Although there are projects underway in Melbourne (myki) and Brisbane, and an endlessly stalled attempt in Sydney, Perth is currently the only Australian capital to have a proper city-wide transport smart card (SmartRider) that lets you pay for any form of transport without ever needing cash on hand, simply by swiping a card on a reader. This is, to be honest, a great pity.As travellers to London (Oyster) and Hong Kong (Octopus) will attest, smart cards make travelling a breeze, eliminating the need to scrabble for change or work out unfamiliar systems, and improving security (you can scan your whole wallet rather than fiddling to take the card out). If you’re visiting anywhere that has a smart card travel system for more than a day or so, ditch the paper tickets and get a smart card: even if you have to pay a deposit to get the card, the convenience is worth it, and in many places (Perth included) you get a discount on travel that’ll quick eat up the cost anyway.
MapMe.com puts a friendly spin on adding information to Google Maps, making it possible to develop and rate maps relating to your favourite topic or your local area without needing a healthy dose of coding knowledge. Maps can easily be assigned memorable names (like the self-explanatory www.mapme.com/map/violent-pubs-nsw, shown above), while future plans include Facebook integration. The project (developed in true Web 2.0 fashion between Australia, the UK, the Philippines and Antarctica) is currently in beta, but seems to be running in fairly stable condition. Give it a spin (registration required to build your own maps).
Just released a new version of the Better Gmail 2 Firefox extension, with bug fixes, the addition of the show CC and BCC scripts, and an update to the Redesigned skin. Download Better Gmail 2 0.5 here.
A new study by Australian consumer agency Choice shows that game consoles, especially the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360, use significant power even when they’re not in use. “Our tests found that leaving a Playstation 3 on while not in use would cost almost… five times more than it would take to run a refrigerator for the same yearly period,” said the study which was published on Choice’s web site.
Right behind the Playstation and Xbox in the electricity-sucking list is plasma televisions and desktop computers. To save money on your bill, turn off the power strip the consoles and TV is plugged into instead of relying solely on the remote control. Here are more ways you can save energy while computing. Power bills soaring? Turn off the Playstation: study [Reuters]
Apple has been pushing out podcasts from universities under the iTunes U brand for a while now, but the concept just got more interesting with the addition of half-a-dozen Australian universities: Australian National University, Griffith University, Swinburne University, University of Melbourne, University of NSW, and the University of WA (for New Zealanders, Otago University has also signed up.) Content includes audio and video versions of guest and regular lectures, as well as research profiles. Shame we got stuck with the US-centric ‘U’ branding; frankly, if you want to go to university, you need to be able to pronounce words of more than one syllable. Though admittedly ‘iTunes College’ wouldn’t be much better.
Dear Lifehacker,
Do you know of any online services where you can specify a list of torrents, and your credit card number, and you can have a disc set mailed to you with the results? Sometimes I can imagine this being faster than a download and certainly less hassle for some people. I searched Google with no luck, but I thought if such a thing exists, Lifehacker will know about it.
Signed, Pressed For Time, Hungry For Torrents
Conferences are often viewed as an excuse to skive out of the office for a few days in a sunny location, but in truth there’s not much point doing that: all your regular work will still be there when you get back. In a busy working life, how can you make sure the information you gather at a conference will get used?Security expert and conference veteran Chris Joscelyne offered this useful tip at the ITSM Conference on the Gold Coast earlier this week: schedule time in your calendar to revisit conference materials and notes the week after you’ve been there. For maximum impact, Joscelyne advises a double-review process: “Make an appointment with yourself one month after you attend a conference and spend two hours reviewing how it was relevant to you.”
Mac OS X only: Freeware application xMod tweaks OS X Leopard system settings through a easy-to-use—albeit clunky—interface. Similar to previously mentioned LeopardMOD, xMod tweaks everything from Finder to Safari, and offers tools to check the status of your hard drives or change the default screenshot behaviour. xMod is freeware, Mac OS X only. For more obscure but arguably cooler set of hidden tweaks, check out previously mentioned Secrets. xMod [Geek Peak via Cool OSX Apps]
If you’ve started controlling your PC with your voice but were looking for more ways you can take advantage of speech recognition to make your computer do things, blogger and Microsoft employee Rob Chambers publishes a handful of free macros you can add to your Speech Macros folder to execute any time. For example, Rob’s Next Slide macro advances a PowerPoint presentation when you say “Next slide” and goes back when you say “Previous slide.”
In case it went under your radar, Leopard’s Spaces feature has improved in the 10.5.3 release by making the workspace switch more intuitive. The upshot: You can now create and switch between workspaces based on tasks rather than apps.
