Windows/Mac/Linux: Vuze—one of the most popular BitTorrent clients around—has just added a killer feature that allows you to easily transcode any download so its playable on your iPhone, iPod, Apple TV, PS3, and Xbox 360. We’ve always been partial to uTorrent for its light footprint—and a little hard on Vuze for its relative bloat—but this update in Vuze is seriously cool, especially for people looking to watch their downloaded videos somewhere other than their desktop. Once a file is downloaded, you can simply drag and drop the download to the device you want to play it on. Smart and simple.
Vuze [via TorrentFreak]Windows only: If you’ve converted to Gmail’s new Task manager because of the tight integration with your email, you might be interested in running it as a desktop application as well. Reader Evan writes in with his simple guide to putting Gmail Tasks into a desktop application, using the built-in application shortcuts feature in the Google Chrome browser—simply navigate to https://mail.google.com/tasks/ig in Chrome, use the Create Application Shortcuts feature on the menu, and resize the window down to a smaller size. You can then access your tasks through a desktop shortcut anytime you want. The process isn’t anything new to most Lifehacker readers, but it’s a great idea that gives you quick access to your Google Tasks, which can then be accessed anywhere from your mobile device or iGoogle page. Hit the link for the walk-through, or you can add Gmail Tasks to your Firefox sidebar instead. Thanks, Evan!
Google Tasks + Chrome = Superb ToDos [Redunk.tv]Corners are tough spaces to work with when it comes to laying out a room, especially if you’re trying to fit a desk in there. Josh pulls it off with a well-placed bookcase.
Got a fridge full of food but not sure what’s still edible and what you’d regret an hour after eating? Web site StillTasty saves money with useful advice on your foods’ shelf-life and best storage practices. The site offers several ways to determine the viability of your leftovers and dusty cabinet items, including a simple search, category browsing, and a forum where you can ask more specific questions. You may have been tossing leftovers left and right in those decadent days of 2007, but these days, every dollar counts—which makes StillTasty a nice little tool. Thanks Anne!
Still TastyDear Lifehacker, I want to sync just my documents folder with an external drive, but I don’t want documents removed from the backup drive in case I need to restore them. What should I do? Sincerely, NeedsBackup
Dear NeedsBackup, You can accomplish this in short order with the freeware version of SyncBack The key to doing a one-way backup is located in the profile setup screen, where you will first choose to backup everything under the directory:
Love a good YouTube video but hate all the noise of flashing ads and inane comments? The Quietube bookmarklet creates minimalist YouTube video pages so you can enjoy the video and skip the rest.The site’s extremely simple, but it has a few features that make it deceptively powerful. First, the bookmarklet (available on the site) just takes a quick click to quiet down the noisy YouTube video. When you click it, you’re redirected to a minimalist Quietube page with the video embedded. On the Quietube page, you can change between a white or black background, depending on which you prefer. If you want to share the page with friends, you could copy and paste the link, but the site actually has a simple link to create a TinyURL for the page so it’s easy to drop the link on Twitter or elsewhere. (The TinyURL also remembers the background colour you chose.) So while there’s not all that much to Quietube, we really like what it does.
QuietubeWeb site Academic Earth is like Hulu for academic lectures, pulling free lectures from Berkeley, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale into one attractive, easy to navigate site. It’s incredible (albeit completely US-centric in terms of the universities selected). The site clearly takes its cues from Hulu and iTunes on its design, but it’s ten times better than either, because it’s open. The videos can be embedded anywhere or downloaded and enjoyed wherever you want to take them. It’s easy to use, has tons of great content, and it doesn’t cost a cent.
Academic Earth [via TechCrunch]Windows 7 only: Tiny system customising utility Logon Changer for Windows 7 swaps out the logon screen wallpaper easily. Using the utility is simple—just select a new wallpaper, test it, and you are done. The only small issue is that the image must be less than 256k and in JPG format, which means you’ll need to convert most downloadable wallpaper backgrounds. If you’d rather do it the manual way without additional software, all you really need to do is a simple registry hack originally figured out by Windows expert Rafael Rivera. Tweaks.com Logon Changer for Windows 7 is a free download. To customise your login wallpaper for XP or Vista, take a look at previously mentioned LogonStudio, and then be sure and check out our guide to getting Windows 7′s best features right now, or learn how to dual-boot Vista and Windows 7.
Tweaks.com Logon Changer for Windows 7Keeping it short and simple often pays off in Google searches. Starting today, however, any queries three words or longer pay off with longer text snippets in the results, giving you more context for your terms.It looks like Google will roll down to three or sometimes four lines to present more of your search terms in the sentences they pop up in, which we have to imagine is a pretty good thing for most anyone. Google’s also touting an improved algorithm for the “Searches related to: your terms here” splice that often appears after the second or third item on a results page. No details, really, other than Google understanding more queries, more languages, and being “more relevant.” Speaking of Google search, how do you force Google to understand a possibly confusing search in context? If you’ve got the Google-fu, educate the grasshoppers among us in the comments. Two new improvements to Google results pages [Official Google Blog]
Quick, simple file-sharing service Drop.io enabled real-time chat streams on file drops earlier this month. As of this morning, they’ve made it far more simple to bring a bunch of friends or co-workers into a (very, very) Campfire-styled web chat room with conference.io. Two clicks to create a room, email the link, and you can review uploads, call in by phone, and, coming soon, log in through a third-party chat app.
