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) Still have the remnants of your pre-digital photo-taking taking up space in closets (or perhaps put to other uses)? Photo blog Photojojo details the steps one Flickr user took to turn an old white plastic film container into a snug-fitting diffuser for a pop-up flash, using only a ruler and a utility knife. It’s a bit more rugged and adaptable than that other DIY diffuser, a coffee filter, and gets you the same reduction in pasty-looking portraits and over-exposure. Hit the link for step-by-step instructions and photos. Reduce, Reuse, Diffuse: Make Your Own Flash Diffuser from an Old Film Container [Photojojo]
Web Worker Daily lets a chief web builder at HP.com tell a rare story—one of senior management leaving a meeting with his workers still respecting his answers and the consideration he gave them. His secret, strange as it might seem, was to keep his lunch sandwich nearby to immediately bite into upon being asked a question, along with a soda for quicker but still-important questions. This wouldn’t work if you’re the type to talk with your mouth full, of course, but substitute an acceptable-most-anywhere coffee or water and you’ve got a way to create needed pauses in conversation without, as the post puts it, “remaining silent for 15 seconds while staring at the ceiling.” Might be worth trying at your next performance review or uber-frustrating meeting, rather than spilling forth with under-cooked ideas. Sandwich Pause Trick When Talking to Real People [Web Worker Daily]
The Digital Streets blog posts a tip on how to send Twitters from a command line using a little utility named cURL. The blog shows the command to install cURL in Ubuntu, but the app is available for Linux, Unix and OS X, and Windows as well. Once you’re set up, the terminal terminology is: curl -u yourusername:yourpassword -d status="Your Message Here" http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml
You could save yourself a bit of time by putting most of that text into your preferred text replacement app, or setting up a terminal shortcut. Either way, it could be a convenient way to get at some of Twitter’s more useful features, like setting GCal events, Remember the Milk, or just setting plain ol’ SMS reminders. Got an easy way to set this up in your own OS? Share your experience in the comments. Posting to Twitter from the Terminal Window [Digital Streets / Tech-Recipes.com]
Productivity guru Merlin Mann grabs a keen idea from an NPR story about weight loss techniques and applies it to the other things he (and most of us) need to mentally push ourselves into doing. The basic concept: Take something you’d normally consider a positive “earning” or “savings,” and flip it into a loss you want to avoid. His example: I wonder if a gym membership might be even more motivating if you received a daily email updating you on the wasted dollars you’d spent by not working out in the last n days.
Which is completely possible with future-mailing services or organisational tools like Sandy . How would you (or have you already) motivate yourself using loss avoidance instead of non-threatening positives? Share your theories and techniques in the comments. Motivate yourself with “loss aversion” [43 Folders]
Erin Doland, editor of the seriously-organised blog Unclutterer, guest-blogs at the Zen Habits site with a kind of beginner’s guide to making the first steps toward becoming an “unclutterer” versus just “clean.” The difference? An unclutterer “has systems in place to handle the things he or she owns,” meaning everything that comes into your abode. As one example, Doland recommends having all your paper-placing items at arm’s length:
Blackberry users ony: Mobile speech-to-text service Jott has released a beta plug-in for Blackberry phones (series 8800, 8300 Curve, and 8100 Pearl only) that lets you respond to those ever-present emails with a “Reply with Jott” feature. The main advantage is that if you notice a message while driving, you can speak your reply and have it sent as an email, rather than drastically increased your chance at an accident. The program should work with most Bluetooth headsets as well, but users have noted that the program defaults to speakerphone mode upon hitting reply, although I don’t have a model myself to see if that’s configurable. Jott for Beta is a free download (while it’s in beta, at least), and be downloaded by pointing your Blackberry to jott.com/bb. For ideas on getting more out of Jott, see how to get things done over the phone with Jott. Thanks Joshua! Jott for Blackberry
Need to send a line of text too long for an instant message, but don’t feel like dashing off an email? Find some text you want access to later while using someone else’s computer or a remote connection? Textsnip, a free text-capture site that provides TinyURL-like links, has you covered. Throw in the text (or HTML, CSS, PHP or most any kind of formatted code), and TextSnip will put it into a URL, tabbed spacing preserved. Depending on how quickly you email and whether you mind sending to yourself, TextSnip is either redundant or an inbox-saving memory enhancer. TextSnip is free to use, no sign-up required. Thanks Julie! Textsnip
