While Mozilla prepares to set a Guinness World Record on Tuesday with its release of Firefox 3, and Apple continues to push Safari on Windows and the iPhone, you’d think that there was no more room for web browser alternatives to Internet Explorer—but you’d be wrong. This week, to much less fanfare than Apple, Microsoft, and even Mozilla gets, Opera released its newest version 9.5 and it’s not out of the browser race by any means. What sets Opera apart from Firefox? Take a tour of some of the new and improved features that keep Opera a viable alternative to IE, Safari, and—yes, even Firefox.
Today’s National Public Radio Talk of the Nation segment discusses how to be a productive procrastinator, asking procrastination expert Timothy Pychyl about “structured procrastination” and prioritizing your truly important tasks. [via]
Reader Torley adds a helpful screencast to the Lifehacker Tip Testers Flickr group, which demonstrates how to use the previously mentioned Picnik Firefox extension. Turn up your speakers and hit play to see it in action. You too can show the world how you use stuff we write up—add your own photos and video to the Lifehacker Tip Testers group pool on Flickr. Use Picnik to make exciting webpage screenshots [Flickr] Picnik 2.2 [Mozilla Add-ons]
Web service IM Feeds notifies you via instant messenger if an RSS feed has updated—like a package tracking feed, a special friend’s blog, or news site you’re tracking closely. To sign up, send an instant message with the word “join” to the IM Feeds bot on one of the four services that it currently supports—AIM (imfeeds), MSN Messenger (msn@imfeeds.com), Yahoo Messenger (imfeeds), or Google Talk (imfeeds@gmail.com). Then, choose your login name to manage your feed notifications and you’re on your way. IM Feeds updates at a fixed 5 minute interval to keep your feeds fresh. IM Feeds [via Web Worker Daily]
Windows only: Freeware application Macrium Reflect Free creates disk image snapshots of any hard drive on your computer that you can restore on any other drive to bring your computer back to the same state. Disk imaging is a great solution for going from zero to a completely setup system if something goes wrong, and we’ve shown you how to hot image your hard drive with a similar software called DriveImage XML. Macrium Reflect Free does basically the same thing as DiX, like creating images while Windows is running, but—also like DiX—the free version of Reflect unfortunately does not do incremental backup. What Reflect does have is a very friendly interface that makes disk imaging seem simple. Just remember that you should still set up automated file backups.
The first consumer-priced, one-megapixel digital cameras hit the streets just over ten years ago, and today digital cameras are everywhere—hell, one megapixel is tiny for even our cell phone cameras. As a result, we snap picture after picture without giving a thought to the price of film, which means you’ve got hundreds of pictures to share with friends and family. Earlier this week we asked you to tell us your favourite photo sharing web site, and today we’re back with the five most popular answers. Hit the jump for the low-down on the five best photo sharing tools the web has to offer.
You can now add notes or share items through Google Reader’s iPhone interface. Emailing an item opens your iPhone’s Mail app with the entire item—links, photos, and all—embedded in the body of the email. Thanks Andrew!
It’s going to be a few years before your toddler’s LiveJournaling, but for now you can share the latest baby news and developments with webapp TotSpot. TotSpot incorporates features of many popular social media sites to create a virtual baby book for parents to catalog their child’s growth. With TotSpot you can upload photos and video, and keep a journal about your child that tracks new firsts (first words, first steps, first time not terrified by the animatronic stegosaurus at the local water park, etc.) and new favourite things. You can input data on growth and development to create a virtual growth chart. Totspot even has a Twitter-esque micro blogging feature for quick and easy updates about what you and the baby are doing.
Windows/Mac/Linux (Firefox): QuickDrag won’t look terribly new to fans of previously-posted extensions Drag de Go or Super DragAndGo, but it’s a lighter-weight extension that does similar work. Grab a swatch of text and drag it up to your address or tab bar to perform a search on the term. Grab an image and drop it above to open it in a new frame, or save it Mac-style to your desktop. It also makes non-clickable URLs easy to open by (you guessed it) dragging them into an empty tab space as well. QuickDrag is a free download, works wherever Firefox (including 3) does. QuickDrag [via Web Worker Daily]
Previously mentioned web-based mind mapping tool MindMeister adds the ability to create and add to your maps via email. Enable your account’s “Geistesblitz Email” in settings and save the unique email address to your contacts. Then, tap out an email list and denote subnodes by indenting lines with a space or a tab, as shown above. Send the email to your mind map address, and it magically appears in your account soon after. For example, the mind map produced by the email above looks like this:
