Just because a product heralds itself as fat-free doesn't mean it's good for you, and Men's Health tackles 12 unhealthy foods consumers often mistake for nutritious. For example, the oft-assumed healthy granola (AU - I think that's American speak for muesli?) bar you're eating with breakfast every day may not be as wholesome as you think.

The upside: Granola is made with whole oats, a nutritious food that's high in fiber.
The downside: The oats are basically glued together with ingredients like high-fructose corn syrup, honey, and barley malt—all of which quickly raise blood sugar.

On the plus side, not all granola bars are unhealthy, and for each unhealthy food the article highlights, it also suggests a healthful alternative. In all, Men's Health gives the thumbs-down to:

• Yogurt with Fruit at the Bottom
• Baked Beans
• California Roll
• Granola Bars
• Pasta Salad
• English Muffins
• Croutons
• Fat-Free Salad Dressing
• Fruit Cocktail
• Reduced-Fat Peanut Butter
• Pretzels
• Corn Oil

Know any other unhealthy food people generally assume is good for them? Let's hear it in the comments.

Windows only: Freeware application miniMize creates thumbnail images of your minimised application on your desktop, providing an interesting and customisable alternative to the Windows taskbar. Similar to previously mentioned ThumbWin, miniMize boasts virtually all of the same features in addition to an arguably improved interface. Several of you who seemed to like ThumbWin reported experiencing a few crashes, so mimiMize might be the replacement you were looking for. If thumbnails on the desktop sound to you like clutter, miniMize won't be for you. If you like the idea of ditching your taskbar for minimised thumbnails, miniMize or ThumbWin should do the job. miniMize is freeware, Windows only.

Christmas is just around the corner. I'm no Grinch (I actually own Christmas decorations and intend to use them, not to mention the Bing Crosby Christmas albums...) but even when you enjoy the holiday, it comes with a lot of social and financial traps.

As a work from home type, I have the luxury of avoiding the city and malls emblazoned with tacky Christmas decorations and large signs saying how many shopping days you have left. But I know a lot of you aren't that lucky. So let's talk Christmas survival.

The Lifehack.org website has a good guide on how to overcome other people's expectations and have the Christmas you want. I liked that it advises deciding how you want to spend Christmas for yourself.

It also advocates buying meaningful presents, or not bothering at all. This is such good advice, throwaway presents are a waste of money and just clutter up the house until you can figure out a polite way to get rid of them.

So what's your Christmas survival plan? I still haven't worked mine out!

Take Your Christmas Back [Lifehack.org]

 

Invitastic is a cute little website which lets you create, send and manage invitations to events. It has fairly limited functionality at the moment, but a couple of nice features.

The invitations don't seem to be customisable - mine came as an email on a yellow background, which wouldn't have been my choice. I did like the fact that it embeds a link to Google Maps so your guests can look up a map of where your event is being held.

The site tracks RSVPs for you - you can see who's said yes, no or maybe, and who hasn't responded.  For Mac users, it offers the bonus of being able to download the event to your iCal (for you the host as well as your guests - the invitation comes with the event as an .ics (Ical) file.

The date format on the website is the confusing American style (11/20/2007) but the invitations themselves express dates as "November 22, 2007" which is much clearer for non-yankees. 

I assume they'll add templates to give some choice about how your invitations look - in the meantime it's a barebones WYSIWYG email invitation service, no more, no less.

UPDATE: Turns out that you can customise how the invitations appear online - I missed the two translucent arrows on either side of the invitation on the invitation creation screen which let you cycle through a range of different backgrounds. The email version always comes with a simple yellow background to avoid image display problems in email.  Thanks to Hillel from Jackson Fish Market (the people behind Invitastic) for getting in touch to clear that up! 

A recent study at the University of Missouri-Columbia reaffirms that a sedentary life increases your risk of diseases like cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and obesity, but the study suggests that even if you get in the recommended 30 minutes of activity 5 days a week, sitting for the remaining 15 and a half hours of the day is still trouble. The solution? According to the article, just standing up more frequently throughout the day to type or do chores can do wonders for your health and double your metabolic rate. If you're interested in incorporating a healthy stand-up into your daily computing, consider an adjustable desk or the more extreme Treadputer.

