Windows only: MultiPhotoQuotes is a feature packed replacement for the basic My Pictures Slideshow screensaver included with Windows. If you’re running a multi-monitor setup, your favourite feature in MultiPhotoQuotes will definitely be the support for your extra screen space. The basic My Pictures screensaver will only put one picture on a single screen at any given time, which even on a small multi-monitor setup leaves a lot of empty space. MultiPhotoQuotes fills the entire available screen space with a grid of photos. If you like a good quotable every now and then, you can keep the quotes feature on to randomly sprinkle quotes from the included quote books.
Microsoft offers Windows 7 as a free beta to get feedback on what needs fixing. Still, if you’re endlessly annoyed with the “Send Feedback” link in every single title bar, there’s a way to remove it. Hit the Tech-Recipes blog for a simple registry tweak that should take less than two minutes to pull off, removing the “Send Feedback” link for good.
Windows/Mac/Linux (Firefox): Fireclip, a free plug-in that monitors specific sections of web pages, puts the at-a-glance convenience of the OS X widget screen in a Firefox tab.
The Projectwoman blog offers a neat rundown of one of Photoshop’s more interesting features – the ability to take light tones from one image and apply it to another, effectively turning day into night or vice versa. As the post points out, the automated process will probably need a little tweaking for the best results, but it can be a very effective trick.
Turn daylight into sunset [Projectwoman]Mac OS X only: We’ve been crazy about Quicksilver—a free application launcher for Macs—for years now. Today Google is releasing a new search-and-launch application called Google Quick Search developed by Nicholas Jitkoff, the developer of Quicksilver.
Like Quicksilver, Google Quick Search not only searches for and launches files and applications—it also can drill down into content and perform context-specific actions. So, for example, Google Quick Search indexes my Address Book contacts; if I perform a quick search to pull up my contact card, I can hit Tab to drill down into possible actions to perform—like composing an email or starting an IM chat.
If you’re one of the people who relies on OneNote for storage, planning and organisation, then be sure to grab the 2009 calendar template for the product. (Yeah, you should have done that a fortnight ago, but we’ll just assume you were on holidays.) If you fancy producing a template yourself, check out this basic guide from Microsoft.
2009 Calendars [via Inside Office Online Blog]You’ve only got three days left to complete our survey for your chance to win a Bravia Z Series LCD TV. That’s plenty of time to answer all those brilliantly worded questions. So get going. You know the drill; simply click through to the survey, tell us about yourself and voila! The TV could be all yours.
[Survey]
A complaint I sometimes hear about IKEA furniture is that it’s so ubiquitous that it lacks any distinctiveness, which is why hacking it has proved such a popular topic. One unusual way to make your IKEA purchase less standardised is to chop it up and reassemble it with a few motors, which is what sculptor Jeff Carter did with the ever-popular LACK table. The motor doesn’t make them it useful as a household surface (and would be fiddly to implement), but slicing a couple up could give you an interesting new twist on the lounge room coffee table.
Jeff Carter[via IKEA Hacker]Lifehacker has been writing about David Allen’s advice on getting more from your time since its earliest posts. We recently peppered Allen with questions about picking up where GTD left off; here’s what he had to say.
Most of the discussion to date of the forthcoming USB 3.0 standard has centred around its much higher speeds. As the USB Forum itself likes to point out, a 25GB HD movie file could be copied in 70 seconds with USB 3.0 (versus an estimated 14 minutes on the current USB 2.0 standard). However, there’s another feature that’s potentially equally useful, especially for travellers: USB 3.0 overcomes the current USB limitation on recharging devices that are completely out of power. While USB charging via a notebook can be incredibly useful, it generally won’t work if the device has gone completely flat — at that point, you need it to be plugged straight into a wall socket until it’s got enough charge for your PC to recognise it when you connect it. As Jeff Ravencraft of the USB Forum explained at last week’s Storage Visions conference in Las Vegas, that’s no longer the case: “We now supply power to the device if you have a completely dead battery.” USB 3.0 isn’t expected to be widespread until next year (and isn’t supported in the current build of Windows 7), but it’s still something to look forward to. More »
