Tech Notes

Three Browser Extensions I Uninstalled and Don’t Miss

A tab manager that promised to organize everything ended up adding its own layer of clutter I had to manage on top of my actual tabs. A password-strength checker duplicated a feature my password manager already handled quietly in the background. And a link-preview extension that was supposed to save time actually slowed down every page load by a noticeable half second.

After removing all three, my browser felt faster and I genuinely haven’t reached for any of them since. The pattern I noticed: each one solved a problem I didn’t actually have, using a feature built into something I already had installed.

Before installing the next extension, it’s worth checking whether the browser or another tool already does the job quietly.

The Keyboard Shortcut List I Actually Use Daily

Not the exhaustive fifty-shortcut cheat sheet nobody memorizes, just the six that actually changed how fast I work: window snapping, clipboard history, quick app switching held for a second longer to see all windows, a screenshot-to-clipboard shortcut, tab reopen, and a dedicated shortcut for pasting as plain text.

That last one alone saved me from hours of manually stripping formatting out of pasted text over the past year. I didn’t even know it existed until a coworker mentioned it offhand.

Six shortcuts, genuinely used every day, beats a printed sheet of fifty I’d never reference again after day one.

Setting Up a Home Server on Hardware You Already Own

An old laptop with a cracked screen turned into a file server and media backup box using nothing but a lightweight Linux install and an external drive I already had. No new hardware purchase needed, just about two hours setting up SSH access and a scheduled backup script.

The screen being broken was actually fine, everything runs headless over SSH from another machine on the network. Closing the lid with an external monitor unplugged keeps it running instead of sleeping, which took some digging in the power settings to figure out.

It’s not fast, but for backing up photos and running a small file share for the household, an eight-year-old laptop handles it without breaking a sweat.

Why I Went Back to a Wired Mouse After Six Years

Wireless latency on modern mice is genuinely low, that part isn’t the issue. What got me was the quiet tax of dead batteries at the worst moment and the tiny but real click delay I could feel once I went back to a wired mouse for comparison.

I ran a week each way, same desk, same tasks, and timed how often I noticed input lag during fast scrolling and dragging windows. Wireless produced noticeably more of those tiny hiccups, small enough to dismiss individually but constant enough to add up.

For gaming or heavy design work, that difference is worth the cable. For general browsing, it genuinely doesn’t matter, and I’d tell most people to keep the wireless mouse and not think twice.