Displaying your new LCD flat screen can be a difficult and expensive process, but blogger Gus Money came up with a novel solution: converting a Pax wardrobe from IKEA into a custom media display unit. Hit the link for details of how he went about the task.
Ikea Pax wardrobe-cum entertainment center [via IKEA HackerWindows/Mac only: With two gigabytes of free online storage, IDrive offers a cheap option for remote backup of critical files for your computer. Download the client for Windows or Mac, select the files you want to keep backed up, and IDrive will automatically begin uploading them to the company’s servers over an SSL-encrypted connection. Then it will monitor your computer for changes to files and folders and connect every ten minutes to update your backup. You can also set a bandwidth throttle to make sure you aren’t choking your internet connection during the workday. IDrive Basic is a free Windows or Mac download with 2GB of storage. IDrive Pro offers 150GB of backup storage for $US4.95 a month or $US49.50 a year. Thanks, PetrinaGabulous! IDrive
Stuck as I am in a minor European airport right now, this seems like a particularly appealing story: researchers at Deakin University in Melbourne are working on a simulation system that makes it easier for airports to plan their security systems and handle new changes in baggage rules. Anything that can reduce the amount of time you spend queuing to get through security is welcome, though some improvements don’t need software. For instance, why does Sydney’s T3 terminal insist on putting the tables where you unpack your laptop so far away from the security scanners, unlike every other airport in the civilised world?
Deakin software bags airport security [AustralianIT]Windows/Mac/Linux: If you’ve been excited about the new Content Aware Image Resizing feature in Adobe Photoshop CS4 but don’t want to plunk down all the cash for the upgrade, check out Seam Carving GUI. It allows you to change the aspect ratio of an image while keeping critical subjects in the image intact. Just select the area you want to preserve (or discard) with a brush tool, and input the new size desired, et voilà, you’ve got yourself a resized image with the import parts intact. Seam Carving GUI is a free download for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. Original photo by Kevin Collins seam-carving-gui [Google Code, via Download Squad]
Windows only (for now): Firefox extension GPhotospace integrates with your Gmail account to store and share digital photos easily with Gmail. Once you install GPhotospace, all that’s left to do is start creating albums from photos on your desktop. The simple-to-use extension uploads the files to your Gmail account (resizing them from small to huge sizes as you deem appropriate), and works entirely from within Firefox. Once you’ve created an album or two, you can share entire albums quickly and easily by clicking the Share button and taking advantage of GPhotospace’s integration with Gmail for autocompletion of email addresses. GPhotospace is free, currently only supports Windows (though an OS X update is in the works). If you’d prefer a tool that worked with the media you’ve already stored in your Gmail account, check out previously mentioned Xoopit.
GPhotoSpace [via Life Rocks 2.0]Windows only: For typography junkies with large font collections, Cfont Pro will help you manage your addiction. With support for all the major font file types, including Postscript and TrueType, this free application will let you preview fonts from disk before installing. It’ll also create proof sheets of multiple fonts and export them to HTML or RTF files so that you can print then for reference or forward to a picky client (for their sake and ours, please don’t give them the option of using Comic Sans). You can also search your machine for fonts, check out font attributes and view single characters full-screen to check for imperfections. Cfont Pro is a free download for Windows only.
Cfont Pro [via gHacks]Windows only: When you want to manage your PC’s processes, startup items, network connections, windows, tasks, open files, and installed software, you can do that all using the free all-in-one monitoring tools System Explorer. The long list of functionality in System Explorer’s broken down into four categories: Monitoring, Autoruns, Software, and Settings (they’re tabs across the top). From there you can drill down and manage running processes, files, tasks, and more. While we’ve seen a few souped-up task manager type apps (like TaskExplorer), System Explorer packs in even more features with a small memory footprint and USB drive-friendly portable version. Check out a few screenshots of System Explorer in action.
Today Microsoft announced Windows Azure, a new version of Windows that lives in the Microsoft cloud. You won’t be running Windows on your PC over the internet with Azure, though; instead the platform is intended to help developers host and distribute software running over the internet.
Box.net—one of our Hive Five Best Online File Sharing Services—has just released their free iPhone and iPod touch application. You can now easily access collaborative files and view Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and PDF documents from your Box.net account on the go from your iPhone.
Windows only: If reading the comments on GTD-related posts is any indicator, many of you have found yourself in the situation I recently found myself in: you love getting things done but somehow your system isn’t working like you planned and you’ve fallen off the wagon. While reading up on ways to more effectively use Microsoft OneNote as a GTD tool I came across a brilliant tag based implementation courtesy of Rob from the productivity blog 7Breaths. We featured Rob’s integration of OneNote and Outlook back in August, but somehow I had completely overlooked his method of using OneNote tagging system to move ideas through the Capture – Process – NextAction/Project cycle.
