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 Freelancer (and funny guy) Chris Hardwick read and tried Getting Things Done, The 4-Hour Workweek, and Never Check Email In The Morning and reports back which productivity systems worked best for him.
Dedicated drinker Adam Cadamally turned 1,050 bottles of beer into an amazing lighted Christmas tree; hit the play button to see the eye-popping construction video. [via]
There are a lot of factors in losing and maintaining a healthy diet and weight, but the HealthAssist blog points out that eating slowly might play a larger role than you realise. Along with the general knowledge of your body needing more time to figure out it’s full than most rush-rush meals allow for, “insulin resistance” and other factors suggest eating more slowly is something to strive for. Portion size and eating speed seem to be part of the reason for the famous “French paradox” — the relatively low incidence of heart disease and overweight in France as compared to the United States, despite the generally high intake of calorie-rich foods and saturated fat. It is well documented that the French take longer to eat than Americans, despite the French eating smaller portions. Recently Japanese researchers found strong positive correlation between rate of eating and body mass index (BMI) and obesity
Having recently been kept from lunch until about 2:30 p.m. by travel delays, I was surprised at how one sandwich and a tiny Diet Coke, eaten during a leisurely conversation, managed to tide me over, despite my usual preference for the over-stuffed specials and the like.
How do you manage to fit a slow meal into a busy day? Or do you see calories as calories, regardless of their intake speed? Tell us your take in the comments.Photo by Bombardier.
9 Strong Reasons To Eat Slowly [HealthAssist]Napsounds is a repository of relaxing audio files designed for power napping. Every day a unique 20-minute track is generated in the electronic, classic, and nature sounds category. You can listen directly from the web site, download the track as an MP3, subscribe via RSS, or set iTunes to grab the track as a podcast. The tracks use a combination of neural linguistic programming, binaural beats, and white noise generation layered into the ambient sounds.
Music-lover dmosiondz put the currently-playing Winamp track front and centre on his/her Windows desktop using one of the most popular desktop customisation tools, Samurize. This good-looking “Now Playing” dashboard boasts album art (middle), song lyrics (right), a Winamp controller (bottom left), plus the time, weather forecast, and system information. Dmosiondz explains the complete setup down to the fonts used:
If you’re finding Google’s new SearchWiki ranking buttons are more annoying than useful, you can hide them using this Greasemonkey user script (a definite candidate for a Better Google extension). Are you customising your results with SearchWiki, or just wishing those buttons weren’t cluttering up your results? Let us know in the comments.
Rather than dismissing a web page or other digital document as TLDR (“too long; didn’t read”), run it through the GreatSummary webapp, which summarises online content in a few sentences. Enter a URL or chunk of text into GreatSummary, choose the number of sentences you want to see (from 1 to 100), and click the “Summarize!” button to get a short digest of the content. I tested GreatSummary on several Lifehacker articles (here’s a five-line sum-up of my lengthy Android review)—and despite the fancy mathematical algorithm behind it, the results are so-so. Overall it’s a useful app to see key sentences, but don’t depend on it to hand you every cannot-miss point. GreatSummary
It might be engaged in a potentially messy court battle over piracy, but ISP iiNet hasn’t abandoned its “more content for users” approach, an attitude that already sees it offer access to iTunes and the ABC’s iView service without counting them against monthly download quotas. In a presentation at its AGM, the company said that it intends to continue its rollout of one new product a month, with the most notable being an IPTV service that’s due to roll out in mid-2009. Details of the service are scant (aside from the partial screenshot seen here), but it adds a new twist to the still largely underdeveloped local IPTV market.
Qantas has been flying A380 services between Australia and the US since October 20, and last week I took my first trip on Airbus’ double-decker plane between Los Angeles and Sydney. Does the much-hyped A380 deliver on its promise of more space, better entertainment and — a crucial question for Lifehacker readers — improved productivity options?
Dear Lifehacker, I always thought it was ridiculous and dangerous that Windows puts wallpapers mixed in with essential system files in the Windows folder. Is there a way or program to point the Display Properties -> Desktop tab to another folder? It would be nice if it then allowed me to organise it with sub-folders. Sincerely, Organised Papers
