5. Everything can be edited & customized

How to develop these abilities

5. Everything can be edited & customized

Almost everything, anyway.

This is one of the best ways to learn a lot about computing in a very short time.

For example, you can use the web browser's Inspect tool to edit webpage content and styling. (Note that this only applies to the page that is on your screen — you are not editing the page on the server, nobody else will see your edits.)

I use this regularly, usually for simple things like changing the font or the line height, which dramatically affect readability.

I used to study my degree at university remotely. The content presentation was terrible and I found it very hard to stay focussed on reading. I started experimenting with re-styling the text, using concepts to increase focus — putting it into narrower columns, increasing the text size, changing the font to a more readable one, even applying a heavy underline to help my eyes keep track of the sentences. Then it occurred to me that there is probably at least one browser extension for applying custom (styling) to a web page, with a GUI editor and the ability to save the CSS for specific websites and web pages.

Learn to think with this idea: “Everything I see can be altered somehow.”

Of course, there are practical limitations — don't expect to alter applications without editing the source code, which you can't do anyway unless you have access to the code.

PDFs are off limits too. PDF "editors" exist, but a PDF is essentially an unregimented map of objects. There is no "text region" or the likes — when you import a PDF into any document editor, the text strings are imported as just that: strings of text, usually disconnected from each other.

But, by looking at everything with the "can I edit this?" mentality, you will quickly discover what can & can't be edited, what software exists in order to edit it, and how to use those pieces of software.

You will learn a lot in a short time, about software, file formats, and computers in general.

You will learn how & why to save your files in certain formats, about lossy & lossless file compression, about saving versions of your important files, about why you shouldn't open special file formats in the wrong applications, and much, much more.