How To Find And Get Involved With A Hackerspace 
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) The Sydney Morning Herald has written up “Australia’s geekiest geek” and it’s made the front page of their online edition. The geek in question is former Linux Australia president Jonathan Oxer – who’s done a homebrew home automation job complete with microchip in his arm which can open his front door. I think I need to interview him for Lifehacker, what do reckon?
By almost every account, Spotlight on the Mac has improved tremendously in Leopard, so in an effort to re-introduce the usefulness of OS X’s built-in desktop search application, the UsingMac weblog dives into the nitty gritty of building precise and powerful searches in Spotlight. Fantastic tricks abound, like searching files by filetype using the kind operator (e.g., kind:music). You’ll also find a handful of hugely useful keyboard shortcuts, like revealing the file in Finder by pressing Cmd-Return (rather than launching the file with Return). Whether you’re just returning to Spotlight in Leopard or you’ve always enjoyed the desktop search options of Spotlight, getting to know the keyboard shortcuts and search operators built into the app can do wonders for your file-searching productivity. Leopard – Optimizing Spotlight Search [UsingMac via Micro Persuasion]
PC Magazine picks 157 of their favorite free applications, from operating systems to security software to webapps. Pretty good list, if a bit long—here’s our top 10 free Windows downloads.
Managing music between your iPod and your iTunes library can be cumbersome at times, if only because you can’t actually do a lot of management on your actual iPod. To that end, a howto from DIY web site Instructables details how to automatically remove unwanted songs from your iPod using smart playlists and the star rating system built into your iPod and iTunes. The idea is simple enough, but if you find it difficult to remember songs you want to banish from your iPod once you’re actually plugged into your computer, this setup will take care of those songs automatically. Got similar methods of your own? Let’s hear about them in the comments. Automatically remove unwanted songs from your iPod [Instructables]
Mac OS X Leopard only: Dig into advanced user settings on your Mac by Ctrl+clicking on an account name in the System Preferences>Accounts area. There you can change Leopard’s default login shell, the account’s home directory or short name, and other important, scary, things that are just daring you to mess with them. (Actually, don’t, unless you really know what you’re doing.) As for shell options? Mac OS Hints explains: In the resulting Advanced Options screen, either type in the path to your preferred shell, or choose among the various shells already installed in /bin: bash, tcsh, sh, csh, zsh, or ksh.
Do you prefer an alternative shell on your Mac? Why? Tell us in the comments. Change your login shell in Leopard [macosxhints.com]
Windows only: Freeware application Nero DriveSpeed slows down the read speed of your CD or DVD drive so you don’t have to endure the loud jet-engine whirring of your drive every time you want to listen to a CD or watch a DVD on your computer. Obviously there are plenty of times when the 48x read speed of your drive comes in handy—particularly when you are transferring data from an optical disc—but if you’re just listening to a CD, for example, your drive really doesn’t need to spin up to top speed. After installation, DriveSpeed can prompt you whenever you insert a disk and you can choose whether to run in Fast or Silent mode. Nero DriveSpeed is freeware, Windows only. Nero DriveSpeed [via One Tip a Day]
Getting work done on the road when you visit another state for a few days is one thing, but flying halfway around the world with your laptop bag is a whole other ball of wax. The 13-hour flight, foreign power outlets, lack of or spotty Wi-Fi, and the pain that is hauling all your stuff onto ferries, tuk-tuks, and buses every few days can sure put a damper on mobile computing. I just spent the last nine days in beautiful Thailand with two friends who have been backpacking through Southeast Asia for several months. While it wasn’t an official working vacation (quite the opposite), I still learned a few back-breaking lessons about computing in that region firsthand and from my pals.
Desktop photo manager Picasa is a Google product, and photo-sharing web site Flickr‘s owned by Yahoo, and the two companies don’t make it obvious how to get the apps to talk to one another. When I returned home from a vacation on the beaches of Thailand, I had a hard drive loaded with photos and I wanted a way to organise, caption, and publish them all at once without duplicating work. Here’s how I did it with Picasa and Flickr.
My book publisher tells me that the second edition of the Lifehacker book, Upgrade Your Life, is hot off the press, and several copies are boxed and loaded onto trucks headed towards Amazon’s warehouses as I type. If you’re planning on buying the book, pre-order from Amazon now before it starts shipping to take advantage of Amazon’s 5% discount on all book pre-orders (which puts the price well below 20 bucks.) Upgrade Your Life is meatier, better-looking, and more up-to-date than the first edition, and good karma will come to anyone who gives it a read. I promise. Upgrade Your Life: The Lifehacker Guide to Working Smarter, Faster, Better [Amazon]
Windows only: EndItAll is a free utility that lets you choose a handful of system and critical processes and applications that you don’t want to shut down—and then kill all the others. Launching EndItAll gives you a prompt similar to Windows’ Task Manager, where you choose the programs that should be protected, restarted, or closed. While the app seems to catch most system processes and auto-protect them, it still requires a bit of knowledge about your system and what killing will do to a process before using. Once you’ve got your footing, however, EndItAll can create a batch file that performs its own function for your multi-kill convenience. EndItAll is a free download for Windows systems only. For other, generally more safe tips on pruning your processes for more memory, check out our guide to mastering Windows’ task manager. EndItAll 2 [via gHacks]
