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Lifehacks for geeks

The tricks of life to the note

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Top 10 Google Sheets Features to Enhance Your Productivity

Level of difficultyEasy
Reading time3 min
Views1.4K

It's been a while since my last appearance, but I'm excited to be back and to share something truly special with you. In this article, we'll explore my top 10 Google Sheets features that are guaranteed to boost your productivity, speed up your workflow, and make your data handling more efficient. So, without further ado, let's dive into these game-changing tools!

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Becoming a UX designer: why is it worthy and what do you need to start

Level of difficultyEasy
Reading time6 min
Views495

If you are at the beginning of your educational path in IT, or contemplating about making changes in your career and starting learning UX design, you might have some doubts and uncertainties on whether UX design is something worth studying and working in right now. We can dispel your doubts: UX designers are very required in the majority of companies, since they help to make products appealing to users, thus raising the companies income and enhancing their reputation. Professionals in this sphere are in high demand right now, and

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Journey to find a headset with a good side talk cancellation mic for calls in an open office

Level of difficultyEasy
Reading time6 min
Views3.8K

TL;DR: All AI-based noise cancellations suck, only the physical cancellation technique works! And physical cancellation is implemented well only in Jabra devices yet, but other features suck them! All Bluetooth headsets suck too! So, no solution yet, just complaints!

The environment: I work in a pretty talky office room, where sit around 10 people, and all of them have many online conferences every day, including me. So, silence in the room is a rare situation.

The problem: The main problem is that most of the microphones pick up all side talk pretty loud, which makes it very unpleasant for other people to listen to my voice in meetings!

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Stress-testing: How Testers Live in a Turbulent World of Bugs

Reading time11 min
Views3.5K

A tester is one of the most stressful roles in IT. You constantly need to be concentrated and report bugs to developers in your team. Lidiya Yegorova, Innotech’s “Scoring conveyor” team QA-Lead shared her practices on how to minimize the stress while testing.

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Unfinished startups — the AELITA project

Reading time5 min
Views859
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Introduction


I spent a long time thinking about whether or not I should write stories like this from the lives of innovators. After all, revealing the essence of unfinished project means you can lose the very foundation of the project, its pizazz and even its know-hows. Moreover, that's already happened to me in one of my projects from 10 years ago. I'm not going to give an example of this situation, it's already been talked about in another article. The story is on this site: intersofteurasia.ru/novosti/605/606.html.

However, considering that modern progress can't be stopped and that sooner or later some curious minds will get to the bottom of a technical solution for something like this, I decided to lift the veil a little bit on the secret life of an innovator.

Be it noted that this unfinished project with the provisional name AELITA is somewhat of a cross between biomedicine, electronics, psychology and much more, so getting it done isn't exactly easy. After all, for projects like this you need enthusiastic people working in different, sometimes diametrically opposed fields of science and technology, but an interdisciplinary approach is capable of giving surprising results if projects like it are completed.
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Grinding in video games and real life

Reading time9 min
Views4K

Grind is a process of slowly getting valuable resources (be it experience points or loot) by repetitive and often simple tasks in video games. It has been present from the beginning of gaming but has become more widespread with the popularization of online RPG games because of their leveling systems and competitive elements. 

It is highly criticized by gamers around the world for making games boring and work-like, yet many people specifically choose to play grind-heavy games. The reason might be because they find simple repetitive tasks relaxing and distracting from real-life problems, as a form of escapism.

However, there is also a gameplay reason for grinding: getting valuable resources early can make a game easier later. Some popular games like Diablo are even centered around grind. Thus, everyone will have to grind at some point to prevent gameplay from getting too difficult, which quickly becomes an inescapable habit. Later, gamers might apply grinding even to games that do not require it. Interestingly enough, grinding early on can also make the late-game boring because it is going to be too easy if the game was not designed for grinding. For example, in Subnautica, getting a lot of resources early on will make some of the late-game tools useless because all the resources that could have been gained with them have already been gained.

From the example above, we can see that grind does not always improve the gameplay. We can also see that it is not always a necessary process and can be either minimized or avoided entirely: sometimes, the need for it exists only in our mind, forcing us to diminish the fun of actually playing the game. Is it just a question of habit or is there any other reason for us to grind?

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Startups going global: a guide to Startup Digest

Reading time3 min
Views1.7K

Techstars Startup Digest was designed as a discovery tool for entrepreneurs looking for tech events in their area. It was founded in 2009 by Chris McCann who just moved to the Valley. He created an old-school newsletter, featuring promising events in the Bay Area. There was no website, all the events were hand-picked by Chris himself, and the newsletter had 22 subscribers. People liked the idea and that number quickly grew. In 2012 it was acquired by Startup Weekend. Three years later, Startup Weekend’s parent company UP Global was acquired by Techstars — and that’s how the project got its name.

Startup Digest can be a useful tool for startups and event coordinators. If you can successfully leverage it, your event, blog post and/or tech product can reach thousands of people at no cost.

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Everything you always wanted to know about human memory (but were afraid to ask)

Reading time5 min
Views2.8K
Having a good memory is advantageous, even as people stay home amidst the pandemic. Our memories help us maintain an intellectual connection to the world, and keep us from mentally deteriorating.

Today, we’re launching a new series of articles on memory enhancement, starting with a short overview of how our memory works and the basic training you can undergo to improve it.


An Easy Way to Make Money on Bug Bounty

Reading time5 min
Views5.1K

Рисунок 2


Surely you've heard the expression «bug hunting» many times. I dare to assume, you won't mind earning one or two hundred (or even thousand) dollars by finding a potential vulnerability in someone's program. In this article, I'll tell you about a trick that will help analyzing open source projects in order to find such vulnerabilities.
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How to save $58 in 5 minutes: let’s use different prices in each country against marketers

Reading time5 min
Views5.6K
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Hello Habr! Now that is summer vacation season. Many of you will take a flight to a place far from your everyday routine at home. Before this hot vacation season starts, we should discuss an interesting and useful method on how to save money using a VPN.

One of the easiest ways to see the value in this is looking at car rentals while on vacation.
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Zotero hacks: unlimited synced storage and its smooth use with rmarkdown

Reading time7 min
Views25K
Here is a bit refreshed translation of my 2015 blog post. The post shows how to organize a personal academic library of unlimited size for free. This is a funny case of a self written manual which I came back to multiple times myself and many many more times referred my friends to it, even non-Russian speakers who had to use Google Translator and infer the rest from screenshots. Finally, I decided to translate it adding some basic information on how to use Zotero with rmarkdown.


A brief (and hopefully unnecessary for you) intro of bibliographic managers


Bibliographic manager is a life saver in everyday academic life. I suffer almost physical pain just thinking about colleagues who for some reason never started using one — all those excel spreadsheets with favorite citations, messy folders with PDFs, constant hours lost for the joy-killing task of manual reference list formatting. Once you start using a reference manager this all becomes a happily forgotten nightmare.

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Time management in real life

Reading time3 min
Views4.9K

no problems


Have you ever noticed that you were busy all day, however, you've done nothing or at X-mas evening you experience an epiphany that nothing was done during the year? If your answer is "yes", you should improve your time management skills. According to Wikipedia, time management is the process of planning and exercising conscious control of time spent on specific activities, especially to increase effectiveness, efficiency and productivity. Nevertheless, how can we deal with it?

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