OMG Prod Hacks

So about a month and a half ago, I found myself on a work trip at a ski resort. It had been planned for literal months, but still it landed on a critical contract negotiation for a project with a reeeeeeally tight timeline. Of course. While everyone was out skiing, I was shuttered in the lodge with my little computer going nuts getting this project pushed through the door- which wasn’t awful because I really suck at skiing. It’s not a physical activity thing, it’s an I grew up in Florida thing.... I digress. Anyway- negotiation done! YES. Then I needed to get my MD to sign the contract. Since she’s a total ski-bunny, asking her to take off her ski-boots to join me inside and digitally sign wasn’t going to happen. So, gotta solve this, asked the front desk to print it, done. Grabbed her at the outside grill lunch, got the signature and then realized that I didn’t have a scanner. HOWEVER, I remembered reading that the Notes app in iOS can create PDFs. Essentially, you take a picture of your document and it puts some filters/compressions on it to look like a scan and BAM, done. Here’s how to do it. Go into the notes app and make a new note. When the typing dialog comes up, there are 5 icons on the top of it, click the little plus sign in the circle and then choose ‘Scan Documents’ from the menu. Then you ‘scan’ by taking a photo. Simple, right? Actually not super simple. It was one of the most clunky experiences ever to get it to my laptop (where Notes is actually synced). But you know what? It solved my problem. 

TL;DR 

I’ve recently been working on a project that has some pretty CPU-draining code (until it’s optimized...we’re not there yet). Every time I have the tab open for more than 10 minutes, but computer sounds like it’s going to set on fire. I also have a problem where I can’t remember links, docs, or things that I need to look at regularly for the most part and the only way to know it to keep it open. 

After my computer had a true meltdown a few days ago (I mean, fan on full all the way through a restart, cursor frozen, not functioning), I decided something had to be done. I remembered a Chrome extension that I used forever ago called OneTab, that would collapse all your tabs into a single tab with a bunch of links. That’s fun and helpful.... if you don’t open more tabs. Soon I had 5000 OneTab tabs of tab links and I couldn’t ever find what I was looking for. However, when I started digging into what solutions were sitting in the Chrome Extension Store and I came out with this genius combo for tab hoarders like me: a tab suspender and tab finder- in my case The Great Suspender and Cluster Tab Manager. 

A tab suspender essentially closes a tab for you, while keeping the placeholder there. This frees up a lot of bandwidth for your computer to do other things- like run super fun webGL experiences, while not losing...let’s say, your place in the book. *NOTE*: This is kill the activity of the tab, which may not be helpful, but there are some settings. Now I have pinned tabs that never turn off (like GMail and Calendar) so I still get alerts. I’m also learning that I need to pin my video conference calls if I’m sharing my screen...otherwise, The Great Suspender comes and boots me out.

Meanwhile, I have a tab manager where I can see the FULL TITLES (WHAAAAAA) of each tab that I have open. (Ha! Instead of the first letter or right now, only the icon). Then a quick tap on that link shoots me over to the needed tab.

So now, I’m sittin’ pretty with an anxiety-inducing amount of tabs open, but me and my computer are not stressed at all.

TL;DR