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Top 10 Pervasive Tech Myths That Are Only Wasting Your Time These days, it’s harder to get a new mobile phone without a built-in camera than with. If you’re not all that enthused about taking grain pictures with it, you can still get some value out of the little lens, as detailed at the Digital Inspiration blog. One idea in particular caught my eye: Car Parking – Most shopping malls here have huge underground parking but there aren’t any signboards so it gets tough to locate the car. So when you park the the car, just look towards the lift (or the exit) and take a picture or record some video. This will save lot of effort (and time) when you return with all those heavy shopping bags.
If my area mall has parking numbers, I sure don’t notice them, so I’ll be giving this a try soon. What MacGyver-esque uses have you pulled from your mobile camera? Give up the secrets in the comments. Photo by Mrs. Gemstone.
Interesting Uses of Camera Mobile Phones [Digital Inspiration]If you’re still not sure what to do with that pile of holiday cards you received this year, wikiHow suggests making them into festive place settings for next year. A great project for the kids, all you have to do is cut circles out of the cards’ illustrations, arrange on clear contact paper, and trim with a little room left at the edges. Nice way to reuse and save money on holiday decorations.
How to Make Placemats From Greeting Cards [wikiHow]Food writer Michael Pollan, author of The Mnivore’s Dilemma has a list of commandments for eating well at the core of his latest work, In Defense of Food. His suggestions go against all the latest diet trends and research and aim to offer simple but well-tested diet ideals. For example: 9. Eat food from animals that eat grass 10. Cook, and if you can, grow some of your own food. 11. Eat meals and eat them only at tables.
In general, Pollan argues that the farther away your food gets from its natural growth, the less healthy and substantial it will be for you. Of course, time and money will keep most of us from, say, growing our own food and never eating food with ingredients we can’t pronounce, but Pollan’s commandments are a fair starting point for thinking out your diet plan. Photo by rexipe.
Michael Pollan’s Twelve Commandments for Serious Eaters: Can You Live By Them? [Serious Eats]Windows/Linux (Thunderbird): Import Outlook’s PST files and choose which email folders to bring into Thunderbird with PST Import, a free extension for the open-source, cross-platform email manager Thunderbird. While Thunderbird can import certain messages and settings from an existing Outlook installation, the PST Import add-on lets you set up email on Linux systems, and gives Thunderbird users the ability to pull specific email folders from a stand-alone PST file. The program was coded in France and one user review noted a dialog pop-up in French language, but the instructions should be fairly straight-forward, regardless. PST Import is a free download and is listed as working with Windows and Linux versions of Thunderbird—if any OS X users want to give it a quick shot, I’ll update whether it works there too. Thanks Eddy!
PST Import Plugin [Softpedia]Even with the specialised “files” sticking out of them, the folder icons on a Windows Vista desktop can be pretty hard to tell apart, and there’s no built-in OS X-like colouring application to aid quick location. The Dumb Little Man blog posts a dead-simple guide to overcoming look-alikes with custom icons. It’s fairly similar to how you do the same in Windows XP, but worth revisiting for a more navigable desktop.
Customize Folder Icons in Vista for Extra Fast Location Of Your Files [Dumb Little Man]Windows only: It’s obvious that the programmers at the Donation Coder site work best under deadline, as they’ve once again turned out a surprising number of useful, quirky or specialised Windows programs in the space of one month, available free for download. Those with serious music collections can check out WTF!? Music Info, which compiles and graphs information based on artist, genre and release year. Anyone seeking to keep their still-new resolutions can track their progress and assign themselves tasks with Point Motivator. All of the programs released for the New Apps New Year 2008 challenge are free downloads for Windows systems only. For more freeware mini-apps, check out the results of the Getting Organized Experiment released last month.
2008 NANY CHALLENGE [via CyberNet]Now that the Xbox 360 has been updated to support DivX/XviD playback, work-arounds like conversion and the Transcode 360 Media Center hack aren’t strictly necessary. The Pain in the Tech blog offers two walkthroughs for using Winamp Remote (part of Winamp 5.5) or Windows Media Player 11 to stream video from your PC to your XBox. Both programs have their pros and cons (based mainly on media accessibility versus buffering times), but both also get the job done. If you’ve put together your own PC-to-Xbox streaming solution, let’s hear it in the comments.
Stream video to Xbox 360 with Winamp Remote and Windows Media Player [Pain in the Tech]
