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How To Kill Time Productively On Your Phone Now that both Yahoo and Blogger have moved toward OpenID support, maybe it’s time you weighed the pros and cons of OpenID and got started using it. Already use OpenID? Let’s hear what you love about it.
One of the best things about KDE 4, the newest release of the mainstream Linux desktop manager, is something it doesn’t do—force you to adapt to its way of running a computer desktop. Sure, the desktop environment boasts new 3-D effects, a polished theme, and improved functionality. But what KDE 4 does best is give users the ability to almost completely re-design their desktops, putting their programs, icons, and useful widgets wherever they see fit, on as many desktops as they want, to create their ideal workspace. I spent some time exploring the features of the less-than-week-old system, the results of which are after the jump.
Searching through crowd-sourced “rules” database RulesofThumb.org is a lot like having your smart-alecky uncle hanging around—but far more helpful and easier to silence. Users submit rules, concepts and common wisdom in various topics to the site, vote other rules up and down, and anyone can glean a little wisdom or motivation from the information. A search for “writing,” for instance, turned up suggestions that one minute of teleplay writing is about 40 seconds of actual television, and that ad copy sentences should be kept to 12 words or less. It’s the kind of site that could probably save you a Google search or two on certain topics, and might give you a little more cocktail conversation material while you’re looking.
RulesofThumb.orgThe Ubuntu Unleashed blog has a handy suggestion on how to add a helpful perma-delete tool to your right-click menu in Nautilus using the Nautilus-Actions plug-in. You just install the “wipe” package, which securely deletes a file multiple times to prevent later data-recovery efforts, and fill in a few text boxes to add it to your standard options in GNOME. After all, you don’t just keep porn sensitive files on your Windows partition, do you? If so, check out DeleteOnClick for Windows and Permanent Eraser for OS X systems, which perform similar secure deletions.
Windows only: Free copying utility Text Mining Tool grabs just the text out of Word documents, PDFs, HTML pages, and other documents without the hassle of opening, selecting everything and hoping embedded images don’t leave strange markers in the text. Once your text is copied, you can either re-save it as a text file or copy it to the clipboard. Its function might not sound all that helpful—until you’ve tried to select multiple pages’ worth of text from a scanned PDF, or tried to grab text from around awkward Flash boxes on web sites. Text Mining Tool unzips to a folder that can be put anywhere and comes with a command line tool for your batch-script-writing pleasure. Text Mining Tool is a free download for Windows systems only. For similar copy power from the selection screen, try DragKing.
Text Mining Tool [via The Red Ferret Journal]The Confessions of a Freeware Junkie blog points out a second-hand hack that can save document scanners quite a bit of space next time they find themselves with gigantic PDF files. The author, having been handed a gigantic colour PDF file to send along and failing to get much out of a compression utility, simply “printed” the PDF to, well, PDF again using Lifehacker commenter favourite PDFCreator, and, viola—a 13 MB file became 3 MB. A bit of colour definition was lost, but the document was still highly legible. Have any of your own tricks for preventing PDFs that take up entire thumb drives? Feel free to share ‘em in the comments.
PDFCreator [via Confessions of a Freeware Junkie]
