Kick off your Lifehacker Monday by making sure you didn’t miss any of the biggest posts from last week:
Microsoft Opens Up POP3 Hotmail Access In Australia“It’s good news that Microsoft has finally opened up POP3 access to the service for Australian users (along with a bunch of other countries)” Microsoft Extends Windows 7 Beta Availability Until January 24thMicrosoftie Brandon LeBlanc admits that the Windows 7 beta release scramble “was not ideal” and says the company will extend its availability beyond the 2.5M cap until January 24th. Windows 7 Shortcuts Enables The Best Win7 Shortcuts In XP Or Vista (Windows)“Windows 7 Shortcuts enables some of the best Win7 shortcuts for XP and Vista.” Do Aussie Workers Need To Take More Holidays?“ When you encounter a headline like ‘Aussies working world’s longest hours’, you’re likely to pay attention — especially if, like me, you’ve just come off a week with several 14-hour workdays.” Make Your XP Desktop Look Like Windows 7If you’ve considered dual booting Windows 7 with XP or Vista but all you really want is some Windows 7 eye candy, reader Dato’ Fazly’s Windows 7-like XP desktop might be right up your alley. Road Worrier’s Favourite Travel Gadgets From CES“After schlepping around Vegas all last week, these are the five technology innovations that I’m hoping might make my travel plans easier in 2009 and beyond.” Fix “Corked” Wine With A Bowl And Plastic WrapDinner’s cooked, the guests are arriving, so you pop open that nice bottle of red and–ugh, what is that? If you’re stuck with a “corked” bottle, here’s how you can minimise the dankness. ActionOutline Is A Blazing Fast, Hierarchical Note Organiser (Windows)“Lightweight note-taking and outlining application ActionOutline Lite organizes your notes or projects in a hierarchical view with the notes on the right-hand side.” Xinorbis Analyzes Your Disk Usage (Windows)“Xinorbis is a portable and quite powerful disk analyser. Graphs, tables, trees, and report generation ensure you know what is going on with your data.” Ubiquity Sees Major Update, New Look, Better Performance (Firefox)“Popular Firefox extension Ubiquity–which adds a natural language command line to Firefox–sees a significant update today.” Windows 7 Beta’s Many Free And Legit Themes (Windows)“Customising the look and feel of Windows is a cinch with themes–problem is, Microsoft generally offers so few supported themes. That’s changed in Windows 7 Beta: Microsoft is already offering 20 fresh themes.” Google Quick Search Like Quicksilver From Google (Mac)“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.”au, organise, best posts
Not everyone finds networking to be a natural social skill. If you’re less of a networking guru and more of a wall flower, using tools to follow up can boost your effectiveness. Over at the self improvement blog Dumb Little Man, Ali Hale covers several great tips for networking effectively. Among the tips: A large part of networking is simply letting people know what you’re up to. This could mean sending the occasional “newsletter” to old college friends; you never know who might be in need of your products or services. It also means taking the time to send out cards or even holiday gifts to your clients. Don’t keep trying to expand your network whilst neglecting or forgetting about those already in it.
Fortunately the internet makes it extremely easy to maintain connections with people using tools like Facebook, Twitter and other social networks. Photo by Noah Sussman. 5 Networking Tips for Wallflowers [DumbLittleMan]
Wall mount your speakers for cheap with this easy DIY project and spend your cash on something your ears can appreciate.A cursory internet search shows that basic speaker mounts can start at $20 a piece for little more than a plastic bracket. Chris Job, a user at the DIY website Curbly, found it much more economical to create his own mounts. Whether for your new 5.1 surround sound system, your cramped media room, or when just wiring your home to fill it with music, it’s best to get speakers off the ground, furniture, and other resonant surfaces, and up to ear level. And since non-powered speakers are actually not heavy at all, with less than $2.00 in materials and an hour of work, it’s surprisingly simple to create custom brackets for mounting them on walls and ceilings.
As long as you have some basic hand tools available like a drill and saw you too can whip up enough sturdy mounts for less than you’d spend on a single store-bought plastic mount. If you don’t want wires dangling down your walls and you’re not about to punch holes in the walls and fish speaker wires into the crawlspace, don’t despair. We’ve covered several DIY speaker stand projects before like how to repurpose cheap floor lamps into speaker stands and DIY cinder block speaker stands. DIY Speaker Wall Mounts [via Make]
Whether you got a shiny new flash drive over the holidays or your old thumb drive is looking for a new lease on life, pack it full of goodness with these five killer portable applications.
As a result of the rotation of months and days in a calendar year, you can use calendars from past years. Spice up your wall with a little vintage fun.
Paul, over at the financial blog WiseBread, was skimming over a magazine when he noticed a tiny little box with an interesting tip in it. There are only 14 combination—including leap years—of months and days on the Gregorian calendar. Calculating the matching years would be an arduous task, fortunately the web site Time & Date lets you check which years are identical to the one your plug in. If you’re looking to grab a vintage calendar for 2009, the chart to the right shows a few of the compatible years. If you’re extra motivated you can even create little charts for several years into the future to keep in your wallet and always be prepared to snatch up any cool vintage calendars you come across. Some places to keep your eye out for calendars: garage sales, flea markets, eBay, Craiglist, and of course the garages and attics of your pack-rat friends and relatives. Photo by Zawezome. Old Calendars Never Really Go Out of Date [WiseBread]
