Political campaigns utilising online media have proved relatively effective in recent years, so NSW motorists’ organisation the NRMA is jumping on the bandwagon with its Roadtube site, designed to let motorists make their complaints about the nuisances associated with driving public. You can upload videos of your key motoring whinges direct to the site or leave a written comment; the NRMA is also organising three temporary video booths in various locations to let the non-tech-equipped have their say as well. Whether this will actually be more any effective than online petitions (or just general lobbying by the NRMA) is of course another question. (The NRMA also effectively claims copyright in your submissions, so if you’re planning on doing more than just ranting straight into a webcam you might want to go straight to YouTube, which the NRMA is itself using for hosting, instead.) Roadtube
Exclusive Lifehacker download for Windows: Gmail Keys adds Gmail-style keyboard shortcuts to Microsoft Outlook—saving you time when dealing with email overload if you use both regularly.
We haven’t verified any of these methods yet (as we don’t have access to iPhone 3.0), but word on the street is that iPhone internet connection sharing—aka tethering—is already working on the iPhone 3.0. Our gadget-loving sibling site Gizmodo has a detailed guide to enabling 3G tethering—but they haven’t verified it either. According to Mac Rumours, USB tethering is also working. On Tuesday Apple indicated that tethering would be an option in the 3.0 software update, but that it’s up to the providers to allow it. So while this really isn’t available to the majority of us yet, it’s a good sign of things to come. We particularly like the notion of USB tethering, which would likely mean less of a battery drain and better connection.
How to Enable 3G Tethering in Your iPhone 3.0 Now [Gizmodo] USB Tethering Seems to be Working in iPhone 3.0 [Mac Rumors]What do you do when you’re looking to make a cocktail but you’re light on a few ingredients? Paul Clark, writing for the food blog Serious Eats, points out that nearly all good cocktails follow a basic ratio and that using that ratio can yield pretty tasty results even when using non-standard recipes. For example, sour-style, liqueur-sweetened cocktails such as margaritas and sidecars usually fall into a 2:1:1 or 3:2:1 ratio of spirits:liqueur:citrus, depending on how sweet or tart you prefer the result. Remember the particular formula that’s to your liking and you can start swapping all kinds of things through to make different drinks: rum instead of brandy, apricot liqueur instead of Cointreau; while a little wiggle with the proportions may be required with some substitutions, as long as you follow the basic formula you can be assured that you’ll wind up with something balanced.
He goes on to detail other ratios and how his experiment with mixing his own cocktails using the formulas yielded positive results. If you have your own trick for mixing drinks, sound off in the comments and save your fellow readers for another round of rum and coke. Photo by Jazarella Mozarella. Serious Cocktails: Applied Math [Serious Eats]
Gmail has popularised archive as an easy way to keep your inbox clean without trashing email, but if you’re using Outlook, archive isn’t really an option—by default, at least. However you like to keep your inbox clean, one of the most time-consuming and annoying tasks in Outlook is moving your mail to an archive folder—and today we’ll show you how to automate it using Outlook’s powerful macro support.
Need a piece of stock art or a freely-licensed photograph for your site, project, or anything else? Lifehacker alumnus Wendy Boswell rounds up a whole squadron of free stock sites to check out, including Lifehacker favourites like Everystockphoto.com. Where do you turn when you need an image without having to worry about attribution or royalties?
Blogger Guillermo Esteves loves his BitTorrent, so when he’s away from his home computer, he still wants to start up any download at a moment’s notice. His solution: Use file-syncing application Dropbox to sync torrents between computers. Assuming you’ve got Dropbox installed on your home computer and work computer, for example, you can download a torrent, save it to your Dropbox folder, and let Dropbox sync that new torrent to your home computer. Using the folder monitoring feature available in most popular BitTorrent applications (including uTorrent for Windows/Mac and Transmission for Mac/Linux), your BitTorrent app of choice can monitor your Dropbox folder for new torrent files and automatically open them when they appear. In practice, that translates to dead simple, instant remote BitTorrent downloads, which we like very much.
You can also upload torrent files to Dropbox from the Dropbox web interface, so you could even do this from a computer where you can’t install Dropbox. This isn’t the only remote BitTorrent method out there, but it’s certainly a good (and easy to implement) one.
Start BitTorrent downloads remotely with Dropbox [Guillermo Esteves]Gmail users can get video and picture previews embedded in any message containing a link to a YouTube video, Flickr or Picasa Web Album pictures, or even Yelp reviews with the four latest Gmail Labs features. Play-able video thumbs, picture previews, and a Yelp summary are posted at the bottom of any Gmail message containing direct links to those services—and that’s about all these do, though it might be helpful to anyone who selectively watches or browses links at work, or otherwise knowing what you’re in for. Google Operating System suggests that the bottom placement can be done better with an extension like Interclue, which we haven’t tested out, but seems to allow selective mouse-over previews of certain media. New in Labs: YouTube, Picasa, Flickr and Yelp previews [Official Gmail Blog]
