 |
|
|
|||||
Even if you use a calendar app to organize your life, the paper calendar is far from being obsolete. Write something down on a printed calendar, and it becomes a persistent reminder of important events. You dont have to dig through any screens to write things down, and you dont have to perform any complex sharing maneuvers to set up a communal calendar for family members or colleagues. But even the paper calendar could benefit from some digital enhancements. With a few minutes of setup, you can print a custom calendar to your exact specifications while also making it small enough to fit on a single sheet of paper. This tip originally appeared in the free Cool Tools newsletter from The Intelligence. Get the next issue in your inbox and get ready to discover all sorts of awesome tech treasures! A printable, personal, pocketable calendar To make your own single-page printed calendar, use NeatoCal. NeatoCal is a free web page that prints out a full-year calendar on a single 11-by-8.5-inch piece of paper. Printing the basic calendar takes maybe 10 seconds, but you can also spend a few minutes customizing it to your liking. Calendars are free to print with no sign-ups needed, and the underlying code is open-source. The default NeatoCal is a 12-month calendar for 2026, with one column for each month and the weekends highlighted in gray. Youre supposed to print it in landscape mode, and theres a little space for writing next to each day. NeatoCals default 12-month view is clean and simple. The real power of NeatoCal, however, is in all the ways you can customize it. Visit the project page, and youll see a list of ways to modify the calendar by adding some code to the end of the page address. For example, lets say you want to print a calendar for 2027. Instead of visiting the main calendar page at this address: https://abetusk.github.io/neatocal/ . . . youd head to this address: https://abetusk.github.io/neatocal/?year=2027 Or lets say you want to print out a quarterly calendar instead of a full year. For that, we can use some code for specifying three months instead of 12: https://abetusk.github.io/neatocal/?n_month=3 What happens when you want to print a calendar for Q2? For that, well use some code to offset the start date by a specified number of months: https://abetusk.github.io/neatocal/?n_month=3&start_month=3 Notice how the above example uses an ampersand (the & symbol) to combine the code for total number of months and the number of months to offset. With a bit of easy customization, you can make your printed calendar look any way you want. The full list of URL parameters reveals all kinds of neat possibilities. You can add moon phases, adjust fonts, change the highlight colors, and tweak the abbreviation length for days and months. Theres even a calendar that highlights alternating weeks instead of weekends: https://abetusk.github.io/neatocal/?layout=hallon-almanackan My favorite feature of all, though, is the ability to import events from ICS calendar files via this address: https://abetusk.github.io/neatocal/?ics Want to add events from your Google Calendar? Head to the Google Calendar website, click the vertical ellipses () next to your main calendar, head to Settings and Sharing, then select Export calendar. This will download a ZIP file containing an .ICS file, which you can drag and drop into the page linked above. If youre feeling especially crafty, you can also use this tool to create an ICS file with one-off or repeating events. Or you can use an AI tool like Claude to turn a list of plain text events into a downloadable ICS file. This is how I was able to create a printable calendar with every Yankee game in 2026: NeatoCal can even create custom calendars with specific events included. Once youve designed a calendar to your liking, just hit Ctrl+P or Cmd+P in your browser to bring up the print dialog (or use the Share command to find the Print option from a mobile device), make sure it all fits properly on one page, and start printing. Stick it to your fridge, pin it on your cubicle, or fold it up into your wallet and start enjoying the analog clendar lifestyle again. NeatoCal works in any web browser, ideally on a device that can send pages to a printer. The site is free to use with no limits or sign-ins. The developer says that everything is loaded locally in your own web browser, though as an open-source project, you can also download and self-host your own version. Treat yourself to all sorts of brain-boosting goodies like this with the free Cool Tools newsletterstarting with an instant introduction to an incredible audio app thatll tune up your days in truly delightful ways.
Category:
E-Commerce
The mitochondria, perhaps better known as the powerhouses of cells, are emerging as a possible factor in the pains of aging. Some scientists are of the mind that poor mitochondrial health can lead to symptoms and diseases related to aging, like Alzheimers and cancer. The mitochondria just give up earlier than other parts of the cell because of the wear and tear that theyre subjected to, Pinchas Cohen, dean of USCs Leonard Davis School of Gerontology, told The New York Times. Theyre the canary in the coal mine of cellular dysfunction. Its true that mitochondria produce energy from the food that we eat. But thats actually not all that they do. How Cell Health Impacts Aging They also help immune functioning, create peptides that send messages between organs, and are essential for general cellular housekeeping, according to the NYT. But as we get older, the number of mitochondria in our cells and their ability to function decline. The organelle begins producing more and more reactive oxygen species (ROS), a toxic byproduct of the energy production process. That has an effect on our overall health. Other researchers believe the reverse, that aging and disease actually cause the dysfunction in the mitochondria. The billion-dollar question in the mitochondria aging field, in my opinion, is cause and effect, said Vamsi Mootha, a professor of systems biology at Harvard Medical School. Is the decline leading to aging, or do you just have old tissue thats sick, so you have sick mitochondria? Either way, its clear that taking care of the mitochondria in your cells is of utmost importancewhich means taking care of your body. Mitochondria Care Daria Mochly-Rosen, a professor of chemical and systems biology at Stanford University and an author of The Life Machines: How Taking Care of Your Mitochondria Can Transform Your Health, told the NYT that working out has an interesting way of healing mitochondria. Exercise causes a little bit of use and tear of the mitochondria, Mochly-Rosen said. And so by exercising, youre actually telling the whole body, OK, time to replenish your mitochondria and make them more pristine by making new parts for it. Sleep is crucial, too, because its during the seven to eight hours a night that the mitochondria get rid of parts that may have been harmed throughout the day. According to the Institute for Functional Medicine, reducing stress and consuming enough nutrition are also beneficial. Plant-based nutrients like polyphenols help strengthen mitochondrial function, as do omega-3 fatty acids, antioxidants like vitamin C and zinc, magnesium, L-carnitine, alpha-lipoic acid, the vitamin B family, and coenzyme Q10. Ava Levinson This article originally appeared on Fast Companys sister website, Inc.com. Inc. is the voice of the American entrepreneur. We inspire, inform, and document the most fascinating people in business: the risk-takers, the innovators, and the ultra-driven go-getters that represent the most dynamic force in the American economy.
