Agronesia

My internet quota is limited so any way to cut down useless usage is helpful. If we talk about flash, there are some websites that genuinely use it for advanced functionality like Wordpress‘ stats system and Google Analytics. However many just use it for bad design and nonessential content which just waste bandwidth.

This is where add-ons like Flashblock comes to play. It lives up to its name: the Mozilla Firefox extension will block flash and replace it with an “f” icon (meaning “**** you” presumably). If we really need the flash content, we can just click on the placeholder.

There’s a whitelist feature which is useful because as I said some websites use flash properly and need it to function. Even the uploader in Wordpress uses flash.

I read Steve Pavlina’s article Overclock Your Audio Learning a while back. Basically, he advocates playing audio materials at a faster-than-usual speed.

This can be accomplished by players such as Windows Media Player. In version 11, you can change the speed from View - Enhancements - Play Speed Settings. By clicking Fast, the speed will be brought to 1.4x. You can start from there and increase it gradually until you can’t handle anything faster.

I myself listen to the podcast japanesepod101.com. For the Japanese dialogue on the beginning, I still use normal speed. However for the English explanations, I apply this method.

It works! At 1.4x, I can still comprehend the talk very much. Of course I was first uncomfortable hearing Peter and others speak at an unnatural speed, but after some while I didn’t really mind.

If you listen to podcasts, try to use this listening technique. You can really save time if you’ve mastered the high speeds.