Web developer Ingo built a simple laptop stand from a three-ring binder and an aluminium rail. The result raises his screen, makes a more comfortable wrist rest, and even creates some handy storage for an external drive underneath.

All platforms with Firefox: Designers will love the usefulness of ColorZilla, a Firefox extension that provides colour readings in RGB and hexadecimal format. For diehard Firefox users who surf the net often, this is a convenient alternative to standalone application Color Cop. We've briefly mentioned ColorZilla before, but I find it a blessing worth its very own post when it comes to grabbing the colour data quickly and easily without having to open another application. ColorZilla's a free download that works with and wherever Firefox does.

Mac only: Get a dynamic list of recently accessed files using Smart Folders in OS X. MacWorld magazine explains how:

Create a smart folder in the Finder by selecting File -> New Smart Folder, or by pressing Command-Option-N. You'll see two lines of criteria in the folder. In the Kind criterion, select Any, or, if you want to limit it to documents, select Documents. Set Last Modified to Since Yesterday, or if you want to go back further, Within Last N Days, where N is the number of days you want to use.

Click the Other button in the location bar, then click the plus (+) button to add folders.

A "Recent Documents" Smart Folder is a great one-stop access point for files you're currently working on but that are located in different "actual" folders. Here's how to save searches as folders in Windows Vista.

Ever since Apple released the iPod Touch, they've removed essential features, rendering it less versatile than the famous iPhone. Creative thinker Travis shows that you can still manage appointments and assignments using your nifty little MP3 player, as long as you're not using your Contacts application. In this video, Travis walks us through assigning each field in the Contacts utility to make a functional to-do list. It certainly isn't as good as the event manager in the iPhone's Calendar app, but it comes pretty close.

The venerable British Library will put more than 100,000 old books - previously unseen by the public - online in a mass digitisation program focused on 19th century books.  Approximately 30 terabytes of storage will be needed to accommodate all the books, which will take 2 years to be scanned and placed online.

British Library books go digital [BBC news]

 

 

Achieving a work/life balance is a tightrope which requires effort from both the worker and their place of work. While we've had the communication technology available to support teleworking for years, it doesn't seem to have taken off, and is more likely to be the domain of the self employed freelance/consultant types. However, employers are cottoning on to the fact that one way to hold onto staff - especially people with children - is to become more flexible. And with a recent survey by the Australian Computer Society putting IT unemployment at a five year low of 3.84%, skilled IT staff may be well placed to make the case for teleworking.

In an opinion piece at CNET, Eric Cinrod quotes figures which suggest that only 13% of American business people think their workplace would let them telework. He goes through a number of reasons why it could benefit not only the employee but the business itself. Worth a read if you're thinking of making a business case of why you should be able to work from home a couple of days a week, or more.

Making the case for telework [CNET]

TechRepublic has a writeup of how users of the UNIX-based command-line email client mutt can tweak it to support some of the email triage and management techniques espoused by David Allen's Getting Things Done system:

"Mutt is extremely powerful, but lacks a little when attempting to implement GTD and the “Inbox Zero” concept. With the aid of a patch that adds support for editing the X-Label header in e-mails (mutt already supports viewing and searching based on the X-Label header), implementing the “Inbox Zero” concept is a few configuration tweaks away."

Getting things done with mutt [TechRepublic]

43 Folders dug up a gem of an article on the University of Kent's website, which looks at getting into concentrating mode, and how to train yourself to stay there.

Although aimed at students, it seemed equally applicable for anyone who needs to block out distractions and concentrate on their work. I don't know anyone who doesn't start their workday by checking their email, but I can see why they say it's a no-no:

"... You can carry out a small ritual at the start of every study session, such as taking out a figurine, wearing your study cap, or putting up a sign. This helps to tune your body into a study mode when you carry out the ritual. It also serves to tell others that you are studying and that you should not be disturbed. Do not choose an activity, such as reading your email or checking the stock market, that may lead you to procrastinate or distract you."

Along with suggesting some tried and true methods such as breaking up your task list into manageable tasks, the article also suggested a cool notion I haven't come across before - worry time.

"If your mind is side-tracked into worrying or daydreaming during the day, then set aside a specific time each day to think about the things that keep interrupting your concentration."

As someone who battles the procrastination demons all too often, I'm bookmarking that page!

