Workspace voyeurs, rejoice: The Guardian Unlimited photographs over 35 authors’ writing rooms. My favourite so far is Graham Swift’s; what’s yours? Tx, engtech!
Hyper but lovable author of Getting Things Done David Allen explains the meat of his GTD system in this five minute video, which covers dealing with the “stuff” in your life, reducing your to-do’s to simple “widget-cranking,” and clearing your mind. Allen comes across pretty frenetic in this quickly-cut together clip, but it’s a good primer for folks new to GTD.
[via What's the next action]As I mentioned on Friday, Australian Lifehacker readers attempting to visit the Lifehacker US are currently unable to get there, due to a broken website redirection. Currently, all of the Lifehacker related URLs (including us.lifehacker.com) are redirecting the AU site. This is *not* working as intended – usually you can hit the “US edition” button at the top of the Lifehacker AU site, or type us.lifehacker.com to travel to the US site. While Australian readers/RSS subscribers get *all* the US content plus additional local content, we understand that sometimes you want to go straight to the US site, and normally things are set up for you to do just that. Unfortunately the fix for this is out of our hands – but we’ve alerted our friends over at Gawker who look after Lifehacker in the US, and they’re working on a fix. Again, our apologies. It’s as frustrating to us as it is to you.
Need a place to store all your bottles of vino? Try ReadyMade’s quick wine rack project made out of cardboard mailing tubes. You can find these pretty cheaply at your favourite office supplies store; the fastest way to accomplish this project would be to plug the tubes into the bottom of a bookshelf – instant wine storage on the cheap. Bottle Pocket [The ReadyMade Project Archive]
There may be ancient evolutionary impulses behind modern-day office politics. If human nature is shaped by our monkey pasts, and the tens of thousands of years our species spent as hunter-gatherers, we might want to use some 100,000 year-old solutions to fights over the printer, snarky sysadmins, and lateral promotions. In that spirit, Stanford neuroscientist and author Robert M. Sapolsky offers Lifehacker some lessons from human prehistory to solve modern-day office dilemmas.
A couple of weeks ago I reviewed the ABC’s news website, and gave it a big thumbs up for incorporating lots of excellent online tools for personalising the ABC’s online news service.
So I was very keen to see what their election website is like. It was due to launch on Tuesday and has finally gone live today. I’ve already done a roundup of election websites and told you about Google’s election website. But the ABC’s site is worth checking out. As well as the things you’d expect to see, such as ABC election analyst Antony Green’s election guide, and a drop down menu which takes you to a page profiling each electorate, there are also some nifty tools like the Election Calculator, which lets you drag the pointer to see the effect of electoral swings on a national or state-by-state basis:
You can also get election news and results pushed out to you via SMS – details are here.
Popular news site Digg releases a slew of new social features, like adding photos to your profile, sending quick “shouts” and sharing links with other users.
Collaboration webapp Taskbin shares and manages to-do lists among groups. Flag tasks in order of urgency to prioritise, and write notes for yourself or share them with group members. What separates TaskBin from other tools is that it doesn’t force you to enter deadlines; it’s a simple list manager that gives an unlimited amount of users a lot of flexibility for getting things done. A great choice if you want to get items off your mind without feeling overwhelmed.
TaskBin [via WorkHappy.net]Here’s a YouTube tutorial on a quick and dirty way to use aluminium foil, a template and some glue to make a Wi-Fi extender. As a bonus, it looks like a tin foil sail, and it’s called a Windsurfer. Slightly better than a Pringles can, yeah? :) They use a printout of a template for the which comes from the Free Antennas website.
How to make a Wi-Fi extender [DL.TV]
Multi-platform browser Opera has released v9.50 Alpha which extends its support for BitTorrent by adding a uTorrent compatible Peer Exchange feature. This will hopefully speed up transfers and reduce tracker load I’ll emphasise again that it’s an ALPHA release – and I’m not an alpha girl at all – in fact I’m even a reluctant Beta user – so I’m not going there. Play wisely, and make sure you’re backed up. :) The Windows version is downloadable here. The Linux versions are here.
