blogs using Google Reader can export their data using the Google Takeout. This is a big disappointment for many readers all over the web