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 Reader’s Digest rounds up 24 tips for changing your habits to improve (or stop harming) your vision, like this gem for those of us who sit in front of a computer all day: Move your computer screen to just below eye level. Your eyes will close slightly when you’re staring at the computer, minimising fluid evaporation and the risk of dry eye syndrome, says John Sheppard, M.D., who directs the ophthalmology residency program at Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk, Virginia.
Beyond that, the article offers tons of other eye-enhancing tips, from the obvious to the obscure (roasted beets, anyone?). Easy Ways to Improve Your Vision [Reader's Digest]
Windows only: Freeware application Zorro aims to take distractions like flashy ads out of your online video watching experience. It does so by blacking out all content that isn’t your video, including your browser window, so it’s just you and your video. Zorro is brilliant in its simplicity: it’s basically a see-through application window, so you launch it, resize it so whatever you want to isolate is inside Zorro’s boundaries, and hit escape to black out everything outside the Zorro window. It could even work as a distraction-stopper for any application you want to bring focus to, like the many distraction-free word processors. Zorro is freeware, Windows only. Zorro [via Confessions of a freeware junkie]
You know you put that phone number in some file on Monday, but you’re drawing a blank as you gaze at your Vista desktop. The How-To Geek offers a solution for those who haven’t explored Windows Vista enough to learn the syntax of the Start menu’s search box. The syntax for finding an Excel spreadsheet, for example, within a range of dates is: name:xls modified:2/1/2008..2/20/2008
The Geek has, as always, way more information on this technique and a mouse-powered one as well, including the syntax for finding files based on date created or just “date.” Got any more Vista-specific search tips for your fellow Lifehacker readers? Feel free to drop them off in the comments. Find Files Within a Date Range with Windows Vista Search [The How-To Geek]
Zoho Writer, part of one of Lifehacker’s favorite (and underhyped) webapps, has added a bunch of new features, and many of them add to the online office app’s appeal to even grizzled Microsoft Office veterans. Most significantly, Zoho now exports to the Office 2007 .docx format, and its creators promise import is coming soon. Also, when exporting to Word formats, headnotes, footnotes, headers and footers will be retained with proper formatting. FInally, a 10-language thesaurus is available for right-click use, and users can create groups of users to share documents with, rather than entering individual email addresses each time. Pretty nifty stuff, and another good reason to check out Google Docs’ main competitor. Zoho Writer Update: DocX Support, Thesaurus, Group Sharing & More [Zoho Blogs via CyberNet]
Mac OS X only: Dashquit is an elegant response to an niggling issue many Mac users have known for years—that the Dashboard widget screen, while awfully convenient sometimes, can also be a memory-sucker. When activated, the Dashquit widget shows you how much memory the Dashboard feature is using at the moment, and offers a big, bold “Stop” button to shut it down (after confirmation). It’s basically a graphical way to perform the terminal commands that shut down Dashboard, which is going to be a lot more convenient for many folks with less memory. Dashquit 3.0 is a free Leopard-only download and uses 50% less memory than it predecessors, but a 10.4-friendly version can also be found at the link. Dashquit 3.0 [via Download Squad]
Want to read a printed copy of a PDF that’s portable and staple-free? BookletCreator is a free PDF conversion webapp that creates documents that can be printed and folded into an easy-to-read booklet. Assuming your PDF is oriented to “portrait” layout and is less than eight pages, you can get what appear to be pretty decent-looking booklets from your document. Got more than eight pages? Tell BookletCreator to split the file into so many pages per booklet, and spread your words and images across multiple copies. BookletCreator is free to use and doesn’t require a sign-up. BookletCreator [via MakeUseOf.com]
Need an on-the-go, no-time-to-iron solution for wrinkled clothes, but loathe paying a premium for spray bottles of liquid wrinkle releaser? The TipNut blog has a recipe for a homebrew version. Pour one teaspooon of liquid fabric softener and one cup of water (distilled, preferably) into a spray bottle with a nozzle that can produce a fine mist, shake it up, and, just as with the commercial stuff, apply it to a small patch first to make sure it won’t stain or discolour. The bonus is that you can halve the mixture if you want to save room while traveling, which is when this magic elixir really comes in handy. Hit the link below for more iron-less tips for smoothing out clothes. Photo by sometimesdee. DIY & Homemade Wrinkle Release Tips [TipNut.com]
Web-based image editor Picnik, recently integrated into Flickr, now offers its full range of editing tools for free, if you don’t mind a few ads. Going ad-free would cost $24.95/year. [via]
Google has unveiled the results of their purchase of JotSpot—the free collaboration tool you could once use to make wiki-like collaboration pages and organize your family—and while the offerings are somewhat slim at this point, it’s looking like a promising addition to the Google Apps suite (both free and premium). You can set up Sites to create pages that only users with email addresses on a certain domain can use, or have your page open to edits or viewing by anyone. Each Sites account gets 10 GB of storage, and importing data and tools from other Google services, like group calendars, spreadsheets, Picasa slideshows, and the like, is pretty streamlined. Google Sites is free to use, and requires a sign-up with a non-Gmail email address. Google Sites [via Google Operating System]
