It's not quite Jack Kerouac but Lifehacker will be hitting the road this weekend, travelling from Melbourne to Sydney via Gundegai. Thanks to an awesomely geeky going away present, we'll be road testing the Tom Tom One XL as we go.
Sadly I haven't figured out how to Twitter via mobile phone, so I won't be updating from the road, I have managed to figure out how to update Twitter from my mobile phone (fear my microblogging skills) so I may do some updates from road (twitter name: stokely) but you can expect to see my notes on the Tom Tom here on Lifehacker AU sometime next week.

See you on the other side. :)

If you're planning an overseas trip this Christmas (lucky you!) then you should be double checking your passport and any necessary visas round about now. A lost passport will take 10-15 days to replace, so if it's gone missing you really want to find out now rather than the day you travel!

The Age has written up a handy guide of what to do if you lose your passport, which includes contact details for the Australian Passport Information Service. Bear in mind that it costs $200 to replace an adult passport, so it's worth taking the time for a second look before reporting your passport lost.

Passport Panic Stations [The Age]

Build the perfect playlist this holiday season with weblog Download Squad's iTunes smart playlist tips. With the holidays quickly approaching, many of us start downloading songs gearing up for the season. Unfortunately that often means you end up with a music library littered with Christmas tunes that are hard to find when you want them and pop up on shuffle when you don't. The playlist itself casts a fairly broad net, but you can tweak the filter's rules as you go. Alternatively, you might try this alternate method for tagging and sorting your holiday tunes. Let's hear how you keep your occasion-specific tunes corralled in the comments.

With winter's uninviting chill just around the bend, falling out of your workout routine is tempting (who wouldn't rather stay by the fire drinking apple cider than go for a jog). To help you cope, weblog Lifehack.org suggests 15 ways to restart and keep your exercise habit going.

Reward Showing Up - Woody Allen once said that, "Half of life is showing up." I'd argue that 90% of making a habit is just making the effort to get there. You can worry about your weight, amount of laps you run or the amount you can bench press later.

The post echoes very closely these suggestions for starting your exercise habit, but if you've neglected a few workouts lately because of the cold, it might be just the motivation you need.

Keep a screwdriver with your everywhere you go with the coin-sized Pocket Screwdriver. At 1" wide, this pocket screwdriver sports a variable thickness so it can fit snugly in several different sizes of screws—meaning it should work a good deal better than the dimes, quarters, and pennies you've been using up until now. The pocket screwdrivers come in packs of 12 for $8.50. If you're looking for a little more power in your pocket, check out the credit card survival multi-tool.

You might have thought this one was way too obvious to warrant actually saying, but no, apparently some people do need to be told:

"When sending a missive to a foreign diplomat, it’s best if you don’t use Babel Fish to handle the hassle of translation for you."

According to the How to Split an Atom blog, some Israeli journalists learned this lesson the hard way after using Babel Fish to translate a message to a Dutch foreign ministry. Wow. Read the full text of what they sent over at HtSaA, it even contains unintentional slurs against the guy's mother. Way to go!

Babel Fish is Not a Diplomatic Tool [How to Split an Atom]

 

 

 

If you have limited space and a burgeoning CD collection, this storage hack from the Ikea Hacker blog might appeal.

The trick is basically to put two CD storage units back to back and on wheels, so you can rotate the new unit to get to the CDs at the back. They've used an old Robyn CD shelving unit from Ikea but there's no reason it wouldn't work for any pair of CD shelves.

As long as you don't mind having to swivel it to see the CDs at the back, this is a nice space-saving idea.

