Optimizing my Desktop: Windows Operating System, Chrome, Docs, and Colab

Disable all default bloatware and ads, and remove all default pinned to taskbar; Chrome - Pin Tabs; Docs - Change Layout to Pageless

Continuation of the previous piece: “Spreadsheet Secrets: Underrated Spreadsheet Functions Pt.2 - Sheets and Excel“ (October 2, 2023, which was about useful functions that are in Google Sheets and in Excel, Very useful new functions that are both in Google Sheets and in Excel, including XLOOKUP; SPLIT; UNIQUE / FILTER / SORT; TOCOL; TEXTJOIN; and more). This is the third part of a planned four-part series on my recommended tech hacks. They are (what I believe to be) relatively simple, accessible tech hacks that I personally find useful. I believe many of these are highly underrated. The upcoming and final part will be: “Optimizing Android Smartphone”. See also my previous piece on my mobile setup: “Mobile Minimalism: Streamlining My Smartphone Layout” (July 5, 2023)

Windows Operating System

Disable all default bloatware and ads, and remove all default pinned to taskbar.

Screenshot of how mine looks:

I find apps via search (shortcut to open search: Windows key)

Chrome (Desktop)

Pin Tabs

I pin my Gmail; Calendar; Google Sheet with my blogpost queue; and ChatGPT4. 

Screenshot, of my pinned tabs and bookmarks, on my personal Desktop Chrome: 

Scrape Images, when have a list of URLs

Google chrome extension - ‘zzllrr Imager Geek’. Works very well, I’ve been using it for years.

Google Docs

Change Layout to Pageless

In many cases, there's no reason to use standard pagination. Especially if not going to be 'published '. Standard pagination is optimized for standard books (portrait mode), not computer screens (landscape mode).

Google Colab

To pull text via API or scraping, use Google colab (Google's web- based jupyter notebook, part of Drive tools, free). Relatively user friendly. Use ChatGPT4 to assist in writing python scripts