Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Fix and Tweak Text Online with TextOpus
11:34PM Kevin Purdy | Need to make all-caps text a little less shout-y? Don’t feel like going through a ream of lines and fixing all the capitalisation? TextOpus, a free text-filtering web app, is a great place to start. Paste in problematic text and choose from a wealth of options, from line adders to a decent, simple “Clean Text” option to a very handy “Strip tags” that takes the HTML and forum code out of a blurb. For those who know what to do with them, there’s also options to hash, hexadecimal, and encrypt text. Next time you’re staring at a wealth of un-printable babble, try TextOpus before diving in with your mouse and backspace key. More »
QuietURL Makes Mistyped URLs Clickable
10:34PM Kevin Purdy | Windows/Mac/Linux (Firefox): Save yourself the time of copying, pasting, and fixing mistyped links with QuietURL, a free Firefox extension that converts URLs with typos or bad formatting. QuietURL comes with a standard set of common fixes, but users of regular expressions can get ultra-specific on what gets fixed. If you’re a regular browser of a forum or site that willfully obscures URLs by messing with the link code (as in “hxxp:// …”), QuietURL can automatically fix those as well, or pull the reverse. For those looking to fix their own fat-fingered URLs, try URL Fixer or switching your router to OpenDNS. QuietURL is a free download, works wherever Firefox does. QuietURL [Firefox Add-ons via gHacks] More »
Geek Girl Dinners – Sydney
8:50PM Sarah Stokely | A new group has started in Sydney called Geek Girl Dinners. An offshoot of a group which started in London, the Sydney group organises through a Facebook group and has already held several events. The group exists to get girl geeks together for technical discussion, a meal and some laughs.If you are a woman geek you are welcome and encouraged to come along – it makes no difference what kind of a geek you are or how small or large your level of technical knowledge. The intention is to learn & share some technical fu, have fun and connect with other women in IT. If you’re a guy geeks who has a female geek friend willing to escort you are also welcome to attend.I noticed that this month’s Sydney dinner is already booked out but if you watch the blog or join the Facebook group you can go to the next one.
And for Melbourne girl geeks – well, watch this space. :) More » Better XP on Eee PC
5:35PM Sarah Stokely | We haven’t yet gotten our hands on the new ASUS Eee PC running Windows XP, but David Flynn over at APC has put together a handy guide for how to tweak the XP Eee for better performance – he shaved a mere one second off the boot time, but managed to reduce the memory footprint by nearly 20% – nice! More » 
Improve your pronunciation with online guide Howjsay.com
4:42PM Sarah Stokely | I’ve just been playing with the pronunciation guide website Howjsay and really enjoying it. It has a slightly tinny English accented ‘voice’ which pronounces words for you from its dictionary.
It boasts over 97,000 words and it found several Spanish words for me (churros, burrito – yes I like Mexican food), as well as a couple of philosophers – the French Foucault and that German ‘difficult to spell or pronounce’ scallywag Nietzsche. When it looked up churros for me it gave both the English pronunciation and the Spanish pronunciation as well.
And it even had Lifehacker in its dictionary – aww! More » Overclocking for newbs
1:49PM Sarah Stokely | The hardcore PC enthusiasts over at Atomic have published a beginners guide to memory overclocking. <3 Atomic. More » 50 quick ideas to make your day more healthy
1:35PM Sarah Stokely | All too often, the drive to get fit leads people to do some extreme form of torture exercise for 2 hours a day for a week, after which time they collapse and give up forever. Working up to it gradually by doing a little bit every day makes so much more sense, and helps you defeat that eternal excuse of “I have no time”.That’s why I loved Dumb Little Man’s list of 50 different things you can do that improve your health in 10 minutes or less. And it’s not just fitness things like “do 15 situps” either. The list includes things that decrease stress (take a 10 minute break, do some deep breathing) or that improve your relationships (call your mother, invite a friend over for a healthy meal).Of course the odd 10 minutes of something healthy isn’t going to build you up to the level of health and fitness you might aspire to – so I’d take it a step further and say – do 10 minutes a day for a week, then aim to do 20 minutes the next week, and so on.Got any ideas for a quick and healthy activity you can add to your day? Share in comments please.
50 Ideas for a Healthy Lifestyle that take 10 Minutes or Less [Dumb Little Man]
More » Change your driving habits to save on petrol
1:25PM Sarah Stokely | Wise Bread offers up a couple of ways to save money on petrol – and the big one is just slow down your driving speed.
On highways, the “sweet spot” for fuel efficiency is 55 miles per hour, or 90 km/hour. In fact, due to wind resistance at speed, you may use up to 20% more fuel if you speed up from 90km/hour to 120 km/h, according to figures the article quotes from Eartheasy.com.
Even on city streets, there are some ways to increase fuel efficiency – learn to take your foot off the accelerator when you can see you’ll need to slow down or stop. Accelerating burns fuel – so it’s wasteful to accelerate up to a red light, then hit the brakes.
Looking for other ways to save on petrol? We previously told you how to shop around online to find the cheapest petrol. Got any other tips for saving on petrol? Share in comments please.
How to save $0.54 per gallon on gas [Wise Bread]
More » 