Category:
E-Commerce
Would you consider tying your shoelaces an achievement? If you’re able-bodied, probably not. Now imagine doing it with one hand, or no hands at all. Suddenly it is. Fewer than 10,000 people have stood on the summit of Everest. It takes months of training and tests the limits of human endurance. However, if you helicoptered to the top, stepped out for a photograph, and flew back down, would that be an achievement? The outcome is the same. Same summit. Same view, but most of us would not consider it an achievement. A new kind of helicopter has now arrived. Artificial intelligence can draft reports, write software, compose correspondence, and generate ideas in a matter of seconds. The systems are improving at a pace few anticipated. Googles chief executive has informed investors that more than a quarter of new code at the company is now AI-generated. At Microsoft, the comparable figure lies between 20 and 30%. Shopifys chief executive told employees that before requesting permission to hire, they must first demonstrate that the role cannot be performed by AI. This was not speculation about a distant future. It was a policy memorandum circulated last year. Artificial intelligence is not merely altering how we work. It is quietly reshaping what it means to have accomplished anything. Philosopher Gwen Bradford argues that an achievement has three core features. First, it must arise from your own agency. The outcome must be attributable to your effort and direction. You cannot outsource the substantive work to another person, or to a machine, and claim the result as fully your own. Second, it must be meaningfully difficult. Achievements typically require effort, skill, and perseverance. Thats why an Olympic medal is universally regarded as an achievement. It is the celebration of the years of grind the athlete went through. Third, it must be non-accidental. The success must result from the exercise of competence rather than the favour of fortune. Winning a lottery may transform ones circumstances, but it displays no mastery. We may envy the outcome, yet we do not admire the ability behind it, because there is none. Sound judgement, effort, discipline and perseverance are what transform a result into an accomplishment. They bind the outcome to the person who produced it. Artificial intelligence unsettles precisely that bond. If increasingly valuable outputs can be produced with ever less reliance on human skill, the source of credit becomes harder to locate. So the question is not whether we will collaborate with algorithms. We will. The question is what counts as achievement in such a world. We will have to shape our sense of achievement by creating new opportunities and by redefining what mastery looks like in a world where our tools think alongside us. LLMs can write a basic article on almost anything. This means that if writers want a creatively fulfilling career, they will need to work with technology to create something richer, more nuanced, and more distinctly human. Three things worth sitting with: 1) Audit your effort, not your output. Bradford’s framework gives you a useful personal test: look at something you produced this week and ask honestly how much of the difficulty you actually absorbed. Whether the output was good matters less than whether the struggle was yours. 2) Resist the urge to skip to the summit. The helicopter analogy extends well beyond Everest. Every time you use a tool to bypass the hard part of thinking, the wrestling, the false starts, the moment before clarity, you arrive at the answer without making the journey. Occasionally, that is fine. As a habit, it quietly hollows out the skills you believe you still have. Use AI to go further, not to go without. Consider a student preparing an essay on constitutional law. Faced with a difficult case, she could struggle through the judgments, reconstruct the reasoning, and attempt her own argument, refining it through revision. Or she could prompt an AI system to produce a polished draft in seconds. The submission might earn a respectable mark. Yet in outsourcing the intellectual labour, she has also outsourced the formation of her own judgement. The grade records an outcome; it does not record the capacities she failed to build. 3) Pick one thing that machines are bad at and get unusually good at it. Machines are poor at navigating moral ambiguity, at building trust in fractured human situations, and at knowing which question matters more than the answer. These are among the hardest skills that exist. Alexander Fleming, the bacteriologist who discovered penicillin, stumbled upon it by accident. But he had the trained eye to recognise what he was seeing. Another researcher might have discarded the contaminated petri dish as a failed experiment. Fleming understood its significance. Luck finds the prepared. So does the future. It is more useful to think of AI not as artificial intelligence that replaces us, but as intelligence augmented, a tool that extends human capacity. A surgeon who uses AI-assisted imaging to detect a tumour earlier than would otherwise be possible has not diminished her achievement; she has elevated it. A composer who uses machine learning tools to experiment with harmonic structures he would never have imagined unaided is expanding the frontier of his own creativity. The nature of achievement is changing, and with it, the scale of what we can reach for. What we can build, solve, and imagine in partnership with these tools exceeds anything a previous generation could have attempted alone. That is not a reason to be complacent about effort. It is a reason to be genuinely excited about what honest, skilled, human-directed effort can now produce.
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||