Do you want to be sure that your final messages and missives are heard? Death Switch is a service which sends out emails upon your unfortunate demise. Why would you want to do such a thing? The company’s website points out a variety of potential reasons like not leaving your coworkers and family high and dry without important passwords or information and being able to get a secret off your chest now that you’re gone. Over at the CNET news blog Technically Incorrect they highlight another potential use of the service, the ability to contact people you don’t have real life contact with after your death. You could set up the service to send out emails to members of mailing lists, gaming guilds, discussion boards, and other virtual communities you participate in. The basic service is free and includes a single email. The pay service, $20 a year, allows you to compose up to 30 emails with 10 recipients each. Only the pay service allows you to include attachments. Death Switch determines when to send out the messages by sending out messages to you on a regular basis. If you fail to respond to enough of those messages in a row, the emails are mailed out. What say you dear readers? A novel way to wrap up your virtual life after death or a bit too creepy? Photo by hansvandenberg30. Death Switch [via CNET: Technically Incorrect]
Expert Windows hacker Rafael Rivera finds a change in the latest build of Windows 7—you can finally customise the logon screen natively without using a third-party solution like previously mentioned LogonStudio for XP or Vista.
Reader Painkilla05′s stylish desktop was inspired from a Microsoft research video showing what computer interfaces might look like in the year 2019.
Baby proofing can be a big task and often involves a fair amount of modification to your physical environment. Avoid having to drill holes into your staircase banister with this trick. Over at the parenting blog Parent Hacks, a helpful reader suggests this great way to avoid having to drill into your staircase banister in order to install a baby gate: My husband and I have been wanting to install a baby gate at the bottom of our steps, but I didn’t want to drill into our banister. There are banister kits available, but they seemed pretty pricey for what they were. We went to our home improvement store and had them cut a 2×2 to the height of our banister. I stained it to match and then we attached it to the banister using zip-ties. Now we are able to contain our little climber without having to damage our woodwork.
Our only addition to this great tip is to suggest you make sure you’re getting heavy duty zip ties. Toddlers are surprisingly strong and a kid leaning back on gate like he’s at a rodeo might exert enough force to damage smaller and weaker zip ties. If you have your own tricks for baby proofing without having to make permanent modifications to your home, sound off in the comments below! Photo by Just Taken Pics. Babyproof Your Stairs Without Drilling Into the Banister [Parent Hacks]
Sibling site Gizmodo rounds up the most noteworthy interface and productivity-minded changes in the Windows 7 Release Candidate. Most relate to Aero Peek, the taskbar, and other interface changes, but there’s also some User Account Control tweaks and new keyboard shortcuts. Got a suggestion for the Win7 developers on what else should change?
Web site Privacychoice rolls the opt-out routines for a couple dozen advertising networks into a single javascript button—so you can stop them tracking you without having to mess with cookie settings. Most advertising networks provide a mechanism to opt out of their user tracking systems, which works by them placing a cookie on your computer that tells them not to track you. Privacychoice automates the process of submitting each of the forms, saving you a lot of time if privacy is your goal—though you could simply setup CCleaner to wipe cookies on a schedule to prevent anybody from tracking your behaviour online. Privacychoice is free, works in most browsers.
Privacychoice [via gHacks]You’re a fan of photographing food in restaurants and your kids outdoors, and you’ve got about $300 to spend on a new digital camera. BestInClass can tell you what experienced shooters would recommend buying. The site, which compiles and sorts the reviews and blog posts of more than 750 professional shooters, hobbyists, and photography web sites, doesn’t make you do any sorting, sifting, or weighing of whose opinions matter more. You check off boxes to indicate what you like to photograph, choose a size (fits in jacket, pants, or doesn’t matter), and then slide to a price limit (though bear in mind that last one will be in US dollars). The results are a nicely streamlined selection of reviews and buyer information, topped off with a specific camera BestInClass sees as your best bet. The sites uses a “fancy algorithm developed over two years” to pick out which make and model fits what you picked as your typical uses, then ranks the rest on the same criteria. You get review outtakes, average customer reviews, technical specs on each model, and not too many ads to interrupt your dig. BestInClass expects to expand into different consumer purchase arenas, but is focused on digital cameras at launch. We can’t say yet whether its algorithms do a better job than an afternoon spent feature-comparing, but it’s at least a great starting point for narrowing the field. Free to use, no sign-up required.
BestInClass [via MakeUseOf.com]Digg founder Kevin Rose apparently let go with some rumours about where this week’s iPhone 3.0 software update will take Apple’s smartphone. If what Rose said at his Diggnation SXSW party holds true, users will get copy and paste abilities by pinching and dragging two quote icons to create “copy boundaries,” then a dialog to cut, copy, or paste in previously copied text. Rose has been spot-on before, but we’ll have to wait to see if he goes two for two.
