Rushing to finish your tasks before the workday completes? Two years ago, Lifehacker alum Keith Robinson shared his three-step guide on how to avoid “Rush Hour”. More »
A diet rich in garlic can have a significant positive effect on your health, according to the New York Times. It seems that garlic increases the production of hydrogen sulfide in your blood, which—in the short term—relaxes your blood vessels and increases blood flow. In the long term: The power to boost hydrogen sulfide production may help explain why a garlic-rich diet appears to protect against various cancers, including breast, prostate, and colon cancer, say the study authors. Higher hydrogen sulfide might also protect the heart, according to other experts.
The downside (if you can call it that)? Benefits from garlic consumption in studies required an equivalent of two medium-sized cloves of garlic per day, and while some countries—namley Italy, Korea, and China—average as high as eight to twelve cloves a day—it may be a lot of garlic by your standards. Then again, if two cloves a day keeps the doctor away, I can deal with the bad breath in other ways.
Unlocking the Benefits of Garlic [NYT]Laurel Papworth has written up an interesting review of online identity manager ClaimID, which she says is a nice social aggregator of online identities.
“Think of ClaimID as a social bookmarking site for identities and profiles. You link to your profile page or account login on some other site and then bookmark it. There’s a hidden/private field and you can choose whether to turn the API functions on or off.”
ClaimID uses OpenID to let you verify or ‘claim’ pages and profiles about yourself online, providing a central repository for yourself or others to search (portfolio 2.0?). It also has the handy bonus of having a private field for password hints, so you can use it as a reminder for the passwords for the sites you visit infrequently.
My Social Identities: ClaimID [Laurel Papworth] More »
Mac OS X only: View the contents of zipped files in Leopard’s Quick Look without unzipping the archive with freeware plug-in Zip Quick Look. Just download the plug-in, drag it to /Library/QuickLook/, and then restart Finder (right-click Finder in the Dock while holding the Option key and select Relaunch). Next time you Quick Look a zipped archive, you should get a look at the contents as well. The Zip Quick Look plug-in is freeware, Mac OS X Leopard only.
Zip Quick Look PluginMac GTD enthusiasts may be interested to know that OmniFocus has entered private beta. The evolution of the Kinkless GTD plug-in for OmniOutliner Pro, OmniFocus is not free, but they have an introductory pricing offer. Feature overview and beta download is here. More »
Wired has a guide to different ways to lace up your shoes to support your feet while running (1), playing hackey sack (2) or skating (3). Which is all very helpful but the one I liked was Number 4:
“This one’s pure fashion statement. You’ll need two laces of different colors. String the first one across the bottom eyelets: Tuck the left end into the shoe; thread the right side through the second eyelet, then across to the opposite side, and repeat to the top. Now take the second lace and weave it through the first from bottom to top and back down. Weave until you run out of room. Then stuff the loose ends into comfortable spots inside the shoe. Kick it with your posse.”
Sounds like a great way to jazz up your kid’s new shoes – pick their two favourite colours for the laces and go for it. :)
How to: Lace Your Shoes [Wired] More »
My latest favourite web tool, Google Notebook, has been buffed with a few new features including mobile phone access, integration with Google Bookmarks, labels, and the ability to quickly save snippets from web pages into your Notebook.You can access your notebooks on your mobile phone by pointing your phone’s XHTML compliant web browser to http://www.google.com/notebook/m. You can’t create new notebooks from your phone, however.You can use the in-browser Notebook tool to collect snippets from web pages – both images and text – by hightlighting what you want to save and clicking on the yellow star at the bottom of the notebook.And finally you can use labels to tag the notes in your Notebook. Get the full rundown on the new features here.
I <3 Firefox + Google Notebook. :) More »
If you need a tool to save a web page or entire web site for offline use (or because you think that hilarious but highly actionable website might not be online for long), Online Tech Tips recommends the ScrapBook Firefox extension, saying it is “light, speedy and accurate”.
I’d also point out that, as previously mentioned, Google Notebook allows you to very simply save snippets from webpages by highlighting them and hitting the ‘star’ button (all without leaving Firefox, bliss!)
Save web pages or entire web sites in Firefox using ScrapBook [Online Tech Tips] More »
If the results of a new survey are to be believed, Australian workers are trigger happy emailers who are oblivious to online etiquette. Nearly half of the respondents to the Arnold + Bolingbroke survey admitted to accidentally sent a message to the wrong recipient, while 51 per cent sent one that was misunderstood, according to the story in the SMH today. More »
Wired details how to use mnemonic visualisations and rhyming techniques to build robust memorisation schemes and memorise anything. For example: The Number/Rhyme technique is a very simple way of remembering lists of items in a specific order. It is an example of a peg system—i.e. a system whereby facts are ‘pegged’ to known sequences of cues (here the numbers 1 – 10). This ensures that no facts are forgotten (because gaps in information are immediately obvious), and that the starting images of the mnemonic visualizations are well known.
The use of mnemonics for memorisation is by no means new, but Wired’s article offers an excellent primer. If you’re big on mnemonics, give us a glimpse at your system in the comments.
Memorize Anything [Wired]
