Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Organise
EchoPic Is A Dead Simple Picture Sharing Site
11:30PM Lifehacker US Edition | Webapp EchoPic is a no-frills online photo storage service, which has no albums or advanced features, but offers a fast way to get pictures on the web painlessly. Registration isn’t necessary to use the basic features; unregistered users have unlimited storage and a file size limitation of 1MB. Registered users have the same generous storage plus an increase in file size limit to 4 MB. One minor caveat: there is no resizing feature, so make sure to resize or crop your photos before uploading them. EchoPic [via About:Photography] More »
Work
Get Around Academic Paper Restrictions
11:00PM Kevin Purdy | The Google Operating System blog points out that Google’s integration of Scholar results means that students and researchers have to settle for “subscription required” firewalls when trying to pull up a paper. Hit the “All (x) versions” link, and you’ll often find a readable copy on Google’s servers. More »
Organise
Transmute Transfers And Backs Up Bookmarks Between Browsers
10:30PM Kevin Purdy | Windows only: Some browsers stash all your bookmarks and their metadata in a single folder that’s easy to import to any other browser. For everything else, Transmute makes the work of shuttling bookmarks between Windows browsers much simpler. The simple but powerful application, also available as a no-install portable folder, supports nearly every major browser for Windows—Chrome, Chromium, Opera, Safari, and, of course, Internet Explorer and Firefox. You can set Transmute to export bookmarks to a particular folder, with or without timestamp dates, and have it create its own backup files in case things get messy. That’s about it, but that’s certainly no small feat. Transmute is a free download for Windows systems only, requires .NET 2.0 framework to operate. Transmute [via Life Rocks 2.0] More »
Work
Why TraceMonkey Is Going to Blow Your Web Browsing Mind
9:30PM Kevin Purdy | There’s a lot about the next iteration of the open-source Firefox browser to be geeked out about. From private browsing modes to tab preview panels, from punchier colours to really smart session restoring, there’s been a lot of thought put into how people want to use the web. But perhaps the greatest promise in Firefox 3.1 is the one most users won’t see at all—a serious overhaul of the browser’s JavaScript engine, newly christened as TraceMonkey. If you don’t obsessively follow the Mozilla developer’s blogs or read insider tech news, you might have a few questions about TraceMonkey—like, say, what’s different about it, how much faster is it, why that matters, and how you can try it out right now. We’ve compiled a primer on TraceMonkey’s features and uses, as well as how to experience it. Read on to see what’s new under the hood in the upcoming Firefox. Graph via Brendan’s Roadmap Updates. More »
Communicate
4:30PM Angus Kidman | The new Sydney Sidetracks project from the ABC puts an intriguing twist on the Google Maps mash-up genre, linking historic video, audio and pictures to their locations online. Content on offer includes early images from Port Jackson in 1821, as well as more recent events such as the Hilton Hotel bombing. As well as being accessible on the site, you can download a version for use on your mobile phone, ideal for a walking tour of the inner-Sydney streets. With luck, we’ll see similar efforts for other cities in the future (the site structure suggests other locations could easily be added).
Sydney Sidetracks
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ABC’s Sydney Sidetracks Puts History On A Map
4:30PM Angus Kidman | The new Sydney Sidetracks project from the ABC puts an intriguing twist on the Google Maps mash-up genre, linking historic video, audio and pictures to their locations online. Content on offer includes early images from Port Jackson in 1821, as well as more recent events such as the Hilton Hotel bombing. As well as being accessible on the site, you can download a version for use on your mobile phone, ideal for a walking tour of the inner-Sydney streets. With luck, we’ll see similar efforts for other cities in the future (the site structure suggests other locations could easily be added).
Sydney Sidetracks
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Communicate
2:30PM Angus Kidman | 3 has jumped on the prepaid 3G broadband wagon (alongside Telstra and Optus), rolling out a range of plans that are yours for the purchase of a $129 USB key and SIM. While we’ve repeatedly noted in the past that 3’s relatively narrow coverage makes it a risky choice, there’s one bundle on offer that helps allay that objection: $149 for 12GB of data, with a 12-month expiry. That’s a solid choice for someone who won’t use the service every week, but (say) makes regular work or family trips to another capital city.
Other recharges (with a more conventional 30 day expiry) include $15 for 500MB, $29 for 2GB or $49 for 4GB. You can roll over unused allowances from one period to the next if you recharge, but can’t have more than 15GB of data in credit. As ever, the kicker is still what happens when you roam off the 3 network outside capital cities onto Telstra. There’s a tiny roaming allowance on each plan, after which you have to pay $7.50 for 4MB (yes, that’s megabytes). That works out at more than sixty times the cost of the 3 data on the entry-level plan.
