You've probably heard about the "Quantified Self" concept. In a nutshell you track everything that's measurable about you and you try to use it to your advantage.

I've started quantifying myself like this a couple of years ago... Here's a quick recap of what I've tried so far and quick thoughts and what I deem useful or not in hindsight.

1. Weight : I started with a Withings scale which automatically records my weight and body fat/lean mass every day. Just looking at the graph gives me awareness of my slacking or of my progress towards my goals and actually makes it easier to stick to my self imposed nutrition plan.

2. Sleep : The second area I tackled was sleep tracking with a device called Zeo which straps onto your forehead and records your brainwaves during the night. The company went bankrupt and the device is actually bothersome to strap on every night. But during the time I used it it gave me some great insights on my sleep patterns and definitely convinced me I should stick to my 9 hours of sleep per night and not try to shave off a cycle in a hopeless chase for more productive time :p

I’ve been drinking bulletproof coffee (recipe here) in the morning for a little more than a month now. I also had a few days off to feel the difference.

Here are my results. There are some positive effects. There are also some negative ones. If you’ve tried bulletproof coffee too, I’d be very much interested to know if your results concur with mine.

Sometimes you have to install Adobe Reader because some pesky government agency forces you to use a pesky PDF file that only works with Adobe Reader. And once you install Adobe Reader, it will take over your whole Mac, even the default PDF preview in Safari.

Here's how to restore the default PDF preview on OS X:

Go to /Library/Internet Plug-ins (there is a "Go To Folder..." option in the "Go" menu of the Finder if you need it).

In that folder, delete the following 2 plugins:

• AdobePDFViewer.plugin
• AdobePDFViewerNAPAPI.plugin

Restart Safari and you're done ;)

This coffee doesn't just taste awesome; it will boost your brain like no other!

Last week, I started to experiment with “Bulletproof Coffee". It’s sort of a commercial product but you can actually make your own at home. This is what I did.

It’s a bit too early to draw conclusions but my first impression is that I’ve been running at 120% mental capacity since I started. And I’ve surely cranked out a lot of extra work that I had been procrastinating on for a while (including work on this blog).

It may also just be a placebo effect or just a temporary energy boost of myself subconsciously wanting to check off as many todos as possible before the summer holidays… or maybe it’s just switching from green tea to coffee… but I sure feel pretty darn good these days ;) I’ll post more when I have had the opportunity to run a couple of weeks on and off that stuff.

In the meantime, if you want to try it out yourself, here’s how I’m doing it at home…

That on/off button at the top right of the keyboard can do more than on/off...

You might wonder what to do with that Eject key on your Mac keyboard, now that drives with ejectable media are gone... or you may not use your power key to its full potential...

Personally, I've been using Ctrl + Eject or Ctrl + Power (depending on what key you have at the top right of your keyboard) for quite some time now. It brings up a popup dialog with the following options:

• Restart
• Sleep
• (Cancel)
• Shut Down

But I always found a missing item here:

• Lock Screen (or Login Screen would also do)

I accidentally stumbled on the right shortcut for that today: Ctrl + Shift + Eject or Ctrl + Shift + Power will put your display to sleep immediately, and if you have your security preferences set up to lock your screen when display goes to sleep, you're all set. Neat! This is the fastest way I know to lock a Mac when I don't want to put it to sleep.

By the way, if you want to put it to sleep, without confirmation, you can use Cmd + Option + Eject or Cmd + Option + Power .

Be careful though, there are also "deadly" restart and shutdown without confirmation shortcuts involving Cmd + Ctrl + ... A good way to lose some work... Thus I'd recommend to stay away from the Cmd key all together when trying out these shortcuts ;)

Whenever you're on a web page with Safari, Chrome or Firefox and want to type a code snippet (or maybe just align what you type) you might be tempted to use the tab key...

But no, luck it moves the browser focus instead of inserting a tab into your text.

In order to actually insert a tab you need to press the following key combination: ctrl + alt + tab.

Note: depending on your keyboard, the alt key is sometimes called the option key.