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) Two years ago on Lifehacker, you learned how to install a motherboard and CPU, wipe your hard drive and install Windows from scratch, and then applied nifty Windows tweaks to your newly-built PC.
Mac OS X only: Freeware application FinderPop adds tonnes of new and useful functionality to your Mac’s context menus through a highly configurable preference pane. FinderPop’s main goal is to make it quick and painless to navigate, copy, move, and alias files across your filesystem through the context menu, but it does much more than that . Unfortunately FinderPop is an app that takes a little time to get your head around, but it’s also an app that you could imagine being blown away by if you were watching someone who was really good with it. FinderPop is freeware, Mac OS X only. FinderPop [via Cool OSX Apps]
If you’re in sunny San Diego today, I’m at O’Reilly’s ETech conference talking about personal productivity at 5PM today. Hope to see you there!
Lifehacker Reader Jared Valentine tried ensuring a fast internet connection by setting Quality of Service rules on his router but found that QoS just wasn’t working well for his needs. To solve his problem, Jared wrote an extensive howto detailing how to set up his computer to automatically detect when he’s on a VoIP call, then aggressively limit his other traffic to make sure he’s got plenty of bandwidth for his voice calls. The tutorial is not for the faint of heart, but if you can pull it off, Jared calls it his holy grail of traffic prioritisation. If you’re looking for a simpler way, you may want to give router QoS rules a try to see if they’ll work for you first. Application Aware Triggered Quality of Service (AATQoS)
iPhone/iPod touch only: Freeware application Touchpad Pro turns your iPhone or iPod touch into a multi-touch mouse for any operating system. You’ll need a jailbroken iPhone or iPod touch, then just install Touchpad Pro from Installer.app. To get it working with your computer, you’ll need to install VNC (it’s already running on your Mac) and follow the instructions on the site. Once it’s running, you can use your iPhone’s screen like a MacBook Air trackpad, which means you get the regular mouse actions in addition to two-finger scroll, double-finger-tap right-click, and a ton more (check out the video for the full demonstration). Touchpad Pro is freeware, iPhone/iPod touch only. Introducing Touchpad Pro
Everybody loves looking back at pictures from a party, but unless you’re lucky enough to have one of those friends who brings a camera to every party and does the work for you, documenting the event can be a pain in the ass. Most of us would rather be, you know, partying. Today I’ll show you a few ways you can effortlessly—but extensively—document your next party, using everything from freeware software to some cheap hardware for your camera. When you’re done, you’ll be able to automate your party photos or make taking pictures fun, giving everyone incentive to contribute to the documentation process.
Geeks joke about having Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) all the time, and ADD expert Dr. Edward Hallowell says that’s not too far off. In his book, CrazyBusy, Hallowell argues that Crackberry culture leads to ADD-like symptoms in people that don’t officially have the disorder—a problem he calls Attention Deficit Trait (ADT). While Hallowell’s fondness for making up words like “gigaguilt” and “screensucking” can be annoying, the overall message of CrazyBusy is that we all need to slow down and think in order to innovate instead of being constantly on the go in a frenzied (dumb) state of mind.
Microsoft Outlook user and GTDer Scott Hanselman uses flags and search folders to clear his inbox. Scott writes: I also try to get to ZEB (Zero Email Bounce) every day or so. This is when you “bounce” up against zero emails in your inbox… This doesn’t mean that you’ve done all your tasks, instead it means you know what your tasks are. [...]Remember that your inbox is not storage, it’s a list of what hasn’t been categorized yet.
Hit the link to see the folders Scott uses to categorize his messages—in fact, his system isn’t far off from my Trusted Trio. ZEB (Zero Email Bounce) and a new Outlook Rule [Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen]
Internet Explorer 7 might have some chops when it comes to handling and organizing RSS feeds, but dedicated Google Reader fans don’t get much love from the browser—there’s no option in the interface for adding a feed anywhere but inside IE7′s “Live Bookmarks,” leaving the copy-and-paste job to the user. Alex at the Google Operating System blog points out two makeshift solutions: Install Google Toolbar 5, or add a nifty “Subscribe” bookmarklet to your Links toolbar, provided on Google Reader’s Settings->Goodies page. Both seem far more convenient than digging to find the address of a site’s feed and pasting it into Google Reader’s “Add Subscription” dialog. Add Feeds to Google Reader in Internet Explorer 7 [Google Operating System]
