When you want the latest update to an important RSS feed sent to you wherever you are, the moment it's published, give the Notify.me notification web service a try. Set up source feeds in Notify.me and have new items sent to you via instant message or email. I signed up for Notify.me two days ago and got no new items from my feeds for a day; then yesterday afternoon the IM bot kicked in and I was getting notifications of new feed updates faster than my check-every-15-minutes desktop feed reader. Suggested uses for Notify.me include job listings, social network updates, and search feeds.

Send a batch of email, IM, SMS or even voice messages with Notifu. The site is designed as a iPhone webapp, but it'll work in any browser. Simply add a list of recipient email addresses, IM handles or text or voice phone numbers and send a message to a group of folks quickly and easily no matter how they prefer to be reached. Your typewritten message will be delivered to callers or voicemail via text-to-speech, and you don't need an IM account to send messages to AIM, Yahoo IM, GTalk or other chat clients. Sign up to register and you can save a set of contacts, get confirmation of message delivery and manage replies.

Feel like Outlook is a bit too keen to tell you every time you get new mail? Trying to be more disciplined in when you check email? The Outlook Team Blog has a handy guide to how to switch off the various notifications within Outlook. This isn't a particularly obvious process, but the post also promises improvements in the future:

They're a bit hard to find in our Options dialogs, and that's something we hope to address in a future release of Outlook.

Editor: Say hello to fellow tech writer and Lifehacker reader The How-To Geek, who was kind enough to pull together some of best Windows Vista power tweaks here on Lifehacker today.
Whether it's the nagging prompts or the irritating notifications, Windows Vista's default settings can grate on your nerves... which doesn't help you be the productive person you want to be. A few simple tweaks can cut down on the irritation—and drastically alter your views on Vista. Let's take a look at some of the best ways to tame the Vista beast and make it a less naggy operating system to work on.

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If you're a Windows Vista user tired of seeing lower-right-corner reminders about security, system updates, or other occasionally annoying speech balloon announcements, the How-To Geek has got a cure-all fix. It shouldn't be undertaken by anybody who isn't sure if they can live without system or application system tray pop-ups, but if you're set on having a distraction-free desktop, you can head to this registry key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced

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You never have to decline 17 zombie bites again: Facebook finally offers long-overdue opt-out capabilities for applications and by sender. When you receive an application request, you can now click the "Block This Application" link to never see that application again, or if you have a friend who's particularly aggressive with the invites, you can also hit the "Ignore All Invites From This Friend." Can I get a Hallelujah! Update: A reader informs us that this has been in place since February. Apologies for the old news! We've been avoiding Facebook for awhile now because of all the, uh, application spam.

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Windows only: You've followed our beginner and intermediate guides to BitTorrent, and you know how to protect your privacy when downloading, but ever since you started on this wild BitTorrent journey, you've wanted to find your way to the BitTorrent promised land—a private tracker. The problem is, they're not easy to get into (trust me, I've tried). Freeware application Open Registrations Checker monitors some of the most popular private trackers for open registrations, alerting you whenever a tracker you're watching opens its registrations. It's not perfect, but it may give you just the heads up you need to get your foot in the door. Open Registrations Checker is freeware, Windows only, requires .NET 2.0.

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All platforms: Normally we don't feature individual widgets that require downloading a separate engine to run them, but the Informer Yahoo Widget might be worth the effort. Place system monitoring tools right on your desktop with Informer, like Wi-Fi signal strength, system uptime, and disk use. Keep tabs on your favourite web site feeds and inboxes with RSS and email notifications for Yahoo Mail, Gmail, and any other POP or IMAP account. Add shortcuts to local folders, favourite web sites and images as well with Informer. Check out Cybernet News' walkthrough of what you can do with this full-featured widget, which is a free download for Mac or Windows and requires the Yahoo Widget Engine to run.

Mac OS X only: Freeware Mail.app plug-in Mail.appetizer notifies you of incoming messages by displaying a preview of their contents. Growl users may wonder why you'd choose Mail.appetizer instead of the GrowlMail plug-in, which offers the same functionality. Well, GrowlMail has a buggy history, especially with Leopard. (In fact, I suspect it's the reason why Growl's currently broken for me). The Mail.appetizer plug-in is freeware, Mac OS X only. The current version is a beta, so be prepared to run into a few bugs.

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Want to keep an ever-present eye on an item you just know is going to go discount at any moment? Price!pinx offers a price-watching service that doesn't require searching (like PriceAmbush) or limit itself only to Amazon, eBay, or any other big-name site. You provide your email address to Price!pinx, then add their bookmarklet to your browser's links bar. When you see a price you think/hope will go lower, highlight it and then hit the "!pinx" link. The site will then email you when it notices a drop in the digits. Looks like pretty handy stuff, although I haven't had the good fortune to see an item go on sale in the last 30 minutes. Let us know if you've used this service, or prefer another, in the comments.

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