If you work in a Windows environment and your company is interested in Microsoft's Unified Communications suite, they're giving away starter kits which contain a full version of Office Communications Server 2007, Office Communicator 2007, Exchange server 2007 SP1 Evaluation and a 60 day trial version of Office Live meeting 2007.
I noticed you need to sign up for a Windows Live ID, and you'll need to provide your company name when ordering. [via The Freebies Blog]

If you have kids, or if you ever dreamed of winning your school science project competition you will love this tutorial on how to grow a square watermelon. Cooler than the cardboard box maze I built to test a plant's ability to grow towards the sun (which didn't work) or even the baking soda and vinegar erupting volcano (which did) - I reckon this would also be fun for a kid's birthday party.

Grow a square watermelon [Instructables via Wired's Geekdad]

US-centric: Google Maps mashup Mezzoman finds the perfect meet-up point for two addresses by establishing the midpoint and suggesting restaurants by cuisine nearby. Finding a good meet-up spot can be a bit difficult, and at one point or another... Read More »

Windows only: Speed up your computer with a spare USB thumb drive with eBoostr, an XP-only application that brings the benefits of Windows Vista's ReadyBoost feature to XP. The app can work with up to four devices, up to 4GB on each, and its smart-cache feature gives speed boosts to your more frequently used apps and data. eBoostr could be perfect for XP users who want a little extra memory but don't want to install RAM themselves, or even for laptop users who've filled every free slot. eBoostr comes as a free trial version, which gives you four hours of functionality each time you boot up, or costs $29 for the full version.

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You already know you can open a link in a background tab by clicking it with your mousewheel, but the TechMalaya.com site points out five other mousewheel Firefox tricks that you may not have known. Like this gem, which requires a change to about:config:

Change the value of middlemouse.paste to true. This will let you paste a clipboard content to any text field with the middle mouse button.

Using this tweak coupled with the beloved AutoCopy extension, you could select text on-page and paste it into a textarea (like in a comments response) with a simple click, drag, and mousewheel hit. See more of our favorite Firefox 2 about:config tweaks.

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If you have pets, you know that summertime is the prime season for fleas. As I discovered yesterday, it's much cheaper and easier to prevent a flea problem in your house than to treat it. For example, a $40 monthly treatment of something like Advantage or Frontline may sound expensive, but once you have fleas in the house you'll need to spend money on flea bombs or carpet spray to get rid of the fleas and eggs in the house, as well as treating your pets to get rid of any fleas they are carrying
I've done some research to find out some tips for preventing fleas from moving into your home.



Prevention is better than cure!

* pre-treat all your pets with a treatment like Frontline or Advantage. You may want to start doing this as early as November to make sure they're protected when flea season starts. These products work by cutting off the breeding cycle of the fleas. If you do this vigilantly you greatly minimise the chance of getting fleas. Set a reminder in your calendar of choice to reapply every month.

* sweep wooden floors, vacuum carpets and rugs and your pet's bed regularly. As a rule of thumb - if pet hair collects there, it's a pet bed, whether it's an old towel they like to sleep on, their designated bed, or your couch.
clean the outdoor areas where your pet hangs out too - eg doghouse

* if you have a garden, plant lots of pyrethrum, pennyroyal or mint, which are deterrants to fleas. A planter near your front and back door, or near the doghouse, sounds like a good plan.

Too late?
If your pet has already picked up fleas (contact with another animal or from visiting an area with fleas), you'll need to do the following:

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Setting up a new HDTV requires a bit more nuance than your old TV probably did, so Forbes.com has rounded up 10 tips for improving your HDTV picture to help you get the most from your new box. For example:

It's important to change the TV's picture settings, which include brightness, sharpness and contrast, in order to find the balance that looks right to your eyes. Out of the box, an HDTV's picture settings aren't tuned to look good in your living room. They're configured to look appealing and eye-catching in a store.

If you recently snagged a sweet new flat panel, let's hear how you achieved optimal picture and performance in the comments. Photo by William Hook.

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Send that cutie who lives two apartments down the hall an anonymous message with new webapp HadToSay.com. Here's how it works: you register for a free account at HadToSay, write your message, and send the message ID and PIN to the recipient via "masked" email or by printing out a card. (See the video for the card bit; it's pretty darn cute.) Your recipient goes to HadToSay.com, enters their message ID and PIN, and they retrieve your message and optionally post a response. You never enter your or your recipient's names, which is a good thing, because all messages are public and browseable. Looks like a fun way to send your special someone a little something to make them smile. As with all anonymous messaging tools, this could be used for good or evil—don't be evil.

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Valentine's Day is just over a week away, which means if you're planning on getting something for your sweetheart this year, your remaining time to buy is quickly dwindling. You could go the DIY route and make something like the "sexy secret book" in the video above, but chances are you've already got tonnes of really great ideas to help out your fellow readers put together one helluva Valentine's Day. Let's hear your V-day gift ideas for the geek in the comments.

