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:
Google’s Top Australian Searches For 2008“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.” Five Best CD And DVD Burning Tools“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.” Bulk Rename Utility Blasts Through Your File Naming Tasks (Windows)“If you take a few minutes to familiarise yourself with the 747-dashboard of an interface that graces Bulk Rename Utility you’ll be rewarded with an enormously powerful tool.” Online Banking Security Myths Debunked“If you’re ever online, the chances are good that you access Internet banking services (83% of Internet users in Australia do, according to Sensis). And because it’s your money that’s involved, you know that security is importangt.” First Look At Opera 10 “Opera 10 is looking to offer stiff competition with the blazing rendering engines in the upcoming Firefox release (Tracemonkey) and Google Chrome (V8) with an update to its rendering engine, Presto.” Gladinet Mounts Web Storage Apps As Virtual Drives (Windows)“Free utility Gladinet Cloud Desktop removes the web interfaces from Google Docs, Picasa Web Albums, Windows Live SkyDrive and Amazon S3 Storage, mounting them instead as folders you can add, remove, or open documents from.” MyHouseHunt.com.au Organises Your Property Viewing Schedule“Buying property almost invariably involves spending a Saturday morning racing from one open house to another, and working out how to organise it all can be a major pain.” Songbird 1.0 Release Official, Fixes Bugs, Plays iTunes Purchases “The long-awaited cross-platform media player Songbird officially reaches its 1.0 release today.” Gmail Google Desktop Gadget Now Available (Windows)“If you want access to your Gmail on your desktop (literally) without running a full-blown email client, now you can download the Gmail Google Desktop gadget.” New Google Reader Feed Bundles Are Localised But Lazy“My initial suspicion that the ‘feed bundles’ feature in the newly revamped Google Reader would be US-centric turned out to be wrong: there’s a dozen pre-grouped set of feeds in 12 categories, including local sports like AFL and NRL. However, the way they’ve been constructed is lazy in the extreme.” SkyDrive Upgrade Goes Live With 25GB Of Space “Windows Live, intended to be a landing page for social activity and Microsoft’s cloud-connected apps, is rolling out a host of redesigns and upgrades today, but none so exciting (to our eyes, anyways) as the anticipated jump of the SkyDrive online storage service to 25GB capacity.” DVDCoach Express Burns Video Files To Playable DVDs (Windows)“Free application DVDCoach burns any video file (like DivX or Xvid videos you’ve downloaded off BitTorrent) to a playable DVD.” FluidTunes Controls iTunes By Your Waving Hand (Mac)“Using your Mac’s iSight camera to detect the hand gestures you make in front of it, free utility FluidTunes controls your iTunes library playback based on those motions.”Windows only: Clone2Go is an easy to use bulk video converter. It supports a wide variety of input formats such as: WMV, FLV, MPEG4, AVI, and 3GP. You can output to an equally as wide variety of formats to ensure you can transfer your media to portable devices like the iPod, Zune, and mobile phones. Clone2Go supports batch processing so you can load it up let it convert unattended. The encoding rate is rather snappy and the GUI is easy to navigate. An added bonus if you find yourself frequently snagging video files for your portable devices off of YouTube and Google Video, is integration with the sites. There is a pro version of the software that allows you to save custom profiles— the free version allows you to customise your settings as much as you like but not save the custom conversion tweaks you make— and gets rid of the nag screen that pops up after you’re done converting. Still the presets in the free version are plentiful, you can tweak them if you need to just without saving, and the nag screen is tolerable in exchange for a free and easy to use converter. For other video encoding alternatives, check out the Five Best Media Converters. Clone2go Free Video Converter [via Confessions of a Freeware Junkie]
The past ten years have completely changed the way we listen to music, watch movies and television, and take photos, and one thing is abundantly clear: The future of your media lies undeniably in the digital realm. Now you just need to find the perfect media centre application to pull it all together. Photo by Aaron Escobar.
Windows only: Create ISO-format disk images quickly and easily with Free ISO Creator. After downloading and installing the software, all you have to do is click Add File(s) or Add Folder to choose the data you want included in the image, select a name and location for the ISO file with “Save ISO As…” and click Convert. You can even create a bootable disk image by clicking Options and selecting the appropriate IMG file. Now you can burn the image to disk with ISO Recorder or mount the image as a virtual drive in Windows with the Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel, Clonedrive or Daemon Tools. Free ISO Creator is a free download for Windows. Free ISO Creator [via Download Squad]
Windows/Mac/Linux: Looking for a quick way to upload and download files from a Google Docs account? If you’re familiar with command line tools, check out GDataCopier. Once I installed a new version of Python (2.5 or higher required) and the GData API for Python, it was just a matter of running gdata-cp.py and I had every document in my Google Docs account backed up to a folder on my desktop. It would also work great for uploading a batch of documents to Google Docs. And of course you can set it up with a crontab to schedule regular backups. Looking for alternatives to futzing in a terminal window? Windows users can use DocSyncer or sync between OpenOffice.org and Google Docs with OpenOffice.org2GoogleDocs. GDataCopier is a free download for Windows, Mac and Linux, requires Python to run. Thanks, TerrenceMarburger!
GDataCopierWe all know that you’re supposed to get in a good, long stretch before a workout, right? Unfortunately most of our commonly held beliefs regarding stretching are dead wrong, according to the New York Times—at least in the way you may be doing it. Researchers believe that some of the more entrenched elements of many athletes’ warm-up regimens are not only a waste of time but actually bad for you. The old presumption that holding a stretch for 20 to 30 seconds—known as static stretching—primes muscles for a workout is dead wrong. It actually weakens them.
Our in-house portable Firefox guru Asian Angel has posted a thorough how-to for those of you hot to use the lightening-fast TraceMonkey JavaScript engine nightly builds without disturbing your full-on Firefox installation. Here’s how to run the newest Firefox TraceMonkey nightly build as a portable version.
Windows only: If you’re looking to create or edit custom icons, try IcoFX. With support for multiple resolutions and transparency, you can create slick, resizable icons for applications you develop or just to help you quickly find oft-used folders. And you can export icons into Windows or Mac format. The software offers some basic image editing tools, but you can also import images from other programs like Photoshop or Illustrator. IcoFX will preserve transparency and even do the resizing and colour mapping. The Tools menu offers both batch processing for handling multiple icons, and a resource editor to change the icons for binary files. The software offers a little more power than drag-and-drop icon creator ToYcon. Too lazy to create your own icons? Try searching ICONlook Thanks, celldrifter!
IcoFXWindows only: Free application DateInTray adds a small, unobtrusive calendar icon to your system tray displaying the current date. Clicking the icon displays a small pop-up calendar. If you liked the calendar integration of previously mentioned Analogue Clock but don’t want to expand your taskbar to enjoy it, DateInTrayis a perfect utility. And if you’re the type to avoid extra system tray utilities to avoid bloat, DateInTray’s minuscule 500-700KB of RAM usage should please even the most miserly of systems. DateInTray is freeware, Windows only. Thanks Doug! DateInTray
Tech blogger Amit Agarwal has a great tip for using Google to search YouTube only for videos offered in higher resolution:
Go to Google.com, type your search phrase and append the following parameters to your search query: site:youtube.com “watch in normal quality watch in high quality”
Once you’ve found something you’re looking for available in better quality, copy the YouTube URL and swing by KeepVid (or have the bookmarklet handy). Paste in the URL and click the Download button. KeepVid will offer you both the lower-resolution FLV and the higher-resolution MP4 — download the latter to save to your phone for reference .
Search High Resolution Videos on YouTube [Digital Inspiration]
