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 Well it wasn’t a very exciting fight for those of us who were sticking with DVD to see what happened, but the media is now trumpeting that Blu-ray has won the format war, with the news that Toshiba is quitting production of HD-DVD players and recorders. That won’t mean much if you’d stuck with DVD to see how the battle went down, but if you’re an early adopter, Gizmodo has kindly put together a guide to what to do next. Their top (cynical!) tip is to offload your HD-DVD gear pronto, before the rest of the world figures out that it’s a dud. Nice.
A Consumer’s Cheat Sheet to HD-DVD’s Death and Blu-ray’s Victory [Gizmodo]
Windows/Linux only: Free, open source application WorldFlashReader speeds up your reading skills by flashing words in quick succession on a large display window. The result is—or at least is supposed to be—that you can both read more quickly and comprehend more at that speed. Similar to previously mentioned webapps Zap Reader and Spreeder, WorldFlashReader offers some features that make the desktop version worth a try, like keyboard shortcuts and estimates of time left to read the current text at that speed. WorldFlashReader can also open web pages, text files, or grab content directly from your clipboard. WordFlashReader [SourceForge via FreewareGenius]
Career advisor Penelope Trunk says that when you’re in that job interview and faced with the question “What’s your salary range?” don’t name a number. If you request a salary higher than the range for the job, the interviewer will tell you you’re high, and you’ve just lost money. If you request a salary lower than the range, the interviewer will say nothing, and you’ve just lost money. [...]You want the interviewer to tell you the range for the position, because then you can focus on getting to the high end of that range.
If your interviewer’s not forthcoming about what they plan to pay and persists asking you to name a number, Trunk runs down several ways to fend off the question, like focusing on the position’s requirements, the current job market, and the employer’s budget. If they’re going to make you an offer, they’ll have to include salary with it. The answer to the toughest interview question [Brazen Careerist]
If you’re an index card junkie but you end up with a bottomless pile of cards before you have a chance to process your tasks, weblog LifeClever suggests ditching traditional index cards in favor of color-coded shorty flash cards. Then tasks can be easily distinguished using red, yellow, and green cards thusly:Tasks to process immediately on returning to my desk. Tasks to process before the end of the work day. Tasks to leave for my Weekly Review.
If your most important tasks often get lost in the sea of your other to-dos, the colour-coded flash card method is a smart solution. Quickly Prioritize Notes with Color-coded Shorties [LifeClever]
iPhone user Steve Rubel has three bookmarklets he uses to make browsing on his phone easier: one that looks up terms in Wikipedia quickly, another which strips images from pages for faster loading, and one that bookmarks pages to read later on. (For more search bookmarklets, check out Springlets.) What are your must-have iPhone bookmarklets for surfing on the go? Let us know in the comments. Three Bookmarklets for Happier Mobile Browsing [Micro Persuasion]
These days, every gaming system in your living room better be able to do more than just play video games if it’s going to earn its place next to your TV. The Xbox 360 makes for an excellent Media Center extender, and the original Xbox is the king of homebrew video-game-cum-media-boxes, but when it comes to expanding your home theatre beyond gaming, the Wii has always been a bit light on functionality. The best thing it’s got going for it is the excellent Opera web browser, but web browsing with the Wii remote is still a bit clunky. Luckily, using that very same browser, you can turn your Wii into a full-fledged media centre with the freeware Windows application Orb. Here’s how.
Mozilla’s baptised its Thunderbird revitalisation effort “Mozilla Messaging” and announces the new features due out in T-bird 3.0 by the end of the year: official calendar integration (a la Lightning) and improved search. If we have our way, a better address book will be on the new features list, too. What do you think can be improved in Thunderbird? What features do you think would help the old bird make a comeback? Reveal your Thunderbird wishlist in the comments. Mozilla Thunderbird 3.0: New calendar, better search [Underexposed] Mozilla opens e-mail subsidiary [Infoworld]
As you might have seen in our comments, our readers love them some Pivot Tables, an aggregation tool that can show your spreadsheet data any way you tell it to. If you’ve felt left off of the data-wrangling bandwagon, the Productivity Portfolio blog has a guide walkthrough explaining the benefits and features of the tables and setting up a simple voting analysis table for an example. Better yet, the post includes a printable PDF for your do-this-when-I-get-home convenience. For more Excel 2007 knowledge, try out PP’s equally helpful guide to AutoFilter. Learn to use Pivot Tables in Excel 2007 to Organize Data [Productivity Portfolio]
Outlook user Adam Wright describes how he automatically filters incoming messages and uses flags to create a to-do list folder alongside his inbox. Outlook’s “Follow Up” folder (normally two folders below the “Inbox” folder) only shows emails with a follow-up flag assigned to it. By using follow-up flags, I can now use my “Follow Up” folder as my todo list (notice I changed the name of my “Follow Up” folder to “To Do”).
We like to separate our email from our to-do’s around here, but that’s not everyone’s cup of tea. Adam’s method could easily be used in any mail client that supports flags or tags (like Thunderbird), too. How Outlook keeps me organized [hi. this is the mediocre life of Adam Wright.]
