Home Pages and Tab Snoozes

What home or start page to have in your web browser is always a conundrum. Usually you want it to be where you tend to go much of the time. But sometimes it is good to have your home page teach you something. Try setting it to Wikipedia’s home page, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page, with its “Did you know…” and “On this day…” sections.

Just as you can have custom ringtones for different groups of people, so you know when you really have to answer your cell phone, you can also have custom vibrations for when you have the ringer turned off. This way, you can ignore all but the most important calls, texts, or other notifications during those periods you should not be checking your phone anyway.

Shutting down and restarting Windows 10 is not quite what you thought it was. In Windows 10, Microsoft implemented a “fast startup” trick to make it appear that Windows 10 boots more quickly by saving a snapshot of current kernel memory to the hard drive that can be read from when you boot up again. But if you use Shutdown/Restart to clear out problems, you need to really use the Restart option.

That dock on the Mac screen has been around for so long we tend to forget that there are options to replace how it works. uBar (brawersoftware.com/products/ubar) is expensive at $30, but it might be one of the best ways to ease into the Mac world from Windows. Another, called Station (truenorthsoftware.com/station), works more to organize documents and apps in folders or nesting docks. DockShelf (thealchemistguild.com/dockshelf) lets you make little tabbed docks. If you want to go totally minimalist, you can use Spotlight, via its keyboard shortcut of Command and Spacebar, to find and launch pretty much anything in your Mac. And then you can hide the Dock and sweep everything off your desktop to revel in the beauty of your ever-changing desktop pictures that you have set to rotate through your Photos library using the System Preferences for Desktop & Screen Saver.

You might want to snooze some of those websites you want to read but aren’t getting to anytime soon. Snooze Tabby (snoozetabby.com), an extension for both Chrome and Firefox, will let you set a time, from 10 minutes up to a month, for when a particular website will pop back up for you to read or react. Why bookmark something that you only need to read once (just not right now)?

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