A story in yesterday's Age has reported that free to air industry group Free TV has confirmed all networks will provide EPGs (electronic program guides) by January 1, but they are still trying to use legal action to stop PVR manufacturers from using ad-skipping.

The writeup in the Age says channels 9 and 10 and the ABC have already started broadcasting their EPGs, while 7 will come online by January 1. While it's supposedly an "open" EPG the legal action being taken by Free TV is trying to restrict EPG access to the manufacturers who don't use ad-skipping in their PVRs.

PVRs bought in the last 3 years should automatically start receiving the EPG broadcasts as the channels come online. So has anyone started using the EPG for new additions channels 9 and 10? I'd be interested to hear how it's working out.

 

 

As someone who's often frustrated by poor or incomplete user guides or product information online, I can see that the Fixya website could be a useful tool. In beta at the moment, Fixya is aiming to be a one-stop-shop for people seeking tech support, user guides and repair guides for products from a range of vendors.

Rather than a tech support business, Fixya is designed as a community, where users provide both the questions and the answers. You can browse the database of already answered questions, or pose your own question to the community of registered experts. Experts are users who have registered with the site and nominated their own area of expertise. They can post answers to the site, or help users directly via online chat.

The success of a site like this will be in attracting knowledgable people who can provide decent answers to user questions. The site encourages people to sign up and answer questions by paying them. It's not a huge amount, a few bucks per answer posted to the site. I noticed that the Top Expert on the site has already racked up 300 solved problems, so the incentive scheme seems to be working to attract problem solvers to the site.

There are already a lot of online forums for people to discuss products and tech problems - this one might be good to browse when stuck on a particular problem - or if you don't have a resident geek to help you. If you know of any particularly good 'tech support' forums, please leave them in comments.

Reader Chris wrote in with a question about the best way to batch rename video files. I'm one of those serial offenders who has a whole bunch of anonymous "Track 1" files in my iTunes library, so I'm a terrible person to ask. So I thought I should throw the question to the Lifehacker AU audience at large!

Here's the challenge Chris posed:

I downloaded tv shows just as avi files, now i have a lot them on my hard drive  in the format 'californication.104-caph.avi " or 'the.wire.s02e03.dvdrip.xvid-ffndvd.avi' and what I was hoping to do was to rename them so they are in this format. 'Chuck.s01e05.Chuck Versus the Sizzling Shrimp(ws.pdtv.xvid.caph).avi'

The way I imagine it was to have a excel file with the variables. Like Tv Show name, Season number, Episode Number, title, group, and then extra stuff like ws.pdtv.xvid. Anyway I have tried looking for a program that could help me do this, which would enable me just to copy and paste the episode titles from tvrage and then it would rename them all at once. I was just really looking for a program, or a way which will help me do this.

Mac OS X only: The default behaviour for the Home and End keys on the Mac can be very annoying—particularly for Windows-to-Mac switchers. Freeware application KeyFixer remaps your Home and End keys so they move the keyboard cursor to the beginning or end of a line, duplicating the behaviour of the Home and End keys in Windows. (Cmd-Left/Right arrow perform the same function by default.) We covered a nitty gritty method for accomplishing this once before, but it requires manually editing system files and doesn't actually work for Firefox. Together, the two flavors of KeyFixer will fix the Home/End behaviour both across your system and in Firefox, which means that's one major OS X annoyance you can cross off your list. KeyFixer is freeware, Mac OS X only.

Ever look up an address on Google Maps and find that the pushpin for that address is more than a bit off? Now you can edit where Google pinpoints addresses (provided you're logged into your Google account) by clicking the Edit link and dragging the pin to a more appropriate location. Moves over 200 meters will need to be moderated before they're applied, and you can see the original location or recently-moved markers at any time. My parents' house in Iowa has always been about a mile off the mark so I've been dying for something like this, but unfortunately it looks like not all locations are currently supported.

Windows and Mac only: Monitor your computer activity easily and efficiently with freeware application RescueTime. Just install the application and let it run in the background so that it can capture data for your online activity and application usage, then check the dashboard and view graphs and charts about your habits. Beyond the rich set of analytics provided, RescueTime also knows when you're away and will not collect any data during that time. If you really want to know how you're spending your time while you're "working," RescueTime is a solid choice. RescueTime is a freeware application for Windows and Mac, requires a free registration to download.

