Since a little while I use headphones at home, so my housemates are not bothered by my music and I'm less distracted by other noises in my surroundings. However, I realized that I often miss phone calls this way. Sometimes I put my phone out of sight (while charging), or I simply don't see the display light up even when it's on my desk. I could call them back all the time, or wait until they call back, but both are not really desirable solutions. So instead I implemented a solution, which most of you would consider over-the-top.
The Cloud. Personally I hate the word, yet I'm using it every hour of the day (when I'm not asleep). Especially my Android device helps me appreciating cloud services, to have all my emails, calendars, tasks and notes available within a few seconds. These cloud services often provide decent search capabilities and I assume they take care of making backups at a regular basis. Previously, a hardware failure could end up being disastrous without a decent backup policy, nowadays it has become merely an inconvenience. The degree of inconvenience depends on the cost of a hardware replacement.
Remember The Milk offers several methods to integrate your task list in Google Calendar. One of the methods is to put a task gadget in the sidebar (it's the same gadget you can embed in GMail as well). Another method is to add a special calendar, which results in checkmarks at each day. When you click those, a popup appears with all tasks due for that day. The final method which is relatively easy to find is in the Info tab of the Settings page. There you'll find a link pointing to an iCalendar resource, containing all your tasks (possibly represented as events).
The Qwerty keyboard originates from the 19th century and is still widely used. As far as my knowledge goes, the touch screen was not yet invented at that time, there were only massive type writers with hammers which could occasionally clash. In fact, the Qwerty layout was designed to be as tedious as possible, to minimize the chance that two hammers would collide. These days Qwerty is obsolete, almost no one has an old style type writer. Still it's used for convenience, while more ergonomic alternatives are available. Dvorak, for instance, is the most well-known alternative layout, which is supported by almost every major operating system.
To keep sane in a life with study, work and personal stuff, one should remain organized. There are several ways to do so; the most effortless way would be to keep all things in memory. While not everyone is gifted with random access memory in their heads, other tools should be used instead. Think of post-its, a notebook or a calendar. A less common way is to create empty files on your Windows desktop, with a filename describing a task. To keep track of all my tasks I use digital task lists. To be more precise, for almost two years I use Remember The Milk (RTM) and since then I barely forgot about doing something.
Yesterday I bought the Beejive instant messenger from the Market and gave it a spin.
Evernote is an online service which stores notes for you. There are various ways to create and sync your notes across machines: there's a web-interface, a reasonable Windows client and an Android client. Quite convenient to quickly jot down something.
There's also a Chrome extension providing Evernote functionality from the browser. This makes it possible to 'clip' pages (store their full content or just a URL). Since a little while the extension also provides Simultaneous Search: when you enter a search query in Google it will also show your notes containing your keyword:
Awesome is a tiling window manager for X11, which automatically tiles windows nicely on your screen as soon as you open or close them. It's highly configurable: the configuration is written in the Lua language. So in fact, you're programming your own window manager to your liking.
This post explains how to use struts, since this is one of the blind spots in the documentation and anywhere else on the net.