Saturday, December 6, 2008

Fast, Effective Workouts For Exercisers Short On Time

10:00AM Adam Pash | We understand that in order to really burn fat and calories you need to sufficiently raise heart rate, which can take around 20-30 minutes alone, but for those days you don’t have an hour to spend exercising, Yahoo Health offers a workout plan that—they claim—gives you an hours worth of calorie burning in roughly 20 minutes. The key, according to the article, is small bursts of high-intensity exercises. While you should always be skeptical of too-good-to-be-true workout plans, the suggestions in the article still may be worth a try this holiday season, when you’re available time for exercise is inversely proportional to the availability of sweets. Photo by Celso Flores. Fast Workouts That Really Work! [Yahoo Health] More »

KLS Mail Backs Up Your Browser, Email And Contacts

9:00AM Adam Pash | Windows only: Despite what its name would imply, free application KLS Mail Backup backs up popular Windows web browsers and address book apps in addition to email applications—including Mozilla Firefox, Thunderbird, and Seamonkey; Windows Live Mail, Contacts, and Messenger; along with Windows Mail, Windows Contacts, and Internet Explorer. Backups are automatically zipped, can be stored locally or on a networked hard drive, and are kept under version control. Apart from the backing up, the application also restores any of your archived backups. According to the Download Squad post, it can also run off a portable device, so you can make and restore backups from your thumb drive. In short, if you’re looking for a solid backup solution for your browser, email, or contacts app, KLS might be up your alley. KLS Mail Backup is free for personal use, Windows only. KLS Mail Backup [via Download Squad] More »

Show A Folder’s Full Path In Finder’s Title Bar

7:00AM Adam Pash | By default Mac OS X’s Finder displays only the current folder name in its title bar, but if you’d like a little more detail, The Unofficial Apple Weblog details how to enable path view in Finder to display the full folder path in the title. All it takes is a couple of seconds and a quick Terminal command. More »

YouTube Videos Now Available In HD

3:00AM Adam Pash | YouTube switched to widescreen format a week and a half back, and now the popular video sharing site appears officially to be streaming videos in HD. From the look of things, most videos that were uploaded in HD should now have a watch in HD link to the bottom right of the video for high quality HD viewing. The site has offered a watch in high quality option for a while now, but the new HD option looks like they’re serious about moving into high definition for their streaming video. Here’s a before and after version look like: More »

Free Gmail Stickers Teach You Gmail’s Keyboard Shortcuts

2:00AM Adam Pash | Google is giving away a free (plus the cost of a stamp) Gmail-related sticker kit, including a page of stickers for your keyboard to train your fingers with the popular email client’s handy keyboard shortcuts. According to the blog, the adhesive from the shortcut stickers “is a bit more removable than standard stickiness, so you can take them off once you’ve trained your fingers.” To get some of your own, just send a self-addressed envelope and an international reply coupon (yes, you’ll be queueing in the Post Office for that one) to: More »

ZScreen Grabs Screenshots, Puts Them Anywhere You Want

1:10AM Kevin Purdy | Windows only: Zscreen is one of a long line of screenshot tools we’ve checked out at Lifehacker HQ, but it’s got a few unique features that set it apart. First off, it’s an open-source project, helmed up mainly by one programmer. More important to most, however, is its flexibility in working with other screenshot and image tools, both through its configurable hot keys (working Shift, Alt, and Ctrl keys to good effect) and being able to send screenshots to an FTP server, the clipboard, a custom-named file, or any other image program you’ve got. If you’re pushing your screens to a file, you can set its JPEG capabilities to scale—after a pic is 100K, for example, you tell ZScreen to scale its quality down to 80 percent. ZScreen lacks the features that blog publishers might want baked-in, like annotation and highlighting, but for straight-up grab-and-edit, it’s hard to beat. ZScreen is a free download for Windows systems only. ZScreen [via Download Squad] More »

ShoppingNotes.com Alerts You On Any Product’s Price Drop

12:00AM Kevin Purdy | Ready to buy a great holiday gift, but not sure if it’ll drop just a bit more before the season is out? ShoppingNotes.com is a simple, useful price watch tool that isn’t confined to a single site. Give it the URL (or Google search and choose from its page) of any product page at an online merchant, hand over your email address, and verify the alert over there. If you just want emails whenever the price drops at all, that’s all you have to do. Signing in or editing your alerts, however, lets you get specific on how much of a discount should trigger an alert, and change the number of days to watch (the default is 30). There are, of course, many other price-watch services, but ShoppingNotes is notably clutter-free, and not too annoying with the ads. ShoppingNotes.com is a free service, requires an account to manage and edit multiple alerts. ShoppingNotes.com [via The Cheapskate] More »