Thursday, March 20, 2008
Belvedere Automated File Manager Updates to 0.3 with New Features, Bug Fixes
2:00PM Adam Pash | Windows only: Lifehacker’s in-house Automated Windows File Manager and all-around snooty British housekeeper for your hard drive, Belvedere, is seeing it’s third release. If you’re unfamiliar with Belvedere, it’s designed to help you keep your desktop or any other folder on your hard drive clean and organised by allowing you to create advanced rules for moving, copying, recycling, or renaming files based on a handful of conditions. Among several bug fixes, the latest Belvedere features more security measures intended to prevent unintended data loss, the ability to create more complex conditions, and a new feature that allows you to test your rules so you can see what files your rules will match before you save and start using the rule. Hit the jump for a closer look at the new features and to download the latest Belvedere. More »
Avoid These 8 Worst Foods in America
1:00PM Adam Pash | The New York Times reviews a book called Eat This, Not That!, a nutrition guide full of images of foods you shouldn’t eat and their healthier substitutes. The book also has a section highlighting 20 of the country’s worst foods, and the article republishes eight of them, categorised with names like “worst fast food meal” and “worst drink”. The “winners”? Worst Fast Food Meal: McDonald’s Chicken Selects Premium Breast Strips with creamy ranch sauce. Chicken sounds healthy, but not at 870 calories. More »The Quick DIY Stud Finder
11:00AM Adam Pash | The video above details how to quickly throw together your own DIY stud finder on the cheap with nothing but a magnet and string. In essence, you’re just using the magnet to find nails in the wall, which would indicate there’s a stud there. The narrator seems a little confused about the purpose of the stud finder (he appears to suggest you don’t want to drive nails into the stud), but the method would still work, and you can even go simpler if you don’t feel like using string. Granted, stud finders themselves aren’t that expensive, so this is more of a quick solution if you don’t feel like heading to the store, but it’s perhaps a bit more exacting than knocking on the wall. Cheapest Stud Finder [Metacafe via DIY Life] More »
Quickly Run a Few Numbers with Calq
9:00AM Adam Pash | Windows/Mac only: Freeware system tray application Calq adds an on-demand calculator to your computer. Once installed, you can pull up Calq at any time through a quick keyboard shortcut, run your calculation, then hide it just as easily. The simple, one-dimensional Calq is freeware, Windows and Mac OS X only. Since this little app obviously retreads territory that’s already available in many other incarnations, hit the jump for a rundown of other quick methods of calculations you might want to add to your repertoire instead of installing Calq. More »
Track Travel and Workouts with a PocketMod
8:00AM Gina Trapani | For the next week and a half, readers are submitting their best life hack for a chance to win an autographed copy of our new book, Upgrade Your Life. Reader Beth writes in with her favourite trick for keeping track of info on the road and at the gym—using the previously mentioned PocketMod print-yourself notebook. Beth says: More »
Must-Have Keyboard Shortcuts and Tweaks for the Windows Command Line
7:00AM Adam Pash | Weblog Digital Inspiration dives into the Windows command line prompt, serving up several useful command line shortcuts and a few worthwhile tweaks for customising the command line to your liking. Apart from an overview of some of the more useful function keys and their effects (which we’ve covered before, and of which F7 is the king), the post also covers simple-but-useful tweaks, like how to change the colour scheme of the window. For instance, if you want to have a white background with black text, type colour F0 and press enter. To revert to the original colour scheme, type colour without any arguments. For a list of all available colours, type colour /? on the command line. AU – Hmm, are command lines US-centric? I’m thinking you may need to type “color”. More »
Facebook Adds Privacy Controls
6:00AM Gina Trapani | Just because your Uncle Joe joined Facebook and you added him as a friend doesn’t mean you can’t upload photos from the keg party. Facebook just added finer privacy controls to the network which let you expand access to your info to friends of your friends, and exclude friends on a name by name basis from particular bits of information. To see the new privacy controls, log in to Facebook and on the privacy page, go to Profile, and click the “Edit Custom Settings…” link. More »
Download Music from Your Friends’ iTunes Libraries Over the Internet with Mojo
5:00AM Adam Pash | Windows/Mac only: Share any song in your iTunes library and download any song from your friends’ iTunes libraries over the internet with freeware application Mojo. Essentially, Mojo makes sharing music with your friends through iTunes wildly simple, from its simple interface to its brilliant implementation. If you’ve ever used apps like previously mentioned ourTunes to download music from shared libraries, you have an idea of what Mojo does, bu you should still prepare to be amazed. I’m head over heels for Mojo, so hit the jump for a full-on screenshot tour and detailed walk-through and overview of everything Mojo has to offer. More »
Top 10 DIY Laptop Stands
3:00AM Gina Trapani | When your hot laptop needs ventilation and your wrists need a break from a flat keyboard, you can drop 50 bucks on a fancy commercial laptop stand—or you can build one of your own. Do-it-yourself laptop users have built several creations from common household materials to keep their notebooks elevated while they work . Made of everything from wine corks to door stops to paper (and paper towel) holders, check out our favourite top 10 do-it-yourself laptop stands for your lap and workspace pleasure. Photo by hunter1_86. More »
