Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Lose Fat and Get in Shape Faster
4:13PM Adam Pash | Web site Health.com lists a series of great tips to “blast off fat faster.” While the title makes it sound like a dime-a-dozen lose-weight-fast article, the post actually is full of practical, realistic tips for ways you can improve your workouts by changing your exercise habits and keeping a closer eye on your body. For example: Know this: “The less time you rest between sets when strength training, the more calories you’re likely to burn,” Dillinger notes. “Keeping rest periods short keeps your heart rate at a higher rate, which naturally increases the number of calories you’re using.” More »
Your essential tools for working on the road
4:03PM Sarah Stokely | If you travel a lot for work, you have a number of increasingly sophisticated options for how to work while on the road. Laptops are getting smaller if you want your desktop apps, or web-based applications and storage options are becoming more powerful and feature-rich too. Or if you’re really dedicated to portability there are PDA and thumb drives.
When I hit the road later this month I’m planning on taking a laptop
with me, as well as a “backup” thumbdrive with all the apps and docs
I’ll need while I’m away.
So what tools are essential for you when you’re on the road? Do you rely on web-based apps or do you like to carry your apps with you? Can a thumb drive really be enough?
Recommend your favourites please. :) More » Stream Your Music Library over the Internet with SlimServer
3:00PM Adam Pash | If you’ve ever wanted to stream your music from your home computer to whatever computer you’re at, web site Mac OS X Hints walks through doing just that with the cross-platform, open-source application SlimServer (the one that runs your Squeezebox). There are a lot of ways to stream music over the internet, but one thing SlimServer has going for it is its integrated web interface, meaning that once it’s set up you can play your music from any browser without installing anything else (as opposed to other, simpler options like SimplifyMedia or Hamachi). If you really want to go nuts and you’re a fan of Netvibes, you can even stream MP3s to Netvibes with SlimServer. Listen to iTunes over the net via a free streaming server [Mac OS X Hints] More »Photobucket launches mobile website
2:20PM Sarah Stokely | For the Photobucket stalwarts who haven’t yet made the move to Flickr or Picasa, you’ll be interested to know that Photobucket has put out a mobile website site for viewing and uploading pictures. You can also access a limited ‘home page’ and more features are on the way. The full details are here. Point your phone to m.photobucket.com to get started. More » Why you should aim to have an average day
2:02PM Sarah Stokely | Lifehacker reader Rod put me onto an interesting article espousing a rather different view of the world – which advises curbing overachieving tendencies and goals to become a sustainable achiever. Entitled “Have an Average Day”, the article suggests that by shedding the heavy expectations you place on yourself, you’re freed up to get down to actually working on what you want to do.
I particularly liked the examples the author uses to illustrate the ‘exceptional impact of a series of average days’:
1. Choose an area of your life in which you have been trying to excel, such as writing, sales, or being a parent.
2. Consider what would constitute an average day in that area. For a
writer that might be 90 minutes of writing; in sales that might be
speaking with five new prospects; a parent might aim to spend an hour a
day 100 percent focused on the kids.
3. Project forward. If you did nothing but repeat your average day five
days a week, what would you accomplish in three months? A year? Five
years?
Writing 100 or so hours over a three-month period is enough to
complete a book; in a year that would be two books, some poetry, and a
screenplay. Speaking with 100 new prospects over the course of a month
would definitely lead to new sales.
A parent who spends at least an hour a day focused on children
racks up 90 hours in three months. In five years, if a parent made even
a small difference in each of the 1,800 hours she or he spent, the
impact would be anything but average.
The notion is similar to the suggestion that you work in increments to beat anxiety, which we wrote about earlier this week. Thanks for the tip, Rod.
Have an Average Day [UTNE Reader]
More » 
Replace Bulky Document Binders with Chicago Screws
2:00PM Gina Trapani | If you’ve got a shelf full of bulky binders, blogger Tim Fehlman says you can consolidate them using Chicago screws, which fit into regular paper punch holes: They are flat and allow you to get rid of the extra space that is taken up by partially empty binders, covers, etc. We figure that we have reduced the amount of space that our documents use by about 60%. With Chicago screw binding your pages turn more like a book that doesn’t quite lay flat, so this sounds best for documents you don’t need to remove or rearrange easily. They’re also cheaper than full-on binders for document archiving, too. Archive Documents with Chicago Screws [Daily Cup of Tech] More »Complete Large Projects with the “Martini Method”
1:00PM Gina Trapani | A recent PhD graduate shares his strategy for getting through four years of dissertation-writing: hard deadlines, soft deadlines, and the “Martini Method.” What I call the Martini Method is named after an anecdote I once read about the novelist Anthony Burgess (of Clockwork Orange fame). Burgess was a very productive writer, which is attributed to a system where he would force himself to write a 1000 words a day, 365 days a year. When he had completed his word count, he would relax with a dry martini, and enjoy the rest of the day with an easy conscience, and normally in a bar. Your PhD might be that novel, work project, quitting smoking, or marathon, and your martini might be a chocolate bar, walk in the park, movie, or vacation, but the concept is the same: small rewards along the way help you get your stuff done. How to complete your PhD (or any large project): Hard and soft deadlines, and the Martini Method [Academic Productivity via Anne Zelenka] More »3 doubles mobile broadband data packages
12:38PM Sarah Stokely | Three’s just doubled the data capacity on its mobile broadband plans – as of today they offer 2GB for $29, 4GB for $49 and 6GB for $69. Too bad if you’re like me and signed up for 1GB for $14.50 offer only *yesterday* – but in the fine print they say the offer will be rolled out to existing customers so here’s hoping… More » 
CI Desk Collapsible Home Office
12:00PM Gina Trapani | If you live in a small space, a home office may seem like a distant dream—unless you’ve got the right gear. The Unclutterer blog points out a space-saving rolling desk that packs several drawers and a fold-out laptop stand with mouse pad extension. This thing is totally compact and portable, so you could set up shop in any corner of the house with it. (Looks especially good for bedrooms that double as offices.) How do you work at home without an actual extra room to set up an office? Let us know in the comments. More CI Desk photos here: galleryPost('cidesk', 2, ''); Lifehacker photo galleries require Javascript; if you’re viewing this in an RSS reader, click through to view in your Javascript-enabled web browser. More »
