The Best Ways To De-Stink Your Stuff 
In Memoriam: Our Favourite Apps And Services That Have Gone Belly Up 
How To Prepare For A Move Overseas 
From Saucy Pics To Passwords: How To Share Sensitive Information 
How Do IKEA's Prices In Australia Compare? 
New flybuys Earns Discounts Faster (But They're Not Good Discounts) If you’re a They Might be Giants fan, you’ll either be thrilled or revolted by this news – it kind of depends on whether you’ve got kids. TMBG – the cult band who gave us “Birdhouse in Your Soul” and the annoying theme song from Malcolm in the Middle – have gone and done a Wiggles. Yep, they’ve got a kids album coming out.They’re releasing teaser material in the form of a weekly video podcast for kids, entitled Friday Night Family Podcast. It’s hosted by muppet-esque puppets of the two Johns.The Geek Day blog gave it the thumbs up from both the parents and the kid in his household, and that’s pretty impressive considering you’d be hard pressed to find a parent who enjoys listening to the Wiggles.The podcast is avaiable on iTunes here or you can download the High Five video episode here.
I spotted a review of a nifty sounding product over at the Cool Tools blog. Lay-It-Out sells lifesize furniture templates which you can place on the floor of your new home to help you visualise where furniture should go.
The templates are made of paper and come in “average” sizes which you trim to your exact specifications (they show measurements in inches and centimetres, which is nice for us metric-types).
Speaking as someone who has moved house and rearranged furniture far too often, this sounds like a nice way of simplifying a process which would otherwise involves modelling software (if you’re a geek) or graph paper if you’re less technically inclined. It also means you get to visualise how it looks in the room, rather than on a piece of paper or computer screen.
They sell a “whole house” kit for $US40, or individual rooms. I note that the templates don’t seem to take wardrobe doors and the like into account – so you’d need to factor that into your room planning as well.
So how do you solve the problem of arranging furniture in a new house? Leave tips in comments please!
Lay-it-Out [via Cool Tools]
A new study shows that 47% of adult internet users have Googled their own names, and most consider the results accurate. Here’s how to have a say in what Google says about you.
For many of you, finals are right around the corner. If you’re starting to prepare, the College Scholarships blog has six considerations to account for when you’re getting your learn on. Avoid caffeine and other stimulant drugs, especially if you’ve exceeded the normal usage amounts as you wouldn’t want to crash during the exam and end up performing poorly. Choose your study area carefully: is a setting with music better or worse for you? Make sure your study setting accommodates your wants and needs. Don’t stress and be positive. Remember, your exams will all be over soon. Prioritise and put your most important classes first on your list. Manage your time efficiently. Study alone or with your classmates, but avoid hanging with your crush. It’s a distraction you’ll want to avoid. If you have additional study tips, feel free to share them in the comments.
6 Things to Remember when Cramming for Finals [College Scholarships]Do you feel that you have too much to do and not enough time to do it in? We’re being pulled in hundreds of different directions nowadays which adds to the perception that we can never get anything done. So how does New York Times blogger Marci Alboher catch up? She has a special system of maintaining emails. She also eliminates unnecessary meetings, sets boundaries when necessary, works when she’s most productive (which, for me, is typically late at night), and knows when to say no at times when a “yes” will be counterproductive. How do you manage motivate yourself to get things done? Let’s hear your tips in the comments.
5 Time Management Tricks [NY Times Blog: Shifting Careers]AU – this sounds awfully familiar to something we ran last week. Either that or I’m getting deja vu.
Looking to lose weight? That conscious decision starts when you go shopping, according to Yahoo Health. In an article listing 127 foods that comprise the “Picture Perfect Anytime List”—low-calorie foods that you can eat anytime and anywhere, Yahoo Health goes as far as to say that you’ll be thin for life if you live by these treats. What, then, is on the Picture Perfect Anytime List? Any fruits and vegetables, soups, garlics and herbs for flavor, hard candy, sorbet, unsweetened juices, seafood, beans, brown rice, and other health foods. Certainly, some of this seems hard to believe, and for good reason. In any event, moderation might still be key, but going low-cal is certainly better than opting in for more fattening alternatives.