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If your new year's resolutions tend to peter off after a month or so, you need to add "publicity and accountability" to turn them into goals, write Dan and Chip Heath at Fast Company. They say resolutions feel good when we make them, but goals feel good when we achieve them  - giving us an incentive to buckle down and do the work.

They describe the tactic of making and visualising concrete goals as a way to "outsmart your future self" and put yourself in the right frame of mind for putting your plans into action. And they use an interesting example from a psychology study to show how it works:

"The psychologists Peter Gollwitzer and Veronika Brandstätter studied college students who had to write a paper about how they spent Christmas Eve. The catch was that they were supposed to submit the paper by December 26. At this point, the paper is in resolution territory: It feels good to imagine yourself getting a good grade by writing the paper. But, as with January gym memberships, the outcome was not pretty. Only a third of the students got around to submitting a paper.

A second group of students were given the same assignment but were required to note exactly when and where they intended to write the report (i.e., "in my Dad's office on Christmas morning before everyone gets up"). A whopping 75% of these students wrote the report. The act of visualizing yourself in Dad's office, writing your paper, changes the way you respond to that environment when you encounter it. Now when you see Dad's office chair, an association springs to mind: Get to work. You've managed to outsmart your future self."

Reading this made me glad that my resolutions this year had concrete goals (I'm happy to report that I hit my target for January and that feeling of success is very motivating). If you've developed any other strategies or mind hacks for staying on target this year, please share them in comments.

Make goals not resolutions [Fast Company]

The second edition of the Lifehacker book is now up on Amazon.com and available for pre-order! That's right: the cover design has been finalised, over 50 new and revised hacks have been locked down, and this little paperback baby weighs in at just around 480 pages. Pre-order your copy of Upgrade Your Life: The Lifehacker Guide to Working Smarter, Faster, Better now for just under 20 bucks so I can earn out my advance and prove to the print world that there's something to this whole blog thing. The book should be in stores everywhere by mid-March. Thanks in advance for your support on this project. Huzzah!!

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This is a short, sharp and hilarious video explaining how to "fix the web" with Greasemonkey - although if I told you the user script host Paul Fenwick is demoing is called "My Space for unsocial fascist bastards" that would probably give you a better idea of the sense of humour involved.

Paul won a prize at Linux.conf.au last week for the best three minute "lightning talk" with this presentation. As soon as I saw it I wanted to get it up on Lifehacker, and Paul has kindly put it on YouTube so I could share it.

Paul says his script (available here) is "almost certainly not as good as the other MySpace de-junking
scripts out there, and exists mostly for educational purposes." At the end he encourages everyone to check out the vast number of scripts that are already available online through libraries like Userscripts.org.

Thanks for the movie, Paul. :)

Fixing the Web [Paul Fenwick]

• What tools do you use to monitor the Blogosphere?
• What is the best system to utilize the Mac as a DVR?
• Why is my home still so cold, even after I sealed up all my windows?
• Is there a service where I can upload a photograph and have a paint-by-numbers kit mailed in return?

Over the past three years the productoblogosphere has exploded with all sorts of advice and systems for getting your work done, like clearing your inbox, firewalling your attention, and outsourcing your life, not to mention the endless riffs and manifestos on David Allen's book, Getting Things Done. But how many of these techniques are actually good advice? Here's your chance to knock us productivity hucksters off our pedestals and tell us which of these tips is more hyped than they should be. Photo by David Prior.

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Windows/Mac/Linux: Freeware application ControlC saves and uploads your clipboard history to the ControlC web site, giving you a 5-day history of all your clipboard data. ControlC recognize URLs, images on the web (displaying the image in the history), in addition to any text you copy. It does not recognize or upload copied files; instead, it will upload the name of the file you copied. You can use ControlC for anything from a bookmarking tool (it does offer social aspects and selectively making clipboard data public) to a clipboard backup tool that persists even after you shutdown your computer. A free account gives you a 5-day history, while a premium account is unlimited. The site is currently in closed beta, but the "beta4040" code will let anyone register. ControlC is free to use, works on Windows, Mac, and Linux. For desktop-based clipboard managers, check out Ditto, Jumpcut, or DDM.

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Hard drives fail, and they do it much more often than we'd like to think. Even if you've set up automated hard drive backups, you're not necessarily getting the best backup bang for your buck—especially if your operating system's main hard drive fails. Even if you've been backing up your important files, you'll still need to reinstall your OS and go through the pain of copying your files back to your new hard drive, installing new applications, and setting up your system to how you had it. There's a better way, my friends. With a RAID 1 array, you'll always have a perfect backup of your hard drive so that—in the event that one drive fails—the other will seamlessly pick up where it left off. That means no reinstalling your operating system, no reinstalling applications, and no time lost in the event of a hard drive failure.