Concentration strategies for students [43 Folders]

 

 

 

 This one will be of interest to legal eagles and those too cheap to shell out for a lawyer in the flesh. A not-for-profit LegalWiki has been set up to be Australia's first free online legal encyclopedia. As with Wikipedia, peer review is expected to keep the information accurate, but it will be up to contributors to flesh out the project, which has been online for about three months.

The writeup of the Wiki in the Financial Review noted that the sections on shareholder rights, prospectuses and the management of companies on the corporation law page were as yet empty.

It could well develop into an excellent resource - the founders are seeking a grant to maintain it and their information page says they hope that legal professionals contributing to the Wiki can qualify for CDP (Continuing Professional Development points), which would encourage participation from the profession.

Wikis and the Law [Financial Review]

Via the Cool Tools weblog I came across library nerd nirvana in the form of WorldCat. This Beta aims to let you search the catalogues of 57,000 libraries to find the closest library that holds the book you seek.

I had a quick zip around it, and I'm guessing that a few more libraries in Oz need to get on the bandwagon before it's much use to us. I looked up David Allen's "Getting Things Done" and it returned two Australian results - both Queensland libraries which doesn't help me much here in Melbourne.

I also entered several more obscure Australian authors (Larissa Hjorth and Cameron Rogers, both of whom I know have titles in Australian libraries including the National Library in Canberra) and the search found their books in overseas libraries but no Australian libraries.

In the meantime, I guess one helpful thing we can do is tell our local libraries they should be participating with World Cat by sending them here.

WorldCat - search 57,000 libraries [Cool Tools]

Gmail's threaded conversations have revolutionised the way many of us interact with our email, but one minor catch to the threaded interface is that if you want to delete one message in the thread, you have to delete them all. However, with a little extra legwork, it is possible to selectively remove messages from a conversation. Here's how:

1. Delete the entire conversation by selecting the email and clicking the Delete button.
2. Now search for the deleted message (don't go to your trash—search). A search as simple as in:trash will probably do. Then find and open that message.
3. Expand the message so you can see every email in the thread.
4. Now just click the Recover from Trash link for every email in the thread you want to keep until all that's left is the email(s) you wanted to permanently delete.

One final optional step you might want to take—to immediately remove the deleted email—is delete the remaining conversation from the trash forever. (Gmail will delete it eventually, but if you really want to get rid of it, you probably want to do it now.) It's not the simplest way to delete an email, but it's really the only way to do so selectively in Gmail. Thanks Jay! UPDATE: As Dustin pointed out here, you actually can selectively delete messages from the drop-down arrow on the right of messages.

Windows only: Freeware application PatchOnClick updates large files by creating patches from the new file and applying those patches to old files with a dead simple interface. At first blush, this may seem like a tool that a normal user has very little use for, but FreewareGenius explains its usefulness perfectly:

Let's say that you have a 50 meg MS Word document that consists of 300 pages. Let's say, furthermore, that you sent this document to someone by email, but that after you did this you changed a few sentences and added a single page. Instead of re-sending your friend the entire document, wouldn't it be great if you could send him/her a small 1-2 meg patch file that would simply append the older file and bring it up to speed? This is what PatchOnClick is designed to do.

In fact, PatchOnClick works for any filetype (well, sort of). To create a patch, you'll need both the old and new version of the document. Then just click the Create a Patch file button and give PatchOnClick both versions. It will examine them and create the relatively small patch file. To apply a patch, you'll also need to have installed PatchOnClick. Run the program, hit the Patch a File button, then provide the program with your old version and the patch file.

According to FreewareGenius, PatchOnFile works especially well with Word documents and ZIP files, creating patches significantly smaller in size than the original file (meaning that sending a patch will probably be much more efficient than resending the entire file), but when dealing with MP4 videos or Excel files, the patch was actually larger or nearly as large as the original (so it wouldn't be worth patching those files). When used with the right filetypes, PatchOnClick could be very useful if you regularly distribute large files over email or the internet. If you give it a try with different filetypes, let us know how it worked for you in the comments. PatchOnClick is freeware, Windows only.

Flickr user danalee advertises her open WiFi network with a simple sign that reads "Steal this connection." Right on.

A computer programmer who's out to re-program himself has written a set of "personal unit tests" he "runs" every morning to check himself. Coders out there know that unit tests are small programs that run on a daily basis to make sure your software is doing everything it should. These personal unit tests include:

Exercise (health) - Pass iff I got at least 20 minutes of any kind of exercise yesterday.

