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 Just because they are rough on their crayons doesn’t mean your kids have to draw with little waxy nubs. Craft site Chica and Jo has a tutorial on breathing new life into your crayons. Gather up all your old crayons, even the tiniest little broken up pieces. Sort them by colours, and them double boil them on your stove top to melt them down. Chica and Jo used a large tin can as an impromptu inner-vessel for their double boiler. While you could use any mold to form your new crayons, they used silicone ice cube trays because they were flexible and easy to get the crayons out of and non-stick. Out of all the shapes they tested a triangle ice cube tray from Ikea emerged as the most favoured. The three pointed shape kept the crayons from rolling off the table and was easy for the smaller kids to grip well. For a more detailed and photo-filled explanation check out the full guide. Recycle Old Broke Crayons Into Fun New Shapes
Windows only: Greenshot is a lightweight, open source, and portable screen-capture tool. The executable and supporting .dll files weigh in at 464KB, making Greenshot a rather lightweight tool and well suited for a flash-drive toolkit. You can generate screen captures by a variety of methods including using the print-screen button as a hot key and activating the main menu from the system tray where you can capture by region, freehand cropping, etc. Greenshot can be set to send your crops directly to a printer, open for editing, or to be saved. The file naming convention is userspecifiedword_YYYY-MM-DD_HH-MM-SS, typical for screen-capture tools and entirely practical. Once you have captured an image you can add text and shapes such as arrows to draw attention or a bright red box to isolate. One curiously lacking feature is the ability to crop after the initial capture. You can use the freehand-capture tool to carefully grab the area you want when getting the initial capture, but once you are in the actual editing stage there appears to be no method to crop. For another excellent, free, and portable screen-capture tool check out FastStone Capture. Greenshot is open source, Windows only.Thanks Ryan!
GreenshotWindows only: Download Mover is a simple application which allows you to apply sets of rules to folders. If you dump all your downloaded files into a designated download folder for instance, you can assign rules to have all images moved to one folder, all zip files to another, and so on. Combine Download mover with Auto Delete and you’ll have the tidiest folders on the block. For a lightweight home-grown alternative to Download Mover, check out Gina’s VB script Hard Drive Janitor. Download Mover is freeware, Windows only.
Download Mover [via Download Squad]Windows/Linux/Mac OS X: If you have ever donated your computer’s idle cycles to a charitable project, Foldit will be right up your alley. After installing the game you are given protein samples to untangle. On the surface it appears as though you are trying to solve a puzzle of tangled cords, but your solutions are much more valuable: The number of different ways even a small protein can fold is astronomical because there are so many degrees of freedom. Figuring out which of the many, many possible structures is the best one is regarded as one of the hardest problems in biology today and current methods take a lot of money and time, even for computers. Foldit attempts to predict the structure of a protein by taking advantage of humans’ puzzle-solving intuitions and having people play competitively to fold the best proteins.
Many people are taking the transition from analogue to digital television as a pretty good excuse to upgrade their televisions. Shockingly, despite paying a premium for a high definition set and all the bells and whistles that go with it consumers aren’t always sure what they are actually getting: A recent survey by the Leichtman Research Group (LRG) shows that 18 percent of HDTV owners think they’re watching high-definition shows, when in fact they’re viewing standard definition programming.
Web-based application Pixolu helps you find images by their similarity to each other. Enter a search term and Pixolu searches the image indexes of Google, Yahoo, and Flickr. Once Pixolu returns results, you can further refine them by dragging images to a holding area on the lower right corner of the interface. In my test run, I searched for pumpkins. I specifically wanted pictures of lots of pumpkins gathered together but not pictures of Jack o’ Lanterns or pumpkin pie. By dragging and dropping pictures of multiple pumpkins from my initial search into the sidebar and refining the search, Pixolu narrowed down the remaining images into just those of tons of pumpkins clustered together.
Pixolu [via MakeUseOf]Complex diet equations involving fat, protein, and carbohydrates get re-spun every other day, it seems, but calorie counting remains the basic math of weight maintenance, according to nutritionists. How much do you care about calories (or kilojoules if you’re being sensibly metric)? How do you track your intake, and output, when you’re eating on the go?
The Christian Science Monitor, a Pulitzer-winning daily newspaper, announced yesterday that it will stop printing daily editions and focus on its online edition, as well as use the savings to keep foreign bureaus open. Media pundits have been claiming the End of Print for decades, but the CSM is the first large-scale news operation to really take the plunge. We’re obviously pretty keen on free digital information at Lifehacker, but also wondering if we, and maybe our readers, will some day miss the portability, the lack of battery power or Wi-Fi connections, and the general look and feel of print newspapers. Are you in the same boat, or do you think the writing is on the wall when it comes to news delivery? Would you settle for a half-way solution, like a Kindle-esque news reader or print-on-demand papers? Tell us your take on the future of print in the comments. Photo by Matt Mattila. Christian Science Paper to End Daily Print Edition [New York Times]
Consumer Reports’ Tightwad Tod blog espouses the value of holding onto your clunker car rather than trading up—a well-maintained, reliable clunker, that is. The magazine’s auto writers suggest that despite whatever your friends, parents, or mechanic tells you, the best rule of thumb for needed service is the recommended maintenance schedule in your owner’s manual. What are the non-essential items that you can usually do without? They include radiator flushes and new fuel filters … To avoid getting unnecessary work, make a copy of the recommended service page, show it to the service manager and say, “this is what I want.”
Simple, yet something most car owners have rarely considered. Hit the link for other tips on knowing when your clunker is past its prime. Photo by berzowska. Hold on to that clunker! [Tightwad Tod]
Lifehacker reader Tom D writes in with this sensible suggestion:
I use a passcode lock on my iPhone, which means if it’s stolen or lost the person who finds it probably won’t be able to make use of it. Obviously this is good, however it means apps like private-i and other “I’m lost, here are my details” apps won’t work either. Also anyone who finds it can’t get into your address book to call “me” or “home” or “mum” or whoever to report it. So I used a label maker and printed out “REWARD IF FOUND “, trimmed it down and stuck it to the back of my iPhone (or any other valuable gadget). Not terribly aesthetically pleasing, but at least if the phone is stolen or lost, the person finding it has instant access to the owner’s info and hopefully the offer of a reward is enough to get their good nature to kick in and make an attempt to return it.
As an obsessed label maker user, I’m surprised this didn’t occur to me before. Got any other neat hacks for dealing with the inevitable moment when your phone gets lost? Share them in the comments. Thanks, Tom D!
