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 Over the year, we’ve been tracking the mixed fortunes of the popular Facebook Scrabble-like game Scrabulous, explaining back in July how to play with US players when the game got blocked, but ultimately having to give up and switch to Wordscraper (from the same developers) after legal action from Scrabble owners Hasbro shut Scrabulous down. But it turns out even that wasn’t the end of the story. As I explain in a story over at iTWire, as part of its legal settlement with Hasbro, Wordscraper now features eight letters instead of seven. That has some annoying consequences — it’s much harder to place eight letters for a so-called ‘bingo’ — but I guess it’s better than the game disappearing entirely.
Scrabulous developer settles Hasbro lawsuit, but the Facebook game has changed [iTWireA common theme at Saturday’s protests against proposals to censor and filter Australian Internet access (you can check out my on the spot report from the Sydney protest at APC) was the need to continue arguing against the proposals. One important way of doing that is by writing to your local member of Federal parliament. The Electronic Freedom Project is maintaining an interesting Project Score Card, which shows what responses have been received from various politicians. Depressingly, the most common outcome seems to be no response at all, followed by a standard form letter. The wiki also has comprehensive links to other useful resources about the still-sketchy but potentially hugely limiting censorship plans. Electronic Freedom Project
Our competition to win $500 off your credit card from Mozo closes at 5pm on Tuesday, so don’t miss your chance to make those Christmas bills a little less onerous. Check out the original post for terms and conditions and to submit your entry.
Kick off your Lifehacker Monday by making sure you didn’t miss any of the biggest posts from last week:
YTPodcaster Makes YouTube Podcast Feeds For Your iPod“YTPodcaster performs a simple function for iPod owners: creating a podcast feed of videos from a YouTube user so that you can watch them on your portable device.” Top 10 Things You Forgot Gmail Can Do“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.” First Look At Opera 10 (All platforms)“Opera released an alpha version of Opera 10 today, a first step toward the next major release of the popular cross-platform web browser.” Will The Smart Phone Kill The Netbook?“Do you think the netbook revolution has lost momentum?” Battle Of The Hardware-Boosting Hacks“When like-minded hackers come together to unleash the true power of seemingly simple gear, it’s truly a beautiful thing. We’ve featured a good number of how-tos and hacks over the years that make expensive upgrades unnecessary and unleash seriously cool features in your gear, and 2008 was no exception.” KLS Mail Backs Up Your Browser, Email And Contacts (Windows)“Despite what its name would imply, free application KLS Mail Backup backs up popular Windows web browsers and address book apps in addition to email applications–including Mozilla Firefox, Thunderbird, and Seamonkey; Windows Live Mail, Contacts, and Messenger; along with Windows Mail, Windows Contacts, and Internet Explorer.” Getting The Most From Online Store Discount Codes“Bargain codes can be a great way to save money, but a little caution is often sensible.” Gmail Labs’ New Task Manager Can Add Email To Your To-Do List“For years now, the gaping hole in Google’s online suite of applications has been a to-do list manager, but not anymore: today Gmail Labs adds a lightweight Tasks module to your email account.” Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 Now Available For Your Testing Pleasure (All platforms)“Hot off the press, the second beta of Firefox 3.1 is now available for download.” Better GReader Extension Gets New Features Plus Fixes (Firefox)“Just uploaded new version 0.5 of the Better GReader Firefox extension, which includes new features and fixes to all the stuff that Google’s recent Reader redesign broke.” TinyResMeter Monitors Your System Stats (Windows)“TinyResMeter is an ultra-lightweight and spartan resource meter.” VLC Remote Adds iPhone Control To Our Favourite Media App (iPhone/iPod touch)“VLC Remote Free lets you play, pause, and skip tracks on the mighty VLC Media Player on any computer from your iPhone or iPod touch.” Google Chrome Officially Leaves Beta (Windows)“Google’s new web browser, Google Chrome, has officially left its beta tag in the dust, graduating to a full-fledged 1.0 release today (just 100 days after the initial release).”If you’re looking for something fun to goof off with as Christmas approaches, look no further than MorphThing. Finally you’ll know what the love child of Hillary Swank and Jack Nicholson would look like. Or for that matter you can find out what you and any other celebrity or uploaded portrait would look like as a morphed image. The lead image for this post was an unholy mashup of my face and that of Heather Graham’s, which shall hence forth insist on being called by it’s stage name: Jasather.
