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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 Google Talk has released a new chatback feature allowing people visiting your blog, online profile, or personal web page to chat directly with you via Google Talk. To use chatback on your web site or supported personal profile page, all you need is a Google Talk account and some web space where you can embed the chatback badge code. Any user who wants to chat with you through the chatback badge doesn’t need a Google Talk account at all, so it’s a great way to let friends, family, or readers of your blog, for example, contact you quickly and easily without needing to register for anything. Google Talk chatback [via Official Google Talk Blog]
Windows only: Browse and play the DVDs you’ve ripped to your hard drive using DVD Rip with freeware application DVD Play. Just point DVD Play to the folder DVD Rip is saving your backed up DVDs to, and DVD Play displays them with thumbnails you can browse. Similar to how DVD Rip is a companion application to DVD Shrink, DVD Play works with the free video player VLC to easily play any of your ripped DVDs. Hit the jump for more details, the demo video, and to download DVD Play.
One of the best features of keeping a TiddlyWiki with you on any system—such as a GTD TiddlyWiki—is the ability to throw into it anything you come across, whether it’s a task to do or a note about dinner. Now you can add organised, easily-imported contacts to that list through twab, a macro that plugs into any Tiddly-type page and can take in contacts from Google, Yahoo, Outlook, and MSN, as well as any others that export into Comma-Separated Value (CSV) format. The tabbed address book comes in a plain gray/dark-gray scheme, but changing those colours—and many more things about twab—is explained at the link below. twab – the tiddly wiki address book
Free Windows utility PDFCreator is a great all-in-one PDF wrangler and paper-saving print option. If you’ve got more than one computer at home doing some regular printing, PDFCreator can also be deployed on a simple Windows home server box (like the kind you might built a home FTP server on) to help everyone in your household save paper. The Confessions of a Freeware Junkie blog has the lowdown on getting PDFCreator set up for creating and sharing PDFs, or securely locking away each users’ printouts, if that’s more your speed. Whether single-user or network-installed, PDFCreator is a free download for Windows systems only. Create a shared PDF Printer using PDFCreator [Confessions of a Freeware Junkie]
Modern Linux systems have advanced to the point of supporting (in one way or another) most kinds of essential computer hardware—it’s the peripherals that cause the vast majority of headaches. But thanks to some helpful community hackers, a wide array of webcams, from cheap to professional, can be implemented in the open-source operating system. Carla Schroder, author of The Linux Cookbook, offers a great guide for anyone trying to get their webcam set up and usable in Linux, including suggestions for software and how to find out what your distro has named your webcam. There’s a part two around the corner, according to the guide, with likely more advanced tips and tricks. Photo by ThenAndAgain. Webcams in Linux, Part 1 [LinuxPlanet via The Linux Tutorial]
Windows Vista only: Shadow Copies, an automated file version saver built into all copies of Windows Vista (and enabled by default), isn’t a complete backup solution, but it could be a life-saver in certain situations. As The How-To Geek blog points out, however, it’s pretty hard to find, let alone extract files from. Luckily, a forum member at the Geek’s site has posted a complete tutorial on accessing and recovering previous file versions using the free utility ShadowExplorer. Using ShadowExplorer requires a good deal more clicking and searching than Apple’s Time Machine, but it’s a good solution for those “Oops, I forgot to back up …” moments. Hit the link below for instructions and screenshots. Recover Files with Shadow Copies on Any Version of Windows Vista [The How-To Geek]
Lifehacker reader and mental state blogger Luciano writes about his main problem with creating a master task list, in the style of Getting Things Done: The “giant blob of threatening commitments” they can become after awhile. To keep a level head and get a daily feeling of accomplishment, he recommends the following: Take your to-do list and pick a few tasks that you will do the next day: not tasks that you want to do, or tasks that you think you might do — but tasks that you wholeheartedly commit to do. Replace your long list of intentions with a short list of commitments.
Windows only: Like the Mac shareware tool Sticky Windows, free Windows utility Nubs allows you to hide your inactive windows to the sides of your desktop using stylish, theme-able tabs. We’ve shown you pseudo-Sticky Windows apps before, but Nubs lets you choose which windows to tab on the fly, and customise how your tabs look. I should note that I had a few .NET bugs upon first running Nubs, and that tab titles have somehow disappeared on me, but that (hopefully) shouldn’t be the norm. Nubs is a free download for Windows systems with .NET 2.0 and above only. Thanks, Yogeshwar! Nubs [Shellscape Software]
