NerdBeach

Slow WordPress Editor? Here’s a Fix If You Use Yoast SEO

There is a multitude of plugins out there for WordPress (a serious strength as compared to its predecessors such as BlogEngine.Net), and many of these are for improving SEO. One of the most popular of these is the Yoast SEO plugin, and the solid reputation is well deserved. However, you may be noticing that your WordPress Visual Editor is getting to be quite sluggish when you go to write a post, which no doubt slows down that important flow between the brain and the screen.  Well, I’m here to say that Yoast SEO might be the culprit if you are using it, and it’s an easy fix.

To be more exact it isn’t all of Yoast SEO causing the problem, but rather the Readability Analysis function of the plugin. This function appears to be constantly scanning the entered text as you compose your next great article, and on a more lengthy composition, you may find that keystrokes are increasingly being delayed as you type.

The solution is to turn off the Readability Analysis function within Yoast SEO.  From your dashboard go to SEO/Features and disable the first entry, Readability Analysis.  The change takes place immediately, so you can toggle it off and try it for yourself back in the editor to make sure you see an improvement.

 

 

Now you are free to type away (and even backspace) without waiting for the screen to catch up. Your thoughts will no longer be held down by a slow screen update, and your fingers will dance with joy across the keyboard. Well, maybe not exactly like all of that, but at least you can see if you have accidentally backspaced over something important before you forget what it was.

As a note, if this does not fix your problem, then you might find that switching to the distraction-free editor may make things work much smoother. To activate this, just look for the icon with four arrows pointed diagonally out while in the editor. While it isn’t a real fix, it may still let you coexist with an editor that is known to be finicky even on the best of days. And nobody has time for that, naturally.

How to Maximize Your MacBook Battery Life

Gold MacBook Retina

Apple has released the latest generation of the MacBook Pros as well as the newer 12″ MacBook Retina, and in most regards they deliver a slim, lightweight experience while still getting the job done. However, there has been a lot of disruption in the ranks as to exactly how much battery life the units have at their disposal. This is something I suffered with too, until I started monitoring the MacBook’s performance and power usage.  By doing so I was able to greatly extend the laptop’s run time. And the tool I used to do this was the free coconutBattery system monitor app.

coconutBattery MacBook Power Monitor

coconutBattery System Monitor

The coconutBattery app is simple to download and install – just be sure that you get it from a reputable location on the web, as it is with all of the distributed free applications out there. Once you have it installed, you will want to monitor the total Watts that the laptop is consuming at a given time. The goal is to reduce this whenever you can.

coconutBattery MacBook Power Monitor

 

Luckily the coconutBattery monitor app makes this easy by letting you put the current watt consumption along with other data right on the toolbar. As you can see, I have chosen to have watts and time remaining displayed for a quick sanity check on power, But you can choose from several options to display. This also gives you back the total runtime left on your MacBook, something that Apple removed in a recent update to the macOS.

coconutBattery MacBook Power Monitor

In the actual screenshot above of the MacBook Retina laptop that I am using to write this, I am currently using 3.6 watts of energy (leftmost display numbers). This will give me 9+ hours of runtime on my current charge of 87%.  Also note that I am running several background processes that also impact battery life, including OneDrive, DropBox, Time Machine, and WiFi.

Monitoring For A Clear Picture

The main thing to do once you get a “real time” power monitor in place is to experiment with what takes the most energy and avoid it. Chrome, for example, hits the power wattage a bit hard, kicking it up to 6+ watts on typical use, At times DropBox will spike usage, but it tends to settle down after a few moments. Microsoft’s Office products on the Mac tend to be rather well behaved, at least with my testing. And Safari, despite  the recent Consumer Reports results, is the more economical browser when it comes to power. In fact, I am actively running Safari at this moment and I am still getting strong numbers for battery life.

I know that no two individuals are typically going to have the exact same use for their laptop, so there really isn’t any hard rules. Instead, you should consider downloading the power wattage meter of your choice (I do like coconutBattery) and take a few moments to identify your battery killers. You might be surprised at how much runtime you can get out of your new MacBook.

Play Real Air Hockey Against Your Smartphone With This Setup

Sure. you can download an air hockey app from a given app store and play against your smartphone, but where’s the challenge in that? No, if you really want to see how you stack up against your favorite smart device, consider building a robotic rig that will give your device the hardware it needs to compete with you mano a mano. Now that is how you really decide who’s best in a physical game. And you just might find out that humans don’t always have the advantage.

Robotic Air Hockey

The project is essentially an X-Y table that manipulates the paddle. The smartphone is placed on a tripod and watches the puck while it controls the paddle wirelessly. The smartphone (which is running a downloadable app that makes this work) is constantly crunching data and plotting trajectories that will eventually lead to your embarrassing failure as a superior challenger to its newborn physical prowess.



 

The project was created by Jose Julio at JJ Robotics, and you can get a kit to make your own robotic game table.  But now I have to wonder if this is just the beginning of our smart devices reaching out from their digital domiciles and making a stand in our physical world.

Consider that the typical smartphone has the hardware needed to actually play the game, including visual processing and data crunching. With a built in wireless control capability, it isn’t limited to a standard set of limbs that humans must make do with. No, it can adapt to any hardware that it can connect with, and becoming an expert on using it is as close as an app download.

smartphone air hockey

And with A.I. continuing to make giant strides, how long will it be until trash talking is part of the device’s repertoire? If you think it’s bad getting beat in air hockey by your smartphone now, just wait until it lays down the smack talk over beating you ten games in a row.

But for now, we should probably just enjoy a simple game of smartphone powered air hockey without questioning its eventual lead to artificial intelligence dominance of the physical world. Plus, you have to admit that this looks really fun. Now, let the games begin, foolish human!

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The Invention of Air Hockey

Air hockey was invented by a group of Brunswick Billiards employees from 1969 to 1972. In 1969, a trio of Brunswick engineers – Phil Crossman, Bob Kendrick, and Brad Baldwin – began work on creating a game using a frictionless surface

source:wikipedia

A Clock Built Of Lego

Can you build a digital clock completely out of Lego? As Swedish computer programmer Hans Andersson proves, it is indeed very possible. I find the articulated movements of the almost robotic clock very soothing to watch. And I imagine that the sounds could be nice as well. Oh, it also tells the time.