Practice – tutoriale

I’m an amateur at chess, but I still like to play.

What are some techniques and strategies for winning at chess games with beginner-level players?

• Coordinate your pieces, and make sure that, as much as possible, one piece is linked to the other.
• Try to protect your King with either pawns or minor pieces (Bishops, Knights).
• For the opponent’s King & Queen, try to put as much attack on them as possible (Rook on same files with a Queen, Bishop on the same diagonal with the opposite King, etc.).
• Try to guess what it’s going to happen – if a pawn structure completely blocks a piece of yours, try to avoid that line/diagonal.
• Always leave room for your opponent’s mistake – consider an easy mate, see if they don’t see a pin/fork, etc. A computer will almost never play assuming that you’ll make a mistake, but humans can do so.
• Try to think while your adversary is moving.

Unfortunately, I can’t tell you much more than beginner games because this is my level.

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I tend to buy some things on special occasions, like Black Friday or similar events (Prime Day).

Why do I do so?

The thing is, shopping can become addictive. You open a web page, you know you need something, then you get into a mode in which you are encouraged to buy.

“I want this, I would like that! Uuu, what a shiny thing!”. And so on.

And starting from an item, I can get into buying some additional things I may not even need.

The solution? Don’t buy often, and when you buy, consider buying on occasions like price cuts.

eMAG does these often in Romania – all sorts of periodic promotions for all their website.

Amazon’s Prime Days are rarer, but when they happen, you get quite a few products at discount. Also, they run some daily promotions, also.

If you’re interested in a specific product, consider using Amazon price tracker, Amazon price history charts, price watches, and price drop alerts. | camelcamelcamel.com.

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How can you do check spelling in Romanian, if you don’t write with diacritics?

Tip: you can write with diacritics, do check spelling and then remove diacritics.

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In a presentation (“Prezentări de succes”) I attended via JA Romania, the presenter said something in the line of: “When you start some presentation, of any sort (video, audio, speech, story), don’t start with «He is X, X is doing so and so». Instead, start with the action. Don’t introduce the characters, starts where the action is”.

I liked the idea.

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If you want to win a mime game, try to choose people that don’t have remarkable things.

Ion Rațiu is famous for his bow, while Radu Câmpeanu is not known for such a thing – thus Radu Câmpeanu is more difficult to guess.

Charlie Chaplin has lots of things you can pick up. Bobby Ewing from “Dallas“? Less so.

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Some principles I like to follow when working on tasks:

• Don’t break the chain. Once I start an action, I try my best to finish it.
• Use the calendar a lot. Prioritize tasks, work on batches.
• Know when you’re most productive. For me, that’s the first part of the day.
• Work on the most important things first. Prioritizing tasks should be an important part of the tasks.

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Let’s say you want to create a password for a website.

How to do it?

One way is to create a password and use it repeatedly on a lot of other websites. That’s a poor solution.

Another solution would be to use a password generator and manager to generate and save a password and use complex, random passwords. The solution is optimal, but it requires some technical skills – handling a password manager is not very complicated, nor is it simple.

You could use a system like GMail offers: create a username based on email, something like:

firstname.surname+randomtext@gmail.com,

where “random text” could be random for each website you create an account.

And, either based on such an email or on the URL of the website, you could create a uniquely different password.

So, if I want to create an account on vodafone.ro, I could use my email name+vodafone.ro@gmail.com, and password “mypassword+vodafone.ro”.

Yet, just by looking at the above example, one can understand how I got to have that password and try to replicate the login on different websites.

Yes, a bot will fail to replicate the password, but a human hacker will easily understand my password.

There’s another solution, though – based on either the URL (vodafone.ro) or email username (name+vodafone.ro@gmail.com), I could generate a string.

There are some hash generators that, starting from such a string would generate a random password.

An online example, but there are many others: SHA256 Hash Generator Online.

Hash for vodafone.ro: “990F509B877370D67FB2202D3D0332543642E6846D17F9F3029E60C0EB395DAC”.

Hash for name+vodafone.ro@gmail.com: “533C151BC4F877C3E7CFE2033CF602F27D6833BD60C8EF5CC0430B431C4D3BF1”.

This is also not impossible to hack, but it’s much more complicated.

You could even create a custom function, a custom hash generator.

Thus, you would have an unique, complex, password for each website.

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When I tell others they can use a password manager like LastPass, I’m often told – “what if I forget/lose that password, or what if LastPass goes down?”.

Quite a few people have been afraid of forgetting the password and getting locked out completely.

The solution is simple – most password managers offer you the option to export your passwords.

Do this periodically, and make an archive with a password you know.

If the online password manager disappears, you’ll still have your archive.

In my opinion, the risks for this happening are miniscule.

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I like to save the jobs I apply to.

I have an Excel file with the following columns:

Date Job Title Company Location Job Listing Job Listing #2 Cover letter Link Portfolio sent? Response? Optimism-level

I save in it the date I applied, the job title, company, where the job is placed, a link to the job posting (and a second one, in case there are more), my cover letter used for the job (so I’ll know, later on, what I wrote to the company), whether I sent a portfolio or not if I received a response, and how optimistic am I of getting the job.

Having a centralized system for this helps with organizing stuff.

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Internet with a failsafe solution – in Năvodari, when I don’t have electricity at home, this also happens on the staircase hall, within the block of flats. There is a router in there, so if I don’t have electricity in my house, there’s no cable Internet.

My solution? I connect to my mobile.

An optimal solution? I think it’s best to have two connections to the Internet.

The poorest solution – “there is no Internet, we’re not doing anything.”

Large companies, which depend on Internet, are looking at a backup solution that costs 30-50 lei per month, and an initial investment in a router that is capable of handling two connections to the net at the same time.

For example, such a router would allow an immediate failsafe – if there is no Internet, another connection would take over immediately.

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