Windows only with Outlook: Sick of bumping up against your employer’s tiny Exchange server space limit? The Outlook Attachment Remover can detach all those huge images and documents your co-workers insist on emailing around and free up space by offloading them to your hard drive. The Attachment Remover is a free Outlook add-in that lets you process a folder of your choosing, and specify which attachment file types and sizes you want to save to your hard drive (like only .PPT’s larger than 100KB, for example.) Great way to reduce disk usage fast without having to manually delete or archive Outlook messages. The Outlook Attachment Remover is freeware for Windows, donations requested.
Windows/Mac/Linux: Freeware application Deluge is a lightweight, cross-platform BitTorrent client. Aside from the standard BitTorrent functionality (you know, downloading), Deluge has a—dare I say—flood of great features for such a young client, including a web interface (like uTorrent and Transmission), full encryption, RSS support, and a plug-in system for adding even more functionality. In fact, if anything Deluge is an attempt at building a cross-platform BitTorrent client with the chops of the popular Windows-only uTorrent, and so far it looks promising. Deluge is free, open source, works on Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Today Microsoft announces that they will extend the amount of time manufacturers can ship low cost PCs with Windows XP until 2010. Clearly someone in Redmond is reading Lifehacker. Note that this doesn’t apply to standard PCs, though, so if you want XP pre-installed you need to buy soon.
Feel like your Getting-Things-Done-style next-action list is slipping away from you? Having a hard time getting through the list because it’s feeling overwhelming? The Tools for Thought blog suggests taking a hard-eyed look at what tasks or projects might be irrelevant without your noticing the change: Maybe an increase in petrol prices has made that road trip less appealing than it seemed a month ago. Maybe it’s becoming clearer that upgrading a piece of software that works perfectly fine is just creating activity for its own sake.
PageOnce, the all-in-one aggregation page for online accounts we’ve previously mentioned, is now open for public sign-ups—and still requires a small leap of faith in turning over a host of login details.
Web-based information manager MyGADs lets you create, share, and retrieve important bits of information like flight confirmation numbers, birthdays, phone numbers, and more. Store address books, calendars, tasks, and notes in personal or public “GADs” with text messages, instant messages, or using the web site. Need to remember Uncle Billy’s birthday? Instant message it to your GAD. Forgot when it was? Ask your GAD. The interface is easy and conversational. Set GADs permissions so friends and family can edit and/or view your GAD (i.e., Mum sets the schedule, kids can check it.) Kind of like a lo-fi cross between Sandy and Google SMS, MyGADs isn’t just limited to retrieving information you have already fed to it. Queries like “Weather in New York”, “Population of Britain”, or “Who is Albert Einstein” will return relevant answers from sites like Wikipedia or the national weather service, too. MyGADS [via Download Squad]
Mac only: Free utility Shades adds finer screen brightness controls to your Mac than the defaults. Once you install the Shades Preference pane and turn it on, you can brighten or darken your screen across a much wider range than the Mac’s built-in controls, and make your laptop in bed much more bearable to your sleepy significant other or the guy on the red-eye flight in the next seat. Shades doesn’t affect OS X’s default controls and colour profiles. If you get carried away by the range Shades provides and dim your screen too dark, Alt+Esc will set it back to the default brightness. Thanks eyeRmonkey! Shades
