Thursday, November 8, 2007
On the road with Lifehacker AU
11:32AM Sarah Stokely | It’s not quite Jack Kerouac but Lifehacker will be hitting the road this weekend, travelling from Melbourne to Sydney via Gundegai. Thanks to an awesomely geeky going away present, we’ll be road testing the Tom Tom One XL as we go.Sadly I haven’t figured out how to Twitter via mobile phone, so I won’t be updating from the road, I have managed to figure out how to update Twitter from my mobile phone (fear my microblogging skills) so I may do some updates from road (twitter name: stokely) but you can expect to see my notes on the Tom Tom here on Lifehacker AU sometime next week.
See you on the other side. :)
More » 
What to do if you lose your passport
11:23AM Sarah Stokely | If you’re planning an overseas trip this Christmas (lucky you!) then you should be double checking your passport and any necessary visas round about now. A lost passport will take 10-15 days to replace, so if it’s gone missing you really want to find out now rather than the day you travel!
The Age has written up a handy guide of what to do if you lose your passport, which includes contact details for the Australian Passport Information Service. Bear in mind that it costs $200 to replace an adult passport, so it’s worth taking the time for a second look before reporting your passport lost.
Passport Panic Stations [The Age]
More » Build the Perfect Holiday Playlist in iTunes
11:00AM Adam Pash | Build the perfect playlist this holiday season with weblog Download Squad’s iTunes smart playlist tips. With the holidays quickly approaching, many of us start downloading songs gearing up for the season. Unfortunately that often means you end up with a music library littered with Christmas tunes that are hard to find when you want them and pop up on shuffle when you don’t. The playlist itself casts a fairly broad net, but you can tweak the filter’s rules as you go. Alternatively, you might try this alternate method for tagging and sorting your holiday tunes. Let’s hear how you keep your occasion-specific tunes corralled in the comments. Creating the perfect holiday playlist with Smart Playlists [Download Squad] More »Restart Your Exercise Habit and Stay in Shape this Winter
10:00AM Adam Pash | With winter’s uninviting chill just around the bend, falling out of your workout routine is tempting (who wouldn’t rather stay by the fire drinking apple cider than go for a jog). To help you cope, weblog Lifehack.org suggests 15 ways to restart and keep your exercise habit going. Reward Showing Up – Woody Allen once said that, “Half of life is showing up.” I’d argue that 90% of making a habit is just making the effort to get there. You can worry about your weight, amount of laps you run or the amount you can bench press later. The post echoes very closely these suggestions for starting your exercise habit, but if you’ve neglected a few workouts lately because of the cold, it might be just the motivation you need. 15 Tips to Restart the Exercise Habit (and How to Keep It) [lifehack.org] More »
Coin-Sized Pocket Screwdrivers
9:00AM Adam Pash | Keep a screwdriver with your everywhere you go with the coin-sized Pocket Screwdriver. At 1″ wide, this pocket screwdriver sports a variable thickness so it can fit snugly in several different sizes of screws—meaning it should work a good deal better than the dimes, quarters, and pennies you’ve been using up until now. The pocket screwdrivers come in packs of 12 for $8.50. If you’re looking for a little more power in your pocket, check out the credit card survival multi-tool. Pocket Screwdrivers [Lee Valley Tools via Make] More »When not to use Babel Fish…
8:39AM Sarah Stokely | You might have thought this one was way too obvious to warrant actually saying, but no, apparently some people do need to be told:
“When sending a missive to a foreign diplomat, it’s best if you don’t use Babel Fish to handle the hassle of translation for you.”
According to the How to Split an Atom blog, some Israeli journalists learned this lesson the hard way after using Babel Fish to translate a message to a Dutch foreign ministry. Wow. Read the full text of what they sent over at HtSaA, it even contains unintentional slurs against the guy’s mother. Way to go!
Babel Fish is Not a Diplomatic Tool [How to Split an Atom]
More » 
How to double your CD storage rack space
8:10AM Sarah Stokely |
If you have limited space and a burgeoning CD collection, this storage hack from the Ikea Hacker blog might appeal.
The trick is basically to put two CD storage units back to back and on wheels, so you can rotate the new unit to get to the CDs at the back. They’ve used an old Robyn CD shelving unit from Ikea but there’s no reason it wouldn’t work for any pair of CD shelves.
As long as you don’t mind having to swivel it to see the CDs at the back, this is a nice space-saving idea.
Limited Space? Just Double up the Storage [Ikea Hacker]
More » 
Kick Off Your Daily Browsing with Morning Coffee
8:00AM Adam Pash | Windows/Mac/Linux (Firefox): Simplify your morning coffee-and-web routine with the Morning Coffee Firefox extension. Morning Coffee bookmarks your regular reads by day (or by combinations of days) and opens up the appropriate set of bookmarks for each day with the click of a button. So let’s say you check an infrequently updating site every Tuesday and Thursday, but you want to get your fix of Lifehacker every day. You can set up Morning Coffee to open specific sites only on specific days so that each morning you’re ready to do your routine reading, you’ll get exactly the sites you want. Granted, you could do something similar by creating bookmark folders for each day, but getting the same feature set out of that method wouldn’t be nearly as simple. Morning Coffee is free, works wherever Firefox does. AU – I’m pretty sure we’ve already written up Morning Coffee – apologies for the duplication. Morning Coffee [Firefox Add-ons via Web Worker Daily] More »
10 tips for finding rental accommodation easily
8:00AM Sarah Stokely | The newspapers are all atwitter about how competitive the rental property market is at the moment – particularly in Sydney. But even in a competitive market you can make househunting a lot easier for yourself by following a few simple steps. I just rented a lovely house in a popular inner city suburb of Sydney for less than I expected to pay – and it only took me two days of looking at houses. Here’s how I did it. More » 
