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) If you weren’t able to make it to South by Southwest here in Austin (or even if you were), you can still fire up that BitTorrent client and download 3.5 gigabytes of free, legit tunes from the music festival. Sweet. [via]
The second edition of the Lifehacker book, Upgrade Your Life, is finally available for purchase, but if you want a free taste before you hand over your hard-earned cash, my book publisher is offering three excerpts for download as PDFs. Check out a sample chapter, the table of contents, and the book index to see what you’re getting yourself into at my publisher’s web site, or pick from the list below.Read Excerpt: Chapter 1, Control Your Email (PDF) Read Excerpt: Table of Contents (PDF) Read Excerpt: Index (PDF)
Enjoy! Upgrade Your Life: The Lifehacker Guide to Working Smarter, Faster, Better, 2nd Edition [Wiley]
All platforms: Mozilla’s pushed out the latest release of the Firefox 3 beta for testers and impatient upgraders. Firefox 3 Beta 4 improvements include a better download manager, smarter location bar auto-complete, speedier performance (twice as fast using Google Apps, says Moz), better memory handling, and even more native look and feel for Mac, Windows, and Linux users with new icons and toolbars. After the jump, check out the Beta 4 highlights from the release notes.
When Leopard was released, one of the most enticing new features was Back to My Mac, a tool that made it possible to access your home computer remotely—including remote control of your desktop and access to your files—no matter where you are. The catch: It requires a $100 yearly subscription to the lackluster .Mac service. Right now I’m working from my laptop in Austin, and I’ve got the same full access to my home PC in Los Angeles as Back to My Mac offers, but I didn’t spend a dime on .Mac to get it. That’s because all of the tools you need to roll your own Back to My Mac are already built into Leopard for free out of the box—you just need to know how to access them.
Wired’s How To Wiki takes on one of the ultimate stress-creators and time-wasters—airport security, naturally—and offers up a few reasonable suggestions to save time and avoid hassle that you probably haven’t thought of. One of the best involves using the best kind of carry-on luggage: 2. Carry a messenger bag. The topside flap gives easy access to your laptop and Ziploc of liquids and gels while the pockets provide plenty of storage for alarm-trippers. As soon as you get in line, tuck your belt, wallet, keys, watch, and phone into the sack.
Microsoft offers a helpful little box to type your security phrases into that instantly grades them as “Weak,” “Medium,” and “Strong.” Before the inevitable eye rolls and comments on the concepts of “Microsoft” and “security,” see the Windows-maker’s helpful suggestion on building a tough password: A strong password should appear to be a random string of characters to an attacker. It should be 14 characters or longer, (eight characters or longer at a minimum). It should include a combination of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols.
I was kind of surprised to see that one of my standard passwords was rated “Weak,” while my previously-thought super-strong password was just “Medium.” Worth checking out, and maybe taking to heart if you’ve got more than a few weaklings in your web login list. Password checker [Microsoft via Web Worker Daily]
The Simple Dollar finance blog tackles a reader’s call for help on how to chip away at her household’s paycheque-to-paycheque habit and start really saving away money. In six pretty easy steps, Trent explains how you can carve out money, put it somewhere you can’t get to it, and do that every month. The first important step: Set up a savings account in a separate place that isn’t easy to access. I find that online banks like ING Direct are a great place to do this, as the money in this account can be accessed if you take the time to log on and execute the transfer, but you can’t easily just write a check or use a card to drain it of money, plus you can set up sub accounts for each of your savings goals.
As anyone who’s reinstalled Windows XP knows, there have been a lot, and I mean a lot, of updates issued for the operating system, and waiting for them to install (/restart/install/restart) can be laborious, to say the least. Luckily, one helpful soul has done the good work of compiling all the patches made to Windows XP since Service Pack 2 was released and creating a tool to make an XP install CD that contains all those changes. You download the roughly 50 MB file, point a utility at your install CD’s i386 directory, then wait for it to make you a new folder you can burn to disc. We’ve pointed out other offline updaters in the wake of the dearly departed AutoPatcher, but this one seems to grab more than just security updates and could save some serious time. RyanVM’s Windows XP Post-SP2 Update Pack [via Digital Inspiration]
Windows only: Sudo for Windows is an alternative for those with programs they often have to “Run as Administrator” in Windows XP or Vista, but offers a more convenient and accessible way of getting there. Rather than having to know an administrative password, “SudoWin” lets you use your own Windows password to elevate your privileges, and doesn’t tie your account to the administrator’s data folders when you log in. A handy tool to have around when you need it, and it runs from a right-click context item. Sudo for Windows is a free download for Windows systems only. Thanks, Joe! Sudo for Windows
