Search site and aggregator VideoSurf isn’t perfect at what it tries to do, but it can be occasionally, surprisingly good at spotting particular faces inside videos. The indexing engine (currently in beta, of course) sorts through videos from most of the popular Flash-based sites and lets you search to find only videos with, say, Jerry Seinfeld’s actual image in them. A few of my searches turned up false positives, but others yielding surprising accuracy, and VideoSurf’s interface lets you skip right to the sections featuring your searched man or woman. VideoSurf is free to use, though you can sign up to save your searches. VideoSurf [via Online Tech Tips]
Windows/Mac/Linux (Firefox): Spinspotter, a free toolbar plug-in for Firefox 3, gives anyone who sees opinions masquerading as objective reporting a kind of little red pen to note the spin with. After installing the toolbar, signing up and logging in, you’ll see red-highlighted lines and sections of stories that other readers saw a bias or other problem with. Luckily, when visiting lightning-rod sites like the New York Times or Fox News, you can turn the marker-viewing off. You can also mark your own passages and describe what you see on Spinspotter’s site. It’d be nice to be able to mark spin with a bookmarklet instead of having a toolbar constantly present—and it looks like that could be hacked up—but it’s an otherwise neat exercise in wiki-style peer review—keeping in mind, of course, that anything group-edited can produce unexpected results. Spinspotter is a free download, works wherever Firefox 3 does.
Spinspotter [via New York Times]Plug your iPhone into a variety of computers, yours or other people’s, and you’ll find that your phone and iTunes want to wipe everything clean and start over, every single time. Andrew Grant at the Shiny Things blog shows how to edit your iTunes Music Library XML file to sync your phone (or iPod touch) with different systems. That means you can, say, auto-grab just your music from your Mac at home, but grab Contacts and Calendars from your work PC. The guide requires very little hacking, and Grant provides links to simple text and hex editors to get the job done. Got a non-edit solution to multi-syncing your iPhone? Tell us in the comments. How to sync an iPhone with two (or more) Computers [Shiny Things via Hackszine]
Reader electrikjesus is beta-testing the BumpTop desktop interface that turns your desktop into a 3D space and lets you move, pile, fan, and lasso your documents the way you would on a physical desktop. From the BumpTop web site:
Don’t neglect your PC over the weekend, give it added oomph and usefulness by trying out these ideas from the past week on Lifehacker:
Rig up your own iPhone fitness setup Sell your car (and save a fortune on petrol in the process) Get rid of excess shortcuts on your desktop with Orphans Remover Enhance Windows Search so it handles Office documents better Or download a copy of OpenOffice 3.0 and change suites entirelyIf you don’t fancy shelling out to watch live broadcasts of the Australian team’s Indian cricket tour but you’ll happily brand yourself a minor cricket tragic, the Emirates-sponsored Team Tracker on the Cricket Australia site might appeal. The application, which is udpated for each international game, shows the travel routes taken by the team and the results at each major event via an on-screen timeline. Emirates Team Tracker
There’s no denying we’re keen on the IKEA furniture hacks here at Lifehacker, but as belts keep tightening, tricking out cheap furniture looks more appealing than ever. And when the hack is as cool as this one from Apartment Therapy — a glass-topped Vika Lauri table which changes colour at the flick of a switch using the Didoer light strip — I know what I’d like to be doing this weekend. Apartment Therapy via [IKEA Hacker]
With the government having decided to emulate the UK approach and adopt a phased rollout for the digital TV switchover, the slowly-grinding digital TV wheels seem to be speeding up somewhat. Lifehacker understands that the main rollout schedule will be announced next week — quite possibly as early as Monday — so if you don’t have a digital-capable TV or set-top box, adding one to your Christmas list sounds more sensible than ever. More »
If you’ve ever wondered why it’s so long between updates for Windows, a post on the Engineering Windows 7 blog about Microsoft’s development process will give you an inkling. While engineer Larry Osterman describes the approach to Windows 7 as “dramatically different”, it’s still amazingly procedural:
Instead of being fairly hierarchical, [Windows 7 lead]Steven Sinofsky has 3 direct reports, each representing a particular discipline: Development, Test and Program Management. Under each of the discipline leads, there are 6 development/test/program management managers, one for each of the major groups in WEX. Those 2nd level managers in turn have a half a dozen or so leads, each one with between 5 and 15 direct reports.
With that kind of approach, even an apparent no-brainer decision like having a shutdown button you can easily find can take a while. It also explains why stripping out so many default apps makes sense — less hanging around means a smaller code tree to support — and why Vista SP2 will be out first.
Engineering 7: A View From The Bottom