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Google's offering two neat tools for tracking today's election action: a Super Tuesday Google Map that displays Twitter posts, Google News headlines, and videos from across the country about the vote, and an iGoogle gadget that tracks candidates' progress in each of the 24 states. If you live in one of the Super Tuesday primary states, be sure to get out there and VOTE today.

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Commentator Andy Rooney takes 60 Minutes viewers on a quick tour of his cluttered workspace, inboxes, and storage bins. My favorite part has to be the collection of floppy disks. At this point he could probably lose the 1994 calendar, though, don't you think?

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Link-shortening services like TinyURL are great for sharing complex URLs (hello, Amazon) over email or IM, but most of us would have a hard time pulling a link like tinyurl.com/3yw6ew from the tops of our heads. MeaningfulURL provides a link-shortening service that lets you customise the name your short URL gets. Paste a long link, choose a prefix like "invite.to." or "enter.to," then add your own text after that to make the link, like "http://enter.to/mycoolsite." The bad news is that the freely-provided links expire in 3 days (you can shell out $2 or $3 for certain prefixes), but for a long URL you need to get at from anywhere, MeaningfulURL might do the trick.

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TheJobBored career blog suggests 15 kinds of documents anyone with a career should keep copies of for themselves—and, preferably, in one place, as a kind of "Personal Personnel File." Many of us might already have a box of "Important Files,", but having copies of the the papers they keep locked away at the office can prevent misunderstandings, help you prepare for salary negotiations, and possibly make your next job easier to snag. Amongst the less-likely items you should try to get copied:

• Anything legal you sign at work. Such as: a noncompete agreement; a confidentiality agreement; an agreement relating to a company-provided property such as a car or a cell phone or a laptop; liability waivers; etc.
• Any formal proposals/memos/agreements you make with or submit to your employer. For example, a raise request, the proposal to create a new position/project or even a proposal to work from home.
• Termination documents from previous jobs. If only to prove/explain the circumstances of your leaving a previous position, these are good things to keep copies of.

What other kinds of work documents do you keep personal copies of, just in case? Share your advice in the comments. Photo by fuzzcat.

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Windows only: There are lots of tools out there for "clipping" text and images from web pages for later access, but few of them have the feeling of web clippings' creative predecessor, the scrapbook. Enter Ript, a free download for Windows systems that offers much of the same grabbing functionality as its project-oriented brethren, but does so without any browser extensions and creates an end product with a highly tweak-able layout. Drag images or copy text into the "bin" Ript creates on your desktop, and then double-click to jump to the "table," where you can resize and rotate images and re-format text. The Ript projects can be expanded to several pages, and views of the project exported to JPEG files for further tweaking. If you're the type who regularly attacks their photos with scissors, Ript is likely the best online equivalent to satisfy your DIY drive. Ript is a free download for Windows systems.

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As anyone who's traded contact/address books between programs and web apps can tell you, every application has its own ideas of what details should be written about the people you know. Flexadex, a free, streamlined web Rolodex-style contact manager, only wants a name and "details," in whatever formats you want. Like a real card-and-wheel Rolodex, contacts are organized by letter, and you can export your contacts to a standard comma-separated value (CSV) file for adding elsewhere. The major downside is a total lack of contact importing, which makes Flexadex useful mostly for those starting fresh or needing a separate, web-accessible contact list for, say, a distinct project. Flexadex is free to use with a quick sign-up. For more contact management ideas, see what our readers had to say about their preferred contact stores.

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Windows warrior Dennis O'Reilly takes a look at making Microsoft Word and OpenOffice.org's Writer app play nice together‐as nice as possible, anyway. For those dual-booting, rocking OO.org without Word, or managing with both apps is keeping documents uncluttered with pictures and embedded objects, setting OO.org to always save to Word file formats, and changing a few config options to help Writer do a better job of importing files. The two apps will still argue over the occasional font and formatting differences, but O'Reilly's guide can help you find some common ground on your desktop.

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Despite its slim profile and Windows 3.1-style interface, Notepad is a tool that Windows users have come to know and love, using it for all manner of tweaking, quick editing, and other tasks. The How-To Geek explains a pretty simple registry hack that lets you add "Open with Notepad" to the right-click context menu anywhere in Windows, saving most of us a few screens' worth of clicking through the "Open with ..." dialogs. We've previously show how to accomplish the same kind of tweak with the freeware apps Sent to Notepad and the larger Send To Toys, but the Geek's solution requires no extra software and just a little bit of registry hacking (which means, of course, it's time to make a backup). Follow the link for instructions, or a file that can add the right key for you.

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