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-dateDespite 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]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.”
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
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]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]
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]
Over at Instructables, Lifehacker reader Matt Lumpkin has posted a detailed guide to how he mounts his laptop on the back of his monitor for an iMac-like all-in-one PC. Obviously this isn’t limited to Macs, but if you want to save some space, declutter your desk, and create a nice, clean monitor-only look, the results speak for themselves. The idea and setup is incredibly simple.
Safari 4 has loads of eye candy and new features—but if moving the tabs above the address bar is too drastic a change for you, you can always change it back—if you’re a Mac user, at least. To move the tabs, simply open up a terminal window and type in the following command: defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4TabBarIsOnTop -bool FALSE
Restart Safari, and your tabs should be back to the same place they were in Safari 3. The full list of secret preferences includes disabling most of the new eye candy, from Cover Flow to Top Sites—just use the commands from the terminal window and restart Safari. We haven’t found a similar method for reverting to the old tab style in Windows, so if you’ve figured it out, let’s hear about it in the comments.
How to revert to the previous Tab style in Safari 4 [Switching to Mac]Microsoft’s Engineering Windows 7 weblog highlights the changes users can expect between Windows 7 Beta and the hotly anticipated Windows 7 Release Candidate. Many are “under the hood,” but you can also expect several visible changes.
