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ABC rolls out online rentals
Posted by Angus Kidman at 5:06 PM on July 9, 2008

While it added a handful of shows to iTunes recently, the ABC has a much wider selection of programming available on its ABC Shop Download site, which launched today. $2.95 gets you a seven day rental on a whole bunch of titles (there's 250 hours of programming on offer), and there's a handful of free taster episodes available as well. For now, the service is Windows-only, though ABC executives have said Macs will be supported in a future release. [ABC Shop Download]

As per several readers' requests, I just updated the Gmail Always Show CC: user script (and its BCC sibling.) Now the scripts can show the CC or BCC fields using a key combination; and they work when replying to messages, too.
YouTube recently started offering video playback in higher-resolution, better-sounding formats like MP4, and that bump in quality can now be downloaded for desktop use as well. The Google Operating System points out two easy methods for grabbing files: A bookmarklet that adds a "Download as MP4" link to video pages when clicked, and a Greasemonkey script that automatically creates the link. Both require that you right-click and assign the to-be-downloaded file the ".mp4" extension, and both may violate YouTube's terms of use, but, as blog author Ionut points out, the same files are available in your browser cache after watching. Hit the link to grab the bookmarklet and Greasemonkey script for Firefox (and Opera) users.

Keep your home spotless by following web site Real Simple's Periodic Table of Cleaning. The table organises cleaning tasks by how often they should be performed, split up into weekly, monthly, three to six month, six to twelve month, or yearly periods. Of course the periodic guidelines aren't hard and fast, and you should feel free to adjust the schedule to your liking, but the table provides an excellent checklist and reminder—both for those household cleaning duties you should perform regularly and especially for those that come along only once or twice a year. Grab the PDF of the Periodic Table of Cleaning from Real Simple.