Electronic program guide provider IceTV has expanded its listings to include regional Victoria. Us urban slickers often forget that programming on regional networks like Prime and NBN, while similar to capital city stations, isn’t identical, so this is a welcome development (though a national and free EPG would still be more welcome). IceTV already covers regional Queensland, so hopefully expansion for other areas (rural NSW being the most populous example) will be forthcoming.
IceTVKick off your Lifehacker Monday by making sure you didn’t miss any of the biggest posts from last week:
Making The Most Of Free Wi-Fi At McDonald’s“McDonald’s rollout of free Wi-Fi offers a useful on-the-road option if you need connectivity in a hurry, but there’s some catches to be aware of.” Six Words You Should Drop From Your ResumeWhether you’re polishing your resume because you’ve been laid off or you just like to be prepared, weblog Squawkfox suggests six words you should banish from your curriculum vitae. Google Calendar Desktop Gadget Released (Cross-Platform)Google Desktop’s gadgets are looking more helpful these days, with the addition of an official Google Calendar gadget that puts your appointments at your fingertips. Minimising The Risk Of Credit Card Fraud“New figures show credit card fraud is getting worse for Australians — but also provide some handy reminders on how to reduce the chances of your card details getting ripped off.” Use Your Playstation Portable As An Additional Windows MonitorWindows only: If you’re on the look out for a new trick to teach your PSP, using it as supplemental monitor for your Windows rig is pretty sweet trick indeed. Aussies Happy Enough To Put Up WIth In-Flight Mobile Calls“A survey of 500-odd Aussies by Microsoft found that 53% were in favour of allowing in-flight calls.” Ad-Aware Updates, Boasts 10 Years Of Malware Protection (Windows)Popular malware-detection app Ad-Aware is celebrating its 10th year of computer crimefighting by releasing a new and improved Anniversary Edition. Here’s what you can expect from the new release. Rouxbe Has Seriously Impressive Cooking VideosWebsite Rouxbe breaks down high-quality instructional cooking videos into separate steps, teaching the basic skills you need to be a great cook. UrlbarExt Adds Super Powers To The Awesome Bar (Firefox)Firefox extension UrlbarExt adds 7 new buttons to the Awesome bar with a wide range of genuinely useful functionality to power up your browsing experience. Gizmo Drive Mounts ISO, BIN And VHD Disk Images (Windows)Free application Gizmo Drive mounts almost any virtual hard drive you can throw at it, including ISO, BIN, CUE, and the new virtual hard drive (VHD) images supported in Windows 7.Good news for Windows users looking to burn a quick ISO disk image to a CD or DVD: Windows 7 supports dead simple burning of ISOs.
Burning that ISO to a disc is as simple as:Double-click the ISO file (or right-click and select Burn disc image. Click Burn.
Not too difficult now, was it? Of course, it’d be even better if Windows 7 could also mount those disk images in addition to burning them, but… baby steps. In the meantime, you can still mount disk images for free with one of the many disk mounting tools we’ve featured in the past. We had a bit of trouble with the ISO burning tool crashing in our tests, but presumably those bugs will be ironed by by the time Windows 7 hits the big show (or maybe not — the basic DVD burning in Vista has always been a sea of bugs for me – Oz ed). If you’ve given ISO burning a try in Windows 7, share if you had better luck in the comments.
Firefox only (Windows/Mac/Linux): Firefox extension Hide Find Bar automatically hides the Find toolbar after it hasn’t been used in a while, helpful for those of us that constantly forget to close it. Using the extension is as simple as installing it and then heading into the options panel to disable the unnecessary status bar icon and configure your timeout setting—by default, the toolbar will close automatically after you haven’t used it for 10 seconds. This also makes the Find bar work similarly to the Find As You Type feature, which deactivates automatically when you are done searching. While the extension won’t be for everybody, it’s useful for those of us that do a lot of research and end up forgetting to close the find bar, which clutters up the interface and steals a few beloved pixels of screen real estate. For more auto-hide goodness, check out our previous guide on auto-hiding the bookmarks toolbar or just clean up some of the clutter by auto-hiding status bar icons.
Hide Find Bar [Mozilla Add-ons]Microsoft just pushed out the first release candidate of Internet Explorer 8 today. The folks up in Redmond are often criticised for dragging their heels regarding web standards—and even new features available to most other modern browsers—but IE8 is by far the best offering of the much-maligned browser to date. We’ve already walked you through IE8′s familiar but useful new features, and so far we haven’t seen any major differences. If you’ve been using IE8, let’s hear what changes you spot in the comments. There’s no central download page, so here are a couple of links to the download depending on your system:
IE 8 for XP IE 8 for Vista and Windows Server 2008
If you’re not using XP or Vista, you can find other links to IE8 RC1 with this Microsoft Download Centre search. Thanks Jeremy!