Empty inbox (mind) - Pass iff, at some point over the course of yesterday, my email inbox was empty.

Those "iff"'s aren't typo's, either—they're programmer shorthand for "if and only if." What would your personal unit tests look like? Tell us in the comments.

Since previously mentioned iTunes Album Art Grabber stopped working, programmer Josh Powell has been scrambling to develop a suitable alternative that aggregates the best album covers from three retail sources: Amazon, Walmart, and Buy.com. You won't get the 1425x1425 pixel quality that iTunes afforded us (and hopefully Apple will offer again), but regardless, if your cover art is looking rather bland, these three sources should keep you occupied.

The Zoho suite of online office apps takes a geeky turn with the launch of DB & Reports, a web-based relational database manager and data visualisation tool. Zoho DB can import and export spreadsheet data of various formats (.XLS, .CSV, .TSV) and offers drag and drop reports with charts, pivot tables, summary and table views. Embed charts in your blog and issue full-on SQL commands (of many flavors from MySQL to Postgres) on your database. While most civilians won't be writing SQL queries, Zoho DB looks like a very powerful tool for data nerds who want to slice and dice their stuff in the cloud—more like Microsoft Access than Zoho Creator. Several templates and sample databases (like world population census data and NBA game results) are available to get you started.

No doubt you've got a home wireless network or you've connected to hotspots at the local coffee shop or airport—but are you getting the most out of your Wi-Fi? Whether you want to strengthen, extend, bridge, secure, sniff, detect, or obscure your signal, today we've got our top 10 best Wi-Fi utilities and tweaks for the power wireless user. Photo by thms.nl.

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Nintendo is now including no-slip jackets with all new Wiis and Wii remotes, but Wii owners who didn't get the included jackets can grab a few free Wii Remote Jackets here.
AU - Info for how to claim your Wii jacket in Oz is here - thanks Skit! :)

Apparently the tradition of great engineers not having college degrees goes back 2,500 years. Harvard classics researcher Mark Schiefsky has shown that many great technical innovations of antiquity, such as the balance and steelyard, were created by craftspeople with no theoretical training in mathematics. A steelyard is a balance with unequal arms, whose operation is based on ancient mathematician Archimedes' law of the lever. Schiefsky poo-poos the idea that you need a fancy law to make a steelyard, and in fact has proven that steelyards were in use long before Archimedes explained it.

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The CyberNet weblog highlights how to save time browsing by setting up bookmark and folder nicknames in Opera. In Firefox, we call this keyword bookmarking, and it's by far one of the biggest browsing time savers you'll ever stumble across. For example, you could set your Lifehacker bookmark to open Lifehacker just by typing "l" in the address bar and hitting Enter. The cool thing about Opera's nicknames is that they can apply to both bookmarks and bookmark folders, meaning you can open a set of bookmarks in a folder with a quick and simple shortcut, as well. If you're not using bookmark keywords/nicknames, it's time you set a few up.

With fears of an avian flu pandemic on the rise, a group at Georgia Tech has made it easy for researchers in the field to identify and analyze the virus using nothing more than a laptop and a small suitcase-sized biosensor (demonstrated by scientist Jie Xu at left). Usually it takes several hours in a wet lab to identify strains of avian flu, but the new biosensor works in minutes. Now researchers can rapidly determine whether a sick bird is carrying the dangerous H5N1 strain of the virus that has occasionally jumped to humans.

Read More »

Got an Xbox 360 but don't want to weave 100 feet of Ethernet cable through your living room or drop $100 bucks for the official Xbox Wi-Fi adapter—and you've got a nasty DIY streak? The Geeks Are Sexy weblog details how to roll your own cheap Xbox 360 Wi-Fi with a few feet of Cat 5 cable, a cheap wireless router, and the open source DD-WRT router firmware. When you're all done, you'll be using your tweaked router as a wireless receiver rather than transmitter. Not only will you get geek points for your hacked Xbox Wi-Fi, but you'll also save around $60—which you can put toward that Xbox Live subscription.

If you're finally taking the plunge to the world of HDTV, it's tempting to go out and buy the biggest screen you can afford. But before you whip out your wallet and plop down for a 65-inch HDTV, make sure you take your practical viewing distance into account with CNET's simple TV-viewing distances chart. For example, if you want to buy that 65 incher, you'd better be able to veg out at least 8.1 feet away from the screen. Want some more HDTV buying tips? Check out our HDTV guide.