9 out of 10 monkeys believe they are not behind glass

Wired’s HowTo wiki has a pretty good weight loss tip that goes straight to my usual argument on “bottom line” calories. I advocate that it does not necessarily matter what you eat, as long as you stick with moderation, and understanding calories-in should equal calories-out. Eat only what you can burn. I am not a Dr. I am not an expert… but it would be common sense that your body will burn only what it needs. The rest will go to fat, right?

The tip:

1. Multiply the pounds you want to lose by the number of calories in a pound of fat: 10 x 3,500 = 35,000.
2. Divide the total by the days you’ll diet: 35,000 ÷ 60 = 583.
3. Calculate your Basal Metabolic Rate 100 calories per pound of body weight
4. Calculate your calories expenditure from exercize
5. Then use the formula (BMR+Exercise)-diet=total allowed calories

It has some other useful info on there about tips to rediscover your full limit at meal time. I might try this just to see how it works:

Try this: One night, eat only half the amount of food on your plate. Wait 30 minutes, assess your feelings of satiation, and then wait 90. If you’re still not hungry, you’ve probably been overeating. Most people grossly overestimate the amount of food they need to feel full, says Dr. David Kessler, author of The End of Overeating. A sensible meal will keep you full for four hours, and a sensible snack, for two. Experiment with reducing your portion sizes, and serve yourself those meals on smaller plates or bowls.

In Firefox about:config, browser.sessionstore.interval change from 10000 to 120000 to stop video streaming lag, per here:

Many users, myself included, visit YouTube on an almost daily basis. Ever since Firefox version 2.0 implemented the session restore function, when you are watching a video on YouTube (perhaps on other video sites as well, I haven’t really tested that), you may notice a tiny freeze-up of the video every 10 seconds or so. This happens because the session restore is by default set to save all open tabs every 10 seconds. This is especially noticeable if you happen to have a lot of tabs open at once.

The quick fix for this problem, at least for my own sake, is to increase the time between each of the saves performed by session restore. By opening about:config in your Firefox address bar, then typing browser.sessionstore.interval in the filter box, you’ll see a value of 10000, which is in milliseconds. (Meaning your session is saved every 10 seconds.) I changed this to 300000, or every 5 minutes, as I don’t have the urgent need for tab restoration. If you feel like being more on the safe side, try increasing it to something a bit lower, say 120000, or every 2 minutes.

I was disappointed when I upgraded to Firefox 3 and found that one of my favorite extensions was killed. FasterFox was one of those tweaks that really made a difference in browsing speeds.

Then I stumbled across this today.

Reduce the amount of RAM Firefox uses for its cache feature

1. Type “about:config” (no quotes) in the adress bar in the browser.
2. Find “browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewer”
3. Set it’s value to “0“;(Zero)

Increase the Speed at Which Firefox loads pages

1. Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit Enter.
   (Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.)
2. Alter the entries as follows:
• Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true”
• Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”
• Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to some number like 10.
• This means it will make 10 requests at once.
3. Lastly, right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0“;.(Zero)

This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives. If you’re using a broadband connection you’ll load pages faster now.

Optionally (for even faster web browsing) here are some more options for your about:config (you might have to create some of these).

1. network.dns.disableIPv6: set “false”
2. “content.notify.backoffcount”: set “5“; (Five)
3. “plugin.expose_full_path”: set “true”.
4. “ui.submenuDelay”: set “0; (zero)

This little hack will drop Firefox’s RAM usage down to 10 Mb when minimized:

1. Open Firefox and go to the Address Bar. Type in about:config and then press Enter.
2. Right Click in the page and select New -> Boolean.
3. In the box that pops up enter “config.trim_on_minimize”. Press Enter.
4. Now select True and then press Enter.
5. Restart Firefox.

I ran into a weird issue with my last cell phone… it duplicated (sometimes tripling or quadrupling) many recurring events. I had four Christmas Day events on Dec. 25, and three birthday reminders for my mom, etc. But I was having a hard time deleting them all without removing the ones I actually wanted to keep.

So in Outlook, I set my Calendar’s Current View to “By Category”. This handily sorted all the recurring events and duplicated events into a nice list sorted by Holidays and the like. I then just highlighted everything I didn’t want, including all the holidays, old events, stale recurring appointments, and then hit Delete.

Piece of cake.

Then I went back into Calendar options, and clicked the “Add Holidays” button to populate my calendar with the correct Holiday events.

I figured this would come in handy whenever someone wanted to clean up a calendar of never-ending recurring events. A easily selectable list makes managing multiple events a simple thing.

At least that’s what I like to think.