Monday, November 12, 2007
Customise your carhorn with MP3s
4:17PM Sarah Stokely | If it wasn’t bad enough having your train ride to work marred by strangers who have chosen “Who Let the Dogs Out” for their ringtones, now you may face the same horrors in peak hour traffic as well, thanks to the Horntones FX-550 MP3 carhorn.
Yep, it lets you download MP3s to your carhorn. Why can I see a future in which little Noddy cars toot the Benny Hill theme in protest at the Bohemian Rhapsody being blared out by rusty old piles driven by Wayne’s World loving stoners? The streets won’t be safe.
I haven’t embedded the video because it starts off with an advertisement, but you can click through if you’re interested.
Horntones FX-550 MP3 car horn [CNET] More » 
Synchnotes between desktop and web
4:00PM Sarah Stokely | Windows only – There are plenty of Notepad-like applications out there, but the ability to synch between web and desktop mode made Synchnotes stand out to the Web Worker Daily blog. WWD said a reader comment put them onto Sychnotes, which is compatible with Windows and Pocket PC environments.The lack of a search function means it would only be really useful for brief notes – and WWD points out that the software doesn’t seem to be under active development. But as someone who works on the road more than I’d like to lately – I can see that it could be worth trialling. Do you use a desktop or web based notepad, or just a plain old piece of paper? Leave your tips for the most effective notekeeping system in comments please!
Synchnotes Takes your Notes Anywhere [Web Worker Daily] More » Photoshop
3:38PM Sarah Stokely | Adobe says it will have a beta version of its online Photoshop product out by the end of the year. CNET reports the online Photoshop Express product will be available “to anyone”, usually through photo sites such as Photobucket.
More » This Week’s How To’s
9:00AM Wendy Boswell | 10 tips for finding rental accommodation easily Even in a competitive rental 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. 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.” Save Time and Paper with a Scanned Signature “At one point or another, we’ve all gone through the print-sign-fax dance to return a signed document, but the Productivity501 weblog details how to create a high quality scanned signature that you can quickly insert in a document so you can save yourself time and paper.” Remote Control Leopard with TightVNC (Mac) “With VNC built right into Leopard, you can remote control your Mac from any other Mac via iChat or the Screen Sharing client–OR any PC using the right VNC client. “ Turn Your Old PC into a Webapp Monster with gOS “If you’ve got an extra PC gathering dust, gOS is not only a worthy operating system for a cheap PC from Wal-Mart; it’s also an excellent (and free) way to repurpose your old PC.” Change a Broken Bulb with a Potato “In short, you just cut a potato in half and stick the flat end of one of the halves into the socket and unscrew. “ Avoid Recipe Disasters Through Preparation “In his latest book, Ruhlman offers some tips for us non-chefs on how to save time and avoid disaster by reading closely and getting ahead.” More »Wired unveils its green geek home
8:19AM Sarah Stokely | [via EcoGeek] I got all excited about visiting Wired mag’s Green Geek home, a $US4 million home in Los Angeles, but upon reading the fine print I see that it’s only open to the public for 10 days. Presumably they’ll sell it to a rich green geek after that. Lucky sod. :) More » 
Use FeedCrier to Read Feeds Via IM
8:00AM Wendy Boswell | Get your favourite site feeds via FeedCrier, a service that delivers updates to your instant messenger client. No download is required; just type in the username for AIM, MSN, Jabber, or Google Talk, along with the website you’re interested in getting updates from, and you’re done. This would be a good way to get the latest news updates delivered to you almost in real time. FeedCrier is a similar service to web app immedi.at; both are excellent tools for keeping a very close watch on a particular feed. Feed Crier [via ResourceShelf] More »iHacked
7:57AM Sarah Stokely | iPhone and iPod Touch 1.1.2 updates have been released and already hacked, according to APC magazine. It breaks the current ‘Jailbreak‘ unlock, but the updated iPod Touch has already been jailbroken and the article says a hack for the updated iPhone was expected soon too. More » How to troubleshoot Internet Explorer crashes
7:46AM Sarah Stokely | If like me you use a mix of Firefox and Internet Explorer for browsing, you remember how great it was when IE finally added the tabbed browsing feature which Firefox had offered for (seemingly) years. Now my big bugbear with IE7 is not just the fact that it crashes regularly, but that when you restart IE, it doesn’t offer to reopen all the tabs you had open before the crash – I love that Firefox can do that!The Online Tech Tips blog offers a few things to try if you’re experiencing frequent IE crashes. When I get my PC back out of jail (storage) I’m going to give these a shot. If you try them out, please let me know if they help stop the crashes.
How to fix Internet Explorer has encountered a problem and needs to close [Online Tech Tips] More » 