Limited Space? Just Double up the Storage [Ikea Hacker]

Windows/Mac/Linux (Firefox): Simplify your morning coffee-and-web routine with the Morning Coffee Firefox extension. Morning Coffee bookmarks your regular reads by day (or by combinations of days) and opens up the appropriate set of bookmarks for each day with the click of a button. So let's say you check an infrequently updating site every Tuesday and Thursday, but you want to get your fix of Lifehacker every day. You can set up Morning Coffee to open specific sites only on specific days so that each morning you're ready to do your routine reading, you'll get exactly the sites you want. Granted, you could do something similar by creating bookmark folders for each day, but getting the same feature set out of that method wouldn't be nearly as simple. Morning Coffee is free, works wherever Firefox does.

AU - I'm pretty sure we've already written up Morning Coffee - apologies for the duplication.

The newspapers are all atwitter about how competitive the rental property market is at the moment - particularly in Sydney. But even in a competitive market you can make househunting a lot easier for yourself by following a few simple steps. I just rented a lovely house in a popular inner city suburb of Sydney for less than I expected to pay - and it only took me two days of looking at houses. Here's how I did it.

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Accessing Gmail via IMAP with Outlook cramping your email style? If you find yourself waiting too long for your Outlook inbox changes to sync back to the mothership, a few settings can speed up the process. By setting Outlook to download message headers only, retrieve new messages less frequently, and work offline, your Gmail in Outlook experience can be smoother and faster. What Gmail/IMAP/Outlook techniques are working for you? Let us know in the comments.

Share files over the internet quickly and easily with web site Drop.io. We've mentioned a number of similar file sharing services in the past, but what's great about Drop.io is it's speed (requires no registration for any party), ease of use (just send a simple link to whoever you want to share the files with after you've uploaded them), and clean interface. Basically uploading files creates a web site to organise them. You can password protect the files, and anyone who you share the link with can add to the repository. Drop.io does have a 100mb upload limit—so it's a bit more suited for sharing documents and images than music and videos—but overall the slickness and minimalism of the site really makes it stand out among its peers. It's tough to say where they plan to make their money (so who knows if/when the crazy ads will come in), but for the time being it's a terrific tool.

Sick of tossing spoiled fruit, veggies, meat, and other leftovers in the trash because they sat around the fridge too long before you got to them? The Former Fat Guy Blog offers an incredibly detailed guide to freezing all kinds of foods to eat later. The article runs down how long foods will last in the freezer, how to reduce the size of ice crystals that form on them, how to prevent fruits from browning and how to blanch vegetables before you freeze so they retain their taste and freshness. Some serious freezer power tweaks here; a great read especially for folks just learning how to cook and store food.

Mac OS X only: Process all of your email from the comfort of your keyboard with free, open source Mail.app plugin Mail Act-On. If you're new to Mail Act-On, just install the plug-in and then read the documentation for how to create rules for filing emails with your oft-used actions. When all's said and done, Mail Act-On is similar to the Gmail Macros script but with less focus on navigation and much more potential for creating powerful rules for dealing with email. We've mentioned this plug-in once before, but this latest version adds support for Leopard. Mail Act-On is free, Mac OS X only. If you use Mail Act-On, share your favourite actions in the comments.

Watch YouTube videos more efficiently with Better YouTube, a brand new Firefox extension that compiles our favourite YouTube Greasemonkey scripts into a single convenient package. Better YouTube smartly enlarges videos for better viewing, hides user comments, declutters the page and disables autoplay (great for vids open in a background tab.) Following in the footsteps of Better Gmail and friends, customise your online video-viewing with Better YouTube.

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Mac OS 10.5 only: With VNC built right into Leopard, you can remote control your Mac from any other Mac via iChat or the Screen Sharing client—OR any PC using the right VNC client. Apple doesn't advertise this, but since Screen Sharing is just regular old VNC (albeit with a much more grokable name), our favourite Windows VNC client, TightVNC, works with it just dandy—with one small catch.

