The Lifehacker Total Security Guide 
Spotify And Its Rivals: Subscription Music Services In Australia Compared 
The Stupid Things You Do On Facebook (And How To Fix Them) 
How To Kill Time Productively On Your Phone 
An Entire Overseas Trip On One Prepaid Travel Card 
Top 10 Pervasive Tech Myths That Are Only Wasting Your Time Kick off your Lifehacker Monday by making sure you didn’t miss any of the biggest posts from last week:
Road Worrier Road Tests The A380“Does the much-hyped A380 deliver on its promise of more space, better entertainment and — a crucial question for Lifehacker readers — improved productivity options?” Five Best Desktop Customisation Tools“It’s crazy to think that an operating system can fit every user’s needs out of the box, even if we are just talking about looks. Luckily, if you’re not keen on the cookie-cutter appearance of your OS, we’ve covered a handful of great tools for tweaking every last pixel of your desktop.” Caledos Manages Your Massive Wallpaper Collection (Windows)“If you like varied wallpaper but find yourself frittering away time digging through your archives picking new ones out, let Caledos Automatic Wallpaper Changer take care of the management side of things.” eBooks Just Published Finds DRM-Free Reading Options“New site eBooks Just Published focuses on newly-published titles that don’t use any form of digital rights management (DRM), making it much easier to read them on a wide variety of devices.” Top 10 Things You Can Do With A DVD“The proliferation of thumb drives and external hard drives has made optical media like DVDs seem a little less handy–but there are still plenty of ways to put DVDs to good use.” Lazarus Form Recovery Saves Web Page Form Data (Firefox)“At one point or another, every power surfer has filled out a long web page form, then lost all the time and effort when Firefox crashed before you could submit it. The Lazarus Form Recovery add-on is out to keep that from ever happening.” Best iPhone Apps For Australians“Danny Gorog at APC has picked out ten of the best Australian-developed applications for iPhone owners.”" Lunascape Is Firefox, Chrome And Internet Explorer Rolled Into One“Windows only: Free application Lunascape is a web browser capable of running any of the three major web rendering engines–Gecko (Firefox), WebKit (Safari/Chrome), and Trident (Internet Explorer).” FoxGLove Standalone Google Apps Portal“Crafty Firefox user Alex customised his own Firefox Portable installation to tightly integrate with Google Apps. He calls his creation “FoxGLove,” and uses it as his own Google-powered productivity portal instead of Microsoft Outlook.” iPhone 2.2 Jailbreaking Tools Now Available (Windows and Mac)“The iPhone Dev team has already released QuickPwn for both Windows and Mac and PwnageTool for Mac.” Minime Minimises Windows to a Single System Tray Icon (Windows)“Small utility Minime clears your taskbar by minimising windows to its single icon in the system tray.” Tark Gives Bookmarks Expiration Dates (Firefox)“If you frequently deal with bookmarks that have limited future utility, the Tark (Temporary Bookmarks) extension can set an expiration date on them.” Newzie Newsreader Watches Feeds and Feedless Pages Alike (Windows)“Free application Newzie is a feature-rich desktop newsreader designed to keep you up to date with the latest web content, whether that content is coming from a traditional RSS feed or not.” TextFlow Offers a New Take on Collaboration (Windows, Mac, Linux)“TextFlow is an Adobe AIR-based word processor with a new and innovative take on document collaboration.” Fedora 10 Officially Released, Ready for Download“Fedora has just released version 10 of the popular Linux distribution.” uTorrent for Mac Officially Released (Mac)“If you’ve been waiting patiently for the popular BitTorrent application, uTorrent, to find its way to your Mac, your wait is finally over: uTorrent for the Mac is officially available.”Unless you had the foresight to stockpile wrapping paper after Christmas last year, you’re looking at buying a lot of over priced paper this holiday season. At the business blog Strategize they came up with a cheap solution for wrapping tons of gifts without breaking the bank. [We used the]basic brown shipping paper that you can purchase in any office supply or paper store. We wound up buying a pretty large roll of it in a 50 weight, but the entire roll was less than $50. The logo is applied with a self-inking rubber stamp that cost us around $25 and was produced in 24 hours by OfficeMax.