Three
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3 Launches Prepaid 3G Broadband, 12 Month Expiry Option But Roaming’s Still A Rort
2:30PM Angus Kidman | 3 has jumped on the prepaid 3G broadband wagon (alongside Telstra and Optus), rolling out a range of plans that are yours for the purchase of a $129 USB key and SIM. While we’ve repeatedly noted in the past that 3’s relatively narrow coverage makes it a risky choice, there’s one bundle on offer that helps allay that objection: $149 for 12GB of data, with a 12-month expiry. That’s a solid choice for someone who won’t use the service every week, but (say) makes regular work or family trips to another capital city.
Other recharges (with a more conventional 30 day expiry) include $15 for 500MB, $29 for 2GB or $49 for 4GB. You can roll over unused allowances from one period to the next if you recharge, but can’t have more than 15GB of data in credit. As ever, the kicker is still what happens when you roam off the 3 network outside capital cities onto Telstra. There’s a tiny roaming allowance on each plan, after which you have to pay $7.50 for 4MB (yes, that’s megabytes). That works out at more than sixty times the cost of the 3 data on the entry-level plan.
Three
More »
Fix
1:30PM Angus Kidman | When assembling a bookshelf for the spare room recently, I could not get some of the screws to go all the way in (and didn’t want to try finishing the task with a drill lest the wood split). However, what looked like an annoying consequence of buying a cheap shelf package actually turned out to be an unexpected boon. The jutting-out screw is ideal for hanging a coat hanger on, giving the room a useful extra place to store coats, or somewhere to hang shirts that are drying on their hangers.
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Unsunk Screws Are Handy As Hanging Hooks
1:30PM Angus Kidman | When assembling a bookshelf for the spare room recently, I could not get some of the screws to go all the way in (and didn’t want to try finishing the task with a drill lest the wood split). However, what looked like an annoying consequence of buying a cheap shelf package actually turned out to be an unexpected boon. The jutting-out screw is ideal for hanging a coat hanger on, giving the room a useful extra place to store coats, or somewhere to hang shirts that are drying on their hangers.
More »
Work
12:00PM Angus Kidman | When Word documents get edited by multiple people, the end result is often an unholy mess, since most people still tend to make direct formatting changes (such as adding bold and italics) rather than using Word’s Styles feature for consistency. The Microsoft Word Team blog gives a useful overview of how you can rescue a format-challenged document by using the Styles pane to identify all the formatting used in a document, and replace ad-hoc formatting with properly defined styles. This useful feature is less than obvious in Word 2007, since the option to launch the actual styles list is a ridiculously tiny arrow under Change Styles and the default is to show only ‘recommended’ styles rather than what’s actually in use, but it’s still there.
How to Make the Formatting in Your Document Consistent [The Microsoft Office Word Team's Blog]
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Keep Formatting Consistent With Word’s Styles Pane
12:00PM Angus Kidman | When Word documents get edited by multiple people, the end result is often an unholy mess, since most people still tend to make direct formatting changes (such as adding bold and italics) rather than using Word’s Styles feature for consistency. The Microsoft Word Team blog gives a useful overview of how you can rescue a format-challenged document by using the Styles pane to identify all the formatting used in a document, and replace ad-hoc formatting with properly defined styles. This useful feature is less than obvious in Word 2007, since the option to launch the actual styles list is a ridiculously tiny arrow under Change Styles and the default is to show only ‘recommended’ styles rather than what’s actually in use, but it’s still there.
How to Make the Formatting in Your Document Consistent [The Microsoft Office Word Team's Blog]
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Communicate
Google Reader Now Translating Feeds Automatically
10:30AM Lifehacker US Edition | Google Reader and Google Translate have teamed up to bring a neat new feature — you can choose to have feeds in Google Reader machine-translated on the fly. For instance, if your Google Reader language is set to English under Settings > Preferences, a subscription to a blog in Japanese will appear (more or less) in English. It doesn’t seem to have been rolled out for everybody quite yet, as some of us at Lifehacker could access the option on the Feed settings drop-down menu and some couldn’t. A neat trick, but the automated translations still have a tendency to be unintentionally hilarious. Users of the new Reader feature are promised that as Translate gets better, so will the translations of the feeds. Is Your Web Truly World-Wide? [Official Google Reader Blog] More »
Fix
10:30AM Angus Kidman | If you’re trying to get pregnant, then tracking your most fertile periods is an important step. Pre Conceptions lets you create a personal ovulation calendar to maximise your chances of conceiving — and unlike many other options out there, doesn’t charge anything for the service. If you do succeed in getting pregnant, be sure to check out our sibling site babblebaby for everything you need to know about modern parenting.
Pre Conceptions [via OzBargain
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Pre Conceptions Charts Your Fertility Cycle
10:30AM Angus Kidman | If you’re trying to get pregnant, then tracking your most fertile periods is an important step. Pre Conceptions lets you create a personal ovulation calendar to maximise your chances of conceiving — and unlike many other options out there, doesn’t charge anything for the service. If you do succeed in getting pregnant, be sure to check out our sibling site babblebaby for everything you need to know about modern parenting.
Pre Conceptions [via OzBargain
More » 