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 The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People author Steven R. Covey advises readers how to to strike a balance between work and life:
Today the average college student or corporate worker considers themselves a “multitasker”. It’s not unusual to meet people in their 20s who are working, going to school, starting their own company, married, raising kids and enjoying hobbies. They end up with a huge list of things that fracture their attention. This isn’t wrong in any way-for the most part it’s admirable-but there is an old saying: to a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
A new Linux-based media center, called Entertainer, is now vying for your living room, and from the looks of this preview video, it’s got major potential.
Here’s a tip which could help spice up a birthday cake for your geeky child or loved one – a kitchen hack for making edible googly eyes. The creators -at the aptly named Evil Mad Scientist Labratories blog – use empty gelatine capsules (like the ones used for vitamins and other pills), hundreds and thousands or cake decorating balls for the ‘pupils’. The pupils are captured in the gel cap, which is gently pushed into a light coloured backing (soft biscuit or a malteser cut in half) to provide the base and the ‘whites of the eyes’.How could a birthday cake *NOT* be improved by this hack? I love it.
One Hundred Percent EDIBLE Googly Eyes [Evil Mad Scientist Labratories via MAKE]
Windows only: Freeware Microsoft Outlook plug-in Xobni (that’s inbox backwards) adds a handful of killer features to its new Outlook sidebar. Among those features: Email analytics, extraordinarily useful contact cards, fast search, threaded (Gmail-like) conversations, and more. The video above gives an excellent overview, so give it a look. Seeing as Xobni has successfully made Outlook appear exciting (which is no easy feat), this freeware, Windows-only plug-in looks like a winner. Currently Xobni is in a closed beta, but the first 50 readers to head to the download page and enter the code “lifehacker” can download. Once you’re in, you should be able to invite friends, so if you use the code, keep an eye on the comments and help out a fellow Outlook user. Outlook lovers, let’s hear how it works for you in the comments.
XobniBuild out a paper flowchart on your gigantic whiteboard with Removable Magic Tape. The tape pulls off easily, leaves behind no messy residue, and can be pulled up and moved around. Weblog Cool Tools suggests using it for testing layouts for books, and it would also be perfect for testing out your scrapbook layouts. Removable Magic Tape will set you back $3 at Amazon.
Removable Magic Tape [Cool Tools] Buy Removable Magic Tape [Amazon]One year ago, Adam shared his favorite PC New Year’s Resolutions so that while you’re working out, cleaning up, and saving money, you’re not neglecting your poor old computer.
Tech help site Of Zen and Computing describes how to use Microsoft Office to do Optical Character Recognition (OCR)—that is, recognize text inside digital images (like scanned documents). The Microsoft Document Imaging application comes with Microsoft Office (who knew?) and can grok text from TIFF images. Haven’t tried this one myself, but after wrestling with various OCR apps several years ago, my expectations are low. What’s your favorite OCR application or method? Tell us about it in the comments.
Read Text from a Scanned Document into Word with OCR [Of Zen and Computing]gOS, the webapp monster of an operating system (which we toured here) has updated to version 2.0, adding Google Gears, virtual desktops, online storage, and more. If you’ve got an old PC in need of rejuvenation, gOS may be the ticket.
Windows and Mac OS X only: If you’ve ever considered using a desktop-based newsreader rather than online options like Google Reader, chances are you’ve run into Newsgator’s FeedDemon (Windows) or NetNewsWire (Mac). Today Newsgator has announced that both offerings are free, meaning that you can now get the speed, desktop integration, smart lists, and syncing capabilities of these awesome newsreaders for the wonderful price of naught. I made the move to NetNewsWire from Google Reader a couple of months back, and frankly, I’m not sure I could go back to web-based RSS. And now that both FeedDemon and NetNewsWire have hit the freeware world, I don’t think I’ll ever have to. They’ve also freed up NewsGator Go! (for Windows Mobile) and NewsGator Inbox (for MS Outlook). Awesome.
NewsGator Releases New Versions of Client Products; Best-of-Breed RSS Readers Now Free [Newsgator]Even in this golden age of Big Internet Companies Acquiring Everything In Sight, there are still a few independent, small webapps out there that don’t get the attention they should for their useful functionality. Every once in awhile we get sick of constantly writing about the big name webapps everyone knows about, so today we’re turning the spotlight away from the obvious greats and taking a look at online tools that may have flown under your radar. Here’s our top 10 pick of of underhyped webapps that should get more attention than they do.
