Friday, February 27, 2009
Fix
Little Registry Cleaner Dumps Your Registry Junk
11:30PM Jason Fitzpatrick | Windows only: If a lot of un- and re-installs left your system a bit messy, Little Registry Cleaner can clean it up, along with startup items and other system utilities. Little Registry Cleaner’s primary function is scanning your Windows registry for invalid entries. You can select which types of entries it will scan for, allowing you to be cautious and only scan for orphan program entries, but leave anything related to the system drivers or DLLs untouched. Little Registry Cleaner has a built-in backup system; once you’ve done a sweep, you can restore to the registry’s previous state if you notice things have gone awry. In addition to speedy registry cleaning, Little Registry Cleaner also has an uninstaller to ensure you don’t end up with orphaned files and registry entries to begin with. You can also edit your startup items, as Little Registry Cleaner has a clean and easy to use interface for seeing which programs are set to start at boot and their associated registry keys. Previously reviewed and popular CCleaner has a similar set of features with a more fire-and-forget style interface, but Little Registry Cleaner is a tool for cautious, incremental cleaners. Finally, it should be noted that cleaning your registry isn’t a magic potion for turning an aging cart horse into a a derby winner; it benefits you most when it removes entries that are causing buggy performance or misapplied software tweaks. As always, be cautious before rooting around in your computer’s brain. Little Registry Cleaner is freeware, Windows only. Little Registry Cleaner [via Download Squad] More »
Communicate
Share High-Res Videos With No Sign-Up At TinyPic
11:00PM Kevin Purdy | Want to send out a high-resolution clip over social networks or email, but don’t want to sign up for a video uploading account? TinyPic, the video-focused cousin of Photobucket, offer free, no-sign-up HD-ish uploads. You get up to 200MB to play around with per upload, and the site can be a little ad-tastic at times—not to mention the large number of videos you don’t want your mother to end up searching through. But the embeds are free, and look pretty great for no-commitment video sharing. Here’s a clip uploaded by a CNET editor for testing: More »
Organise
Add Links To Safari 4’s Top Sites In Windows
10:30PM Kevin Purdy | Safari 4’s Top Sites is a flashy, useful feature, but it’s not exactly intuitive how to manually add a site to it. As the Tech-Recipes blog points out, one of the easiest ways to bulk-add your links to Top Sites is to create links to each site on the desktop, either by dragging the URL from any browser’s address bar or manually creating them with a right-click New/Shortcut action. Then simply launch Top Sites and drag your desktop bookmarks into the grid. You’ll see the site thumbnail soon, but you won’t see the delete/pin/update notifications while Safari is running this time. Launch Safari again, and all is well. I’ve found that another, semi-easy way is to simply type in the URL of a site into Safari’s address bar while Top Sites is open, and don’t hit enter or head to the site. Then just drag the URL you typed in down into the Top Sites grid, and you’re good to go. Got an easier solution, or another Top Sites hack? Tell us about it in the comments. Safari 4: How to Add a Site to Top Sites [Tech-Recipes] More »
Organise
4:30PM Angus Kidman | Sleep isn’t everything! Give your leisure activities a Lifehacker tinge and check out these ideas from the past week:
Learn how to complete a high-speed email cleanup
Check out the Google Search box on Windows (warning: not for the IE-phobic)
Decide whether a Comes With Music phone makes sense
Build yourself some flash cards with Cramberry (warning: not for the study-phobic)
Get your iTunes lyrics database up-to-date
More »
Five Things To Do This Weekend
4:30PM Angus Kidman | Sleep isn’t everything! Give your leisure activities a Lifehacker tinge and check out these ideas from the past week:
Learn how to complete a high-speed email cleanup
Check out the Google Search box on Windows (warning: not for the IE-phobic)
Decide whether a Comes With Music phone makes sense
Build yourself some flash cards with Cramberry (warning: not for the study-phobic)
Get your iTunes lyrics database up-to-date
More »
Travel
3:00PM Angus Kidman | Despite Twitter’s increasing visibility, the question “What’s the point of it?” still comes up quite a lot. The TwiTip blog offers one intriguing answer to that question: drawing the attention of the wider world when you’re stuck on a plane that’s (say) been sitting on a runway for two hours while the airline tries to find someone to refuel it. As the post itself notes, tweeting about your situation won’t necessarily make things get fixed any quicker — but it can’t hurt, and it’ll help to pass the time.
Using Twitter to Get Travel Assistance in an Emergency [TwiTip]
More »
Can Twitter Get You Out Of Travel Trouble?
3:00PM Angus Kidman | Despite Twitter’s increasing visibility, the question “What’s the point of it?” still comes up quite a lot. The TwiTip blog offers one intriguing answer to that question: drawing the attention of the wider world when you’re stuck on a plane that’s (say) been sitting on a runway for two hours while the airline tries to find someone to refuel it. As the post itself notes, tweeting about your situation won’t necessarily make things get fixed any quicker — but it can’t hurt, and it’ll help to pass the time.