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US centric: A new Google Earth layer keeps tabs on political spending by pinpointing where and for what projects U.S. government officials are budgeting funds for across the country:

Members of Congress know where the money is going: now citizens can, too. The Sunlight Foundation today released a Google Earth application that plots the locations for almost 1,500 earmarks in the House Defense Appropriations bill. This graphic illustration of defence earmarks gives anyone with an internet connection a bird's-eye view of exactly where Congress is directing federal spending—and the ability to investigate whether the earmarks address pressing needs, favour political contributors or are simply pure pork.

CNet news reports that the map's points, attached to the U.S. House of Representatives defence spending bill is heavy on military tech projects like "ubiquitous RFID chem/bio detection" and "semi-autonomous robotic manipulation and sensing." You'll need Google Earth running on your desktop to open the freely downloadable map layer file.

We've previously highlighted unnecessary meetings as a workplace practice that should be over, but not all of us call the shots. For those brave enough to point out the cost of unnecessary meetings, or look at the cost of their own time, salary comparison website PayScale offers the free webapp Meeting Miser. The in-browser timer uses actual or estimated salaries of everyone in the room to tally up the cost of a meeting by the second, the minute, or in total. There are lots of personal timers with more functionality out there, but Meeting Miser's narrow time = money focus makes for a persuasive argument. Meeting Miser is free to use, but requires a PayScale registration to save meetings for later reference.

Windows only: Free-for-now to-do list application Tudumo is styled for those aiming at Getting Things Done and geared to keyboard shortcut enthusiasts. All the basic to-do features like tags, due dates, action descriptions are present, but hitting one shortcut (Ctrl-Windows-T) from anywhere to add a quick item is a nice way to keep your list front-and-center. Tudumo also features quick as-you-type search and drag-and-drop tagging. Tudumo is a free download while it's still in beta for Windows XP, 2000 and Vista and requires the Microsoft .NET 2.0 platform be installed.

Windows Vista Only: All too often, quick downloads and working under deadline leave documents, pictures, and other file types out of the specific folders so helpfully set up at installation. Free Vista sidebar widget The Magic Folder serves as a kind of maid for your file messes, automatically moving files you drop on it to their correct folders based on file extensions. The widget can be modified to move files to your own folder setups (allowing for some Getting-Things-Done-style filing, perhaps), but the neatest aspect is the option to have it watch a folder you choose and do its file-organising magic whenever a new file appears. The Magic Folder is a free download for Windows Vista only.

Windows/Mac/Linux (Firefox): Eliminate another step on your path to wiki-based organisation with TiddlySnip, a free Firefox extension. Once you've configured TiddlySnip to point at your wiki, online at TiddlySpot or off, you can submit entire web pages, your clipboard contents, or just the text you've selected to it, with custom tags and duplicate prevention. For those wondering what's with all the tiddly talk, TiddlyWiki is a one-page, one-file personal wiki that you can bring anywhere and type away at to contain your thoughts, projects, and anything else. I've already started using TiddlySnip to store away StumbleUpon discoveries for later and pare down my lengthy list of del.icio.us bookmarks, but I've only just begun.

Microsoft has rolled out a suite of Windows Live services and peeled off the beta tag, offering six free desktop downloads and a few other webapps. Among the offerings (after a free sign-up) are IMAP-enabled Windows Live Mail, desktop applications for writing and uploading blogs and picture galleries and a parental controls application for web browsing and others. As CNet points out, the precursor for this kind of online/offline software bundle is the Google Pack, the difference being, of course, that the offerings aim to tie more of your computer life to Microsoft's platform. The majority of Windows Live services are entirely free, and while the online services seem to work with non-Internet-Explorer browsers, the desktop applications will require Windows.

Tired of pulling from the same sad-looking clip art files in Microsoft Word? Need a funny, cute, or weird image to liven up a presentation? The Open Clip Art Library has you covered. More than 10,000 Scalable Vector Graphic images—the kind that still look smooth when you resize them—are posted there, freely licensed for use in personal or commercial projects. OpenOffice users can also get a clip art infusion by installing OxygenOffice Professional, and DIY types might think about setting aside some clip art for customised wrapping paper.