Monday, September 10, 2007

Home Remedies for the Common Cold

11:30PM Lifehacker US Edition | Blog HealthMad has listed five home remedies to beat the common cold. The list boils down to mostly hot liquids, namely chicken soup, hot and sour soup, and lemon tea, but it also adds yogurt, garlic, and ginger, which act as natural antibiotics. Of course, if you’re careful enough to avoid colds altogether, you may not have to worry about this list. If only we could all be so lucky. What home remedies have you tried to avoid a lingering cold that has been tough to beat? Coping with the Common Cold [HealthMad] More »

Get the Most Out of College

11:00PM Lifehacker US Edition | Now that most students are back in college, the Students’ Blog has written up a few great tips to get the most out of academics while still having a great time socially. Since most students are finally on their own after so many years, it could be hard to find self-discipline with this newfound freedom. But the Students’ Blog has you covered. A sampling of tips: Notes – Take your laptop with you, or else buy a notebook for each class, and TAKE NOTES. Most professors pull questions for their tests from their lectures, so if you sleep through your classes and only read the textbook, you could end up in serious trouble on your finals. More »

Internet Explorer keyword bookmarks with “about:”

10:30PM Kyle Pott | You can access your Internet Explorer bookmarks with a quick registry hack and the about: command in the address bar. The gist of the hack shown at the Technoworld weblog is to manually add your bookmarks to the registry so you can quickly navigate to them by putting about:YourBookmark into the address bar. You can access your bookmarks from the dropdown menu, but as you know, mouseless navigation can do wonders for your productivity. Couple this hack with an “about:” entry for Texter, and you can put together a pretty handy ad-hoc mouseless navigation scheme for Internet Explorer. I wouldn’t recommend setting up shortcuts for URLs shorter than six characters (the length of “about:”) but it would be very handy for complicated URLs that you visit frequently like “about:bank” or “about:gasprices”—you get the picture. It is about as close as you can get to keyword navigating for Internet Explorer. Trick : Make use of “about” pages for fast navigation and security in IE [Technoworld] More »

Optimise Your Power Strip

10:00PM Gina Trapani | My fellow anal gadget owners will nod in understanding when they read this: The right power strip plug arrangement is essential for anyone with a few energy-sucking peripherals at their workspace. The rest of you shaking your heads, let me make my case. My cordless workspace includes a 12-outlet power strip mounted to the back of the desk, which is awesome. What’s not so awesome is that the oft-unplugged plugs weren’t easy to get to, and devices that I need always on (like the Wi-Fi router) made it impossible to just cut the power on my whole rig on shutdown in the interest of saving energy. Did I mention I had no way to tell what plug was what? Here’s how I perfected the setup. More »

Help Rewrite Lifehacker the Book!

1:09PM Gina Trapani | Just like software, books get upgrades too: I’ve been tasked with the job of expanding and revising Lifehacker the book to a shiny new second edition due out in the spring of 2008. But I need your help. As I dive deep into revising this monster, I want to hear from you: what do you want to see in the second edition of the book? What did you love, hate, roll your eyes at, shrug or smile at the first time around? I’ve set up a Google Group to get your opinions and thoughts as I write, and in return you’ll get sneak previews of the new edition, a behind-the-scenes look at a book-in-progress, and incredibly good karma. The really helpful folks will even get their name listed in the book’s acknowledgments—after that, fame and fortune await! Join up the Lifehacker book 2.0 Google group and have your hand in getting the latest and greatest in life hacking on shelves this spring. Thanks in advance for your help and interest and for making the site—and the book—better every day. Lifehacker book 2.0 More »

Top 5 music websites for Australian musicians

12:53PM Sarah Stokely | Recently we told you about the struggling musician’s toolkit, a roundup of useful websites for musicians. I asked for some tips on good sites for Australian musos, and Jamie McDonald from Liveband came back with his Top 5: Bandmanager This site almost makes we want to grab a guitar and hit the road! Bandmanager gives musicians a way of coordinating gigs, rehearsals and touring online without having to spend a day making phone calls, and sending emails. It also has a great band web-site builder so you can hit the road and keep the business side of things going without having to spend hours in front of a computer. Even if you are not in a band, I’m thinking this could be good for organising the family to be in the one spot at the one time for Christmas! Usync A great tool to help bands pay the bills. This Aussie site was created by some very experienced musos from Sydney to help artists build and connect with their fan base. You can create a “backstage” area for fans to not only let them know what you are up to, but sell your music and merch. I noticed today that there is even a Sony BMG artist using these guys, so they are just going from strength to strength AIR Ok, a bit of a boring name – the Australian Independent Record label Association – but if you were writing a list of what is going to help you make it as a muso, after writing down “work harder at my music than every other muso I know” I would write down “join AIR”. No point wasting your time making mistakes that others have already made when you could be gigging. This site is a great resource for anyone in the industry or wanting to be in the industry and I find myself on it at least once or twice a week to make sure Liveband is going in the right direction Lefsetz Letter Bob Lefsetz has been around the music biz for years and has got plenty to say about it. You mightn’t always agree with what he has to say, but he knows his stuff and at the very least the Lefsetz Letter is a good read. At its best you will get to know which way the industry is turning, be the next big thing, make a fortune and retire to a tropical island! The island could be a little crowded though because a huge number of people in the industry worldwide read the Lefsetz Letter. Sonicbids This nifty site makes it really easy for bands and promoters to link up without sending constant press-kits through the mail. A lot of the festivals in the US are solely using Sonicbids for artist submissions. Takes a lot of the licking and sticking press kit envelopes out of the equation while giving you a very professional electronic press kit to put you out and about. Thanks for the tips, Jamie! More »

Liveband updates us on DRM

11:55AM Sarah Stokely | Recently we told you how to download an MP3 memento of a live gig at Liveband. In that post I mentioned that Liveband had a reasonable fair usage policy, but it was unclear about whether they were using DRM. Their site says”Files that are encoded with DRM will be promptly displayed as such on the performance profile page.” I emailed Liveband to try to find out more about the DRM situation, and here’s what Jamie McDonald from Liveband told us: “When we were developing Liveband I spent a lot of time looking into DRM and we actually have the capacity to encode music so that is why it is our terms of use, etc. The great news is that no artist has ever requested it. For us, we use DRM to really refer to the usage rules we would like our customers to adhere to, but we are not encoding the music to restrict them to those rules. What we have tried to do is find a balance where it lets you use your live recording that you have purchased from Liveband how you would like to use it, but also gives some guidelines. In a practical sense, we would discourage an artist form using DRM on Liveband as it contradicts what we are trying to do – ie. give fans access to the unique experience of hearing the artist live and (if they were there) reliving the expeirence and having it for bragging rights with friends! Nice to see an online music business which is dedicated to giving customers control of the music they buy, kudos to Liveband for that. More »

The Most Productive Bookmarklets

7:00AM Wendy Boswell | Just when you thought it couldn’t get any more awesome, tip blog LifeClever has put together a killer list of the most powerfully productive bookmarklets that work on your iPhone. There’s a bookmarklet to help you find words on the page, find Wikipedia articles, YubNub, and lots more. If you’ve got an iPhone and have discovered a good bookmarklet that helps you accomplish something, please share it in the comments. 17 powerful bookmarklets for your iPhone [LifeClever] More »