Thursday, December 6, 2007
Hard drive
11:30PM Tamar Weinberg | One year ago on Lifehacker, we reviewed several apps that visualize your hard drive usage, and we provided some command line tricks, too. More »
Be the Perfect House Guest?
2:00PM Adam Pash | With the holidays just around the corner, many of us are preparing to board a plane and spend a few days under the roof of a loved one. To make your stay a good one, the Frugal Law Student Weblog suggests 10 ways to be an excellent house guest this year. For example: To show your appreciation for the free room and board, bring a.gift. It doesn’t have to be big or expensive. Baked goods are always appreciated. Some of the tips are a bit presumptuous (strip the bed before you leave?), but anyone who’s housed guests knows that a considerate house guest is a real pleasure to board—and if you show up with food or a gift, consider yourself a hall-of-famer. Think you’re the perfect house guest? Give us your secrets in the comments. 10 Ways To Be An Excellent House Guest [The Frugal Law Student via DIY Life] More »Find a good domain name
12:05PM Sarah Stokely | Collis Taed at the North x East blog has posted a list of suggestions about what to do when the domain name you want is gone.
Increasingly, people who are really wedded to the word or idea they have for their domain name are starting to use alternative extensions like .net. While .com has been the net standard for a while, obviously we have .com.au – but the rules are much more strictly enforced in Australia and the domain name must reflect your business name very closely. While there can be challenges with non-typical extensions, Collis suggests overcoming the tendency for people to assume your site has a.com assumption by continually marketing your site with the extension, for example writing Flashden.net rather than Flashden.
Playing with spelling is another one to be careful of. I’ve had trouble locating Australian social news aggregator Kwoff on a few occasions because I default to the correct spelling, Quaff, which is actually a wine website. I thought it was just me having the memory of a leaky seize but I noticed a couple of weeks ago on the Kwoff blog that after a mention on Radio National (where people only heard the name, rather than seeing it spelled out) a lot of people tried to visit the site by typing www.quaff.com.au. Kwoff responded by buying a Google Adword so that if people googled looking for it, they’d see a sponsored link saying “Looking for Kwoff?” with a link to their site.
The Kwoff story is a good reminder that you need to pick your domain name carefully, and consider the kinds of spelling or navigational mistakes people may make when looking for your site.
What to do when the domain name you want is gone [North x East] More » 
Tag Your Tunes by Mood with Moody
12:00PM Adam Pash | Windows/Mac only: Tag your iTunes music by mood with the freeware, colour-based tagging utility Moody. While your music is playing, just pick a colour for the song with Moody’s 16-color scale (sad to happy, calm to intense). Once tagged, Moody writes the mood to the comments of your song’s metadata (it’ll look something like MoodyC3). You can either use that metadata to create mood-based smart playlists or just use Moody to fire up a playlist based on your mood. It may sound a bit tedious, but if you put Moody in quick tag mode, you can tag a lot of music pretty quickly. Moody is freeware, Windows (with .NET) and Mac OS X only. Moody [via MacApper] More »Upgrade Better Gmail extension to avoid problems with Gmail
11:24AM Sarah Stokely | Users of the Better Gmail Firefox extension (written by our own Lifehacker US ed Gina) please note that the old version can interfere with functions in the new version of Gmail, as noted in Google’s official help centre here. If you strike a problem, you’ll get a message in Gmail that reads: “Certain Greasemonkey scripts may interfere with Gmail”. I’ve updated our original post about the new Better Gmail 2 to include the instructions on how to uninstall Better Gmail and install Better Gmail 2, so check it out if you’ve had issues, or just want to try out how the new improved Gmail works with the new improved Better Gmail 2 Firefox extension. More » 
Silence the click of your mouse
11:15AM Sarah Stokely | If you’re a quiet PC obsessive, then you may like to try this hack, which uses a little bit of soldering to de-click your mouse. Check out the full instructions at abcLinuxu – and note that it’s a hack for “most” mouse styles – you’ll want to check against the photos he’s posted to see if yours is similar.I personally have such a noisy, clicky old keyboard (hilariously named the “Dell Quiet Key” by the way) that my mouse noise wouldn’t even rate - your mileage may vary.
Silent Mouse – the Second Encounter [via Hack a Day] More » 
Quick Look at Multiple Files Simultaneously
11:00AM Gina Trapani | Mac OS X Leopard only: You already know about Leopard’s useful Quick Look feature, which previews any kind of document with a tap of the Spacebar. (Go ahead, select a file in Finder and hit the Spacebar to see its contents immediately, no application launching required.) Well, you can also preview several files at once with Quick Look. Just select multiple documents in Finder and hit that Spacebar. You’ll get an “Index Sheet” button when you mouse over the Quick Look popup—click on that to see a grid of files. You can also go full screen with Quick Look previews, play videos, read PDF’s, see the contents of Office files, and use the arrow keys to see the next and previous files in the list with Quick Look. [via MacUser] More »
LogMeIn Free for Mac released
10:44AM Sarah Stokely | A free Mac version of remote PC access software LogMeIn has just been released. LogMeIn Free for Mac can be downloaded here. You’ll need to create a (free) account. Once installed on your Mac, the software will let you connect to and control your Mac from a browser via a Windows, Mac or Linux PC as well as the Apple iPhone and other handheld
devices.LogMeIn Free for Mac runs on OS X v10.4 (Tiger) and v10.5 (Leopard).I haven’t tried out the Mac version of LogMeIn, but we previously reviewed LogMeIn for Windows here and told you how to use LogMeIn to provide remote tech support here. More » 
Unhappy? You May Just Be a Perfectionist
10:00AM Adam Pash | The New York Times takes a look at the culture of perfectionism, suggesting that the tenets of the perfectionist—when applied to things like personal relationships or when taken too far at the workplace—can take a serious toll on your happiness. As part of a study at U.C. Davis, employee assistance counselor Alice Provost forced perfectionists to: Leave work on time. Don’t arrive early. Take all the breaks allowed. Leave the desk a mess. Allow yourself a set number of tries to finish a job; then turn in what you have. The results? Much to the surprise of the perfectionists, everything continued to function as usual, and much of their perfection-motivated worries weren’t all that important. If you’ve got similar perfectionist inclinations—or you’re just in the spirit of the holidays—give yourself a break and give this exercise a go. While you’re at it, here are 10 other ways to defeat brain drain. Photo by ewitch. Unhappy? Self-Critical? Maybe You’re Just a Perfectionist [NYT] More »
