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 If you’ve been planning on buying a new Mac for the student in your life, Apple’s announced a back to school promotion where students (kindy through tertiary) buying a new Mac and iPod can get the iPod for free. The offer applies to MacBook, MacBook Pro, iMac and MacPro purchases before 18 April – if you buy a 4GB iPod nano or other qualifying iPod, you can get a $199 postal rebate.
Webapp Pingie takes any RSS feed and alerts you of new items in that feed via SMS message. It would be a bit ridiculous to subscribe to the full Lifehacker feed (or other frequently updating sites) with Pingie, because no one really wants 20-plus text messages a day. However, for lower volume sites, services like Pingie or previously mentioned Web-alerts could come in very handy. Pingie is free to use, requires an email address to set up your account.
PingieTech help site Of Zen and Computing points out the crucial icon on the fax machine, printer, and copier you need to know before you feed the paper—the ones shown here. If the lines are showing on the front of the paper icon, feed your paper in face up (like letterhead into the printer). If the lines are on the corner fold? Put it in face down. Call this post a salute from Captain Obvious if you want, but the slower ones in the group need a little extra help sometimes. This tip reminds me of that oft unnoticed arrow on your car’s gas gauge that tells you which side the cap is on.
How to Tell Which Direction the Paper Goes into the Printer [Of Zen and Computing]Killer Windows folder shortcut tool FileBox eXtender has been updated to support Vista. [via]
Windows only: Share a single keyboard, mouse, and clipboard between multiple Windows computers with freeware application Input Director. Similar to the cross-platform keyboard sharing app, Synergy, Input Manager offers an easier setup and a handful of really useful features—including the ability to copy and paste files and folders between systems (a feature that never seems to work correctly in Synergy). While Synergy is the best available solution for a multi-platform setup, if you’re only running multiple Windows machines, Input Director looks like the best solution. If you happen to have an all-Mac setup, check out previously mentioned Teleport. Input Director is freeware, Windows only.
Input Director [via FreewareGenius]Two years ago, Lifehacker alum Keith taught you how to see that the grass is greener on this side.
Our favourite way to keep your email inbox empty is a simple, three-folder system we call The Trusted Trio. However, if you’re using Gmail and want to keep a clear inbox, it’s actually a duo. Here’s how to use two simple labels to consistently empty your Gmail inbox.
Streaming radio and music recommendation service Last.fm now streams full length tracks and even albums on-demand, making it the largest completely legal souce of free, on-demand streaming music on the web. Any single track can be played up to three times before you’re prompted to join their yet-to-be-released subscription service, which will offer unlimited plays of any song. Currently the service is available to the US, UK, and Germany, but Last.fm is working to expand to other countries. If the new service has piqued you interest in Last.fm, check out these 15 Last.fm power tweaks for more ways to take advantage of the excellent music service.
Free the Music [Last.fm Blog]Whether you do your downloading via BitTorrent, FTP, or plain old HTTP, efficiently sucking files down from the cloud onto your hard drive takes the right tools. Whether you’re a web video addict, constant software downloader, MP3 freak, or BitTorrent junkie, we’ve got some power downloading tools for you. Step inside for our picks of the best free download managers that get you the files you want fast and easy.
You may have noticed that standard Google searches put the search terms right in the URL—as in google.com/search?q=tech+jobs+portland. That’s fine in most cases, but what if you have the sneaking suspicion your boss or IT guy is looking through your Google searches, or you don’t want your searching history sold by your ISP to marketers? Tech blog Digital Inspiration ferrets out 10 Google-mirroring URLs hosted by Google on its own servers, seemingly created for the purpose of offering a little shielding from prying eyes. See the full list after the jump.
