In addition to your traditional checking, savings, and emergency accounts, financial weblog Get Rich Slowly suggests setting up another money bucket for irregular or unexpected expenses. Sock away money in a “Freedom Account” for expenses like clothes, vacations, and car maintenance. Setting this money apart from your regular monthly bills ensures you keep a tighter rein on what you spend on irregular expenses, and it also helps you set savings goals for larger purchases. Whether or not you’re already doing something along these lines, let’s hear how you track and manage your irregular expenses in the comments. Use a Freedom Account to Prepare for the Unexpected [Get Rich Slowly]
You don’t have to mod your classic Xbox to run the best free media centre application around anymore: Dedicated developers have ported the Xbox Media Centre (XBMC) software to the Mac, and its killer features will convince you to abandon Front Row forever. The latest XBMC on OS X beta dropped last week, and it’s as stable and useful as ever. Dubbed the “throw out your Xbox” release, XBMC for Mac 0.5 beta 1 adds the key feature that finally puts your media centre Mac under the TV where it belongs: remote control support. Let’s take a look at how you can (and why you want to) replace Front Row with XBMC on your Mac.
Web surfing game PMOG (The Passively Multiplayer Online Game) just opened up user registrations to the public. PMOG, a social surfing game, lets you rack up points and leave gifts and traps for your friends on web pages as you surf. Install the PMOG Firefox extension and make your surfing, ahem, more (virtually) productive by earning points. Then use your points to buy things like mines, treasure, and armour that you can leave as gifts or traps for your friends as they land on various web pages. See PMOG in action after the jump.
Windows/Mac/Linux (All platforms): Alliance, a free, open-source, cross-platform peer-to-peer application, takes nearly all of the security and privacy concerns out of peer-to-peer file sharing by putting you in charge of your own network. The dead-simple interface lets you add Alliance-using friends to your network and files on your system to share, and you can search, chat, and download like any other peer-to-peer app. The traffic between clients is encrypted at a low level, but you can apply an experimental SSL layer if you’d like a bit more protection from snooping. For trading files with co-workers or friends, it’s a nice no-overhead solution. Alliance is a free download for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux systems.
Now that you know how to stitch together panoramic photos with free software, publish your creations at Panoye, a panoramic sharing web site. Panoye users are building “a virtual tour all around Earth” with user-submitted panoramic images. Upload, tag, geotag, and share your panoramas on Panoye, which offers YouTube-like HTML markup to embed a pannable panoramic image onto your own web site, like the one after the jump:
The default prompt in Windows’ Command Prompt isn’t the easiest to read, but Microsoft has a font, Consolas, that works much better in a terminal, as attested to by our commenters. The Digital Inspiration blog runs down how to set Consolas as the default font in your command prompt. Vista users can perform a registry hack to enable their pre-installed Consolas, but XP users without Office 2007 can download the PowerPoint viewer to grab all the Vista fonts. Hit the link for installation and registry-tweaking instructions. Change the Font of Command Prompt Window to Consolas For More Comfortable Reading [Digital Inspiration]
The publisher of Australasian Camcorder magazine, David Hague, has shared some tips for how to build a survival kit for when you’ll be trying to take photos or video while on the road. He’s pretty serious about his images – he says he chooses between three different backpacks:
“One is used for in-the-field video trips, a second for casual day to day use where an opportunity may happen to get a shot or video and the third is when I am seriously going away for a week or so.”
His list of supplies includes the stuff you’d expect, like backup batteries and SD cards, but also have some other items you might not have thought of, to help you solve any problems you might come across like inclement weather:
jeweller’s screwdriver kit dry socks sealable plastic bags as emergency camera ‘raincoats’ basic first aid kit lens cleaning kitHit the link to see the full list. You can tell David was once a boy scout, can’t you. :) Got any other items to mention that you carry with you in search of the perfect image? Share in comments please.
Video and photography survival kit [Hydrapinion]
Martial arts master Bruce Lee was obviously a man who could accomplish lofty self-set goals, and the Little Dragon’s principles of effort and work can apply to those cranking widgets rather than besting Chuck Norris. The Positivity Blog highlights some of his writings and teachings and how they apply to everyday work, including these simple concepts: “It’s not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential.”“If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you’ll never get it done.”
As the post author points out, that applies to both de-cluttering your work routines and space, as well as over-thinking problems to procrastinate them. If nothing else, Lee’s advice serves as more, uh, intimidating credos to keep posted near your desk. Photo by SqueezyBoy. Bruce Lee’s Top 7 Fundamentals for Getting Your Life in Shape [The Positivity Blog via 43 Folders]
The security of your personal information is so supposedly tenuous on social networking sites that one legal expert has described it as: “like the situation in East Germany – you never know who’s spying on who“. Wow. It’s not Godwin’s Law, but I think I can see it from here. Do you think your info is that exposed?
Linux only: Free multimedia note organizer BasKet takes a page from Microsoft’s OneNote, along with a good portion of Getting Things Done-style organisation, to offer an all-in-one spot to drop your thoughts and next actions. You can quickly paste in text and images, sure, but you can also set up launchers to open files with particular programs, grab a section of your screen to paste up, and grab text from files. BasKet also runs as a desktop widget, and offers a pre-built GTD package for help in getting yourself oriented. BasKet is a free download for Linux systems, and requires a number of KDE libraries to run. Thanks, Mark!
BasKet Note Pads
