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Lifehacker
Outlook users, if you find yourself entering the same things into email messages, you should take a look at the Quick Parts feature, which saves snippets of both text and images for easy reuse. While Gina briefly mentioned this feature in her guide to Tweaking Outlook to empty your inbox faster, let's take a closer look at how to use it.
Your Start menu and Applications folder are growing larger and harder to navigate every day, but with a solid application launcher at your side, you'll never notice. On Tuesday we put a call out for your favourite application launchers, and over 400 spirited comments later, we've pulled out the five most popular. Take a look at the time-saving app launchers that made the list, and then cast your vote for the one app launcher to rule them all.
A user from DIY web site Instructables details how to cut a watermelon to easily remove most of the seeds so you don't have to endure the familiar seed-spitting routine. The key is cutting the watermelon along the seed line, allowing you to simply scrape off the majority of seeds. Of course this is a lot more complicated than just cutting your watermelon in half, grabbing a spoon, and digging in, but if you can't stand the seeds and you don't want to pay more for lesser quality, more expensive seedless watermelon, this little melon hack may be worth a try. Now you know how to cut a mango, a pineapple, and a watermelon with confidence.
Next time you wipe your PC's hard drive clean and reinstall Windows with that old installation disc, you don't want to connect your fresh, unpatched and vulnerable system to the internet only to download 176 new updates from Microsoft. If your XP installation CD is older than 2004, once your system is online, you'll have to wait for hefty service packs to download, chained to your mouse while pushing the Next button, watching progress bars, and rebooting multiple times. Wouldn't it be better to start your installation, head out to run errands or grab coffee, and come back to an up-to-date system before your system gets online? It's possible, using some free software and a blank disc. After the jump, I'll show you how to create an automated, customised XP installation CD or DVD, that includes Microsoft's official-but-not-released Service Pack 3 for Windows XP.
Mac OS X only: Freeware application FlashMount streamlines software installation and speeds up mounting various disk images like DMG and ISO files. Intended as a default replacement for OS X's built-in DiskImageMounter.app—the program that traditionally mounts disk images—FlashMount forgoes the progress meter, presumably because the mount is fast enough you don't need it. The second thing FlashMount does to speed up software installation is automatically bypass the EULA (the licence agreement) for downloaded software. That may be fine if you never read the EULAs anyway, but if you're particular about licenses you accept, it's probably not for you. FlashMount is freeware, Mac OS X only.
Firefox only (Windows/Mac/Linux): The Auto Context Firefox extension automatically shows your right-click context menu as soon as you select text on a web page, taking a step out of your workflow if the right-click menu is your go-to toolbox. Once installed, Auto Context also provides extensive options for tweaking your right-click menu to your heart's content. Since I can only think of two reasons you'd select text with your mouse—either you want to copy it or you want to perform a right-click action on the text—I'd heartily recommend that you either install this extension or the previously mentioned AutoCopy extension, which automatically places selected text to your clipboard. Auto Context is a free download, works wherever Firefox does.
Windows only: Free, open source application HotKeyBind creates keyboard shortcuts for common Windows actions, from launching applications and opening files to searching the web and shutting down your computer. HotKeyBind is even useful for Windows actions that already have shortcuts of their own or can be assigned shortcuts, because HotKeyBind provides a universal interface for creating and managing all your custom keyboard shortcuts and existing Windows shortcuts across your system. HotKeyBind is impressively robust on features, including text-replacement (though we still heartily recommend Texter for that), making it a must-have for the keyboard junkie. HotKeyBind is free, Windows only.
New York Times food columnist Mark Bittman used to look down on the microwave for any sort of cooking beyond reheating leftovers or softening ice cream. But after a couple of conversations with microwave cooking experts and a few experiments of his own, it turns out that the microwave is a more valuable tool in the kitchen than some of us give it credit for.
For any vegetable you would parboil or steam, the microwave works as well or better, and is faster. Put the vegetable in a bowl with a tiny bit of water (or sometimes none), cover and zap. Asparagus: two minutes; artichokes (a revelation): six; cauliflower (try my cauliflower with tomatoes and pimentón): five; potatoes or beets: four; spinach: one or two; eggplant: we'll get to that.
Blogger Samar Kamat loves keeping up with his favourite web sites with Google Reader, but noticed Reader can take forever to load feeds with longer items. His solution? Switch to List View.
The default view in Reader is the Expanded View, which is great for 80% of feeds, like Slashdot, where posts are short and concise. However, for very verbose and object-heavy posts, it takes a load off of your bandwidth to load only one page at a time. So next time you're waiting for the images on your tutorial to load, just switch to List View and enjoy the speed.
Readers are submitting their best life hack for a chance to win an autographed copy of our new book, Upgrade Your Life. Here's our latest winner.
Reader Jeadly got sick of hitting the Caps Lock key without meaning to, and uses a custom utility to stop the madness without disabling it completely. Jeadly writes:
I've written an AutoHotkey script that handicaps the Caps Lock key. I suppose I should call it "Handicapslock." With my script running, the Caps Lock key doesn't lock "on" unless you double tap it, so its behaviour is more like the Shift key.
