Tuesday, January 1, 2008
Separate Work and Play with User Identities
12:10PM Adam Pash | You’re no doubt aware of how easy it is to let work and play bleed into one another—especially if you use the same computer for both. Weblog Hack Your Day suggests a simple-yet-effective solution: Create distinct work/play computing boundaries with different user identities. When I recently reinstalled Vista, I created three accounts. The one labeled “Daniel” is where I keep all my personal stuff, like photos, music and so on. The one labelled blog is where I manage everything related to my online stuff like posts, guest posts, other articles, website promotion and so on. The third is where I have all the stuff related to my dayjob. More »
Find Quality Album Art Fast at AlbumArt
12:00PM Adam Pash | Got a new MP3 player and decided it’s time to gussy up your music library with high quality album art? Web site AlbumArt offers lightning fast search results for CD and DVD cover art for an impressively wide range of artists and albums. A lot of the art appears to come from Amazon, but good luck finding it as quickly by searching the source. We’ve actually mentioned AlbumArt once before, and though it’s not as high quality as my previous now-defunct album art source, it’s a wonderful go-to source for quickly filling out your music library with quality art. AlbumArt.org [via FreewareGenius] More »Recycle
11:30AM Adam Pash | Rather than send your Christmas tree to the landfill (where it takes forever to decay), turn that tree into mulch and give Mother Nature a helping hand. [via] More »
Get Live Firefox Chat Support from Mozilla
11:05AM Adam Pash | If you’ve returned home from the holidays having evangelised to your friends and family about the wonders of Firefox, you’ll be thrilled to know that Mozilla has just launched a new live chat support service. The support staff is volunteer-only (they’re just kind Firefox users looking to lend a hand) and support is not 24 hours, but what a great bookmark for that new Firefox installation you added to your parents’ computer—or your own. Firefox Live Chat [Mozilla via Download Squad] More »
De-duplicate iCal Events
10:40AM Gina Trapani | Mac OS X only: AppleScripter John Maisey offers an iCal utility that deletes duplicate events in iCal calendars. If one too many sync operations left your calendars with multiple instances of the same event, the Delete iCal Duplicates script will clean those up for you. Now available for both Tiger and Leopard, the Delete iCal Duplicates script is a free download for Mac only, donations appreciated. Delete iCal Duplicates [Applescripts | John Maisey via Hawk Wings] More »Your Biggest New Year’s Resolution?
10:00AM Gina Trapani | Lose weight. Save money. Quit smoking. Get fit. Rule the world. Is this what your New Year’s resolution list looks like? We spend all day yapping about the ways you can improve your life, and the brand New Year is the time lots of people choose to muster the resolve. So tell us, dear lifehackers, what is your grand Poobah of all resolutions in 2008, the one you’ll grit your teeth and stick to like glue for as long as you can possibly stand it? Inspire us by shouting out your resolve in the comments.
Get Preemptive Search on Your Phone with Boopsie
9:00AM Kevin Purdy | Having web access on your cell phone can be convenient, but only if it doesn’t take you 2 minutes to navigate to Wikipedia and type in “Auld Lang Syne”. Boopsie, a free mobile search app, aims to cut down the number of keypad clicks between you and the information you’re looking for. Functioning like a multi-engine Google Suggest, Boopsie brings up sites and results as you type partial queries. So finding “Atlas Shrugged” on Amazon, for instance, requires just an “am” to get to Amazon Books, and then “at shr” to pull up the results, which are then formatted for small screens. Mobile browsers can search at Boopsie.com, desktop users can try it out at boopsie.mobi, and we can all laugh at how few relevant names there must left for web applications these days. Boopsie [via Digital Inspiration] More »Banned
8:20AM Kevin Purdy | Starting tomorrow, spare lithium-ion batteries—the kind found in laptops and cell phones— will be banned from checked airline luggage in the US. But you can still bring two batteries, in clear baggies, in your carry-on bags. More »
Set Your Agenda by Phone with reQall
8:00AM Kevin Purdy | New voice-to-text reminder service reQall is more than a little bit like the better-known Jott, but stands apart with wide accessibility and support for users in the UK and Canada. As with Jott, the primary feature is a phone number to call and speak a reminder to, which is then transcribed and made available a whole heck of a lot of ways—on your reQall and iGoogle pages, by RSS, through a standard iCal feed, a text message alert, or in a daily email agenda. As you might expect, the transcription isn’t perfect (see screenshot above), but fairly accurate and able to both time-shift and set reminders into categories. reQall is currently a free service (and the founders have stated that a free version will remain after beta), and can be signed up for by phone or at the web site. reQall [via MakeUseOf.com] More »
