Yak Shaving -- [MIT AI Lab, after 2000: orig. probably from a Ren & Stimpy episode.] Any seemingly pointless activity which is actually necessary to solve a problem which solves a problem which, several levels of recursion later, solves the real problem you're working on.

Word Tip -- A useful tip for editing: You can delete entire words with your keyboard. Just put your cursor at the beginning of the word and press Ctrl and Del together.

Photoshop Trick -- Fotfiller has a quick three-step Photoshop tutorial to make coloring pages for your kids from any digital photo. Kids can take the photos of family, friends, places, or toys and turn them into unique coloring pages.

HowTo -- Get Eight Watch Batteries From a 12-Volt Battery

(HT: Challies.com)

Firefox Extension -- When your filtering through results returned by a search engine it can take quite awhile to filter through them trying to find what you’re looking for. One thing that I think most people will agree with is that you’ll normally find what you’re looking for in the first ten results that are provided…and Snap Links can quickly open all of those links for you.

To use the extension all you have to do is hold down the right mouse button and draw a box around the links that you want it to open. It will then indicate which links will be open by placing a red border around them, and when you release the mouse button it will open all of those links in new tabs (they all open in the background without replacing your current tab). (HT: Cybernet)

Download of the Week -- Free program FileHamster makes real-time backups of your files as you work.
Though designed with artists in mind, the program has applications for anyone who could benefit from having incremental backups of their documents. Any time you save your active document, FileHamster copies it to a specified folder. Subsequent saves are stored incrementally as revisions. You can add comments to each revision so you have a record of the changes (if necessary). The software lets you designate individual files and/or folders to be "watched" for backups. It even supports a handful of plug-ins, including logs, notes and Zip compression. (HT: Lifehacker)

See also: The Yak Shaving Razor Archives

Have a useful recommendation for making life more pleasant? Send them to me at jpcarter[at]evangelicaloutpost.com.