Using Twitter to Get Travel Assistance in an Emergency [TwiTip]
More »
Design
1:30PM Angus Kidman | Photography is a visual medium, but that doesn’t mean visual skills are the only ones that matter if you want to take great photographs. According to Paul Hermann, a photographer for 20 years and director of the photography collective Red Eye, the successful photographers he has met all have several traits, including obvious ones like an original vision and a solid work ethic. But as he explained during a presentation on successful freelance photography at the Focus On Imaging conference in Birmingham, they also have a less obvious common trait: they’re all well-read and curious about a wide range of topics. “They all have an interest in the world, they read a lot,” Hermann explained. Being better informed translates into more ideas and more original images. That’s something you don’t need specialised equipment to achieve, and it’s something you can use to stand out in a hyper-crowded market. As Hermann pointed out: “There’s vastly more people who want to become photographers than can be.” More »
Want To Take Better Photographs? Read More Of Everything
1:30PM Angus Kidman | Photography is a visual medium, but that doesn’t mean visual skills are the only ones that matter if you want to take great photographs. According to Paul Hermann, a photographer for 20 years and director of the photography collective Red Eye, the successful photographers he has met all have several traits, including obvious ones like an original vision and a solid work ethic. But as he explained during a presentation on successful freelance photography at the Focus On Imaging conference in Birmingham, they also have a less obvious common trait: they’re all well-read and curious about a wide range of topics. “They all have an interest in the world, they read a lot,” Hermann explained. Being better informed translates into more ideas and more original images. That’s something you don’t need specialised equipment to achieve, and it’s something you can use to stand out in a hyper-crowded market. As Hermann pointed out: “There’s vastly more people who want to become photographers than can be.” More »
Fix
12:00PM Angus Kidman | Microsoft has released a “cumulative update” designed to improve performance in Outlook 2007, with claimed improvements in start-up times and overall stability as well as some bug fixes. But just how well-tested is it? The Microsoft Office Outlook team blog proclaims that the patch “should address many concerns for both individual users and those managing large deployments of Outlook alike” and boasts “your daily experience with Outlook will be greatly improved”. However, the download page is rather more circumspect, warning against installation unless you’ve experienced some highly specific symptoms (rather than the random crashes which are part and parcel of Outlook usage for most of us). Given that ambivalence, I’m holding off for a day or two; if you give the patch a try, let us know if it makes any difference in the comments.
Outlook 2007 hotfix package
More »
Microsoft Releases Outlook Patch, Can’t Decide If It’s Essential Or Experimental
12:00PM Angus Kidman | Microsoft has released a “cumulative update” designed to improve performance in Outlook 2007, with claimed improvements in start-up times and overall stability as well as some bug fixes. But just how well-tested is it? The Microsoft Office Outlook team blog proclaims that the patch “should address many concerns for both individual users and those managing large deployments of Outlook alike” and boasts “your daily experience with Outlook will be greatly improved”. However, the download page is rather more circumspect, warning against installation unless you’ve experienced some highly specific symptoms (rather than the random crashes which are part and parcel of Outlook usage for most of us). Given that ambivalence, I’m holding off for a day or two; if you give the patch a try, let us know if it makes any difference in the comments.
Outlook 2007 hotfix package
More »
Communicate
10:30AM Angus Kidman | Optus has a shockingly poor reputation for the performance of its 3G network, so it’s no surprise Australia’s #2 telco is looking for ways to improve. Suzanne Tindal at ZDNet reports that Optus is using “web accelerator technology” (essentially sophisticated proxy systems) to improve performance, especially on iPhones. Mind you, that still won’t deal with other issues like sneaky calling card policies and declining broadband value.
Optus trialling 3G web accelerator [ZDNet]
More »
Optus Using Web Accelerator To Boost Mobile Performance
10:30AM Angus Kidman | Optus has a shockingly poor reputation for the performance of its 3G network, so it’s no surprise Australia’s #2 telco is looking for ways to improve. Suzanne Tindal at ZDNet reports that Optus is using “web accelerator technology” (essentially sophisticated proxy systems) to improve performance, especially on iPhones. Mind you, that still won’t deal with other issues like sneaky calling card policies and declining broadband value.
Optus trialling 3G web accelerator [ZDNet]
More »
Work
Google Apps Status Dashboard Tells You If A Google App Is Down
10:00AM Adam Pash | On the heels of this week’s Gmail outage, Google’s released a new App Status Dashboard that rounds up performance info, site problems, and outages for Google apps including Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, and more. So next time your Gmail account takes a turn for the worse, you can check up with Google to see if it’s just you or if it’s a system-wide problem. [Google Apps Status Dashboard] More »
Communicate
9:00AM Angus Kidman | At Lifehacker we’re suckers for any kind of free Wi-Fi, so the news that iiNet customers can now get free Wi-Fi access in Starbucks stores was pretty much guaranteed to bring a smile to our faces. Of course, that’s not as open an offer as McDonald’s free Wi-Fi for everyone, or even as widespread an offer following last year’s Starbucks store shrinkage. But given iiNet’s market share, it’s still going to offer some caffeine-fuelled on the go work convenience to a lot of people.
Starbucks [via APC]
More »
Starbucks Offers Free Wi-Fi To iiNet Customers
9:00AM Angus Kidman | At Lifehacker we’re suckers for any kind of free Wi-Fi, so the news that iiNet customers can now get free Wi-Fi access in Starbucks stores was pretty much guaranteed to bring a smile to our faces. Of course, that’s not as open an offer as McDonald’s free Wi-Fi for everyone, or even as widespread an offer following last year’s Starbucks store shrinkage. But given iiNet’s market share, it’s still going to offer some caffeine-fuelled on the go work convenience to a lot of people.
Starbucks [via APC]
More » 