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 Blogger Paul Stamatiou steps through getting acquainted with and then becoming proficient downloading music, movies, and other files with Usenet. After introducing you to the basics of Usenet, Stamatiou delves into more advanced usage, describing how to start Usenet downloads by sending an email to your home computer. BitTorrent is by far the more popular (or at least well known and discussed) method of file sharing right now, but Usenet has been around forever, and its often blazing download speeds and ease of use has kept a lot of users loyal for years. If you’re a die-hard Usenet user, let’s hear what you love about it along with your tips for Usenet newcomers in the comments. How To: Download with Newsgroups [PaulStamatiou]
If you’ve opted to be a canary in the Firefox 3 beta coal mine, report back to your more cautious cohorts what it’s like in there. Firefox 3 offers a slew of new features and revamped look and feel, but we want to know what’s made you willing to ditch the stable Firefox 2 for the new beta.
Firefox with Greasemonkey: The Videoembed Greasemonkey user script automatically embeds any video from YouTube, MySpace, MetaCafe, and more directly into a web page wherever videos are linked but not embedded. If you stumble onto a bookmarked YouTube video on del.icio.us or a Google Video on Digg, for example, you’ll no longer need to click through to watch the video. Handy! Videoembed is free, requires Firefox with Greasemonkey. Videoembed [Userscripts.org via MakeUseOf]
If you’re itching to give the new Firefox 3 Beta 3 a test-drive but don’t want to muss up your Firefox 2 configuration, give the self-contained Firefox 3 Beta 3 Portable Edition a try (Windows only). Of course, running your current setup through MozBackup first couldn’t hurt.
Web site iWebSaver saves entire web pages to your iPhone or iPod touch by converting the entire page to a data URL, then providing that data link as a bookmark you can save to your bookmarks or your home screen. That means next time you’re about to jump on a plane or hit the tunnel on the train, you can use iWebSaver to save some reading material directly to your device before you lose your signal. One would think you could do this just by loading the web pages in beforehand, but Safari often reloads pages inactive, so that’s not a foolproof method. iWebSaver ensures you’ve got some reading material saved directly to your device. Be sure to bookmark the iWebSaver bookmarklet to save any site on-the-fly. iWebSaver [via Steve Rubel's Twitter]
One of iTunes’ most powerful and useful features is Smart Playlists: dynamic, search-based lists of songs that save you the work of grouping tunes by hand. But with almost 40 fields to search against—from Album and Artist to Bit Rate and Category—there are thousands of possible Smart Playlist combinations. If you listen to music while you work, but don’t want to waste time manually creating playlists in iTunes, today we’ve got our top 10 favourite Smart Playlists that will keep your tunes fresh and focused automatically.
Firefox 3 Beta only: If you’ve taken the plunge into testing the brand new Firefox 3 beta but your favourite extensions are disabled, that’s because developers haven’t updated them and may not be providing secure updates yet. If you’re an impatient risk-taker who needs your extensions back NOW, here’s a cheat that may get them to work. Big Honking Warning: Only do this if you’re willing to deal with possible bleeding edge extension bugs and security risks!
What happens when you take a grown man’s Blackberry, cell phone, and computer away? He breaks down into tears, that’s what. The Today show unplugged a Forbes magazine editor (who volunteered for the experiment!) and madness ensued. This clip is over a year old, but it’s a must-see if you’ve been considering unplugging on a regular basis. Could you make it a week sans email and cell phone? Let us know in the comments. [via Electrolicious]
Lifehacker reader Samar liked the quick-write convenience of the GmailThis bookmarklet, but wanted to dig deeper to find a solution that would both work with his (and our own) favourite Windows keyword launcher, Launchy, and run whether or not Firefox (or any default Windows browser) was already open. We’re glad he did, because he’s come up with a one-line command that lets you open new Gmail composition windows from anywhere. The tip, and screenshots, after the jump.
Moonk, a free Flash conversion application, serves as a one-stop shop to turn your photos, videos, or music into slick-looking embeddable boxes. Sure, YouTube and a wealth of other hosting sites can do much the same, but for those who don’t want to add their videos or other media to a search-able site or mess with privacy settings, Moonk lets simply make your media files web-playable. New users get 500 MB of storage—pretty generous, considering the small size of the Flash output. I also like the uncluttered interface and straight-forward conversion tools, compared to similar tools of its kind. Moonk is a free service, but requires a sign-up to use. Moonk [via Red Ferret Journal]
