Friday, August 8, 2008
Fix
Get In Shape With Little or No Equipment
11:30PM Lifehacker US Edition | Many people are under the impression improved health and fitness requires a costly gym membership or home exercise equipment. The consummate minimalist in all endeavours including fitness, Leo of the blog Zen Habits has put together a list of exercises that are heavy on results but light on equipment. It takes no equipment to get a great workout and get in shape, and with one or two pieces of simple equipment, you can turn that great workout into a fantastic one, you magnificent beast, you. More »
Work
MyTextFile Web-Based Plain Text Editor
11:00PM Gina Trapani | Plain text file lovers, rejoice: web-based text editor MyTextFile offers plenty of space to store your notes and lists plus a revision history of the file in question. Sign into MyTextFile with your Google account to get your single editor window (which delightfully supports the Tab key inline). Enter and save up to 256KB of text (enough to enter Romeo and Juliet, the site assures) and MyTextFile will keep a history of file revisions for you. You can even switch into a full-screen mode for distraction-free text editing. While it doesn’t offer folders or multiple files like (the ancient and stagnant) Yahoo Notepad, revision history plus the Tab key thing alone is worth checking out MyTextFile. MyTextFile [via Digital Inspiration] More »
Fix
Turn a Loofah into a Lint Trap
10:30PM Lifehacker US Edition | Last time I laundered our home’s fluffy bathroom rugs, enough fluff came off the rugs to clog the washtub drain and cause a minor flood in the laundry room. In my haste to clean up the mess I forgot to put “Buy lint trap” on my to-do list. Today I found myself needing to launder the rugs without lint trap in hand. Rather than get in the car, waste gas driving to the nearest store, and spend $3 for what amounts to a silly little nylon net that cost pennies to produce I did some re-purposing. More »
Fix
Make Firefox 3’s Bookmarks Available to Launchy and Quicksilver
10:00PM Gina Trapani | Firefox 3 doesn’t store your bookmarks in the plain old HTML file that Firefox 2 did, so desktop launchers like Quicksilver and Launchy can’t index them properly. But the HackCollege blog has a solution: a Firefox 3 about:config tweak that makes Firefox automatically export your bookmarks to a file. Change the browser.bookmarks.autoExportHTML value from false to true to get a bookmarks.html file saved to your Firefox profile directory each time you shut down your browser. More »
Communicate
Google Launches 2008 Olympic Games Site
5:52PM Gina Trapani | Google unveils a 2008 Summer Olympics landing page, a clearinghouse for various GOOG tools that are tracking the events in Bejing. See a Google Map of medals, YouTube video highlights, Google News headlines, a 3D video tour plus Sketchup models of the venues, and add an iGoogle gadget that tracks medal counts to your Google homepage. How are you following the Olympics this year (or are you avoiding them altogether)? Tell us what you think in the comments. Google 2008 Summer Games [via The Official Google Blog] More »
Communicate
10:54AM Angus Kidman | In the absence of a proper free electronic program guide, subscription EPG IceTV has long been the best choice for people who want a proper, easy-to-program guide for their personal video recorder and don’t plan to purchase a Foxtel IQ box (or more recently, a Tivo). As Nick over at Gizmodo notes, IceTV has now rolled out a free iPhone application which lets you use your cherished Apple phone to program your IceTV device remotely. Even non-account holders can use it for checking today’s TV guide (though there’s plenty of other sites that’ll give you that feature). The application is free for iPhone 2.0 users. [IceTV via MacTalk via Gizmodo]
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Program IceTV using your iPhone
10:54AM Angus Kidman | In the absence of a proper free electronic program guide, subscription EPG IceTV has long been the best choice for people who want a proper, easy-to-program guide for their personal video recorder and don’t plan to purchase a Foxtel IQ box (or more recently, a Tivo). As Nick over at Gizmodo notes, IceTV has now rolled out a free iPhone application which lets you use your cherished Apple phone to program your IceTV device remotely. Even non-account holders can use it for checking today’s TV guide (though there’s plenty of other sites that’ll give you that feature). The application is free for iPhone 2.0 users. [IceTV via MacTalk via Gizmodo]
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Organise
10:45AM Angus Kidman | When I wrote about Google’s new notifications of how it has customised your search results recently, I speculated that this feature might not be a high priority for the google.com.au site, since that already customises results to suit Australian users to some extent. That turns out to be correct, as Google Australia corporate affairs head Rob Shilkin confirmed to me this week:
This is Google.com only for the time being. We’re always looking to roll out our features internationally if it will help the user experience, but no specific timetable for .com.au.
Note that accessing the main Google page via the ‘Go to Google.com’ link may not get you to that feature either, since Google continues to use your location to customise advertising and other features even if the search results are from the US site. More »
No Google customisation notifications in Australia any time soon
10:45AM Angus Kidman | When I wrote about Google’s new notifications of how it has customised your search results recently, I speculated that this feature might not be a high priority for the google.com.au site, since that already customises results to suit Australian users to some extent. That turns out to be correct, as Google Australia corporate affairs head Rob Shilkin confirmed to me this week:
This is Google.com only for the time being. We’re always looking to roll out our features internationally if it will help the user experience, but no specific timetable for .com.au.
Note that accessing the main Google page via the ‘Go to Google.com’ link may not get you to that feature either, since Google continues to use your location to customise advertising and other features even if the search results are from the US site. More »
Organise
9:40AM Angus Kidman | Here’s some news you’re unlikely to have missed: the 2008 Beijing Olympics are about to start. If you’re an Olympics tragic or an uber-patriotic type, then your big challenge for the next fortnight is working out how many late-night broadcasts you can watch without destroying your career, using Google to locate your favourite obscure event, and adding a few #080808 tags to your Twitter feed. But if (like me) major sporting events just aren’t that interesting (or your concerns about China’s human rights record are rising to the fore), here’s 10 cool and useful things to do with your PC while everyone else is obsessing over the medal count.(Photo by Nagyman.)
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Top 10 computer alternatives to watching the Olympics
9:40AM Angus Kidman | Here’s some news you’re unlikely to have missed: the 2008 Beijing Olympics are about to start. If you’re an Olympics tragic or an uber-patriotic type, then your big challenge for the next fortnight is working out how many late-night broadcasts you can watch without destroying your career, using Google to locate your favourite obscure event, and adding a few #080808 tags to your Twitter feed. But if (like me) major sporting events just aren’t that interesting (or your concerns about China’s human rights record are rising to the fore), here’s 10 cool and useful things to do with your PC while everyone else is obsessing over the medal count.(Photo by Nagyman.)
More »
Organise
MiniLyrics Automatically Fetches and Displays Lyrics for Your Media Player
9:00AM Adam Pash | Windows only: The MiniLyrics plug-in automatically downloads and displays lyrics for the currently playing song for a handful of the most popular media players. With support for everything from iTunes and Windows Media Player to Winamp and MediaMonkey, MiniLyrics fetches lyrics and—when possible—plays them back karaoke-style. The interface is completely skinnable, and you’re likely to find a skin matching your preferred media player. You can also view floating lyrics in big red text for large, line-by-line playback of lyrics in time with the song. Not bad for a little impromptu karaoke or just a quick glance at the lyrics of a song. MiniLyrics is nagware, Windows only. For alternatives, check out previously mentioned EvilLyrics or the Lyrics Plugin. Thanks Lekan! MiniLyrics More »
Organise