127 Foods that Fight Fat [Yahoo Health]Mac OS X only: Sick of not being able to exit Finder? A quick terminal command will add a “quit” option to the menu in Finder. This means you can run Finder like any other Mac application. If you’re running some heavy applications, simply close Finder and enjoy the extra, albeit small, processing power. Open a terminal and enter the following command: defaults write com.apple.Finder QuitMenuItem 1
You will need to restart for the changes to take effect. Here’s the caveat: Finder also manages the icons on your desktop. If you exit Finder, you won’t be able to see any of the icons on your desktop. Just click the icon in the dock to bring Finder back.
Add a Quit Menu to the Finder [Freewaremac]Weighting in at the size of a business card, the tiny Thumb Calendar makes it possible to keep a calendar on you at all times. The Thumb Calendar is two sided and in order to use it, you must cover the dates that are not directly below the month header with your thumbs. The designer only has a PDF version for 2007 on his homepage, but you can grab a 2008 version from Flickr (linked below). The Thumb Calendar is a free download and makes a great addition to any purse or wallet.
Thumb Calendar 2008 Edition [Flickr via Adam Sporka's Home Page]If you’re looking to create a high-tech Christmas wreath, this high-output LED project should do the trick. You’ll need a plastic card case, a 9-volt battery, a Ryobi fan from Home Depot, 8 high output LEDs, a CB220 protoboard, and a few Ohm resistors. Fit the protoboard, battery, and plastic card case onto the fan. Solder the LEDs and the rest of the parts onto the protoboard. Then, solder the resistors onto the pins. You’ll need to download a program to the module, but once you’re ready, drill 3 holes into the back of the plastic case and affix the case onto the back of your fan. Power on the module and you’re ready to roll. The end result is a pretty nifty light display, but just be careful to keep out of reach of young children.
How to Do a Christmas LED Wreath (Video) [Sclipo] How to Make a Christmas LED Wreath [Zedomax]This week’s best posts include:Speed up White Pages Searches Sometimes the simple hacks are the best – a reader shows us how to speed up searches on the White Pages website by using the text version of the site. Find Candidates, Polling Booths with Google Maps The election is right around the corner – but Google Maps can help you track down the vital information to get you to your nearest polling booth informed and ready to vote! Build a Hackintosh Mac for Under $800 “If the high price tag for Apple hardware has kept you from buying a Mac but you’re willing to roll up your sleeves and get adventurous, you can build your own “Hackintosh”–a PC that runs a patched version of OS X Leopard.” Hackintosh vs. Mac Pro vs. MacBook Pro Benchmarks “How does my Hackintosh stack up to the Apple-built competition? To find out, I put my Hackintosh, a Mac Pro, and a MacBook Pro through the paces.” Top 10 Quicksilver Plug-ins “Launching applications and documents is just Quicksilver’s gateway drug: The more you get used to doing things with Quicksilver, the more things you want to do with it.” Extend the Life of Your Razor Blades “Sick of dropping cash on new, pricey razor blades every few weeks because you can only get a couple weeks of use from a new blade before it shaves about as well as sandpaper?” De-Pixelize Your Images with VectorMagic “Web site VectorMagic turns virtually any image into vector art that can be resized as much as you want without any nasty pixelation–perfect for creating your scanned signature, for example.” Double Your Productivity with a Serial Workflow “While there’s something to be said for multitasking, a serial workflow–completing one task after another in order of priority–can be much more conducive to getting your work done.” Set Up a Self-Cleaning Mac with Hazel “Let’s take a closer look at how Hazel can keep your Mac’s hard drive free of files you don’t need anymore.”
