Tuesday, November 20, 2007

12 Healthy Foods That Aren’t

11:00AM Adam Pash | Just because a product heralds itself as fat-free doesn’t mean it’s good for you, and Men’s Health tackles 12 unhealthy foods consumers often mistake for nutritious. For example, the oft-assumed healthy granola (AU – I think that’s American speak for muesli?) bar you’re eating with breakfast every day may not be as wholesome as you think. The upside: Granola is made with whole oats, a nutritious food that’s high in fiber. The downside: The oats are basically glued together with ingredients like high-fructose corn syrup, honey, and barley malt—all of which quickly raise blood sugar. On the plus side, not all granola bars are unhealthy, and for each unhealthy food the article highlights, it also suggests a healthful alternative. In all, Men’s Health gives the thumbs-down to: Yogurt with Fruit at the Bottom Baked Beans California Roll Granola Bars Pasta Salad English Muffins Croutons Fat-Free Salad Dressing Fruit Cocktail Reduced-Fat Peanut Butter Pretzels Corn Oil Know any other unhealthy food people generally assume is good for them? Let’s hear it in the comments. You Call That Health Food? [Men's Health] More »

Ditch Your Taskbar for Minimised Thumbnails with miniMize

10:00AM Adam Pash | Windows only: Freeware application miniMize creates thumbnail images of your minimised application on your desktop, providing an interesting and customisable alternative to the Windows taskbar. Similar to previously mentioned ThumbWin, miniMize boasts virtually all of the same features in addition to an arguably improved interface. Several of you who seemed to like ThumbWin reported experiencing a few crashes, so mimiMize might be the replacement you were looking for. If thumbnails on the desktop sound to you like clutter, miniMize won’t be for you. If you like the idea of ditching your taskbar for minimised thumbnails, miniMize or ThumbWin should do the job. miniMize is freeware, Windows only. miniMIZE [via Appaholic] More »

Survive the Christmas season

9:55AM Sarah Stokely | Christmas is just around the corner. I’m no Grinch (I actually own Christmas decorations and intend to use them, not to mention the Bing Crosby Christmas albums…) but even when you enjoy the holiday, it comes with a lot of social and financial traps. As a work from home type, I have the luxury of avoiding the city and malls emblazoned with tacky Christmas decorations and large signs saying how many shopping days you have left. But I know a lot of you aren’t that lucky. So let’s talk Christmas survival. The Lifehack.org website has a good guide on how to overcome other people’s expectations and have the Christmas you want. I liked that it advises deciding how you want to spend Christmas for yourself. It also advocates buying meaningful presents, or not bothering at all. This is such good advice, throwaway presents are a waste of money and just clutter up the house until you can figure out a polite way to get rid of them. So what’s your Christmas survival plan? I still haven’t worked mine out! Take Your Christmas Back [Lifehack.org] More »

Invitastic – online invitation manager

9:16AM Sarah Stokely |   Invitastic is a cute little website which lets you create, send and manage invitations to events. It has fairly limited functionality at the moment, but a couple of nice features. The invitations don’t seem to be customisable – mine came as an email on a yellow background, which wouldn’t have been my choice. I did like the fact that it embeds a link to Google Maps so your guests can look up a map of where your event is being held. The site tracks RSVPs for you – you can see who’s said yes, no or maybe, and who hasn’t responded.  For Mac users, it offers the bonus of being able to download the event to your iCal (for you the host as well as your guests – the invitation comes with the event as an .ics (Ical) file. The date format on the website is the confusing American style (11/20/2007) but the invitations themselves express dates as “November 22, 2007″ which is much clearer for non-yankees.  I assume they’ll add templates to give some choice about how your invitations look – in the meantime it’s a barebones WYSIWYG email invitation service, no more, no less. UPDATE: Turns out that you can customise how the invitations appear online – I missed the two translucent arrows on either side of the invitation on the invitation creation screen which let you cycle through a range of different backgrounds. The email version always comes with a simple yellow background to avoid image display problems in email.  Thanks to Hillel from Jackson Fish Market (the people behind Invitastic) for getting in touch to clear that up!  More »

Prolonged Sitting Causes Disease, Standing Fights It

9:00AM Adam Pash | A recent study at the University of Missouri-Columbia reaffirms that a sedentary life increases your risk of diseases like cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and obesity, but the study suggests that even if you get in the recommended 30 minutes of activity 5 days a week, sitting for the remaining 15 and a half hours of the day is still trouble. The solution? According to the article, just standing up more frequently throughout the day to type or do chores can do wonders for your health and double your metabolic rate. If you’re interested in incorporating a healthy stand-up into your daily computing, consider an adjustable desk or the more extreme Treadputer. MU study finds that sitting may increase risk of disease [EurekAlert] More »

Give or get tech support at Fixya

8:33AM Sarah Stokely | As someone who’s often frustrated by poor or incomplete user guides or product information online, I can see that the Fixya website could be a useful tool. In beta at the moment, Fixya is aiming to be a one-stop-shop for people seeking tech support, user guides and repair guides for products from a range of vendors. Rather than a tech support business, Fixya is designed as a community, where users provide both the questions and the answers. You can browse the database of already answered questions, or pose your own question to the community of registered experts. Experts are users who have registered with the site and nominated their own area of expertise. They can post answers to the site, or help users directly via online chat. The success of a site like this will be in attracting knowledgable people who can provide decent answers to user questions. The site encourages people to sign up and answer questions by paying them. It’s not a huge amount, a few bucks per answer posted to the site. I noticed that the Top Expert on the site has already racked up 300 solved problems, so the incentive scheme seems to be working to attract problem solvers to the site. There are already a lot of online forums for people to discuss products and tech problems – this one might be good to browse when stuck on a particular problem – or if you don’t have a resident geek to help you. If you know of any particularly good ‘tech support’ forums, please leave them in comments. More »