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Going Paperless at Home?
Posted by Adam Pash at 2:00 PM on February 12, 2008
The New York Times highlights one Google engineer's quest to achieve a paperless home, suggesting that while the paperless office may still be a ways off, a practical and paperless home may be just around the corner. Why?
...at home, where printers are slow, noisy and devour expensive ink cartridges, people are more cautious about hitting the "print" button. What little paper comes into the home -- receipts, bills, invitations — can be scanned and then shredded. Filing cabinets can be emptied, the data kept, the paper gone.Since Lifehacker readers are likely nearer to the forefront of the paperless lifestyle, let's hear what kind of progress you've made toward a paperless home, along with what paper you're just not willing to go without on the homefront (aside from the obvious toilet-kind) in the comments.
That kitchen sponge you use to wipe down dishes, the sink, the cutting board, and counter is a breeding ground for bacteria—which you can easily kill in the microwave. Step by step web site wikiHow suggests several ways to de-germ your kitchen sponge, including thoroughly wetting the sponge (this part is important) and microwaving it for one minute to kill any yeast or mold that's accumulated on it. Alternately you can put it through a dishwasher cycle, soak it in a bleach or lemon juice solution, or dry it out completely in between washes. Or, you know, you could just get a new sponge. 
Windows only: Get 
So you've just finished paying off (or mostly paying down) your holiday expenses, and now Valentine's Day looks like it's going to break your frugal stride. Not necessarily so, says Trent at The Simple Dollar personal finance blog. Rather than taking the easy-but-expensive route, he recommends both a few nuggets of common wisdom (thoughtful cards, secluded spots) and an idea that's new to me:
Want to rearrange the window-top buttons in your GNOME-based Linux system? The FOSSwire blog shows how to put your titlebar in any order you please, using the ever-helpful gconf-editor tool. Launch the editor, browse through the folder trees to Apps->Metacity->General, then find "button_layout" in the right-hand pane. Double-clicking on the "Value" field lets you rearrange (or remove) the four known buttons on either side of the windows (separated by a colon), so you can get Mac-style left-focused buttons, a minimalist menu-only look, or anything else you'd like. If you mess up too badly, you can right-click the button_layout item and "Unset" to restore its default values. Hit the link below for more guidance on using gconf-editor and tweaking the window settings.
Windows only: Sendto Flickr adds one-click photo uploading to your Windows right-click "Send to" menu, making it easier to post photos instantly to your account and worry about the details later. While Flickr's 
Got data to graph but not much in the way of spreadsheet skills? Web app Track-n-Graph gives you all kinds of bar, line, and other graphs and chart templates to use or create, as well as a simple interface for putting in the data to create them. There's a number of handy templates on the site already, including mileage and health-related trackers, and you can collaborate on your data projects with others or embed the results in a web site. A free sign-up limits you to five data projects, with unlimited use available for $25 or a single-graph upgrade for $5. For more personal project data trackers, try 
Moving around and walking, even just as part of your normal daily routine, can make a big difference in your dietary goals and overall health, but far too many of us tend to stay still for hours at a time. The Dumb Little Man blog has a great list of suggestions on how to fit physical activity into the standard work day, just by doing things a little bit differently. One tip I can attest to:
