If office gremlins are making off with your daily meal, innovative designer Sherwood Forlee has a clever solution: the Anti-Theft Lunch Bag. Simply put, Anti-Theft Lunch Bags “are regular sandwich bags that have green splotches printed on both sides.” With your sandwich inside, the bag simulates mold and makes the contents look disgusting. These bags aren’t available for purchase, but the idea shouldn’t be difficult to replicate if you need more sandwich security at your workplace. Thanks Patrix!
Apple pushes out a Leopard update that puts the current OS X version at 10.5.5 today. The Mac OS X 10.5.5 update changelog lists improvements and bug fixes in Mail, Address Book, iCal, and MobileMe. Get the 136MB update download through Software Update; as per usual it’ll require a restart to install.
While for casual snaps (and web sharing) almost any camera with a resolution of 1MP or more will do, if you’re serious about getting printed output from your camera that’s bigger than a standard shot, you need to make sure you have enough megapixels for the task. Megapixel Calculator helps map the often confusing relationship between image size and camera resolution, and has other handy reference charts like how many images in various formats you can fit on a typical memory card — great for when photo mathematics has your brain fried. [Megapixel Calculator via Projectwoman]
eBay’s doing some cleaning up around the site (and for once it doesn’t seem to involve putting PayPal anywhere the designers can think of). One consequence is that the Bid Assistant, a feature which helps you place bids on multiple similar items until you win an auction, is getting dumped, apparently because of lack of use. The eBay announcements board has the details on how the feature is getting ditched and what impact there’ll be if you are currently using it. [
Mac OS X only: Free application Dock Dodger removes any running application from your Dock, decluttering your Dock for apps that you want to keep there and ditching the rest. When might something like Dock Dodger come in handy? Let’s say, for example, you downloaded the very cool system monitoring application XRG when we mentioned it recently. The app’s great, but it has a useless Dock icon. To get rid of its icon, just drag XRG to the Dock Dodger window; next time you restart the app, its icon is nowhere to be found. If you decide you want an icon back in the Dock later, just rinse and repeat the same process. Dock Dodger is donationware, Mac OS X only. Dock Dodger [via MakeUseOf]
Google releases Google Desktop 5.8 for Windows today and promises 50% less memory usage during startup and faster shutdown.
Google Gears, the browser plug-in that lets you access your favourite webapps when you’re not online, is now out of beta and available for the Safari browser for Macs (in addition to Firefox on all platforms). Gears gives you offline access to Remember the Milk, Zoho Suite, Google Docs, and more webapps.
The popular open-source VLC media player has released a significant update with an interface refresh for Windows, Linux, and Unix, improved playlist and media library tools, and a whole lot more. The release, codenamed Grishenko, also adds support for more input and codec types, which means that the media player that you can always count on to play back any file you throw at it has gotten even better. VLC 0.9.2 displays album art, includes a metadata editor, scrobbles to Last.fm, and even includes YouTube video support (just give VLC the URL of the video you want to watch). VLC media player is free for all platforms. While you’re getting cozy with the new version, be sure to check out how to master your digital media with VLC. VLC media player
For their new “Purple Pedals” campaign, Yahoo has dispatched a handful of GPS-enabled bicycles equipped with cameraphones that automatically shoot and upload photos to Flickr to riders in cities all over the world, from San Francisco to New York and soon, to Singapore, Denmark and the U.K.. The bikes come with solar panels which power the camera, and special software that uses the phone’s accelerometer to snap photos every 60 seconds automatically when the bike is in motion. I was one of the lucky folks to get my hands on one of these bikes, and I’ve been riding it all over San Diego for over a week now. Let’s take a look at how the bike works, how it was made, and how you can turn your handlebars into a tripod and photo-map your neighbourhood in similar fashion.
Linux only: Free to-do manager Tasque is a clean, unobtrusive interface for managing your to-do items on your Linux desktop. The program can run with its own local database of tasks, or can integrate with an Evolution-based workflow. Tasque gets really helpful, however, when hooked up to the web-based task manager Remember the Milk. Importing, completing, and adding tasks with a smart text box all work perfectly with RTM. You can add notes to a task with a right-click, but tagging looks like it has to be handled from RTM’s web interface. If you’re a fan of simple to-do lists you can access from your desktop or the web, Tasque is a great solution. Tasque is a free download for Linux systems only; hit the via link below for help installing its repositories in Ubuntu.
Tasque [via Automaticable]
