Monday, April 21, 2008
Tips for Haggling Your Next Purchase
11:15PM Kevin Purdy | Over at the Get Rich Slowly personal finance blog, one buy-savvy reader shares the techniques and thinking she’s used to improve her haggling, a skill many of us have neglected or ignored entirely. Whether at a yard sale or big-box electronics store, changing your angle of approach can often yield solid savings. A few of her suggestions: If I’m at a yard sale or buying a bunch of things, I pile them up and ask for a better price because I’m buying a lot. I always ask if there’s a discount for good customers, and that’s often all it takes to get a discount. I ask, “Can you take $XXX if I promise to give it a good home?” I say, “It’s so cute, I don’t need it, but it’s really attractive, can you take $XXX for it?” It’s amazing how minor a nudge it takes to get something off the price. More »
PreviewConfig Adds File Types to Vista’s Preview Pane
10:00PM Kevin Purdy | Windows Vista only: Vista’s Preview Pane can be helpful in determining exactly which file you’re looking to open, and PreviewConfig lets you extend its usefulness beyond the handful of files Vista automatically provides text or image previews for. The no-install utility provides a list of file types registered on your system, and you simply select the file and choose to add a text or multimedia preview. Multimedia previews generally work with any video or audio file that plays in Windows Media Player, or pictures that can load with a double-click. PreviewConfig is a free download for Windows Vista systems only. For a registry hack that accomplishes the same thing (with more effort), see the How-To Geek at the via link below. PreviewConfig [via The How-To Geek] More »Upgrade your Life
1:05PM Sarah Stokely | I’m happy to announce that we’ve just received a bundle of copies of Lifehacker guru and goddess Gina Trapani’s new book, Upgrade your Life, to give away to Lifehacker AU readers. Keep your eyes open for our upcoming Lifehacker competition, which will be asking for your best Lifehacker tip, and you could win your very own copy. And of course huge thanks to Gina for sending us copies of her book to give away! :)
More » Geek TV
12:55PM Sarah Stokely | Mike Wilcox at PC Authority has written up what he describes as “the ultimate geek TV” – an all-in-one LCD TV which has a DVD player and can play DivX and .avi files from an external USB drive. The PRO LCD TVs are made by by Melbourne-based manufacturer Kogan, and they also come with a standard digital TV tuner and HDMI ports. The 19 inch version is $449. I’m not sold on the idea of 5W integrated speakers though. Anyone checked these out?
More » 
Linkbunch adds quick copy and paste feature for links
12:40PM Sarah Stokely | We previously told you about LinkBunch, a Firefox extension which lets you consolidate groups of links to send to friends via Twitter or IM. They’ve just added a handy feature for getting links out of LinkBunch – by copying them to the clipboard.
This is a nice way around the problem of having long links snipped short to be displayed in LinkBunch. It meant that you couldn’t select the links and copy them.
Now when you click “Copy Bunch to Clipboard” it will copy all the links in the bunch to the clipboard in plain text format.
New feature: “Copy Bunch to Clipboard” [LinkBunch Official Blog] More » 
Get notifications to track changes in Google Spreadsheets
12:20PM Sarah Stokely | Here’s a tip for the Google Spreadsheet users out there. Google has added the ability to set alerts to notify you about new data as it is added. This will be useful if you work collaboratively and have shared your spreadsheet with others, or if you use forms to collect information from multiple users.
At the top right of the Spreadsheet page you’ll see a link to “Set Notification Rules” (or you can find it in the File menu). You can control
what parts of your spreadsheet to track, and how often alerts are sent. You can see the options in this screenshot:
[via Google Tip of the Day Gadget]
More » MS SaaS Trial
9:00AM Sarah Stokely | Microsoft is trialling a software as a service model for home users. The Albany trial bundles Office Home and Student, Windows Live Onecare, collaboration software Office Live Workspace and three of its Windows Live web services, according to the writeup in ZDNet.
But blog Valleywag has heaped scorn on the offering, saying it’s an attempt to get people to pay a monthly fee for software that mostly they already have or can access for free or via subscription already.
Here’s the bit that annoyed me (from the ZDNet story):
“If and when Albany users cut their subscriptions, they won’t lose their
data, said Gordon. They will be able to go out and buy a copy of Office
and still access their documents and data, he said.”
Uh, actually, ‘you’ll need to go buy a copy of our software to access your data’ sounds a lot like lock-in to me. Why pretend otherwise? More » Two easy tips for reducing email distraction
8:54AM Sarah Stokely | There are a number of tricks people use to minimise distraction by email such as turning off email alert sounds, but here are two tips which I’ve been using lately which are even lower tech than that.I work from a home office, so I don’t get to go home and leave my computer behind at night or on the weekends – it’s always there, even when I am doing non-computer related things. I found that as a result I was wandering over and checking my email when I should have been focusing on reading a book or doing other things around the house. Very distracting.My solution? I put the computer to sleep! Glancing at a turned off computer screen is, for some reason, much less tempting. If your computer must be on 24/7 because you’re downloading or something like that, easy – just turn off your monitor. Works for me! More » 
Mount Flickr as a Drive with Flickrfs
4:30AM Kevin Purdy | Linux only: Flickrfs makes uploading to, downloading from, and organizing a Flickr account just like handling files in a mounted file system. After installing and setting up the link to your account, you can see all your photos separated into tag folders, edit and back up the pics and their metadata, and crop and resize photos on the fly, all reflected in realtime in your online account. The tool works mostly through your native file browser and the command line, but the program’s author has created a visual desktop Flickr organizer that links into his app. Flickrfs is a free download for Linux systems only; Step-by-step instructions on setting up the dependencies and the program itself available at the project’s home page. Photo by myrtti. More »
