With the recession causing enough stress for all of us, the British Medical Journal decides to bust several common medical myths—for example, reading in dim light won’t ruin your eyesight, so go nuts.
All-things-Apple weblog TUAW points out a simple Terminal trick to enable half-star ratings in iTunes for finer grained control over your iTunes rating system. The same functionality is available with the simple tick of a checkbox in previously mentioned OS X tweaker Secrets, but if you don’t want to install another preference pane for this simple hack, this Terminal tweak will do the job: defaults write com.apple.iTunes allow-half-stars -bool TRUE
I did a little searching without any clear results, so if anyone knows how to enable half-stars on the Windows side of the fence, let’s hear it in the comments.
Tech writer Mike Elgan brilliantly argues that while our parents taught us hard work and long hours will lead to success, in the internet age the ability to control what you pay attention to is the key.
A person who works six hours a day but with total focus has an enormous advantage over a 12-hour-per-day workaholic who’s “multi-tasking” all day, answering every phone call, constantly checking Facebook and Twitter, and indulging every interruption. It’s time we upgraded our work ethic for the age we’re living in, not our grandparents’ age. Hard work is still a virtue, but now takes a distant second place to the new determinant of success or failure in the age of Internet distractions: Control of attention. Hard work is dead. Are you paying attention?
His points about the merging of work and play onto our computers—which we are on all day, which can make play look like work—are well-outlined and spot-on. Read this whole article; it’s a great kick in the pants for getting focused in the New Year. the new work ethic: just paying attention at intellectual properties [via ]
Windows only: We’ve already highlighted the best free video conversion tools, but if you want to both edit and convert a video, those apps aren’t up to it. That’s where Free Video Converter comes in. Free Video Converter lets you choose sections of any video and join or split clips so that once you’re ready to export or convert the video, you get final say on what you see. More »
The ReadWriteWeb blog bemoans the lack of browser extension support in Google Chrome (so far), and offers a list of handy bookmarklets that can tide you over for now. From Gmail This, to Dictionary, to Delicious ‘marklets, this collection looks a lot like our top 10 useful bookmarklets. Of course, bookmarklets don’t take up the memory or require installation like add-ons do, so these are worth dragging to your Firefox toolbar as well.
Make “Add-ons” for Google Chrome Using Bookmarklets [ReadWriteWeb]iPhone 2.0 only: My most-used app on the iPhone, Google Mobile, has a hidden settings panel called “Bells and Whistles” that lets you customise the colours and sounds. To reveal the new pane, go into Google Mobile’s Settings area, scroll to the bottom of the page, and swipe up several times until the “Bells and Whistles” entry appears. Then tap it to set the app’s theme colour, sounds (chicken or monkey), and turn on a live waveform for voice search. Neat! Ring in the New Year with Bells and Whistles [Official Google Mobile Blog via TechCrunch]
