Saturday, March 21, 2009

The Pirate Bay Adds Personal RSS Feeds For Remote BitTorrent Downloads

9:00AM Adam Pash | We’re all about ways you can start BitTorrent downloads on your home computer no matter where you are, and now popular BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay adds one more way: personal RSS feeds. If you’re adventurous enough to sign up for an account at The Pirate Bay, just head to your settings page and find the URL for your personal feed. You should be able to add that feed to your BitTorrent client of choice with RSS support, and it will automatically download every new item you add via the web interface—from any computer. It’s not bad if you’re nuts for The Pirate Bay, but for a similarly simple solution that will work with any torrent site, check out how to start BitTorrent downloads at home from any computer with Dropbox. Personal RSS [The Pirate Bay Blog via TorrentFreak] More »

Synapse Brings Elegant Jabber/Google Talk To Linux

8:00AM Kevin Purdy | Linux only: It will only ever truly support Jabber/XMPP/Google Talk, but Synapse, a new alpha-level IM app, is a pretty—and pretty efficient—way to chat if you’re all about open-source communication. The developer of Synapse has a goal of spreading the love for XMPP, which is an open, extensible chat standard. That’s great for the open-minded set, and users of Google Talk, which conforms to the standard, but is obviously a bit restricting, given the number of contacts one might have on “legacy” systems like AIM or MSN. There might be room in the future for server-side conversion of other protocols to XMPP, but for the time being, it’s open-source or the road. That said, even in a theoretically buggy alpha, Synapse looks great. More »

How Do I Attach A File In Gmail From The Windows Context Menu?

6:00AM Lifehacker US Edition | Dear Lifehacker, I want to be able to right-click a file in Windows explorer, hit “Send to Gmail”, and automatically attach the file to a new email. Is this possible? Sincerely, Gmailer More »

Grab New Icons To Spice up Your Desktop

5:00AM Jason Fitzpatrick | Mix things up on your desktop with some fun new icons. Web design blog Noupe has an awesome collection of the 50 most beautiful icon sets of 2008, ripe for you to pick from. Most of the icon sets were originally intended for use in web design, but many of them are available as .ICO files and almost all of them are available as .PNG. If you don’t have the software tools on your computer to convert graphics into .ICO format for use as icons, take advantage of some of the free tools we’ve reviewed like iConvert. 50 Most Beautiful Icon Sets Created in 2008 [via Download Squad] More »

Speed Up Firefox By Limiting History Size

4:00AM Lifehacker US Edition | Firefox only (Windows/Mac/Linux): Firefox is a powerful browser with extensions to do almost anything, but it’s never been accused of being light on resources—and limiting your history size can help. Every time your browser requests a page or image from anywhere, that data is stored in your browser history for a default of 90 days—for most of us that translates to an enormous amount of data stored in the internal history database. The Mac Tips and Tricks weblog has a quick and very useful tip to make Firefox load more quickly—just visit Preferences -> Privacy -> History and turn the dial down to a more reasonable 5-10 days. You’ll need to clear your history or restart Firefox after you make this change, but in my testing the startup speed improved significantly. If you want to keep your entire computer clean instead, you can set reader favourite CCleaner to run silently with a keyboard shortcut, or set it up to run on a schedule for hassle-free system cleaning—just make sure to include Firefox in your CCleaner profile. Quick Tip To Speed Up Firefox [Mac Tips and Tricks] More »

Smush.it Bulk Optimises Images

3:00AM Jason Fitzpatrick | Decrease your bandwidth usage and save yourself some editing time with Smush.it, a web-based image optimisation service. Although designed with web site optimisation in mind, Smush.it doesn’t discriminate. Dump a bunch of images in, and smush.it shaves them down. The service strips metadata and recompresses the images to decrease the file size, while its compression algorithm does an excellent job preserving image quality with little to no visible artifacts. Smush.it supports bulk upload, and can also pull images directly from a site. It also has plug-ins for both Firefox and the Wordpress blogging platform. If disk size isn’t so much an issue as the dimensions of the image, check out two great programs we’ve reviewed for some quick and dirty cropping: IrfanView and, my personal favourite bulk cropping tool, JPegCrops. The web-based service and extensions are free, no sign-up or registration required. Smush.it [via MakeUseOf] More »

Carbonite Backup Utility Comes To OS X

2:30AM Adam Pash | The popular Windows backup tool Carbonite, released a Mac version this week—so if you’ve been wanting to get Carbonite’s excellent backup service on OS X, you’re in luck. Not a fan of Carbonite? Check out some other excellent alternatives. If you want a more detailed look at how it compares to the other popular backup utility, Mozy, check out our Mozy vs. Carbonite faceoff. More »

The Stratocaster Desktop

2:00AM Lifehacker US Edition | Reader jumping4jc’s stylish desktop takes inspiration from a beautiful wallpaper and adds useful system stats and a nicely blended dock to make an impressive desktop customization. More »

Reload Tabs By Double Clicking On Them

1:30AM Jason Fitzpatrick | Firefox: Don’t stretch your fingers or move your mouse to get a tab refresh. The Reload Tab On Double-Click extension reloads pages with a swift double-click. Soon enough, you’re in a kind of lazy-mouse nirvana, and monitoring multiple sites for live news or other updates gets a lot easier. The lightweight extension doesn’t do much more than that—not that it needs to. Reload Tab on Double-Click works wherever Firefox does. Reload Tab on Double-Click [via Mozilla Links] More »

Shampoo Less (If You Can Pull It Off)

1:00AM Kevin Purdy | It’s a daily ritual for many, but NPR asks you to consider why, exactly, you’re shampooing your hair every single day. It’s not always necessary, and can actually harm your hair. National Public Radio’s story, available in text and audio, details the history of the social ideal of washing one’s hair every day, and talks to some stylists and dermatologist who say the oil your scalp produces to protect your hair, or sebum, is stripped away and forced to produce at a higher level—kind of like the chest-shaving paradox explored in Seinfeld. “If you wash your hair every day, you’re removing the sebum,” explains Michelle Hanjani, a dermatologist at Columbia University. “Then the oil glands compensate by producing more oil,” she says. Before you start accusing us of spreading a bad hygiene trend around, take note that not all hair types tolerate a drastically less frequent shampoo schedule quite the same. And nobody’s suggesting skipping the daily bathing ritual, but sticking to hot water on certain days might save some cash, and give your hair a bit more health. Photo by flash.pro. When It Comes To Shampoo, Less Is More [NPR] More »