Friday, October 5, 2007
Quickly Access Commonly Used Folders from My Documents
11:38PM Gina Trapani | When you need quick access to folders located all over your hard drive, Windows user Denny says your best bet is creating several shortcuts to those folders in My Documents. Windows has made a point of making access to your “My Documents” folder very simple. From anywhere you can hit Win+E to open Windows Explorer, and then you’re just a click or keystroke away from My Documents. Basically every Browse dialog has My Documents as a quick link in the sidebar, and if not it has it in the drive selection dropdown. So he makes shortcuts (.lnk files) to other folders and places them in My Documents, renaming them starting with an underscore to make ‘em appear first in the file listing. How do you get to oft-used folders on your PC? Let us know in the comments. Quickly Access Commonly Used Folders [Grinn Productions] More »
Mac OSX
11:18PM Gina Trapani | Reports suggest Apple will release Leopard late this month—October 26th, rumour has it. You can pre-order Mac OS 10.5 on Amazon now. More »
Screen Grab Web Sites Online with Thumbalizr
10:30PM Tamar Weinberg | Easily generate web site screenshots and thumbnails with web application Thumbalizr. Just submit the URL into the search box and wait about a minute until the screenshot becomes available. Thumbalizr is quite similar to screenshot generator WebSnapr with two benefits: it offers multiple resized screenshots (150px, 320px, 640px, 800px, 1024px, and 1280px), and it doesn’t add a watermark to the bottom of the generated images. This sure beats having to manually resize images with an image editor, and it saves time, too. Thumbalizr More »
Store Passwords Securely on Your Palm OS PDA
10:00PM Tamar Weinberg | Palm OS only: Take your passwords with you everywhere you go with Cryptex, a freeware Palm OS application that promises to keep your sensitive data secure with RC4 encryption. Add as many accounts as desired with as many fields as necessary. Easily distinguish your accounts with the many beautiful icons provided within the Cryptex application. The interface is extremely easy to set up and use. Best of all, this Palm OS application is absolutely free. Cryptex More »
DIY mood necklace
10:37AM Sarah Stokely | Via the 43 folders blog, here’s ”a Lifehack to create a simple but effective ‘mood necklace’ from freely available materials!”
I LOL’d.
DIY Mood Necklace [Your Monkey Called]
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Making Things Talk – DIY projects that communicate
10:34AM Sarah Stokely | Geek Gestalt has blogged about a book which sounds right up Lifehacker’s alley. ‘Making Things Talk’ by Tom Igoe comes out in the US this month. It’s from Reilly, the publisher of Make magazine.
The book promises to teach you how to bestow ”the power of communications upon your favorite tech creations through simple projects that present the guidelines for electronic verbosity.”
One project in the book is creating a ”networked cat cam” – another is “the interactive pet bed that sends you personal emails”.
Sounds impressive until you realise it’s just DIY Tickle Me Elmo. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. :)
‘Making Things Talk’–DIY projects that communicate [CNET]
More » ResearchBitch.com takes notes and gives quotes
10:17AM Sarah Stokely | At CNET’s News blog, Elinor Mills writes up ResearchBitch, a web service which claims to be a search engine that does your research for you, using the tagline ‘you give us the notes, we give you the quotes’.
“A student can ostensibly provide the site with at least 100 words from an outline, class notes, an assignment or just random thoughts. Ten to 30 minutes later you are supposed to get an e-mail notification that directs you to a custom Web page with the results.”
Mills reported mixed results for her search, in which she uploaded an entire article on the effect of global warming on polar bears:
“…results for this line: “If emissions of greenhouse gases and resulting global and Arctic warming continue apace, the study said, two-thirds of the 22,000 or so bears will disappear by mid-century,” provided results that were on target, bringing up links to newspapers and other sources related to global warming. Each result has a button you click on to get a full listing of similar results on Google.”
But the sentences which lacked context on their own brought back irrelevant results. Her advice? “Make sure that every single sentence is targeted to get the best results.”
I’m struggling to see why a simple Google search wouldn’t achieve the same results – but this site might provide a humourous diversion of the “what does a google search of my name bring up” variety.
ResearchBitch.com takes notes and gives quotes [CNET]
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Do try this at home
9:00AM Sarah Stokely | Via MAKE:Blog – The Times Online has a great writeup of a few science tricks you can use to amuse small science geeks who come to stay (or indeed older ones who are fans of the Ig Nobels. An extract from the fabulously titled Mick O’Hare book, How To Fossilise Your Hamster, the article looks at how to measure the speed of light with a bar of chocolate, why spaghetti always breaks in three places and how ants can survive being microwaved.
Do try this at home [The Times]
More » Roundup of social news aggregation in Australia
8:54AM Sarah Stokely | While doing some research on social news sites in Australia, I came across a post at Blogpond, which which was a really good roundup of social news aggregation in Australia. We wrote up one of them – Kwoff - earlier this week, but it also goes over a few I hadn’t even heard of:
At a glance, redruby (financial), bloggerati (web 2.0) and too right (politics) are each targeting a specific niche. Kwoff maintain their focus will be on politics, business and culture. Confer and Ausculture.com seem more geared to lifestyle, recreation and entertainment.
Social News Aggregation in Australia [Blogpond]
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