What Are The Hourly Rates For IT Contractors? 
What Do You Do With Your Gadgets When You Move Overseas? 
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 The iTransmogrify bookmarklet for the iPhone or iPod touch converts embedded Flash content to mobile Safari-supported formats so that Flash media—like embedded YouTube videos and streaming MP3s—will play from Safari with the click of a bookmark. Obviously your iPhone or iPod touch has YouTube built in, but if, for example, you’re reading Lifehacker and we’ve embedded a YouTube video, Safari won’t recognise that and take you directly to the YouTube app. One click of your new iTransmorgrify bookmarklet, though, and it will. The bookmarklet also supports several Flash-based MP3 players.
iTransmogrify [Joe Maller]While we often write about the productivity killer that is information overload, here at Lifehacker we publish up to (and sometimes over) 20 posts a day. Yes, we’re aware of the irony. But in case you didn’t know: we’ve got several category pages and feeds that you can use to filter Lifehacker posts down to just the topics you want to see.
First, we offer two versions of our “all posts” feed: the Full content feed includes the full text of posts with images and advertising. The second is post excerpts without advertising. If you want all of Lifehacker every day, take your pick between those two.
If those two feeds serve up too much content for your taste, we’ve also recently created the “aus” feed – which as the name suggests, bundles up all the Oz-centric posts from Lifehacker (around 6 posts a day).
Mac OS X only: Freeware Mac application Disctop Pro displays the currently inserted CD or DVD on your Mac desktop, complete with album artwork. The app animates your disc insert and ejection and gets great marks in the looks department, but it also has its useful features, too. When you’re playing back a CD, you can skip or pause tracks from the floating CD, and the app customises its behaviour for the Mac you’re using, from iMacs to MacBooks to Mac Pros. Disctop Pro is freeware, Mac OS X only.
Disctop Pro [via TUAW]If tracking your calorie intake is part of your New Year’s resolution and you already use Twitter, create and maintain a food diary using the Twitter-enabled Tweetwhatyoueat service. Here’s how it works: on Twitter, friend the Tweetwhatyoueat bot (named twye) and direct message it your meals and snacks throughout the day from the web, your phone, instant messenger, or your Twitter client of choice. Tweetwhatyoueat creates a food diary based on your direct messages, calculating your calorie totals as you go. (Your food intake isn’t public, so your friends won’t know about those Twinkies.) Being a closet Twitter fan, I love this new way to make the service actually productive. After the jump, check out Tweetwhatyoueat in action.
You already know you can turn that old t-shirt into underwear yourself—but if sewing’s not your thing, hip undie company Solojones will do the recycling for you. Ship them your concert, race, techie schwag or any other tee to reincarnate, and they’ll turn it into a pair of bottoms—a neat gift for the ladies. The transformation works best with stretchy shirts, and it’ll set you back $30 (or $45 for two right now).
solojonesMany of our personal finance mistakes may be due to evolution, according to the Los Angeles Times.
US-centric: You no longer have to pay to opt out of annoying unsolicited snail mail: the Direct Marketing Association has dropped their dollar fee to get your name on their mailing preferences list. The DMA’s member companies honor this granddaddy of snail mail optout lists, which is supported by the U.S. Postal Service. I paid the buck way back when to get on the DMA list, and it’s since reduced my unwanted postal mail a whole lot. This dropped fee is long-awaited, great news. See also five ways you can clean up your snail mail.
How To Get Off A Mailing List [DMA]US-centric: Video rental service Netflix is lifting the limits on its “Watch Now” feature, allowing subscribers to watch as many hours of streaming video as they can handle. The service requires Windows with Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player 11, so it could still use improvements in terms of accessibility, but in all it’s a move that may make a lot of users happy while fending off potential competitors like Apple. And while you’re taking advantage of that unlimited viewing, here’s how to rip “Watch Now” videos to your hard drive.
Netflix Watch Now [via Yahoo News]Now that Mac OS X v10.5 Leopard’s been out almost three months, several apps, tweaks, and plug-ins have emerged that can customise (and sometimes re-Tigerise) your Mac. Now that you’re comfortable with Leopard’s new features, like Stacks, Quick Look, Time Machine, and Spaces, it’s time to roll up your sleeves and make your Mac look, feel, and behave just how you like. Personalize Leopard’s great new features, revert the annoying ones, or just get a taste of the things you didn’t know your Mac could do with our favorite Leopard tweaks.
Linux only: We’ve seen how visualizing your hard drive usage can help you clear the biggest space-eaters and make room for more useful information, and KDE-based Linux users have a great tool to do that. Free download Filelight scans your hard drive and displays space usage on a colored radial, with details that pop up as you mouse over each segment. Directories closest to the system root are show on the inside, and Filelight seems to have few problems analysing mounted non-Linux-format partitions, such as Windows. For those who liked the looks of Baobob but try to operate in a clean KDE environment, Filelight is an attractive space-making tool. Filelight is a free download for Linux systems only.
Filelight [via FOSSwire]
