Friday, October 19, 2007
Prepare Your Mac for Leopard
11:30PM Gina Trapani | Macworld says there are a few things you can do to clean up and prepare your Mac before you take the leap to OS X 10.5 Leopard. Install the latest versions of your current applications (many are rolling out Leopard updates), clean up your hard drive, uninstall unneeded software, run the Apple hardware test and repair your hard drive using Disk Utility. The list of file and folder deletion candidates is especially impressive. First there are the usual culprits like Documents and Applications, but to dig deeper and rid yourself of cruft, look in: More »
Make a Facebook Friends Collage
11:00PM Gina Trapani | The Digital Inspiration weblog found a hidden Facebook feature—the ability to view your friends as a grid of profile pictures. Here’s how: Step 1: Log in to your Facebook account and click the Friends tab. Step 2: Select the drop-down box and click the list separator (-). You’ll get back a neat collage of your entire friends list in profile photo thumbnails. Okay, so Facebook’s not the most productive webapp out there, but it is great for networking. How do you get stuff done (besides playing Scrabulous) on Facebook? Let us know in the comments. Create a Photo Collage Using Pictures of Your Facebook Friends [Digital Inspiration] More »iTunes
10:30PM Tamar Weinberg | Two years ago on Lifehacker, we posted some still-applicable tips on how to clean out your iTunes library by de-duplicating songs, tagging your files and importing album art. More »
Customise the Open and Save Dialog with OpenWide
10:00PM Tamar Weinberg | Windows only: Get a customised Open and Save dialog box (with details, icons, or lists) with OpenWide, an application that does what Windows does not. You can already customise the views of your individual folders using Folder Options in the Explorer, but unfortunately, your saved view does not extend to dialog boxes. The application is extremely small (72KB) but many might find the default System Tray icon feature unnecessary. Fortunately, the tray icon can be disabled. For those who often save files and need detailed information quickly, this application comes in handy (though Windows itself should really support this without the need of an extra app). OpenWide is a Windows-only freeware application for personal use. OpenWide [via the How-To Geek] More »
Change the Default Message on HP Printers
8:00PM Gina Trapani | Flummox your coworkers with an “Insert Coin” message on the office printer using the HP Printer Job Language (HPPJL) command set. The Hackszine blog describes how to customise the Ready prompt on HP printers’ LED display with a few simple commands: I haven’t been able to test yet (no HP printer here), but if I’m reading the code right, you can actually do this right from the command line using telnet. Just telnet to port 9100 and type in the following: \e%-12345X\@PJL JOB \@PJL RDYMSG DISPLAY="MESSAGE HERE" \@PJL EOJ \e%-12345X Sadly, I don’t have an HP printer here to test this out either, but I’d love to see someone pull this off. If you do, let us know how it goes in the comments. (Oh yeah, and here’s how to undo it when the boss hunts you down.) Change the message on HP printers [Hackszine] More »I like your old stuff better than your new stuff
11:36AM Sarah Stokely | The Coding Horror blog has an elegant post which ponders why good software goes bad – looking at the evolution of small, effective programs into monstrous bloatware. He links to PC World’s annual list of software apps they preferred before they got ‘improved’ and also links to a few online archives for older versions of software, such as oldversion.com, oldapps.com, and old-versions.net. Nice to know they are out there, after writing up the new Winamp the other day, I was toying with the idea of looking up an older version of it.
Why does software spoil? [Coding Horror]
More » Tips to actually enjoy exercise
11:16AM Sarah Stokely | The Lifehack.org blog has posted an article on exercise which tackles one of the most difficult parts of making exercise a regular part of your life – transforming it from a “must do” to a “want to do” activity.
One of my big achievements this year was moving from zero exercise, to doing vigrous exercise classes three times a week. It’s taken me a long time to get into the habits, social and lifestyle patterns and attitude to enjoy exercise and go out of my way to ensure it’s part of my life, so I feel qualified to comment on the bits of the post I agree with and those tips which I don’t agree with. :)
More » How to save water
11:03AM Sarah Stokely | Given the longterm water restrictions we’re facing on the driest continent in the world, I think it was remiss of me not to post about water conservation last week in the flurry of environmental posts for Blog Action Day.
Fortunately, tipster Peggy wrote up a post on some simple ways that anyone can reduce their water usage. A couple of tips – capturing clean water from the shower while you wait for it to heat up, and capturing clean water from your washing machine – can give you ample water to water your plants or garden. Nice.
If you’re interested in finding out more about low-usage shower and tap heads, grey water capturing devices, etc there are lots of resources online. But my favourite water saving tip? Shower with a friend. ;)
How to save water [psychopyko]
More » Giving Twitter a Try
10:55AM Sarah Stokely | You can already read Lifehacker through Twitter, but I’m a latecomer to the notion of microblogging. But at the Media Connect conference I attended recently, Duncan Riley of Tech Crunch and Ben Barren of Gnoos both spoke very favourably of Twitter as a tool for bloggers to stay on top of the news. I decided to give it a try, so as of yesterday, I’m twittering! More » Conduct a ‘time audit’ of your working week
10:29AM Sarah Stokely | As I mentioned yesterday, we’ve posted a few timers and time tracking tools lately. In my quest to become more productive in my working week, I’ve decided to put my money where my mouth is, and use next week to conduct a ‘time audit’ of my working week.
I haven’t yet picked which time tracking tool to use, but from Monday morning until Saturday morning when I finish work for the week, I’m going to keep a record of the tasks I do and how long they take me. At the end of the week I’ll have a better understanding of how long various tasks take (ie research, writing and editing, as well as the marketing, networking and pitching for new business that’s part of any freelancers job.
Gina posted recently about using a digital timer to get things done. I had a look at the blog that tip came from, and I liked the philosophy behind it – which is make the list of your daily, weekly and monthly activities, then decide on the amount of time you have to complete each one. Use a digital timer to keep on track. I think once I’ve done my one week audit and gotten an idea of how long my take me, I’ll be in a position to put a system like this in place. Anyone else interested in doing the audit next week? Let me know in comments.
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