Friday, November 7, 2008

Radio Beta Streams International Stations

10:00AM Jason Fitzpatrick | Radio Beta is a web-based radio station aggregator with a host of features. Rather than simply serving as a search engine a basic playlist-builder, Radio Beta allows you to search radio stations by both region and genre, save your favourite stations, and as an extreme convenience play all the radio stations you find with an embedded player right on the Radio Beta website. If you’d like to visit the website of the station you’re listening, every listing includes the country, language, genre, city, the broadcast frequency and a link back to the source of the audio stream. Radio Beta [via Download Squad] More »

Get Stuff Done By Becoming A Weekend Luddite

7:00AM Jason Fitzpatrick | Reinhard Engels over at the self improvement blog Everyday Systems found that his weekends were astoundingly unproductive. Despite having a job that had him stuck in front of a desk every day all week, he would gravitate towards his computer on the weekends and wile away the hours. I don’t watch much TV. I don’t play video games. But I fritter away endless hours in front of the computer. I tried a bunch of restrictions on home computer use. It was much harder to stick with them than I’d thought. Here’s what did stick: thou shalt not touch the computer on weekends between breakfast and dinner. If had has any ideas that related to the computer like designs for his website, emails he needs to send, etc. he simply writes them down on a piece of paper and sets it aside until he’s devoted his daily block of time to analogue pursuits. While it sounds like pure heresy to a die hard nerdling like myself, on the days when I devote my computer to resource hogging tasks and leave it to do its thing I’m amazed at how much I get done without the digital distractions. For more distraction management ideas, check out Reduce Screen Time with 52 Nights Unplugged and Unplug to Avoid Online Distractions. Photo by deanj. Weekend Luddite [Everyday Systems] More »

Be The Designated Photographer To Make New Friends

6:00AM Jason Fitzpatrick | When trying to make new friends in a new city, Brain over at Lifehack.org has a few suggestions to get your social life on track. Among them: if you’re looking for a way to foster follow up contact after meeting people for the first time, snapping photographs at gatherings is a great way to keep in touch with the new people you meet. Despite the proliferation of camera phones and cheap digital cameras many people still aren’t avid shutterbugs, but most people love pictures. Make yourself some social calling cards with the address of your favourite photo sharing site on them or ask the person for their email to send the pictures out and you’ve got an instant in for future contact. em>Photo by Mourner. How to Make a Bunch of New Friends in Any New City [Lifehack.org] More »

Turn A Photograph Into A Stencil

5:00AM Jason Fitzpatrick | After following the stencil tutorial at DIYer blog Instructables you’ll take your stencil making to a whole new level. By using the cutout filter in Photoshop on each layer of colour and/or highlights you want to include you can build a series of templates for your multi-layer stencil masterpiece. Perfect for those times when a simple one colour stencil won’t cut it. Photograph to Stencil [Instructables] More »

Top 10 Things You Forgot Gmail Can Do

2:00AM Kevin Purdy | When friends push friends onto Gmail, it usually involves talking up the seemingly limitless storage space, the fast-moving interface, or its inter-connectedness with other Google applications, like Calendar. Those features are all fine and good, but Gmail does a lot of helpful things that some users never get to dig into. From one short web address, you can video chat Skype-style with contacts, ensure you didn’t leave yourself logged in elsewhere, help mum gradually migrate from her old dial-up-era email address, and pluck a single message out of tens of thousands. Let’s dig in and take a look at Gmail’s less-touted features for power users. More »

mTAIL Tracks Log File Changes

11:30PM Lifehacker US Edition | Windows only: Actively track changes in your log files with lightweight application mTAIL, a Windows-based emulation of the venerable tail command found in *nix based operating systems. Instead of opening a log file to review the contents, mTAIL keeps the file open and displays it as the system writes to it. Firewall your attention by setting up filters and alerts in mTAIL based on keywords. The app will cull out events in the log you don’t need to see and alert you to the events you’ve pre-flagged. If you’d like a few more flourishes to go with your tail emulation, check out equally as free BareTail. mTAIL is a free download for Windows only. Thanks Michael Kizer! mTAIL More »

Over-The-Air Podcasts Coming To iPhone

11:00PM Kevin Purdy | Leaked screenshots of the upcoming iPhone 2.2 firmware update show a cleaned-up interface for the App Store, but, more importantly, the ability to download podcasts directly to your device over Wi-Fi or 3G. Direct downloads will be limited, however, to 10MB or less, so jailbreak-required apps like Podcaster still have a decent half-life. [via] More »

TaskFive Streamlines Tasks In An Elegant Calendar View

10:30PM Kevin Purdy | The first thing you’ll probably notice, and possibly complain about, in the free online task manager TaskFive is that it limits you to five to-dos for each day. If you see that as more of a creative/realistic constraint than a hindrance, you’ll probably like its other features. TaskFive sports a seriously clean design, with a one-week calendar view and simple click-to-edit tasks. You can set up SMS and email notifications for task due dates and daily agendas, and companies can set up group task calendars for multiple users—though TaskFive charges a per-user fee after more than two are added. For individual task management without too much fuss, though, TaskFive seems like a pretty great solution. TaskFive is a free service, requires a sign-up to use. TaskFive [via Hack the Day] More »

Battle Of The iPhone Task Managers

9:00PM Kevin Purdy | When the iTunes App Store first opened up to eager iPhone and iPod touch upgraders (and iPhone 3G buyers), one of the first types of applications to show up was the to-do/task manager. From simple check-box lists to voice-transcribing tools, there’s a bewildering number of apps, many of them free, that promise to help you keep track of your necessary actions and projects while you’re away from your computer. Today we’re checking out five of them, all free except for one requiring a “Pro” account, and comparing their features and functionality side-by-side, as well as asking which app you use to keep their busy lives together. Read on for the full show-down. More »

Five Things To Do This Weekend

4:30PM Angus Kidman | Don’t get steamed up — get productive! Here’s some useful Lifehacker tips to follow up over the weekend: Find some old pics from your mobile phone and combine them to make wallpaper for your PC Wait until everyone’s left the house and then check out how well Firefox’s porn mode works Tweak your Ubuntu desktop for maximum productivity Get a head start on planning for 2009 and print yourself either a compact calendar for your wallet or a custom calendar for the next few months Decide if it’s a good time to switch banks now that transferring automatic payments is easier More »