A Munchkin is the sort of person who, faced with a role-playing game, reads through the rulebooks over and over until he finds a way to combine three innocuous-seeming magical items into a cycle of infinite wish spells.Or who, in real life, composes a surprisingly effective diet out of drinking a quarter-cup of extra-light olive oil at least one hour before and after tasting anything else.Or combines liquid nitrogen and antifreeze and life-insurance policies into a ridiculously cheap method of defeating the invincible specter of unavoidable Death.Or figures out how to build the real-life version of the cycle of infinite wish spells.
It seems that many here might have outlandish ideas for ways of improving our lives. For instance, a recent post advocated installing really bright lights as a way to boost alertness and productivity. We should not adopt such hacks into our dogma until we're pretty sure they work; however, one way of knowing whether a crazy idea works is to try implementing it, and you may have more ideas than you're planning to implement.
So: please post all such lifehack ideas! Even if you haven't tried them, even if they seem unlikely to work. Post them separately, unless some other way would be more appropriate. If you've tried some idea and it hasn't worked, it would be useful to post that too.
I've started watching TV Shows at 2X speed. This has been incredible:
I can watch twice as much TV in the same amount of time.
Lots of TV shows which are very interesting, but are slow (e.g. Breaking Bad, Sopranos) become MUCH funner to watch.
I started doing this a few months ago. It started when I realized that I already listened to Audiobooks at 2X-3X, and that TV Shows are basically the same thing.
Some tips:
You should use the VLC player, which lets you 2X while preserving proper audio.
In VLC, you can hit the "+" button to go to 1.5X, then again to go to 2X, 3X, 4X etc.
You can start with watching things at 1.5X speed, then go to 2X when you feel confident.
At higher speeds, you should watch with subtitles, which makes things much easier to follow.
I've switched from VLC to Daum's PotPlayer which has fantastic support for youtube videos and playlists and allows speeding up videos like this. It also uses significantly less memory and cpu than watching youtube in firefox.
Yeah, I've been doing this too, but only after I've determined something to be too boring when I try to watch it normally. I'm glad I didn't watch Puella Magi at 2x, for instance.
Another tip: Youtube can be watched at 1.5 and 2x, as well as slower speeds, but you have to go to testtube first and enable the experimental HTML 5 player.
(Currently it seems a little bugged: if you select a higher speed, you can't go back to 1x, because the normal speed button doesn't work. Reloading fixes that.)
3diegocaleiro
I highly recommend people who use cars to somehow do this in their cellphones and connect the cellphone to the car soundsystem.
I cannot stress how much Traffic is not traffic anymore as soon as it become introduction to evolutionary anthropology. Bostrom told me there is cellphone software for accelerating podcasts, but it only worked for paid ones. Does anyone know one that is free?
Thus spake Eliezer:
It seems that many here might have outlandish ideas for ways of improving our lives. For instance, a recent post advocated installing really bright lights as a way to boost alertness and productivity. We should not adopt such hacks into our dogma until we're pretty sure they work; however, one way of knowing whether a crazy idea works is to try implementing it, and you may have more ideas than you're planning to implement.
So: please post all such lifehack ideas! Even if you haven't tried them, even if they seem unlikely to work. Post them separately, unless some other way would be more appropriate. If you've tried some idea and it hasn't worked, it would be useful to post that too.