Computing Tips

Updated July 9th, 2024

Free Custom Email Domains

Youtube over RSS

You can get a youtube channel rss feed by inspecting the page source for a channel page, and then digging for the .xml link. They include a long serial number which I don't think there is a good way to find anywhere else.

Exporting Apple Contacts

You can export your apple contacts (if you wanted to quit IOS) by zooming out to lists, long pressing on a list and selecting “export”. It exports as a file format called .vcf or “Vitual Contact Format”, or (and I'm not kidding) vCard. You can then inport these into an open contacts manager like Thunderbird. For me, including contact photos blew up the file size and broke the export file. So when exporting, exclude contact photos.

Bookmark Everything, Use non-general Search

Bookmark even the things that are trival to find to avoid a google search for resorce cost, info quality and ethics. Firefox will search your bookmarks. I keep things like wikipedia pages for trig identities, metric prefixes, and things like that. I also add wikipeida and arch wiki search engines to firefox to again use less google. Its a matter of approching the most primary source.

Configure Pacman

The pacman config lives in /etc. You can increase the number of parallel downloads, turn on fun things like color, and there's an easter egg if you add 'ILoveCandy' to the 'options' list.

Sleep Command

If you need a break from the computer you can use the 'sleep' command to just wait a little bit. I recommend starting with 10 seconds.