If a great recipe leaves you with leftover fresh herbs, don’t leave them to wilt away in the fridge. A few minutes in the microwave can have them ready for long-term storage. Household tips and tricks blog TipNut.com has a guide to drying fresh herbs in your microwave, oven, or in the open air. To microwave your herbs, wash them carefully, then pat dry to remove all extra moisture. Then, through the magic of controlled radiation: Place herbs in a single layer on a paper towel, cover with another paper towel. Place in microwave and heat for 2 minutes on high. Turn paper towel and microwave for another 1 minute or reheat in 30 second intervals until herbs are dry and brittle.
The microwave method is radically more expedient than using the oven or air drying, which take several hours and several weeks respectively. Make sure to watch the herbs carefully and dry them in small increments, though—you don’t want them to be tinder for a microwave fire. Before storing your herbs, ensure they are completely dry and check their container condensation the following day. If there is even a small amount of moisture, discard the herbs, because it’s not worth the risk of mould exposure. Need a source for those fresh, then dry, herbs? Get started with one of our favourite house hacks, an indoor one-pot herb garden. Photo by shawnbot. How to Dry Herbs With a Microwave [TipNut.com]
iPhone/iPod touch only: Ever with you could print a picture from your iPhone without going through the hassle of syncing, locating, and printing the picture? Air Photo wirelessly prints any photo from your iPhone with two taps. The application works in conjunction with an Air Photo Server app that runs on your Windows or Mac PC. Assuming the server is running on your desktop, printing a picture from your iPhone is dead simple: Just launch Air Photo from your home screen, pick the picture you want to print from your camera roll or other albums, then simply hit Print. Air Photo takes care of the rest. Naturally, the iPod touch doesn’t actually take any pictures of its own, but Air Photo is still capable of printing any pics you’ve synced to your Photos. It may not be something you’ll use every day, but it’s a really cool little trick—essentially bringing PictBridge-like functionality to the iPhone. The Air Photo Server is a free download for Windows and Mac OS X; the Air Photo iPhone app will set you back $US1.99 from the iTunes Store. If you’re an HP inkjet user, check out HP iPrint Photo, a free iPhone app with the same goal that only supports HP printers.
Air Photo Server Download [Sudobility via Download Squad] Air Photo [iTunes Store]2Pad kills the cringe factor of combing through a webmail account packed with attachments. Save yourself the hassle of sifting through it all and collect your pictures and video in one swoop. Last year we highlighted 2Pad as an up-and-coming product. Since then, the feature set’s expanded, most importantly expanding from a few select webmail services to any provider that offers IMAP. After signing up and providing your webmail login credentials, the mining process can take a few minutes or hours, depending on your media attachment volume. When everything’s finished, you’ll receive an email and a link to the new unsorted gallery filled with your pictures. The pictures aren’t just dumped into your 2Pad inbox—each picture is tagged with the full text of the email, and any relevant tags if you’re using a label/tag system. And pictures from your brother’s wedding won’t be buried in the pile as DSC07813 through DSC07845, as the name of the person who sent them, any text from the body of the message, the file name, or tags will find them. In addition to its core picture-mining powers, 2Pad offers media sharing, albums, and a basic image editor powered by previously mentioned Fotoflex. A basic, free 2Pad account comes with 1GB of storage and a cap of 20MB per image file and 10 minutes per video file—space and file size increase incrementally from there with paid accounts. If you’re a Gmail user and you’re partial to this idea, you may also want to take a look at previously mentioned Xoopit.
2PadThe Windows Vista for Beginners tutorial site walks through tweaking your startup items to improve performance—a common practice, but this time with a helpful twist. Most of the techniques are nothing new to Lifehacker readers (see Gina’s complete guide to speeding up your PC’s startup), ranging from trimming startup applications to using Startup Delayer to keep everything from starting at once, but this guide goes the extra mile, attempting to answer the often unaddressed question: What should I disable? The post is geared towards the less tech-savvy, but could be helpful for anybody as a resource to share with others that don’t have the know-how but are tired of slow startup speeds.
Streamline your Startup Applications & Improve Windows Performance [Windows Vista for Beginners]There are plenty of sites that offer databases of recipes, searchable by ingredients. Cookin’ With Google takes the wider approach, harnessing Google’s custom search power to return recipes from tons of food-focused sites. It’s just like performing a standard Google search, and has the same powers and limitations. Too many specific terms, and you’ll narrow your results into oblivion. Just entering “lemon,” though, is overwhelming. As the site itself suggests, combine a few ingredients and maybe a cuisine or technique—braised, fried, barbecue—and you’ll get a wealth of intriguing responses from sites like Epicurious, Chowhound, Recipezaar, and many others. Our previous picks for clean-out-your-fridge recipes have included Five Mushrooms and RecipeMatcher, and Cookin’ With Google earns a spot next to them. Free to use, no sign-up required. Thanks carlosdelvaca! Cookin’ With Google [ResearchBuzz]
