I’ve been trying out various programs, plugins, and other life hacks to help give my life some structure to boost my overall functionality.

I have assembled a list of various programs and extensions to help make things less time consuming and overall easier. I’ve also made a list of New Years resolutions to give myself some concrete goals to apply these methods to. Starting today I will be making use of this blog for more than just showing renders. I will start making WIPs, tutorials, and daily posts. Time to give this Tumblr some love. 

Goals:

- Set aside time each day to learn some programming starting with lectures at Academic Earth

- Manage my time, productivity, and keep logs of my activity using various software and share my experiences online. 

- Aim toward a format that is easily understood and available in many file types. 

- Each week look back on a set of tasks and find a way to complete the goal in fewer steps and use it in future workflows. Not all shortcuts in life are bad. 

Software:

- Cool Clock extension for Chrome  

  This is a clock with many features ranging from a calendar, alarm clock, stopwatch, a countdown timer, hourly time announcements, an in-browser clock, and all the tools needed to customize its functionality to your liking.

- Chrome to Phone Extension

Want whatever you’re looking at instantly flash onto your phone with the press of a button? This does just that with a little bit of added functionality. Along with instantly opening any webpage you’re looking at on your phone, you can also right-click phone numbers and have it ready to call out, or load maps/GPS navigation from a route or location in Google Maps. 

- Imgur Extension 

Imgur has made rehosting and sharing images pretty speedy already, but with this extension it’s only a matter of right-clicking an image and choosing “rehost image” for your image to have a link ready to use. 

 - Shorten URLs Extension

Shorten a URL right from your toolbar. Just copy and paste into the icon menu and hit a button. Gives the option to use various URL shorteners, including TinyURL.

- Foxit PDF Reader

PDFs are slow and annoying, especially with Adobe’s cow of a product. Most of you will never use 95% of the features that make Adobe Acrobat and Reader so large. The plugin is also handy; it makes viewing PDFs in your browser just as snappy as any other webpage.