Setting up my new laptop

I recently bought a new laptop, nothing fancy - just another MB Pro. My general resistance to change (and yes, I know it's a character flaw) compelled me to buy something that would require minimal time to get used to. At the same time, I do like to start afresh, so I rarely transfer settings/preferences from my old computer to the new one, which means that for the preferences that I do like to keep, I'll have to reconfigure them again.

Unfortunately, I have forgotten how I made those changes in the first place (especially the small ones), and had to figure them out one-by-one. So I thought I would start a post with the steps I took to set up this laptop, and I'll have something to refer to for the next

Let's start with Google Chrome

1. I was rather annoyed when they took google scholar away from the google page (this was about what, 3 years ago now?), because it meant a few extra clicks needed to search for a paper. I know it's not THAT much time, but hey, minimize all transaction cost right ;). Fortunately, Chrome allows you to search from different search engines from the "omnibar" (seriously, the address bar is a much more intuitive name). This is how you do it:

Chrome > Settings > Search > Manage Search Engines
Add:
First Column - Google Scholar (or name of any other search engine)
Second Column - Easy to type shorcut (I use "s")
Third Column - http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=%s

The next time you want to do a google scholar search, all you need to do is to type the shortcut in the address bar, and there you go, google scholar in your address bar!

2. Default font in blogger
Blogging in Times feels so formal, which discourages me from blogging. I've changed the default font on blogger to Arial, just so I don't have to change it everytime. This is a chrome setting, and not a blogger setting. To change it, go to

Chrome > Settings > show advanced settings > Web Content > Customize Font > Standard font

Changing the standard font here will change the default font in blogger.

3. Syncing Zotero with Dropbox
Zotero is a citation management application. It's the one I use, no special reason, since I think the major ones are all pretty similar. That said, I do have a soft spot for zotero because it's open source and not owned by a certain publishing giant.

I am hoping to make any computer a working computer, so I'm slowly migrating everything to cloud servers. It would be nice if I had all my papers in one place accessible from anywhere/even offline. To do this with zotero, simply create a zotero folder in dropbox, and change the appropriate settings in zotero for all computers.

Zotero > Preferences > Advances > Data Directory > Custom > (path to dropbox zotero folder)