Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with simplicity

Careers about making life simple

NeoLeo — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 00:50:48 -0800

What are some careers that involve making life simpler? About a year ago I discovered the field of human factors and usability. I'm taking the steps to pursue that field, but I've been noticing some other career fields that are related in that they strive to make things simpler, more efficient, and/or easier to use. Some examples:

- usability specialist
- interface designer
- interaction designer
- human factors engineer
- ergonomist
- information architect
- industrial engineer
- technical writer
- professional organizer

Can you guys come up with any other career fields like the ones above?

I Can't Get No Satisfaction

Fairchild — Thu, 21 May 2009 07:39:59 -0800

How to you curb your desire for material goods? I'm pretty good at not succumbing to shopping for things I can't afford or don't need. Lately I have been wanting to buy, buy, buy! I want new things for my house. I want new furniture and artwork and other expensive things that are not in the cards right now. I'm not broke, it's just not in the budget.

My house is pretty nice and I don't need anything. I have a lot of new things that I bought last year. How can I stop wanting to purchase even more new things? I have a problem with never being satisfied. If I bought a beautiful print or piece of furniture, next week I would want something else. If I redid my kitchen I would hate my bathroom, etc.

Can you point me to blog entries, articles, and advice that inspire simplicity? Intellectually I know things can't make me happy but I still want and have anxiety that things aren't as nice as they should be. Bonus for tips and advice to change or improve rooms with very little cash. Thanks.

Recurring text box in Word?

Shepherd — Thu, 14 May 2009 14:03:17 -0800

I need to make a sticker sheet in MS Word updatable -- all the stickers on the sheet look the same, but if I type "Q" in the first sticker, "Q" will appear on all the other stickers. Is this possible? Working on making an Avery-compatible label sheet for a company that only sells eight different things, but in a range of varying sizes. So ideally, he'll be able to print label sheets one sheet at a time, with the same product type on every label on the sheet (say, GRAPPLEGROMMET ALPHA), and then a space to the left of the first GRAPPLEGROMMET ALPHA sticker, where he can type an XXS, XS, S, M, L, XL or XXL and see every other sticker on the sheet update automatically.

Idea being this saves (a) the time-consuming process of typing S on every single sticker on the sheet when he needs a bunch of "S" stickers for GRAPPLEGROMMET ALPHA, and (b) saves the time-consuming process of doing that ourselves, and then creating 64 label templates when all we really need are 8.

I would think that there's a simple way of doing this, but everything I look at veers abruptly into Visual Basic programming and odd form-driven functions that don't really work. Is there some way of just making a text box whose contents will be copied in linked text boxes across the same document?

Beautiful, simple iPhone games

fiercecupcake — Mon, 04 May 2009 10:48:29 -0800

I love Ferry Halim's Orisinal games. What are some games for the iPhone with a similar beautiful aesthetic and simple gameplay? Bonus points, as always, for free or cheap.

24 hours, no more no less? I doubt it.

onshi — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 13:24:36 -0800

Examples of suspiciously round numbers that have, in all probability, been fudged up or down? Extra points for cases where those numbers can be safely discarded in favour of a different, more realistic figure. We just had a refrigerator delivered and we are advised to let it "stand" for 24 hours before plugging it in. The interwebs confirm this as a widely invoked rule of thumb, the rationale being that in a fridge transported horizontally, oil from the compressor seeps into places it doesn't belong such that the fridge mustn't be switched on until the oil has time to settle back into the compressor. If plugged in too soon, the oil tends to block refrigerant lines (negatively affecting cooling performance) and could potentially cause the compressor to fail completely.

I accept this explanation, and am willing to adhere to the 24 hour guideline just to be safe, but I find it incredibly unlikely that a full day (not one hour more or less) is really required for this process; instead, I would suppose the "true" time it takes would be 12-18 hours at most -- potentially far less -- with the remainder added as a safety margin and to account for idiosyncrasies across brands and models. Instead of providing an accurate figure with each model, a nice, round, extra-safe number that's easy to remember is promulgated by the entire industry.

