Wednesday, April 2, 2008
Grab a Free Copy of “How to Find Lost Objects”
11:10PM Kevin Purdy | We’ve previously featured “Professor” Solomon’s free pages featuring his 12 Principles for finding what you’ve lost, but now the good man is offering up his entire 67-page book, “How to Find Lost Objects,” as a free PDF download. If you not only want to find a particular lost object—like, say, the iPod Touch I managed to misplace for two months—but want to learn the habits and thinking that help you find things on a regular basis, hit the link for your guide to “The Eureka Zone,” “Domestic Drift,” “Pocket Gobble,” and more. How to Find Lost Objects [Professor Solomon] More »
Best Instant Messenger?
1:00PM Adam Pash | Once upon a time you needed a chat client running on your computer for each and every instant messaging service you used, and since different buddies used different IM protocols, you had run different programs at once to chat with all your peeps. But that’s no longer the case. Nowadays advanced chat applications work across networks, and boast plug-ins and features that put IM apps of yesteryear to shame. For this week’s Hive Five, we want to know: What’s your favourite instant messenger client? Your choice can be desktop- or web-based—or anything, really—as long as it does chat. Hit the jump for details on how to cast your ballot. More »
Darken Gmail with Gmail Redesigned
12:00PM Adam Pash | Firefox with Stylish: The Gmail Redesigned user style—which requires the Stylish extension to use—skins Gmail with an attractive, well laid-out, and completely overhauled look. Everything in the Gmail Redesigned interface is darker and a touch sleeker than the default Gmail interface, which hasn’t changed all that much since Gmail launched four years ago today. Right now the developer is issuing updates to this style almost every day. Once Gmail Redesigned is complete, we hope to add it to the rest of the Gmail skins in an upcoming release of Better Gmail. Gmail Redesigned [Userstyles.org via UneasySilence] More »
Songbird music player brings you music from the web
11:16AM Sarah Stokely | It seems like a lot of people might grumble about iTunes but they keep using it. But a Wired piece on open source music player Songbird caught my eye yesterday. Built on the Mozilla platform, it’s aiming to be as customisable as Firefox, and describes itself as a “desktop media player mashed up with the web”.
What does this mean? Songbird was designed for people to be able to access music from the web as well as from their own computer’s music collection. So it includes a web browser for streaming and downloading music. When you navigate to a page which has embedded music on it, Songbird will display a simple playlist window of all the available music on that page so you don’t need to hunt for the links. Nice.
I’m curious, and I’m downloading it right now as I type. If you’ve tried Songbird, I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on it.
Songbird Music Player Challenges iTunes with Major Update [Wired]
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Movideo offers high quality music videos
11:02AM Sarah Stokely | If you like watching music videos online, but the poor quality of YouTube makes you sad, you may want to check out newly launched site Movideo. They’re advertising “near DVD” quality (PC Authority’s writeup said you can get full-screen full-screen 16:9 playback up to 720×405 and audio bitrates up to 192K) putting it below HD quality but a fair whack better than YouTube.
You’ll see from the screenshot under the cut that they’ve got links at the bottom of the screen if you want to buy a download of the song from Telstra, or a hard copy version through J B Hi-Fi (or ringtones, although we don’t encourage that). They do show ads in a separate screen, but not before each song – looks like you’ll get an ad for every three songs or so.
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Instantly Set a Screensaver Away Message
10:55AM Gina Trapani | Readers are submitting their best life hack for a chance to win an autographed copy of our new book, Upgrade Your Life. Here’s our latest winner. When reader Jim steps away from his PC at the office, he likes to let everyone know where he is—and he uses his screensaver to do just that. But digging through the settings every time he has to change the status message is tedious, so Jim streamlines the process with a handy script that he invokes with a simple key combination. After the jump, download Jim’s fabulous script and learn how to set it up for yourself. More »
Speed Up Google Reader Load Times
10:52AM Adam Pash | Blogger Samar Kamat loves keeping up with his favourite web sites with Google Reader, but noticed Reader can take forever to load feeds with longer items. His solution? Switch to List View. The default view in Reader is the Expanded View, which is great for 80% of feeds, like Slashdot, where posts are short and concise. However, for very verbose and object-heavy posts, it takes a load off of your bandwidth to load only one page at a time. So next time you’re waiting for the images on your tutorial to load, just switch to List View and enjoy the speed. More »Bad gadget
10:40AM Sarah Stokely | I’m getting Office Space flashbacks… Wired is running a competition for readers to submit their best and most shocking photos of how they destroyed their most hated gadgets. There are already a few pictures up there, including a Treo with a massive bullet hole through it. Meep. More » Stranger Danger
10:30AM Sarah Stokely | Nice to see Google Maps being used to scare people away from using public transport. The SMH has published a story today about the rise in assaults occurring on trains, accompanied by a happy interactive map detailing just how dangerous YOUR station is. Does this mean we should all start walking to work? More » Reclaim time by fighting ‘feature creep’ in your life
10:16AM Sarah Stokely | Web developer and Zen Habits guest poster Glen Stanberry has an interesting perspective on how to keep control of your productive time – by treating the increasing demands on your time as ‘feature creep’ into the software of your life. These kind of time stealing features can be mobile phones, IM, social networking sites, etc.
He suggests a few tactics for cutting out or reining in some of these ‘features’ in our lives, including setting hard deadlines on internet usage, and importantly, weighing up the pros and cons before signing up to any new online accounts:
“Every social media account that you sign up for will require at least some attention. They send frequent emails, and ultimately try to get you on their site.If you need to set up a ton of accounts, be sure that the email settings are turned waaaay down so that the amount of email you receive is minimal.”
The amount of spam that most social networking sites generate can be huge. I’ve reined it in by turning off email notifications wherever possible. A social networking aggregator like FriendFeed can help reduce time wasting because it centralises your notifications and friend updates – so you only see them when you choose to visit the site.
So how do you reduce ‘feature creep’ in your life?
Life Coding: 9 Ways to Fight Feature Creep in our Lives [Zen Habits]
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