If you’ve been tempted by the thought of an Eee PC, here’s a good local deal: Catch Of The Day is selling off the original 7.9in Xandros Linux model for $327 plus shipping. To our way of thinking, even at $499, the Eee is a killer buy; with this kind of saving, you’d want to get in quick.
Avoid the hassle of scraping off parking stickers or decals with Sticker Shield, a plastic sheet that surrounds stickers and attaches them to your window through the power of static adhesion rather than sticky goo. As a result, not only can you easily remove the sticker when you no longer need it, but you can also reapply the sticker whenever you want. Check out the video demo for a better idea of how Sticker Shield works. A set of two 4″ x 6″ sheets will set you back $US5 from the manufacturer. If you’ve used Sticker Shield before, let’s hear how it worked for you in the comments. Sticker Shield [Cool Tools]
Windows only: The free Picasa2Flickr plug-in uploads photos from image-editing application Picasa to photo-sharing web application Flickr at the press of a button. We’ve mentioned Picasa2Flickr once before, but when Picasa changed its plug-in structure a while back, it broke Picasa2Flickr. This new and improved version actually just sends your selected photos straight to Flickr Uploadr 3.0, Flickr’s default tool for uploading photos. There were always good workarounds for perfecting your Picasa to Flickr workflow, but it doesn’t get much better than Picasa2Flickr. Picasa2Flicrk [SourceForge]
Editor: Meet io9 contributor Lisa Katayama. When she’s not blogging about robots and futurism, she’s spreading the word about how to GTD in the most unexpected ways. Here’s a sampling of a few clever tricks you’ll find in her new book, Urawaza. When it comes to life and getting things done, we like to do things a little differently in Japan. When I break a glass in the kitchen, I don’t use my vacuum cleaner to clean it up; I use a slice of bread. When my socks become dirt-stained from running in a muddy ravine, I don’t pour bleach on them; I stuff them with marbles. And to save space and money, I have never bought a document shredder. I just stuff incriminating documents in a stocking and toss them in the washing machine.
In the olden times (last week), only stock prices 15 minutes old were available on the web—guess the carrier pigeons needed time to fly ‘em into the data centre. No more. As of today, Google Finance, the Wall Street Journal, and CNBC now offer up-to-the-second NASDAQ stock prices online so you can obsess about your portfolio real-time. (NYSE quotes remain delayed while the pigeons negotiate their raise, and the Oz editor suggests you don’t hold your breath waiting for the ASX to do this either.)
Windows only: Test your LCD monitor for dead or stuck pixels with simple freeware application IsMyLcdOK. There’s not much to the program: Just run it and then walk through the battery of onscreen tests designed to isolate dead or stuck pixels. Chances are you may already have an idea where you monitor’s pixels have gone awry, but with IsMyLcdOK you can be sure to spot any bad pixel. Once you’ve done that, take a look at our previous guides to fixing dead pixels, repairing stuck pixels, or removing LCD image burn-in. IsMyLcdOK is freeware, Windows only. IsMyLcdOK [via Shell Extension City]
ACCESS DENIED. Those two bone-chilling words are the last thing you want to see when you’re trying to log into a system or open a file, but they’re not necessarily a dead end. Several free tools can help you find lost passwords you can’t remember or that your computer has saved but obscured. Let’s take a look at a few free remedies for lost password panic when you’re trying to log onto a computer, network, or just figure out what’s behind that string of asterisks.
Reader Paul writes in with a handy Craiglist searching tip: Contrary to popular belief, Craigslist does have an Boolean “OR” search method; it can be done by placing an apostrophe just before each search term. I discovered this by the trial and error method. By default, Craigslist uses a Boolean AND between search terms; for example, searching the Seattle Craigslist for an ad containing the words Blue AND Green AND Red AND Orange you would simply enter: Blue Green Red Orange in the search window, and get about 43 results, each containing all four words.
Need empirical proof that you’re listening to the same old artists over and over on music discovery site Last.fm? LastGraph, a slick little API app coded by Andrew Godwin, takes your Last.fm username and models it into revealing timeline graphs. Check out your overall listening frequency, and an eye-popping multi-colour artist history timeline. The big caveat is that LastGraph must, for now, institute hold queues for data-gathering and timeline rendering. If you can keep your browser open for a bit, however, it’s a neat way to pull more useful data from your Last.fm profile.
Right-clicking a folder in Nautilus, the default file browser in Ubuntu and other GNOME-based Linux distributions, gives you a “Permissions” tab that aims to be simplistic, but can be somewhat confusing for anyone trying to open up a folder. The Tombuntu blog points out a one-click tweak to enable an “advanced,” straight-forward permissions dialog. Launch the gconf-editor (using Alt+F2) and browse to the following preference: /apps/nautilus/preferences/show_advanced_permissions
Hit the checkbox, and you’ve got a more powerful permission-setting dialog. Hit the link below for a command line version and more details. Enable the Advanced File Permissions Dialog in Nautilus [Tombuntu]