Another example that springs to mind is the maximum recommended dosage information for non-prescription drugs (e.g. not to exceed 1000mg every 4 hours), which must be set well below the "true" toxic dose for safety reasons and to compensate for the low granularity in the "adults" and "children" doses as opposed a more accurate dosage based on body mass (e.g. 300mg per kg per hour). This fudged number -- say, 40% of toxic for a body mass 1 standard deviation below the mean for an adult or child -- would probably be further rounded down to a multiple of the quantity of drug in each tablet. Alternatively, the tablet size would be adjusted to be a factor of the various fudged dosage guideline(s).

So my question to you: which fudged numbers have you come across? Why do you think they are fudged? What factors would need to be taken into account to determine the corresponding "true" number? Anecdotes where you have personally shown the fudged number to be so? Thanks!

When to go simple, when to go complex?

world b free — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 15:56:28 -0800

When creating, would you pursue a simple premise you know you can execute to perfection, or would you pursue a really complex you know might flop? I know what I'm really asking about is how to get through a creative process. I do believe you should learn how to draw before you can paint Abstract Expressionism. Maybe I just need some reassurance from Internet strangers.

One piece of me-specific information: I've been at this for about five years, but wouldn't say I can do it at a professional level yet.

Jeff Smith wasn't lazy, but I am!

piedmont — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 14:43:19 -0800

Know any freezable and/or crock-pot-able stews that also happen to be vegetarian (or pescatarian) and go well with rice? I like good food... Unfortunately I also tend to be a bit short on time and cash.
I have me a fancy new-fangled rice cooker, now I'd like to be able to set it before work so that I can come home and zap a stew and throw it on fresh brown rice. What vegetarian or seafood stews can I cook and toss in the freezer? Alternately what stews can I make in a crockpot that consist of mainly canned and frozen goods? Recipes for curries and other spicy delights are especially welcome-I have access to well stocked ethnic markets, so lay it on me!

What to do with too much coconut

ruelle — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 11:46:04 -0800

I have copious amounts of coconut cream and coconut shavings. What food-item (ie: not 20 galleons of piña colada) can I make with those ingredients that would require as little additional ingredients and effort as possible. And if you would have a bare-bones recipe at hand, it would be very much appreciated. :) I was thinking perhaps something along the lines of simple coconut cookies...? Does anyone have an idea for a simple recipe?

Simplicity: The big city - or the small town?

Gerard Sorme — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 17:16:00 -0800

Simplicity means different things to different people. In general, do you think it is easier to live a simple life in the city - or the country? An urban environment - or a small town? Does anyone know of any studies done on how stress is raised - or lowered - by simple living in the city versus small town life?

Which language would a lazy Martian linguist learn?

greytape — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 04:27:14 -0800

Are some languages objectively harder than others? If so, which ones? This has been bothering me for a while now. Obviously Japanese is harder to learn than French for us English speakers, because French and English are related languages. But what about Japanese compared to, say, Mayan?
When I was in Malaysia a few years ago I learnt that Malay had no tenses, which farely amazed me, but also led me to believe that it was a simple language. Now I'm not so sure, as I've noticed that all languages tend to have hard elements and easy elements. For example: French has a difficult conjugation system, but a relatively small vocabulary, whereas in English the situation is reversed. So I now tend to think that there was probably some other aspect of Malaysian that was crazy difficult.
Does the human mind adapts language to an approximate level of complexity, so that all languages are of a fairly similar objective difficulty, or are there any natural Toki Ponas out there?

Help Me Scale Back My Digital Life

Gerard Sorme — Sun, 02 Jul 2006 13:54:24 -0800

Help! Lately, I have found that technology has truly become a burden rather than something that is fun and productive for me. I have multiple email addresses, domains, Flickr accounts, del.icio.us accounts, Bloglines, on and on and on. It has got to where I am so deluged with information that I have found my mind going to mush. It's almost scary......no, scratch that....it IS scary. However, I think the above may be the reason. Good old, "information overload." I know that sounds so cliché - but it's all too real for me. Can MeFites help and offer ideas to scale back and maybe offer ideas for doing as much as I possibly can through the interface of ONE SITE? I'm slowly going crazy trying to "keep up," proving, for me at least, that less is probably going to be more. Thanks in advance.

