Saturday, July 12, 2008
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This Week’s Best Posts
10:00AM Lifehacker US Edition | Happy weekend y’all! Before you head out into your weekend, make sure you didn’t miss any of the good stuff published here this week: How to get free iPhone data on a Vodafone plan “On the face of it, Vodafone’s iPhone plans don’t look particularly cheap and doesn’t offer any free Wi-Fi hotspots, but it turns out that there’s a catch you may be able to use to get a lot more data.” Slim Ink posts books to your door“Voracious book lover but find it difficult to get to the local library? Australian book rental site Slim Ink could solve your reading woes.” What’s Good (and Free!) in the iTunes App Store“More than 550 new applications arrived for the iPhone and iPod touch this morning in iTunes’ brand new App Store and more than 130 of them are available for free.” “Better” Firefox Extension Updates Now Available“Spent the long weekend posting a rash of ‘Better’ extension updates that add features, fix bugs, and offer full Firefox 3 compatibility.” iTunes 7.7 Now Available For Download“Apple just made the latest version of iTunes 7.7 available for download and it includes the newly-opened iTunes App Store, which is available for iPhone users who have the iPhone 2.0 Software Update.” Kid-Proof Your PC with SteadyState“When you’ve got your Windows XP or Vista setup running perfectly, you don’t want to lose all your painstaking customisations to a reckless tot, an experiment-minded friend or spouse, or a rogue system-lousing program.” Are You a Productivity Hobbyist?“Let’s face it: if you’ve spent much time in the productivity blogosphere, then 100 more motivation hacks, 50 more Firefox plug-ins, and additional GTD system tweaks probably aren’t going to make you that much more productive.” More »
Fix
DIY Moleskine Wallet Hack
9:00AM Adam Pash | Moleskine enthusiast Richard Bryan details how he replaced his wallet with his treasured Moleskine by sewing together an elastic book cover capable of holding his credit cards, cash, and business cards. The end result is certainly bigger than your average wallet, but if you carry your notebook with you wherever you go, why not take the route to convergence? Bryan’s photostream provides a lot of great photos and details for pulling off the Moleskine wallet. Moleskine Wallet Hack [Flickr via MAKE] More »
Fix
Snacks that Heal What Ails You
8:00AM Adam Pash | Yahoo and Men’s Health round up seven snacks that heal, claiming that your best route to many common ailments lies in a well chosen snack from your supermarket. For example, rather than reaching for a can of soda when you’re stressed, the article suggests a cup of low-fat yogurt or a couple tablespoons of mixed nuts. Scientists in Slovakia gave people 3 grams each of two amino acids — lysine and arginine — or a placebo and asked them to deliver a speech. Blood measurements of stress hormones revealed that the amino acid-fortified public speakers were half as anxious during and after the speech as those who took the placebo. Yogurt is one of the best food sources of lysine; nuts pack tons of arginine. The remaining six snacks cover your metabolism, energy and brain boosts, your immune system, alertness, and your—ahem—bedroom impulses. 7 Super Snacks That Heal [Yahoo Health] More »
Design
Turn Your Photos into a Small Planet
7:00AM Adam Pash | Blogger Tom Hole details an image editing technique for turning a digital photo landscape into a tiny planet. To start off you’ll need to create a 360-degree panoramic photo. The author uses a shareware app called PTGui to create the panorama, but we’ve covered how to create panoramic photos with free software already. Once you’re there, the author describes how to process the panoramic pic with either GIMP (the free, open-source photo editor) or Photoshop (the not free one) to end up with the very cool small planet effect. If you’ve made your own little planet in the past, let’s see how it worked out for you in the comments. An Idiots Guide to Creating Small Planets [tjhole via Hack a Day] More »
Work
GrabUp Makes Screenshot Sharing Effortless
6:00AM Adam Pash | Mac OS X only: Freeware application GrabUp automatically uploads screenshots to the internet and pastes the URL in your clipboard for quick and easy sharing. The application installs as a preference pane in your System Preferences and integrates with your Mac’s default screenshot shortcuts. So if you hit Cmd-Shift-3 and select an area for a screenshot, it’s automatically uploaded to the GrabUp servers and the URL is copied to your clipboard. You can enable or disable GrabUp through the preference pane, and if you enable GrabUp for your menu bar you can go through the history of your screenshot upload URLs. GrabUp is freeware, Mac OS X only. For more robust alternatives, check out previously mentioned Skitch and Jing. GrabUp More »
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Calendar+ Enhances Your PocketPC Calendar
5:00AM Lifehacker US Edition | Windows only: Free PocketPC app Calendar+ sorts the Today screen calendar to your liking. Set Calendar+ to only display X number of days ahead or to ignore certain days altogether or to show only relevant appointments. Calendar+ versions are available for Windows Mobile 6/5/2003 and earlier PocketPCs. Thanks, Myrddin-Wyllt! Calendar+ [MohairSofa] More »
Work
How to Run Windows on Your Mac for Free
4:00AM Adam Pash | Weblog MakeUseOf details how to install Windows on your Mac with freeware virtual machine software VirtualBox. We’ve already shown you how to run Windows apps seamlessly in Linux with VirtualBox, but the MakeUseOf guide takes on the new OS X beta version of VirtualBox with a nice step-by-step for getting started. It sounds like VirtualBox isn’t as robust as other Windows-on-Mac alternatives, but it is the only no-cost app. If you’ve always wanted to ride the Windows-on-Mac train but didn’t feel like shelling out for VMware Fusion or Parallels, VirtualBox looks to be a viable alternative. If you’ve tried running Windows on the latest version of VirtualBox for Mac, let’s hear how it’s worked for you in the comments. 1 Free Program to Run Windows on your Mac [MakeUseOf] More »
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Five Best Windows Backup Tools
2:00AM Adam Pash | Your data is your life, and if you’re not backing it up regularly, you’re flirting with disaster. Read on for a closer look at the five best Windows backup tools as voted by Lifehacker readers. More »
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Find Makes You More Productive at the Command Line
1:30AM Gina Trapani | Programmer Eric Wendelin says you can get a lot more done with sets of files at the command line once you’ve mastered the basics of find, an old school search tool. Find in and of itself gives you the same functionality as Google Desktop or Spotlight, but because it’s at the command line, you can pipe results into other tools like grep or sed and really get things done in a flash—like do a global search and replace. If all this is making you go “huh?” but you’ve dabbled at the command line before, hit up Eric’s post, which is a nice intro to what you can do with find. Here’s another helpful introduction to the command line. Find is a beautiful tool [Eric Wendelin's Blog] More »
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