Fundamentals

To become a keyboard ninja, you should be familiar with the basic Windows keyboard shortcuts. These work in pretty much all programs:

• Control key shortcuts
• Ctrl+a: Select All
• Ctrl+x: Cut
• Ctrl+c: Copy
• Ctrl+v: Paste
• Ctrl+z: Undo
• Ctrl+f:  find/search
• Alt key shortcuts
• Alt is often used to access program menus (e.g., File, Edit, etc). Just press and release Alt and they keyboard focus will be on the menus. Navigate with the arrow keys or by pressing the underlined letters.
• Whenever you see a single underlined letter in a word (usually in buttons, check box options), you can hold Alt and press that letter instead of clicking.
• Alt+F4: close program
• Alt+Tab: switch program. You can hold Alt and repeatedly press Tab to cycle through programs. Alt+Shift+Tab cycles backwards.
• Win key shortcuts
• Win+’search term’: the Win key opens the start menu and in Windows 7 you can start typing to search your computer.
• Win+d: show desktop
• Win+e: launch Windows Explorer (“My Computer”)
• Tab
• Tabbing is a very basic keyboard ninja skill, mainly used when better keyboard navigation is not available. In almost every program, you can Tab to cycle through the interface. Shift+Tab cycles backwards.

These fundamentals are enough to make you a pretty good keyboard ninja. But these next tricks will really help you take your skills from impressive to amazing.

Skills

Desktop:

• Use an application launcher, this makes it super easy and quick to start a program or open a folder. I love Launchy.
• If you’re really serious about customizing/creating keyboard shortcuts and automating just about anything, spend some time learning Autohotkey. It’s like playing god with your computer.

Browser:

• Open links using ‘find-as-you-type’ links mode (press ‘ and type). Enable it in Firefox (Options > Advanced). Download the extension for Chrome.
• To take mouseless browsing to the next level, try a Vim-like browser extension. I swear by Vimium for Chrome, it’s very simple to use and incredibly useful. Pentadactyl for Firefox is more for experienced Vim users.

Conclusion

This guide will give you a great start, but a good keyboard ninja keeps learning new moves to his skill set. Learn the keyboard shortcuts for programs you use frequently. And practice, practice, practice! Try not to use that mouse. Print yourself a cheat sheet. You need to internalize them.

Did I miss any good ones? Let me know in the comments.

To be precise, I’m using algebra here to refer to elementary algebra. It’s the one we’re all familiar with: solving an equation for a variable (x).

Algebra lets us solve problems that would be extremely difficult without. Easy equations can be solved trivially in your head: for example, say you have $8 and you give $3 to your son and the rest to your daughter. Obviously, you gave her $5, but you could also write out the equation and solve it: Subtracting 3 from both sides we get

But when it gets more complicated, it’s much more convenient to use the rules of algebra to manipulate the equation to isolate x: for example, say you’re at an amusement park and the pricing is as follows. $12 to get in and $3 per ride. You have $30 and a 50% off coupon. How many rides can you afford? You could count it out, or write out the equation and solve it using algebra: This is tedious to solve without algebra. But it’s very easy to solve with algebra: multiply through by 2, then subtract 12, and divide by 3, yielding x=16.

As you can imagine, when the equations get more complicated it becomes practically impossible to solve them without using algebra. Algebra provides a set of tools to systematically solve equations. We can even program computers with these rules so that they can solve equations for us algorithmically.

Manipulating equations to solve them is extremely useful, and not intuitively obvious. Without algebra, we would be greatly inconvenienced.

Instacalc

I just found this cool web app, Instacalc, and made a couple calculators with it for your convenience.

In the first one, you enter the price and calories per unit: Calorie Cost Calculator 1

The second one takes unit price, calories per serving, serving size, and servings per unit: Calorie Cost Calculator 2

It’s not a perfect solution, but I was unable to find a simple web app for this (I could write a JavaScript calculator, but I’d much rather use a web app). WolframAlpha widgets looked promising but I couldn’t get enough control of it to handle this type of calculation.

Spreadsheet

You might find it more useful to create a spreadsheet and enter all the data so that you can save it and compare many foods at once. This is what I did and it’s super handy. Make columns for ‘Food name’, ‘Price’, ‘Calories’ and fill in the data. Then create a fourth column to calculate ‘Calories per dollar’. In this case the formula would be calories/dollars, for example, =C2/B2. Just fill that formula down the column to get results for all your entries.

Why should I

Looking at calorie cost is an eye-opener: it reveals just how expensive vegetables and fruits are compared to fats. If you’re trying to keep your food costs down, knowing which foods are cheap—which foods to fill up on—is essential.

Here are the top apps you should get:

• Gmail app
• Google Maps app
• Opera Mini – a much better browser than the one your phone came with
• Snaptu – an app package with speedy apps including Facebook, Twitter, Picasa, Weather, and more
• Ebuddy or Nimbuzz – instant messaging apps

You can find lots of other cool apps. I found one that lets me use my phone as a remote control for my computer via bluetooth—it’s great for watching videos since my PC is my TV. I mainly find it nice to be able to check my Gmail or the weather, and to access Google Reader with the Opera browser.

A real paleo regimen is heavy on fat, and plant foods play a minor role. Now, good paleo-quality meat is indeed expensive, but good paleo-quality fats are very cheap: I get pastured, organic pig fat for $2/lb and render it into lard, my staple source of calories. You can find cheap paleo meats as well: I often get bison hearts and livers for $1.50/lb. I get them ground so I can conveniently cook up a portion, and because ground meats can soak up more lard.

To get an idea of real food costs, you have to look at the cost per calorie, not the cost per weight that stores put on the price tags. Consider the real costs of a few foods. (Note that this only accounts for calories, it doesn’t take into account the value of micronutrients or the quality of the food. I intentionally excluded meat because you eat meat for structural protein, not for the calories):

• vegetables: 250-350 kcal/$
• fruits: 300-400 kcal/$
• potatoes, yams: 700-1000 kcal/$
• coconut milk: 800 kcal/$
• conventional butter or cream: 1000 kcal/$
• paleo-quality lard: 1600 kcal/$
• sugar: 4000 kcal/$
• flour: 6000 kcal/$
• canola oil: 7000 kcal/$

As you can see, trying to fill up on fruits and veggies is a waste of money. Eating nutrient dense foods is the way to keep paleo costs reasonable: fill up on cheap fats and use starchy vegetables as fat vehicles. Potatoes and yams can soak up wonderful amounts of fat. The fact is, budget paleo is high fat paleo.

Note also how cheap the 3 primary agents of disease are (sugar, grains, seed oil)… damn the government subsidies for those poisonous foods, and its regulations on healthy foods!

I eat a simple paleo diet pretty affordably: cheaper cuts of grass-fed beef and bison, cheap pork (organic, but grain-fed) from a local farmer, lots of lard, carrots/potatoes/yams/canned salmon as fat vehicles, some vegetables to cook up with ground beef, salsa for flavor, fruits eaten with coconut milk. I don’t like to spend time cooking so my meals are pretty plain (but paleo foods are tasty anyways). My focus is utilitarian: I like easy meals that efficiently nourish me. I never follow recipes—I just improvise with what’s on hand, probably just as paleo people did.

Genetically modified foods are no more dangerous than “natural” foods because they are not fundamentally different from natural foods. Virtually every animal and vegetable sold in a health-food store has been “genetically modified” for millennia by selective breeding and hybridization…. Plants are Darwinian creatures with no particular desire to be eaten, so they did not go out of their way to be tasty, healthy, or easy for us to grow and harvest. On the contrary: they did go out of their way to deter us from eating them, by evolving irritants, toxins, and bitter-tasting compounds. So there is nothing especially safe about natural foods….

A blanket fear of all artificial and genetically modified foods is patently irrational on health grounds, and it could make food more expensive and hence less available to the poor.

I second that. I’ve been sleeping on a latex foam mattress for 4 years. I’ve been quite pleased with it. It’s very comfortable.  One of the big benefits is that they don’t wear out—mine’s still like new. I’ve also been using a latex foam pillow, which has also been great, though it took some time getting used to.

So what is one to do? Simple: take distance courses. Online or independent study. It probably won’t save you much money, but it can save you a load of time and effort. First, if you’re a fast learner you aren’t wasting any time in lectures aimed at slower students. Second, you completely avoid lectures and note-taking, and you’ll learn that much better. Third, you can work around your own schedule and if you can get all your courses by distance, you can completely avoid living on campus or commuting.

You’ll need to be self-motivated and disciplined, because it’s all too easy to neglect your coursework. If you’re a strong student, you’ll love it.

For more wonderful Vivaldi music, get this torrent.

I verified this in Windows 7 (64-bit) using CPU-Z. When it’s working, the Core Speed and Multiplier will change according to the processing load.