You probably already knew your iPhone’s included earbuds include a click-button microphone that performs special actions depending on what you’re doing, but there’s a new one. One click toggles playback or answers and hangs up the phone, two clicks skips to the next track, and more recently added, three clicks goes back to the previous song. Handy.
Blogger and information junkie Steve Rubel details how he uses Gmail as a taggable, searchable knowledge base using previously mentioned tricks and tools like Gmail plus addresses, the Ubiquity Firefox extension, and Gmail Labs Quick Links. It’s a fantastic system, not only because it works perfectly with apps you already live in (namely Gmail), but also because you can save and tag an entire web page in a few keystrokes. Likewise, you can access the information quickly and easily with Gmail’s excellent search. I recently detailed how you can expand your brain with Evernote, a free, cross-platform note-taking application, but if you live and breath Gmail, Rubel’s methods (which improve on similar Gmail solutions we’ve seen before) are worth a try. Make Magic with Metadata in Gmail [Micro Persuasion]
Grab the Google Chrome Channel Chooser from Google to keep up with the latest dev releases of Chrome as they’re rolled out. That means new features and bug fixes will be at your fingertips sooner than later, but your Chrome may be a bit less stable. [via]
Personal finance webapp Rudder wants to be your daily financial adviser—via email. Once you activate your account and feed it your financial data, Rudder sends you a daily email summarising your fiscal state of affairs. Rudder aggregates the balances of your checking, savings, and credit card accounts and lists them alongside bills you’ve got due. Rudder offers a projected cash flow widget called “What’s Left”, which factors in pay dates, bills, and credit cards to project your future income and assist in personal planning. One caveat: while the web site itself is encrypted and presumably your bank’s web site is encrypted, email is inherently insecure. While an email from Rudder doesn’t contain any more information than the name of the institution and the balance of the account, that might be more than you’re willing to share with the nosy guy that works in IT reading your email. Privacy issues aside, Rudder is an automated way to get money updates without having to check multiple banking web sites by hand.
Rudder [via Download Squad]Our favourite bookmark-syncing extension for Firefox, Foxmarks, is venturing into syncing your passwords as well as your bookmarks between browsers over the internet. Coupled with Foxmarks’ new profile support, you can selectively sync what passwords go where and keep your banking passwords at home and your IT passwords at work. You have to opt into the password sync beta to enable it in your Foxmarks account. Of course, trusting your important passwords to a feature in beta—no matter how secure it appears to be—should make anyone concerned about security and privacy antsy, so do proceed with caution, and maybe only use this feature for your low-security passwords. Do you sync your passwords to the cloud, or do you wish you could? Let us know in the comments. Password Sync: What happens in Profiles, stays in Profiles [Foxmarks Blog]
Windows only: Free application MZ Ultimate Tweaker is a system modification tool that covers the gamut of system tweaks, putting everything from performance to display tweaks just a few clicks away. The application is very similar to the TweakUI Windows XP PowerToy. But apart from all the minor modifications it can make to your system, it also comes loaded with several useful utilities worth checking out.
Adobe AIR has graduated from alpha to beta for Linux—specifically, Fedora Core 8, Ubuntu 7.10, and Open Suse 10.3. Linux users, check out our top 10 apps worth installing Adobe AIR for. [via]
It’d be wonderfully convenient if you could take your important documents and applications with you wherever you go, but lugging a laptop with you every time you step out the door is far from convenient. That’s where MokaFive’s new cross-platform application called iPhone Sentinel comes in. By turning part of your iPhone or iPod touch into a portable hard drive, iPhone Sentinel and the MokaFive Player allow you to run virtual machines directly off your iPhone, so you can run anything from an entire operating system to standalone video games like Quake. Here’s how it works.
Mac only: Windows virtualsation software for Mac VMware Fusion’s version 2.0 has graduated from beta and is now officially available. In our test drive of Fusion 2.0 beta 1 and beta 2 we were impressed with 2.0′s better multi-monitor support and integration of the Windows VM with OS X in Unity. The final highlight reel of Fusion 2.0 features include:
The Digital Inspiration blog details the best method (at least for now) of changing Google Chrome’s User Agent String to get around browser restrictions. The hack involves opening up Chrome’s chrome.dll file with a hex editor—Amit recommends Xvi32—and searching out the User Agent String value and replacing it with whatever browser you want sites to think you’re coming from. You could do this with a portable Chrome app to create a tiny iPhone emulator, or create multiple copies of your chrome.dll to make switching back less annoying. Got another User Agent trick worth hacking for? Share it in the comments. How to Change User Agent String in Google Chrome Browser [Digital Inspiration]