Just when we thought that Gmail was stagnating, the big G rolled out upgrades that delighted power users: IMAP access, and a speedier, developer-friendly interface. As makers of the Better Gmail Firefox extension, we were psyched to get a personal heads-up from Gmail's Product Manager, Keith Coleman, alerting us to the revamp so we could update the extension. In addition to wrangling third-party developers to update their code, Coleman took time out of his busy day to answer some of our burning questions about the recent changes at Gmail. After the jump, hear what he has to say about IMAP, LDAP, Greasemonkey, the iPhone, and other third party Gmail clients, apps, and development.

Read More »

If you're like most college students, you've either heard of or encountered the dreaded Freshman 15: the excess weight you pile on once you get to school. The GoCollege weblog hints at ways to avoid—and to fight—that weight gain. Some tips include steering clear of munchies when you're stressed out, eating slowly, opting in for low fat options where applicable, and walking away from the vending machine. Most of the suggestions are obvious enough, but since a lot of us have been there, why don't you share how you battled your Freshman 15 in the comments.

Search operators—those commands that engines use to narrow down what you're looking for—are pretty useful. For example, if you wanted to know if we've covered anything about video editing, you might be compelled to go to Google and type site:lifehacker.com video editing into the search box. But what else can you do to get the desired results? The HybridSEM weblog goes into extreme detail about the various search operators that work for Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Looking for a video on MSN about monsters? Use the feature:video monsters operator. If you're a searchaholic, this guide comes in pretty handy, and you'll certainly learn a thing or two about how to find things more easily on the 'net.

Microsoft has quietly launched a free for-your-domain apps suite, Windows Live Community Builder, that offers a number of Windows Live services customised for domain owners, including Live Mail, photo sharing, calendars, the LiveDrive online storage app and more. The services offered indicate a clear attempt to match up with Google Apps, but users of Windows Live and other Microsoft applications can get a lot more out of this suite—alerts, central contact lists, the "Spaces" page builder and other features. The Live Community Builder requires a free sign-up and a registered domain name.

Windows Mobile 5 & 6 only: Free open source media player MPlayer, long known to Linux fans for its format friendliness and streamlined operation, has been ported in somewhat rough fashion to Windows Mobile-powered smartphones. While that means formats like RealAudio/Video, Ogg, M4A and others are playable, users are reporting that the program is a monster when it comes to processor use (which also makes it a battery killer) and has only the most basic "open file" functionality. But if you've got a low-quality file or a powerful phone, it could make for a nifty toy to play with until it gets fixed. MPlayer is a free download for Windows Mobile 5 and 6 phones only.

Windows XP and earlier only: Free taskbar application The Wonderful Icon gives those who do a lot of window shuffling a range of customisable actions in one handy taskbar icon or a set of user-chosen hotkeys. Choose from a list of useful functions like saving and restoring clipboard content, text replacement and window tiling, or create your own app launchers and function shortcuts. The program took up about 5MB of memory on my XP box, which isn't small change, but it could help newcomers to automation and hotkeys get their system just how they like it. The Wonderful Icon is a free download for Windows XP/2000 and earlier versions, with Vista support promised for an upcoming update. For those who crave a lower-memory, DIY solution, check out AutoHotKey.

US-centric: Dying to catch those last few tickets for an upcoming show but don't want to be stuck with the worst seats in the room? New ticket search website SeatQuest drills down on the tickets still available in your... Read More »

Add-ons like Tracker, Beagle, and Google Desktop can give Linux users powerful search-and-launch capabilities, but knowing a little command line kung-fu can be a faster path to your files and programs. Linux blog Debian/Ubuntu Tips & Tricks offers a stellar introduction to "find," a built-in command that Linux (and Mac) users can use to launch intensely specific searches. Follow along and you'll be able to locate that MP3 you downloaded last Tuesday with the word "house" in the title in seconds flat. Feel like broadening your bash skills a bit further? Check out a more full-fledged introduction to Unix commands or print out a handy guide to the command line.

Having a strong source of natural light is a boost to most any picture—unless it's pointing right at the lens. The Digital Photography School blog offers a few tricks and tips to help non-professionals shooting at the beach, from a low angle or wherever the glare of the sun intrudes. Using a DIY lens hood, for example, can prevent the lens flare effect that only rarely works in a photo's favour. Have any of your own direct sunlight tips? Let's hear 'em in the comments. Photo by MoonSoleil.