Monday, February 23, 2009

Turn An Old Contact Lens Case Into An Ear Bud Protector

11:30PM Jason Fitzpatrick | If you’re a contact lens wearer with a cluttered stockpile of extra lens cases, don’t toss them out. Use them to protect your bud-style headphones. Instructables user Mowdish shows how to modify an old contact case to both stash your ear buds and keep the wires from getting tangled up. You simply cut away enough material from the side of the case to accommodate the stem of the ear bud when the cap is screwed back on. As shown in the photo above, you can cut away the plastic to make a perfectly sized slot for your particular style of ear buds. Not a contact wearer, or not sure where to drum up a contact case you can mod? Try asking real friendly-like at an optical store, or check out some previously posted methods for keeping your headphones tangle free—the DIY ear bud cord caddy is a starter. more details and pictures, check out Mowdish’s full tutorial below. Thanks Adam! Ear Bud Case from a Contact Lens Case [Instructables] More »

Get Ubuntu’s New Notifications In Your System Now

11:00PM Kevin Purdy | Ubuntu 9.04, the next version of the Linux desktop due in April, will definitely feature the new unified, transparent desktop notifications. But non-bleeding-edge Ubuntu users can get them now. Ubuntu blogger Stefano Forenza adds onto another Ubuntu hacker’s tutorial to give you the step-by-step terminal instructions needed to get the new notification systems on your Ubuntu desktop. The switch isn’t permanent, of course, and Forenza details how to install, test, uninstall, and replace your current notifications with the unified system for Jaunty Jackalope (boy, does that name still hurt our ears). He also notes the system’s limitations with apps that provide button-based feedback; in short, it’s not a happy compromise, at least at this point. In other Future-Buntu news, Ubuntu 9.10 (due for October 2009), “Karmic Koala,” has been officially announced and given a few missions: a heavy focus on cloud computing and netbook powers (few specifics mentioned); faster, streamlined boot-up; and, perhaps most overdue and welcoming, a total re-theme that will offer something beyond the long-running brown/orange, love/hate scheme Ubuntu fans are so familiar with at this point. Digging the Linux distro’s focus on looks and alerts? Got your own list of must-haves for the Koala? Share ‘em in the comments. [HOW TO] Get the new Notifications on Intrepid [Stefano Forenza] More »

Make Chicken Stock Like A Pro

10:30PM Kevin Purdy | Stock, the infusion of meat remainders, vegetables, and other ingredients into water, is always on-hand in gourmet kitchens. Learn how to make it in your own home for better, healthier, and more environmentally-friendly meals. More »

Tweak uTorrent’s Settings For Faster Downloads

9:00PM Kevin Purdy | Aside from having a really fast, non-filtered broadband connection, there are a few ways you can speed up your BitTorrent downloads through simple tweaks. The MakeUseOf blog runs down a few of them. The MakeUseOf poster prefers Windows client uTorrent for its manageability and efficiencty—as do we, and our readers—but most of their tricks can be tackled in any torrent grabber. The list starts out with the obvious stuff, like choosing healthy seeds with lots of peers, and gets down into the nitty gritty, like increasing Windows’ allowance of “Max Half Open TCP connections” through a third-party patch: After running the patch, you have to set the number of connections in your torrent client. For example, in uTorrent go to Options – Preferences – Advanced – net.max_halfopen. Set any number from 50 to 100. But see that net.max_halfopen is set lower than the value set in TCPIP.SYS. Always check if it is still patched because Windows updates sometimes overwrite it. 10 Ways To Speed Up Torrent Downloads [MakeUseOf.com via The Red Ferret Journal] More »

Use Gmail’s Multiple Inboxes Feature To Manage Multiple Addresses

6:05PM Jason Fitzpatrick | Stacking together a handful of separate features in Gmail gives you a unified inbox for managing multiple email accounts, and an easy way to glance at and manage them all. Earlier this month a feature appeared in Gmail Labs: multiple inboxes based on labels. Zach Gellar, over at The Official Gmail Blog, has a great tip for leveraging the multiple-inbox trick into a full fledged control panel for multiple email accounts: More »

DiskDigger Recovers Deleted Files

6:00PM Jason Fitzpatrick | Windows only: If you’ve just deleted some important media files, DiskDigger is a straightforward file recovery tool geared specifically toward recovering multimedia and document files. As we noted earlier this month in our feature on properly erasing your physical media, just because Windows says a file is gone doesn’t mean it’s lost forever. DiskDigger is a standalone application that scans the sectors of your physical media looking for complete or partial media files. Unlike other file recovery tools that look for any files, DiskDigger is focused on the ones that people most commonly accidentally delete and need to recover. In the options menu you can specify what kinds of files you want it to search for, including: images (JPEG, PNG, BMP, TIFF and.GIF), documents (DOC and PDF), and multimedia files (MPG, MP3, WMV, MOV and more). DiskDigger has active preview, allowing you to view files as they are discovered in the recovery process. The preview feature is especially helpful when scanning large drives, which can be a lengthy and intensive process. It took nearly two hours to deeply scan a 120GB SATA drive, although for smaller media recovery the process is markedly quicker; it took just 10 minutes to scan and recover files from a 2GB SD card. One of the more interesting things about the deep scan of a primary drive is the number of images that aren’t written over yet, despite their advanced age. In the screenshot above, you can see a photograph of Marilyn Monroe from when my wife and I redecorated a guest room with a 1950s/Marilyn Monroe theme over a year ago. Despite heavy drive activity, the photograph occupied a sector that remained untouched in all that time and was completely recoverable—yet more reinforcement to practice safe data handling and make sure to securely overwrite critical files. If you need to go beyond DiskDigger’s media resurrection, make sure to check out our feature on recovering deleted files with free software for a huge assortment of tips and tools for getting your files back. DiskDigger is freeware, Windows only. DiskDigger [via Download Squad] More »

Why Airline Travel Won’t Be Getting Much Faster, Cheaper Or More Comfortable

4:00PM Angus Kidman | Air fares keep dropping and planes are getting more high-tech — what’s not to like? But according to one airline expert, we can’t look forward to much more improvement in the flying experience. More »

Free Ebook On Investment Research

2:00PM Angus Kidman | If you’ve escaped the current financial market woes and have some cash to invest, then this is likely to appeal: a free ebook on how to conduct due dilgence on any investment scheme you might encounter. While the central message of due diligence could be summed up as “check everything”, extra detail is always welcome. It’s in unprotected PDF format, so now matter what your preferred platform, you should be able to read it. Due Diligence Made Simple [PDF][via OzBargain] More »

How To Frame Your Images In Photoshop

12:00PM Angus Kidman | Even when you’ve finished editing an image, adding a frame and other details can give it a much more alluring appearance. Helen Bradley’s ever-helpful Project Woman site offers a step-by-step guide to how to frame images in Photoshop, adding an outline, credits and a border for a professional appearance. Show Off! Frame your photos in Photoshop [Project Wom,an] More »

Score Cheap Newspapers (If You’re A Student)

10:00AM Angus Kidman | We’re constantly being told that newspaper audiences are shifting from print to online, so it’s no surprise that publishers are trying to hook university students — who may be as poor as church mice now but who are likely to earn a decent sum in the future — as early as possible. Both Fairfax (which publishes The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age) and News Limited (which publishes The Australian) are offering ludicrous on-campus discounts for newspapers ($30 or $40 respectively for the academic year). You have to be willing to pick up the weekday papers on campus, but at these prices, that’s not much of a sacrifice. Both deals via OzBargain More »