Tuesday, January 6, 2009

CrazyLittleFingers Rewards Your Toddler’s Curiosity

11:30PM Jason Fitzpatrick | CrazyLittleFingers is a keyboard locking application. Unlike some of the previous keyboard lockers we’ve covered, CrazyLittleFingers corresponds the keystroke to a picture and sound related to the key. Press L and you see a picture of a lion. Press R and you see a movie of a rooster. Keys that have no symbolic link for children like the page up and page down keys produce rising and falling guitar sounds. Numbers show the number on the screen. The only caveat is that it doesn’t lock the mouse. This is fine on a single monitor setup, because you can’t click through the images or access the start menu so clicking wouldn’t accomplish anything. On a multiple monitor setup however it only locks the primary screen, the mouse is still effective on the other screens. It would be nice if the program did a simple poll to see if other monitors were active and darkened/disabled them. Still if your toddler isn’t a proficient mouse user it should work fine. CrazyLittleFingers is freeware, Windows only. Photo by John A. Ward. CrazyLittleFingers [Donation Coder: New Applications for New Year Contest] More »

iTunes To Drop Most Copy Protection, Vary Prices

10:30PM Kevin Purdy | The good news: CNET has sources saying the three largest music labels will allow Apple to offer music downloads free of copy-protection. And the bad news might not be that bad. In exchange for the DRM-free tracks, Apple will reportedly allow labels to push three tiers of pricing. Older songs from the archives will likely get cheaper than 99 cents, songs that are newer and “midline” (i.e. not big hits) will inhabit the familiar 99 cent mark, and newer, bigger hits will fetch higher, unnamed dollar amounts.< If announced at the Macworld conference today—which our gadget-obsessed cousins at Gizmodo are, of course, covering live —there could also be over-the-air 3G downloads coming to iPhone owners, and DRM dropped from everything in the iTunes store on launch. As Greg Sandoval at CNET points out, though, that leaves a question mark on tracks already purchased through iTunes. Will variable, DRM-free pricing make you a (new or returning) iTunes customer? Tell us your take in the comments. Sources: Apple to expand DRM-free music, new pricing [CNET via AppleInsider] More »

Install-It Creates Auto-Starting Installer CDs For Any Applications

10:00PM Kevin Purdy | Windows only: Free app Install-It puts a small auto-starting application on any removable drive that makes installing applications a double-click affair. After downloading the Install-It package, you’ll want to extract its files to somewhere you can reach, like your desktop, and open up the Install.ini file in your favourite text editor. This file is simply a list of program descriptions and the locations of their installer files. If you’re creating a disc full of useful installers, just replace the default examples with your chosen verbiage for each app and the location/names of the setup files. You separate those two items with a comma, using slashes where necessary, and end each line with a semi-colon. More »

Why Your Self-Handicapping Excuses Don’t Work (And How To Fix Them)

9:00PM Kevin Purdy | The New York Times takes a revealing look at self-handicapping excuses—like “I barely slept the night before the test”—and why we create them, as well as the extremely unlikely chance that anyone else buys them. The short version of the research and studies cited is that we all do it, in varying amounts, to protect our fragile egos. It’s a two-way victory: If you ace a project, you did great despite your car having trouble, your cat dying, being sick, and not having hardly heard the initial presentation. If not, well, hey, you know why. If you’re a regular self-handicapper, though, you can grow too attached to whatever you use without knowing it, whether it’s alcohol, rule-defying, sleep-deprivation, or whatever convenience you cling to. Those who study self-handicapping, though, offer a seemingly devious way to go at it another way and benefit—namely, get someone else to deliver your excuses: In a recent study, James C. McElroy of Iowa State University and J. Michael Crant of Notre Dame had 246 adults evaluate the behaviour of characters in several workplace anecdotes. The participants’ impressions of a character began to sour after the second time the person cited a handicap. “What happens here is that if you do it often, observers attribute your performance to you, but begin to view it as part of your disposition, i.e., you’re a whiner,” Dr. McElroy wrote in an e-mail message. “But you can avoid this happening if someone else does the handicapping for you, and surprisingly enough, even if they do it often.” Which cliched excuses and handicapping preambles do you wish you could banish, whether in yourself or co-workers? Let’s hear your take on pre-emptive defeat in the comments. Photo by pattista. More »

Big Bucks In Travel Savings For Webjet

1:30PM Angus Kidman | Declines in air fares nothwithstanding, airline price comparison site Webjet seems to be doing OK. Steve Creedy at the Australian reports that the site has seen a 19 per cent rise in demand over the last six months. To be honest, I’m surprised that so many people make use of the service, because of the $21.85 in extra charges which it slaps on bookings — my inner scrooge would rather try and score the same flight direct from the relevant airline with that kind of fee involved. More »

Is Lenovo’s Double-Screen Notebook Genius Or A Rip-Off?

11:30AM Angus Kidman | One of the reasons I’ve always resisted a multiple-monitor setup is that the work habits which result wouldn’t translate readily to notebook use and I spend so much time on the road. Lenovo’s new dual-screen W700ds notebook (which the company rather pretentiously calls a “mobile workstation”) partly overcomes that objection by offering a second slide-out 10.6 inch screen behind the main 17 inch display. Check out the video demonstration above to see how it works. There’s some nice features here (including a built-in CF reader and a healthy 5 USB ports), though the weight would be an issue and at $8,199 for the cheapest model, I won’t be buying one any time soon. Do you think we’ll see more dual-screen notebooks, or is this a very specialised niche? More »

Flickr Gallery Plus Tweaks Flickr For Better Galleries

11:00AM Adam Pash | Firefox only (Windows/Mac/Linux): The Flickr Gallery Plus Firefox extension or Greasemonkey script make browsing galleries faster and easier in Flickr. Once installed and set up, Flickr Gallery Plus automatically grabs larger versions of each image in a set so you can view each picture waiting for another page to load. It even turns sets into nice slideshows that fade between photos. Like to navigate photos from the keyboard? You can advance between images with the right and left keys. If you’re a Flickr junkie, Flickr Gallery Plus is a great add-on to view Flickr sets. For more spicy Flickr improvements, check out our very own Better Flickr Firefox extension. Flickr Gallery Plus is available in both Greasemonkey script form and as an experimental Firefox extension (that means it hasn’t been vetted by the folks at Mozilla yet and you need to log in to download it), works wherever Firefox does. Photos by Qole Pejorian. Flickr Gallery Plus Greasemonkey Script [Google Code via CNET] Flickr Gallery Plus Firefox Extensions [Firefox Add-ons] More »

Picasa For Mac Beta Released, First Look

10:40AM Adam Pash | Google has officially released its popular photo management application Picasa for Macs, after years of offering Picasa as a free Windows download. More »