KickYouTube is one of the simplest solutions for downloading YouTube videos we’ve reviewed at Lifehacker. So simple that if you can find YouTube videos you like and type the word “kick” you’re in business. The mechanism is web based and very straight forward. When you’re watching a YouTube video that you would like to download for archiving or later perusal, simply add the word “kick” to the URL immediately in front of the word youtube. For example if you wanted to download the Merlin Mann video we suggested as weekend viewing to throw on your iPod for a subway commute, you would do the following:
Load the URL for the video in your browser:
http ://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOgHE5nEq04
Insert the word “kick” between the www. and the youtube.com section of the URL:
http://www.kickyoutube.com/watch?v=uOgHE5nEq04
That’s it! After you send that URL, the page will reload with the KickYouTube toolbar at the top of the screen, as seen in the screenshot above. From there you can download the file from YouTube as an FLV, MPG, MP3, and even HD MP4. Note: going to the KickYouTube website directly will just give you a video demonstration on how to use the service, to actually engage the toolbar and begin grabbing files you have to find a YouTube video you want and insert the “kick” into the URL of the video. For another simple method of downloading YouTube videos, check out recently mentioned YTPodcaster.
KickYouTube [via MakeUseOf]Windows/Mac OS X 10.5 only: Want live video streams to run in a dedicated window instead of a forgotten tab buried in your browser? StreamDesk brings a hand-picked selection of live video streams from sites like Ustream.tv, Justin.tv and Stickam directly to your desktop. For Mac, it requires OS X Leopard (version 10.5) and Flash 10. For Windows, it requires .NET 3.5 and Flash 10 — though the StreamDesk installer will helpfully download both for you. The content is currently tech-heavy, but you can request new feeds like the Shiba Inu Puppy Cam from a form on the developer’s site. StreamDesk is a free download for Windows and Mac OS X 10.5.
StreamDesk [via Download.com]While you can load Google’s normal webapps in your iPhone browser, Google has iPhone-optimised versions for most of the popular ones. Google System compiled a list of URLs to bookmark on your iPhone for Google’s homepage, Apps, iGoogle, Gmail, Calendar, Reader, Docs, Talk and News. You can also use these on other mobile phone browsers, unless you have Windows Mobile and Mobile IE like I do. Want to see how the iPhone half lives? They’ll load just fine in Firefox as well.
With a hot Jacob’s Ladder arcing angrily between a pair of wires, Rafael and Max put a thoroughly modern spin on the traditional cheese plate by sending a few thousand volts through a grape and a piece of fromage in this video. Note that the two chefs wear goggles to protect their eyes and non-conductive wooden chopsticks to hold the food. What they don’t offer is a taste test. They do, however, offer a winking “Don’t try this at home.” From coffee warming coils to hot dog electrocutors, what are your favourite ways of cooking with juice? Things – Cooking with High Voltage Electricity [Vimeo via New In November]
If you’ve got a clutter of Stickies on your Mac desktop and you want to archive them all in one fell swoop, here’s a kludge jury-rigged from Print to PDF:
While there’s no direct “export all” feature in Stickies, there is a fairly simple workaround. First, select File -> Print All Notes. In the Print dialog, click the PDF pop-up menu, then select Save as PDF.
The PDF can then be printed if you prefer a paper record, or you can copy and paste the text from a reader into any text editor. If you’ve set up a Stickies tutorial, this would be a good way to save what you’ve written for reusing it later. Looking for other ways to improve your sticky notes? Check out Stick ‘Em Up for extending Stickies or download and try SketchBox. If you have a quicker way to convert your stickies to a text file, let us know in the comments.
Export text from all notes in Stickies [Macworld]