How to pick a simple cell phone?

eaglemoon — Wed, 17 May 2006 09:27:57 -0800

I am tired of being connected and available all the time. To that end I have decided to drop my Treo PDA phone and just get a simple phone that will give me access to my calendar and contacts - but no email - no web - mobi-video - just plain old POTS. Any recommendations for simple cell phones?

Advice for clearing literary clutter

matildaben — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 11:27:21 -0800

Suggest practical and creative systems for reducing the number of books I own (rather long exposition inside). Hopefully this is part 1 of an ongoing decluttering and stuff-organizing project. I am really feeling more motivated to get rid of more stuff nowadays. I've read a lot of the decluttering threads and my issue is very specific and practical, and hopefully does not require therapy.

The vast majority of my possessions by weight and volume consists of books. I would like to develop a system for getting rid of them that will have a very practical, behavioral, methodical approach to the emotions that compel me to keep them.

One category of books is the ones I haven't read yet. This is pretty large. One thought that I had for dealing with them in a mostly scientific way was to arrange them in piles according to a 1-5 assessment of how likely I would be to read them (forcing myself to answer honestly for each one), and keep only the 5's. If there's still too many 5's left, I might break it down further by asking myself what my reasoning is for why I might want to read it (e.g., would I learn something valuable, keep up with a favorite author, be entertained, etc.). For partially read books, the question would be similar, "how likely am I to finish this?" So, I pretty much have a system for this category, and mainly am interested in hearing about similar strategies that have worked for you, or refinements or gotchas to this system. For instance, how does one estimate likeliness to read? What sort of questions does one ask oneself about motivation to read a yet unread book?

Books that I have read break down into several categories. The first is books that I have kept just because I enjoyed them when I read them, will probably never read them again, but they gave me pleasure so I keep the book around to honor that. Again, here, I think reason and logic can prevail if I just put them in a pile and say "I honor how much I enjoyed you when I read you" and then let them go. But that will probably be more painful than it sounds. For this category, advice, strategies, tales of similar efforts, and gotchas are welcome.

Books that I have read and may read again are a much smaller category, and once I have determined which ones those are, I can probably use a similar system as with the unread books to weed them out.

Then there is the large, amorphous category of books I hold on to for some sentimental reason - I read them in a great college class, I know the author, etc. I don't want to be too brutal here and rule them out completely merely because they are sentimental tokens - I want some kind of clarity on what questions to ask myself to determine which ones have a meaningful enough sentiment to hold onto and which ones are just emotional baggage. This is probably the toughest category, and the one where I'd probably benefit the most from hearing about "hacks" that have worked successfully for other people who operate in a similar fashion.

Living normally on the cheap

Jaybo — Mon, 11 Oct 2004 01:18:23 -0800

What is the cheapest you could live and still maintain a fairly normal lifestyle? Somehow when thinking about (Canadian) Thanksgiving and both the gorging on food that would ensue and also about those who are less fortunate, a friend and I began comptemplating the cheapest we could live and still maintain a fairly normal lifestyle. Here's what we came up with for monthly expenses...

Rent - $300 for a VERY inexpensive bachelor apartment
Utilities - $200 for gas, power, water
No TV and only use Internet at library or possibly $20 for dial-up
We debated whether we could survive with no phone and in the end decided it was possible.
Food - $10 per day should provide 3 basic but healthy meals
Transit Pass - $50/month
Clothing - $20 per month
Entertainment - library books, people watching

I may be missing some stuff but adding it all up, we figured that a person could probably survive on $40 per day.

Does this sound reasonable to you? (I know there are a LOT of assumptions in my question about what a "normal" lifestyle is, what a "cheap" apartment is, etc.)

PS - Sorry to post two questions so close together!