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 Telstra today rolled out MyConnect, a set of email-related services designed for mobile phone users. While the concept — the ability to access multiple email accounts on your Next G phone and synchronise contacts — is appealing, the pricing is not. The offering consists of three services: MyInbox (essentially web mail with MMS and SMS access), MyEmail (up to five accounts accessible on your mobile), and MySync (contacts synced from your mobile into the cloud daily). MyInbox is free if you’re a BigPond or Next G customer, but MyEmail is $7 a month, and MySync is $3 a month. Admittedly, rival email sync services like the BlackBerry or MobileMe aren’t free either, but $3 a month for contact syncing — something you should be able to achieve for free via Bluetooth to your PC — sounds way overpriced. Telstra MyConnect
In the spirit of the infamous Fake Steve Jobs, Fake Stephen Conroy has arrived on Twitter, making a mockery of our Minister for Communications. As Dan Warne reports at APC, the faux feed is actually the work of Electronic Frontiers Australia, as part of their campaign against the government’s clean feed proposal. If you’re opposed to that proposal, it’s a great addition to your Twitter friends.
Say G’day to Fake Steve Conroy [APC]I went to a charity concert by Bananarama (yes, the 80s girl group who sang ‘Venus’ and ‘Love In The First Degree’) the other night, and found myself unexpectedly positioned right in front of the stage. Even more unexpectedly, the usual security goons who try and block people taking pictures were nowhere in evidence, leaving me cursing that I’d left my EOS at home and only had the basic camera in my BlackBerry to fall back on. I took 150-odd photographs, but unsurprisingly given stage lighting and the camera’s limitations, not many of them turned out too well.
Electronic calendars are all very well, but sometimes a print calendar is easy to work with for long-term planning. Lifehacker reader Phil recently went hunting for a calendar-generating application, and ended up plumping for PDFCalendar.com. Here’s why Phil finds it useful:
As a person who finds calendars scary (which kind of inhibits planning), I was excited the other day to figure out I could break my year into four 13-week blocks. I wondered if there would be any calendar printing apps online that would let me print out in that format. PDFCalendar.com does all that and more — enter your specs, click ‘download pdf’ and it’s done in moments. The only limitation is that it only produces one page at a time, so you need to enter a start date and download a pdf for each new quarter. Very cool though.
A cautionary note: remember to change the paper size to A4 from the default US Letter to avoid printing hassles. If you’re after a more compact calendar approach, check out recently mentioned Compact Calendar Creator. Thanks Phil!
PDFCalendar.comPeople search engine 123people.com aggregates search results from several different sources online — and off. Simply enter a person’s name, and 123people will display search results from social networks, telephone listings, web pages, Wikipedia and the like. A quick search on my likely new representative in city government, David Chiu, turned up some good candidates for his home address and phone number, and certainly found plenty of photos on Flickr and web sites and articles related to his recent campaign (as well as plenty of information about David Chiu, competitive poker player and others). Potentially creepy? Yes. Potentially useful? Also yes. (It didn’t do half as well for non-US searches like the Lifehacker AU editor, it should be noted.) 123people.com
Dear Lifehacker, I have Firefox installed on three separate computers, and I find it difficult to keep the same Add Ons/Preferences synchronised between all three machines. Is there an automated way to synchronise my Firefox installation between all three machines? In other words, if I add a new Add-on or Greasemonkey script to one Firefox installation, can it be automatically added to my installation on my two other machines? Signed, Three Firefoxes, One User
We’re on a Windows 7 Preview screencast bender! You’ve already seen Windows 7′s Aero Shake and Peek features today, but another useful drag-and-dropper is the ability to resize any window to half the size of your monitor and dock it to the left or right side of the screen. In an earlier screencast you saw that dragging a window to the top of the screen maximises it. Following that, if you drag a window all the way to the left or the right of the screen, Windows 7 will display a glass overlay. Let go of the mouse button and it will snap the window onto that overlay, which is half the screen’s size—a handy helper for widescreen monitor owners. Hit the play button above to see this in action—apologies for not including the half-siz docking action in the earlier clip.
One of the main development goals for Windows 7 is improving battery performance on laptop systems. Much of that is down to the manufacturer who builds the machine, but Windows 7 also includes a new command line tool for identifying power problems. As demonstrated in this morning’s WinHEC keynote, you can type powerconfig /energy duration:20 and generate a report identifying potential sources of power problems, ranging from poorly configured Wi-Fi to battery-draining background applications. While you can set shorter durations for the test, running for longer identifies more potential problems. The current public builds of Windows 7 don’t have lots of UI elements enabled, so it’s likely that there’ll be a friendlier front-end to this system before the final version arrives — but it’s still a nice tool for the power tweaker.
DIY web site Instructables posts a detailed step-by-step guide for repurposing the keys from an old keyboard as thumbtacks. All you’ll need to pull it off is the keyboard, round-topped push pins, a drill, and some hot glue. It’s quick, easy, and decidedly cool if you’ve got a nostalgic kick for retro computing.
Keyboard Thumbtacks [Instructables]By not permitting results with appended prefixes like Re: and Fwd:, you can quickly find the beginnings of an email thread in Gmail. Simply type -subject:Re: -subject:Fwd: to only reveal conversation starters, and optionally add from:[email address] (where [email address]is an actual email address) to find an email from a particular sender. Too lazy to type all that out? Go to Settings > Labs, enable Quick Links, and scroll down to click the Save Changes button. Now search on -subject:Re: -subject:Fwd: and click Add Quick Link in the Quick Link pane on the left. Give your search link a better name (I went with the highly technical-sounding “Thread Intro Search”) and click OK. Now with one click, search results with only initial messages will appear, and you can further refine results by adding terms and qualifiers to the string already in the search box.
Gmail tip: searching by the first post in a conversation [Rakesh Agrawal's Blog via Google Blogoscoped]
