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) Webapp the Awesome Highlighter aims to give context to shared links by allowing users to highlight text in a webpage before they send it out. Very similar to previously mentioned web site Jump Knowledge, the Awesome Highlighter creates a special URL that saves your highlighting schemes and displays them when you click through to the link. It’s good to give quick context to a link, but if you want to heavier annotation, Jump Knowledge is a lot more feature-rich.
Tutorial site wikiHow runs down instructions for turning a pair of cords into a nifty shoulder bag. This project reminds me of a DIY jeans bag I saw live and in person at SXSW this weekend. The jeans bag—which involves no sewing at all—holds together with only duct tape and love. Neat! How to Make a Corduroy Pants Purse [wikiHow] Simple no-sew messenger bag from an old pair of jeans [DIY Life]
Windows only: Simple, freeware application Windows Hidie can hide any porn window on your desktop from view with a simple keystroke or through its slightly more advanced interface. When Windows Hidie hides a window, it disappears from your taskbar and from the Alt-Tab switcher, so essentially it’s completely gone from the casual onlooker’s view. You can hide the active window with a quick stroke of Win-Z, show all hidden windows with Win-S, or toggle the display of the graphical interface to the program with Win-A. It’s simple, does one thing, and does it well. Aside from what some might consider seedy uses, an app like this could also come in handy to keep apps running in the background that don’t minimise to the tray. Windows Hidie is freeware, Windows only, requires .NET 2.0. For a similar, more robust alternative, check out previously mentioned Magic Boss Key. Windows Hidie [via gHacks]
Yesterday the ABC announced a swag of new digital services including online TV channels and the addition of digital downloads to the ABC store – but unfortunately it has confirmed that ABC Shop video downloads will have DRM, and they’ll be confined to the Windows Media Format.While its downloadable audio books and music will be in Mp3 format, with no DRM attached, a PR person for the ABC has confirmed it’s a different story for the ABC Shop’s video downloads. Video will be in Windows Media format, playable either through the ABC’s Media Player or in normal versions of Windows Media Player.Video will also have DRM, she confirmed:
"The DRM license will vary according to what the customer purchases but for launch we are 'renting' download titles for a period of 7 days after which they will not be playable."<br /><br />This is disappointing news – surely our national broadcaster should be aiming for accessibility, so why lock their downloads to Windows users only? Sorry Mac and Linux users, no love for you! And as for DRM – it might be understandable if the ABC had to use DRM as part of licensing agreements with content producers, but if the it is using DRM on content it owns, that is a real shame.
<br />The second edition of the Lifehacker book, Upgrade Your Life, is a compilation of the best 116 hacks and downloads from Lifehacker’s archives. This dead tree version of the web site transforms dozens of blog posts into comprehensive, edited tutorials, which will be familiar to longtime readers. While an official electronic version of Upgrade Your Life isn’t available, today I’ve pulled together links to all the past posts that informed each book chapter to give you a one-stop preview of what’s inside that cover. Consider this post the unedited web version of the book. After the jump, get a ginormous roundup of all the posts that created Upgrade Your Life by chapter. And shhhh, don’t tell my book publisher I’m giving this all away.
Brilliant new file sharing web site EatLime expedites online file sharing by allowing your friends to begin downloading the file as soon as you start uploading it, meaning you don’t have to wait for the file to finish uploading before they begin downloading. You can share files up to 1GB with a free registration or up to 100MB with no registration. In testing EatLime, I found that eventually—once my download caught up with my upload—I was essentially downloading in real-time from the upload, which is fantastic. If you’ve ever shared large files online, you know what a pain it can be in terms of time. EatLime could cut a significant chunk out of the time it takes to share files online.
Reader Ryan writes to ask:
I loved your column about setting up Back to My Mac for free, but I’ve got a Mac at home and a Windows PC at work, so what I really want is to get Back to My Mac from a Windows PC. Is it possible to get Back to My Mac from Windows?
Since the tools we used in our setup are really just versions of VNC and FTP tools baked into Leopard, and VNC and FTP are about as old and widely supported as time itself, it most certainly is. Check out the details for getting back to your Mac from a Windows computer after the jump.
You don’t need a URL hack or Firefox extension to force YouTube to send you videos in the highest quality that’s available: in your Account settings, you can tell YouTube to default to the higher-res, better audio version of clips when they’re available. Apparently YouTube automatically detects your connection speed and chooses which video to feed you by default, but if you’re always on a fast connection, changing this setting will hook you up straight away.
Finance blogger Nickel tracks receipts and other scraps of tax-related paperwork throughout the year in two places: a basket at home, and an envelope in the car. Any time a business or medical expense comes up, in the basket or envelope the receipt goes. Same goes for charitable contributions. Every once in a while, Nickel transfers the contents of the envelope on-the-go to the basket. (Once that’s done, you can easily digitise that paperwork with the right scanner.) How do you capture receipts and other tax documents as you go? Let us know in the comments. Keeping Track of Your Tax Paperwork [I Will Teach You To Be Rich]
The Associated Press takes on a few ways to stop multitasking and start focusing, with quotes from Gina and Merlin Mann of 43 Folders.
