Thursday, November 15, 2007
iiNet announces naked DSL plans
11:07AM Sarah Stokely | Naked DSL is finally here for those wishing to dump their monthly landline fee. APC magazine reports that iiNet has announced a $49.95 package which offers 2GB peak and 2GB off peak download allowance – with the sweetner of free local and national calls through iiNet’s VoIP service. Calls to mobiles aren’t free – they’re charged at 29c per minute, with no call connection fee.
There’s a full pricing table of the available home and business plans in the APC article, or you can check out the details at iiNet’s website here.
iiNet’s Naked DSL goes on sale; pricing revealed [APC]
More » 
Free Wi-Fi for Sydney delayed
11:01AM Sarah Stokely | The Sydney Morning Herald reports that the state government’s plan to offer free wi-fi for the Sydney CBD has been delayed.
The state government had promised free wi-fi by 2009 for the CBD, North Sydney, Parramatta, Penrith, Liverpool, Newcastle, Wollongong and Gosford. They’re now saying the complexity of the project and the number of tenders is slowing things down.
Maybe they just need to get Adelaide-based ISP Internode on the case – they’ve been offering free municipal Wi-Fi in Adelaide and other regional areas for a fair while.
More » 
Make the Perfect Mashed Potatoes this Thanksgiving
11:00AM Adam Pash | If you’re preparing to whip up a bowl of mashed potatoes this Thanksgiving (and who isn’t planning to make this holiday staple?), the New York Times explains how to make the perfect, classic mashed potato dish. Starting with hot, dry potatoes and hot butter emerged as one of the two crucial steps toward mashed potato success. The other was using a good masher: in fact, technology trumped every other factor in my experiments. Check out the article for the details (the instructions are all on the second page), and if you’ve got your own tips for heaven-sent mashed potatoes, let’s hear them in the comments. AU – yes, Thanksgiving is an American holiday but anyone can enjoy good mashed potatoes. :) The Secret? It’s Not the Potatoes [NYT] More »Tiger
10:53AM Sarah Stokely | Apple has released possibly the last major update for OS X Tiger, the predecessor to the shiny new Leopard. CNET reports that OS X 10.4.11 updates its browser to Safari 3 and fixes some bugs and security holes. It also improves support for Intel based Macs running VMWare’s Fusion virtualisation software.
More » 
A cheap hack to improve your Apple iPod headphones
10:33AM Sarah Stokely | This hack leapt out at me because it offers a very cheap way to solve the very annoying habit which iPod headphones have of falling out of your ears while jogging. Basically you use a leather punch on some cheapy ear plugs (the kind which are handed out free at gigs!) and then pop them over the ear bud of your headphones. Easy!
How to upgrade your Apple In-Ear headphones [Chaos Projects via Hack a day]
More » Tips for being a frugal parent
10:13AM Sarah Stokely | I suspect that having kids is a great way to learn about time and money management. The Simple Dollar blog has published a few tips for frugal parenting which offers both time and money saving tips.
A couple of time-saving tips stood out - including finding activities which can be supervised by one parent while the other parent is freed up to do other work or have some downtime, and swapping babysitting with another family to ensure a night off from the kids every now and then.
Some of the money saving tips made my inner child groan (oh noes, home hair cuts!) but the emphasis on finding simple, creative toys seems to offer more benefits than just saving money.
Likewise, this tip really stood out:
Involve the children in every possible activity that you do. Even if it creates a mess or eats up time. If you take out the trash, have them help bag it and tie the knots. If you cook supper, show them what you’re doing. If you do the dishes, or go to the store, or anything else, involve them in the process. As they grow older, they’ll naturally become more and more involved and you can become less and less involved – in other words, you’re teaching them how to be frugal adults who can do things for themselves.
So, for the parents out there, got any time or money saving tips to share? Leave them in comments please.
Eight tips from an ultra-frugal parent [The Simple Dollar, via Lifehack.org]
More » Mimic Time Machine with rsync
10:00AM Adam Pash | Like the concept of Leopard’s Time Machine but aren’t running Leopard on your machine? The IMHO weblog steps through how to mimic the backup chops of Leopard using the rsync command line tool. By default rsync is Unix-only tool, but we’ve covered how to use rsync on Windows as well, so this method applies to pretty much everyone. And while you won’t get the stylish graphical interface of Leopard’s Time Machine, you will get incremental, full backups of your drive. Time Machine for every Unix out there [IMHO] More »Activity Tracker gadget for iGoogle updated
9:41AM Sarah Stokely | A new version of the Activity Tracker gadget has been released for the iGoogle homepage. I’ve mentioned Activity Tracker before when I used it to conduct a time audit of the working week.Notable new features include the ability to expand and collapse your task list (see picture), the ability to drag and drop your tasks to rearrange them, and the ability to add notes to each activity log. You can also edit the activity logs. The full list of new features is here.
For the multi-tasking amongst us, the developer mentioned a cute way to track 2 tasks at once: Add Activity Tracker on another tab and you should be able to have 2 Activity Trackers running on 2 tabs.
Activity Tracker Version 1.0 with new advanced features [ScreeperZone]
More » 
Transfer Songs from Your iPod to Any Mac with Senuti
9:00AM Adam Pash | Mac OS X only: Copy songs from your iPod directly to your iTunes library with free, open source application Senuti. We’ve mentioned Senuti in the past, but this app keeps getting better. Aside from the fact that Senuti has updated to work with Leopard, it also has a greatly improved interface since we last featured it. But what’s most useful is the new blue dot, which indicates whether or not the song is already in your iTunes library, making Senuti perfect for “borrowing” a song or two from a friend’s iPod without introducing duplicates to your iTunes library. Senuti is freeware, Mac OS X only. Windows users, check out previously mentioned YamiPod. Senuti [Fading Red via MacApper More »