Windows only: Selecting blank media would seem to be a straight forward affair. You discover a certain brand works great for your purposes so you plan to buy more in the future. Simple! The label wrapped around the spindle of DVDs you just purchased doesn’t tell the whole story however. While there are dozens and dozens of DVD brands, there are only a few actual manufacturers. If you’re looking for that perfect burn and want to take another step towards becoming a blank-media connoisseur, DVD Identifier will help you dig beneath the labels and find more detailed information about your media. No need to waste burn time if you know the discs are low quality or won’t be accepted by a finicky console or DVD player. DVD Identifier is freeware, Windows only, and works on CD, DVD, HD DVD, and BLU-RAY media.
DVD Identifier [via gHacks]A life cluttered with possessions is such a common state of affairs that George Carlin once based a well received comedy routine around the absurdity of the accumulation of material goods. Over at the financial blog The Simple Dollar, Trent decided to stare down his pile of goods through the belly of a suitcase. What if he needed to move on with his life with nothing more than a suitcase to haul his loot? What would make the cut? What if the suitcase became a perpetual litmus test? If you carry it further, why not simply apply the “suitcase test” to every purchase that you make? If it’s not something that will fit in your “suitcase” – basic clothing, basic toiletries, cooking supplies, and a small number of splurge items – don’t buy it, or at least strongly consider not buying it.
After applying the suitcase test to the contents of his house, he and his wife went on to unload a considerable amount of their belongings with eBay sales and donations to charity. What items would make the cut if you conducted your own suitcase test? Photo by Phineas H. The Suitcase Test: The Things You Really Need [TheSimpleDollar]
TiddlyDu2 is a TiddlyWiki derivative tweaked to serve as a personal information manager. TiddlyDu2 has categories for sorting current tasks, long term projects, life goals, and a context based system task management that will be more than familiar to GTD devotees. Additionally there is a contact management subsection and a calendar system with a handy time line function. Just like TiddlyWiki, TiddlyDu2 is a stand alone wiki that can be launched from your home computer, carried with you on a flash drive, or hosted from your personal server or wiki host. If TiddlyDu2 is free and works anywhere you have access to a web browser. TiddlyDu2 [via Linux.com]
The internet has made it easier than ever to share media and data with friends, family, and co-workers, but that doesn’t mean burning your own CDs and DVDs is a thing of the past. Blank optical discs are dirt cheap, they work virtually everywhere, and if you bought your computer sometime in the last 5 years, chances are you’ve got the necessary hardware to quickly burn anything you want to a disc in just a few minutes. Now all you need is the right authoring tools. Photo by the trial.
Windows only: Take a few minutes to familiarize yourself with the 747-dashboard of an interface that graces Bulk Rename Utility and you’ll be rewarded with an enormously powerful tool. You can rename files, substitute some or all of the file name, apply numbers and lettering, swap extensions, append with time and date stamps, rename based on image EXIF data and audio ID3 data, and all that just scratches the surface. Concerned that somewhere in the labyrinth of check and text boxes you may have misstepped? The quick preview function is a fast and handy feature to help you sidestep any mishaps. Bulk Rename is freeware, Windows only.Thanks IOStreamCTO!
Bulk Rename UtilityIf you’ve been feeding your ego with vanity searches and Google alerts, you may be happy to know that the once email-only digest of Google alerts is now available in RSS feed format, too. Delicious.
Send a batch of email, IM, SMS or even voice messages with Notifu. The site is designed as a iPhone webapp, but it’ll work in any browser. Simply add a list of recipient email addresses, IM handles or text or voice phone numbers and send a message to a group of folks quickly and easily no matter how they prefer to be reached. Your typewritten message will be delivered to callers or voicemail via text-to-speech, and you don’t need an IM account to send messages to AIM, Yahoo IM, GTalk or other chat clients. Sign up to register and you can save a set of contacts, get confirmation of message delivery and manage replies. Notifu [via eHub]
Windows only: Reader Juliana created a simple but extremely useful AutoHotkey script that creates a new folder in Explorer with a quick keystroke of Ctrl+N. If you’re an AHK user, you can download the script source here and just copy and paste it into your own AHK script. (This is a great compliment to the Better Rename script, for example, which brings Vista-style renaming to XP.) If you’re not an AHK user, you can still add the shortcut sugar to Explorer by downloading the executable (linked below). It may not change your life, but if you’re a shortcut lover, it certainly adds a much-needed feature to Explorer. New-Folder [Mediafire]
