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 You can tell it’s December when annual Top 10 lists start appearing left, right and centre — but at least Google’s most popular search results (just issued to the media) have the virtue of being based on millions of searches rather than just some bored hack’s guesswork. Mind you, the actual top searches do tend to suggest that we’re a fairly thick bunch: why would you type Google into Google itself? More interesting from a Lifehacker point of view are the fastest rising terms, which include iPhone, YouTube, Firefox 3 and wiki. Here’s the ten most popular terms overall:
GamesSydneyYouTubeMySpaceFacebookGoogleeBayMyWeatherHotmailNew web service Nombray is out to help folks establish their online identity by registering their name-based domain. Enter your name into the Nombray search engine and register the various available combinations of vanity URL available. (For example, a search for my name returns GinaTrapani.name, GinaTrapani.us, GTrapani.com, etc.) Then, register the URLs of your choice for $US20 apiece, and use Nombray’s simple web page designer and hosting service to link to the various social networks and profiles you’ve set up across the web. (See CEO Chris Lunt’s Nombray-powered chrislunt.net site above for an example, where Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter are linked from tabs in a top frame.)
Nombray [via Webware]Last year we showed you a new, lightweight Linux-based operating system called gOS (aka Good OS) with an emphasis on integrating web-based applications with your desktop. gOS first gained notoriety as the operating system on Walmart’s $US199 PC, and now the good folks at gOS have put together a new, super-lightweight operating system for netbooks called gOS Cloud that runs entirely inside a web browser (which looks like it’s probably a tweaked version of Google Chrome). Details are scant, and there doesn’t seem to be an available download yet, but gOS Cloud looks like it could be the perfect OS for your netbook or aging computer. Until then, the original version of gOS is already available for download and works great.
gOS Cloud [via CNET]Apple releases a list of the most popular free and paid iPhone and iPod touch apps in the iTunes Store with Pandora, Shazam, and Remote leading the charge in the free section. Compare to our list of what’s good (and free!) in the iTunes App Store which we posted shortly after the App Store opened its doors. [via Macworld]
Windows/Mac/Linux: The long-awaited cross-platform media player Songbird officially reaches its 1.0 release today. The open-source application—built on the same platform as Firefox—promises to bring exciting new innovations to a software jukebox market that has become arguably quite stale. Like Firefox, Songbird is extensible, meaning that users can customise the look, feel, and features of Songbird to their heart’s content. We took you on a screenshot tour of Songbird last month, and from a feature standpoint, not much has changed. From a functionality standpoint, Songbird has gotten much, much better.
Mac OS X only: Google announced CalDAV support in Google Calendar earlier this year, which meant that with a little know-how, you could sync iCal with Google Calendar. Now the Google Mac Blog has officially announced CalDAV support for iCal, and to go along with the announcement they’ve released a new iCal sync application called Calaboration. With Calaboration, you can quickly and easily set up bi-directional syncing between iCal and Google Calendar with just a few clicks of your mouse. It’s quick, it’s easy, and it works like a charm; just run it once to set up your calendar syncing and you shouldn’t need to run it again until you need to add a different calendar. Calaboration is a free download, Mac OS X only. If you’re not on a Mac, check out how you can sync Google Calendar to any desktop calendar you’ve got. Calaboration [Google Code via Official Google Mac Blog]
Merlin Mann doesn’t crank out posts on software, focus, time-savers, and the other realms of “productivity pr0n” anymore, but he’s still got a razor-sharp focus on the kinds of thinking that move things forward. He writes at 43 Folders about trying to get better at his personal photographs, and fighting off the mental nags that try to pull him off-path: … Even if a given shot is sh*t — and, most certainly, the vast majority of all my photos are varying degrees of sh*t — you still learn from the bad ones and no damage is done. Truth is, at the level I’m playing, there’s no real cost associated with failure. Unless, you count the damage of working with unrealistic expectations or the paralysing joylessness of the conventional wisdom that only some are “Blessed with Creativity…” [insert Tinkerbell glissando]
The full post gives a tight, clear view on what it takes to learn, and learn honestly, from mistakes and making improvement a real goal. Similar in topic to Ira Glass’ advice on working past the awful, and pretty funny, to boot. Photo by craigmdennis. Photography, and the Tolerance for Courageous Sucking [43 Folders]
Google has upped its commitment to bringing newspaper archives online, first announced in September, by buying 20 million historical pages from Paper of Record, covering the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and Europe. Good news for scholars, students, and “Day you were born” print-out.gifts.
Windows only: Ken Rename is a portable file renaming utility. The interface is straight forward with support for simple and complex renaming tasks. Ken Rename supports wildcards, macros, numbered file lists, string replacement and removal, and has an undo function to save you from a renaming mishap. Weighing in at under half a MB, Ken Rename is a handy addition to your flash drive toolkit. For a similar program with the welcome addition of a preview function, try WildRename. For a Mac friendly, but non-portable, alternative check out File List. Ken Rename is freeware, Windows only.
Ken Rename [via The Portable Freeware Collection]Microsoft’s Live Mesh file sync technology, previously available only via Windows PCs, has now been extended to Windows Mobile, allowing you to access files via your phone (and potentially leave the PC itself at home), and to Mac OS X, useful if you work across both Windows and Max platforms. Unfortunately the Mobile option is US and UK only for now (just as Mesh itself was in early previews), but it should become available in Australia within the next few months. If you’ve sampled the Mac version, tell us how it tastes in the comments. Live Mesh goes Beta, adds preview for Mac client and Mobile client
