Lifehack

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Lifehacks [ laifhæks ] ( English for life tricks ) are hacks that relate to imponderables, strategies or activities in life. They are used to solve a problem, to achieve the goal in an unusual way or to increase effectiveness - sometimes even efficiency . Often they aim to make everyday life easier.

The manifestations are different:

  • Often it is about using things creatively and completely differently than originally intended. As an example, a foldback bracketserve as a cable holder. Originally this clip was designed to hold documents together. Thanks to the special shape of the clamping lever, for example computer peripheral cables for USB, audio or monitor can be enclosed with the lever. The lever now serves as a cable guide, with the bracket being used to attach this structure to a table top. The purpose of this life hack is to prevent loose cables from falling behind the table. Other examples of hacks of this type are a device for increasing the range of a WLAN antenna made of foam packaging scraps and wire, the use of digital picture frames as a screen for control computers or as an animated door sign and macro photography through the collimator lens of a DVD drive.
  • In addition, life hacks also include procedures that do not involve any misuse and serve to make strategies or activities in life more efficient. This includes, for example, a process that, thanks to a special winding technology, helps avoid tangled cables in headphones.
  • It also includes exploiting security gaps in everyday life. For example, at the DEFCON 2015 hacker conference in Las Vegas, Australian Chris Rock presented lifehacks that, thanks to such loopholes, should make it possible to officially declare people dead via the Internet or to apply for birth certificates for babies that do not exist.

Word origin and popularization

Bringing together the words of life ( english life ) and Hack to Lifehack was in 2004 during the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego, California, by the British technology journalist Danny O'Brien proposed and published. After the presentation of his lecture “Technical Secrets of Overproductive Alpha Geeks ”, the word became widespread on the Internet and a year later the American Dialect Society named it the second most useful word of 2005 (after podcast ). There and (since June 2011) in the Oxford dictionary a lifehack is described as something that makes everyday strategies or activities more efficient. This is unusual for a hack because it is inherently effective , but not necessarily efficient. In fact, this is also true here: Consisting of a smartphone and a magnifying glass, built into a shoebox, a video projector that is designated as a lifehack, for example, is not generally efficient as long as there are projectors that are cheaper than the smartphone and the magnifying glass shown there, and that too get by without handicrafts. Rather, this lifehack shows further limits of what is feasible, which in turn is typical of a hack.

On YouTube , life hacks are a separate class of videos with tips that make everyday life easier. Since 2014, life hacks - clever tricks - have been featured on Pro7 on the German TV program Galileo .

Differentiation from live hack (also live hack)

Live hack, seldom also live hack (composed of English live - alive, undelayed - and hack ), is very similar to the word lifehack discussed here in terms of spelling and pronunciation. However, the words differ in meaning. A live hack is equivalent to real-time, in the sense of a live broadcast or direct demonstration of a hack.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ German-English Dictionary: life , dict.cc; Lexicon: Hack in the context of hackers , Wissen.de, accessed on December 25, 2015, "... at MIT the term hack came about for a technical trick"
  2. ↑ a b lifehacker.com to Life Hack (English origin of the term)
  3. ↑ a b Words of the Year 2005
  4. ↑ a b zeit.de on a lifehack from the DEFCON hacker conference , by Patrick Beuth, August 10, 2015
  5. ↑ 12 Binder Clips Life Hacks , youtube.com, Author: CrazyRussianHacker, September 1, 2015
  6. ↑ a b t3n.de on Lifehack as a German term (with examples such as self-made cable holder and video projector)
  7. ↑ "c't Hacks" magazine, issue 01/2012, p. 22
  8. ↑ "c't Hacks" magazine, issue 01/2012, p. 32
  9. ↑ "c't Hacks" magazine, issue 01/2012, p. 96
  10. ↑ a b lifehack added to Oxford Dictionary , today.com
  11. ↑ Life Hacks - Headphones without tangled cables , youtube.com, Stern, July 16, 2014
  12. ^ O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference
  13. ↑ TMRC - Hackers ( Memento from May 3, 2006 in the Internet Archive )
  14. ↑ On Hacking (stallman.org)
  15. ↑ Life Hack Channel , Life Hack Germany , youtube.com