If a full-sized charging station is overkill for your single mobile phone or iPod, try this smaller gadget cradle that mounts neatly on a wall outlet. Craft blog Zakka Life put together a simple tutorial for making a cradle that’s perfect for single, regularly-charged items—the kinds of things you dump out of your pockets upon returning home. The DIY project pictured here is made from a bottle of lotion. Assuming you have a similar empty bottle from your own bathroom, the only cost is the few minutes you’ll spend making it. The tutorial at Zakka Life has step-by-step pictures and more information about how to make it work for your wall. Cellphone Holder for Charging [via Unclutterer]
Windows only: Everything, a super-snappy file finder that’s one of our Top 10 tiny & awesome Windows utilities, offers a new portable version that’s just as speedy as its standard-installation sibling. Everything’s portable version takes a few seconds on launching to build a database of all the files on an NTFS-formatted drive, saves it in whatever folder you’ve saved the application, then brings up a single text box to type into, and a big white space without any files listed—yet. As soon as you start typing in file names, regular expressions, or boolean-style operators (like ! in front of “not” phrases), Everything almost instantly pulls up the files matching that search. And there’s a lot that’s been added to a new version earlier this month, including support for USB/removable drives, shortcut keys, and a claim to improving search performance by 30 percent. There’s also a host of nifty options you can enable, like an HTTP server for remote file searching—hit the MakeUseOf link below for a peek at a few of those value-added items. Everything portable is a free download for Windows systems only. Everything Search Engine portable (second .zip download link) [Voidtools via MakeUseOf.com]
Google Docs takes another step toward becoming a proper document tool, adding a full-fledged find and replace toolbar, as well as a browser-based SVG drawing tool. Docs had a kind of low-powered, actually apologetic find and replace tool before that could only do whole-document, every-instance replacements. Now it’s a bit more familiar, with one box for the finding text (or regular expression), one for the replacement, and buttons and shortcuts (Ctrl+F, Ctrl+G for next) that can replace items one-by-one:
ScreenToaster, the totally web-based screencasting tool we took for a spin two months ago, has quietly rolled out a whole bunch of new features, including HD-quality YouTube uploads, Flash/QuickTime downloads, and more recording tools. The two big items in ScreenToaster’s update are HD-quality auto-uploads from your final editing screen, along with the ability to download either a .swf Flash file or a .mov QuickTime movie from your full-screen or partial screencast. There’s a drawback, however, in the form of a ScreenToaster logo embedded in the corner, and WebWorkerDaily reports that YouTube exporting loses any supplementary webcam footage and subtitles.
Internet Explorer 8 is now in general release, but that doesn’t mean that the product is bug-free. In an interesting move, Microsoft has now opened up its online bug tracking database for IE8 to the general public, meaning you can vote on which bugs you’d like to see fixed most urgently. Many of the currently listed bugs are relatively minor rendering issues, but it’s a good place to check in if you are having issues with how IE8 handles your own site, or weird performance problems. IE8 Technical Beta Bug Database [via IEBlog]
For anyone trying to get their finances under control, identifying and then eliminating debts is a vital task. But are we always rigorous enough when we make that assessment? More »
Excel can perform very complicated analyses on data, but often the trickiest part of the exercise is deciding what approach will get you the results most efficiently. Microsoft’s Excel blog offers a useful summary of the pros and cons of two common data analysis approaches: building formulas or using the pivot table function. The author admits his own bias towards formulas, but pivot tables also have some advantages (particularly if you’re working with external data). If you’ve got your own rule of thumb for making choices in these kinds of situations, share it in the comments. Analyzing Data: Functions or PivotTables [Microsoft Excel Blog]
We’re pretty keen on apps for enhancing Last.fm here at Lifehacker, but the service just became a lot less relevant for Australians. Nick over at Gizmodo reports that Australian users will now have to pay 3 Euros a month to listen to Last.fm music. While you can still access the other services Last.fm offers, as Nick correctly points out most of those are a lot less interesting if you don’t use the main player. The service is still free for the big three music markets (the US, UK and Germany), so it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that (as ever) Australia is just not a priority for new digital entertainment options. Farewell Last.FM, We Hardly Knew Thee… [Gizmodo AU]
Not long after Lifehacker posted about imminent changes to eBay Australia’s discussion boards, we got an email from the company’s PR wallahs. The good news? Next week’s redesign of the discussion boards will include a general discussion board for non eBay-topics, branded “Community Spirit”. That’s a welcome development for eBay chat enthusiasts, although only time will tell how closely monitored discussions on that new board prove to be. More »
Long, rambling emails certainly have their place among friends, but wouldn’t it be nice if there was some sort of SMS- or Twitter-like limit to the amount of text someone could fit into an email? That’s what web site Sentenc.es is all about. It provides the following manifesto:
The Problem E-mail takes too long to respond to, resulting in continuous inbox overflow for those who receive a lot of it.
The Solution Treat all email responses like SMS text messages, using a set number of letters per response. Since it’s too hard to count letters, we count sentences instead.
sentenc.es is a personal policy that all email responses regardless of recipient or subject will be a pre-determined number sentences or less. It’s that simple.
The idea? Just pick the Sentenc.es link that best suits you (there’s two.sentenc.es, three.sentenc.es, etc.), paste it in the signature of your email, and hope your manifesto is respected.
We can guarantee that it won’t be, and to be honest, it probably shouldn’t be respected in all cases, but it certainly doesn’t hurt to offer it up as a suggestion.
three.sentenc.es [via Kevin Rose]
