Windows only: FedEx QuickShip is a freeware Microsoft Outlook toolbar that integrates your Outlook address book with FedEx shipments. That means creating a new shipment is as easy as clicking Ship and choosing your contact's name from your address book. You can also track packages, check shipping rates, schedule pickups, find FedEx locations, and more with the FedEx toolbar. As Download Squad points out, the tool could use even tighter integration (for example, recognizing tracking numbers in emails), but if you do a lot of shipping at work and Outlook is your go-to email client, the QuickShip toolbar is a must-have. QuickShip is freeware, Windows only.

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The New York Times Shifting Careers blog discusses employees coming to work when they shouldn't, primarily when they're sick—a practice known as presenteeism (the opposite of absenteeism). The problem with presenteeism: It's making your coworkers sick and it may be costing your employer a lot of money. So why do people do it? Generally it's either due to job insecurity or the feeling that work won't go on without you. With that in mind, we're curious: What are your criteria for staying home sick? Do you take yourself out of commission when you start to sniffle, or does it take a full-blown case of the flu to slow you down? Let's hear your thoughts, including how presenteeism is handled in your workplace, in the comments. Photo by Mussels.

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Tom Tom's sat nav offering just got even better, according to Nick over at Gizmodo. Tom Tom Home is their software suite which lets you plan trips in advance, manage points of interest and upload silly voices (just in case you want John Cleese telling you where to go).

Tom Tom Home just got a major upgrade - it now works on both Mac and PC and Nick describes it as "a user-generated content utopia". You can upload your own points of interests as well as download other users POIs and rate other people's content. You can also create your own maps.

Tom Tom Home is a free download (although some of the services it offers are paid) and can be downloaded here.

Tom Tom goes Home 2.0 with New Software [Gizmodo AU]

Want to go beyond construction paper, glue, and scissors this year? Do-it-yourselfer Ian Lesnet wired up a pulsating LED Valentine's day heart that's touch activated. Check out the video to see it in action, and download the plan details over at his web site. (Also hit the the via link for more great DIY Valentines for geeks from Make.)

The GeekDad blog quoted parenting advice from sci-fi author Neal Stephenson today. Talk about cool. :)

Even though I'm not a parent myself, I find myself really enjoying the GeekDad blog for the insights it offers about how to be an encouraging geek parent to your little ones. I know first hand about the stupid social forces which often succeed in dissuading bright girls and boys from pursuing their childhood interest in geeky pursuits like science and maths, so it's great to read ideas on how to let your kids know that geeky is ok.

It quotes Neal Stephenson's example of how just doing things in front of your kids can be a way to inspire and teach them 'in the background':

"Stephenson said when he was a kid, his dad was constantly tinkering on
some garage project or another, and despite Neal's complete
indifference for any of his dad's enthusiasms at the time, he was
influenced by this embedded tinkering. It was part of the family scene,
part of his household, like mealtime style, or the pattern of
interactions between siblings. Later on when Neal did attempt to make
stuff on his own, the pattern was right at hand. It felt comfortable,
easy. Without having to try very hard, he knew how to be a nerd."

I love this notion. It's not forcing kids to participate, it's not 'do as i say' - it's leading by example.

The other thing which rocked about this GeekDad post was that it linked to an audacious Australian experimenter who dabbles in Tesla coils, high voltage and a lot of things that look incredibly cool. His name is Peter Terren and his website is called Tesla Downunder. The image I've used is a screenshot from the website. I imagine visiting his house would feel like visiting Doc Brown in Back to the Future. Woo!

Subterranean Tutoring [GeekDad]

Firefox only (Windows/Mac/Linux): The Update Scanner Firefox extension monitors web sites and alerts you whenever the site updates its content. While RSS feeds have put an end to your days constantly refreshing most sites worth their salt, there are still web pages that lack feeds that you may want to keep an eye on. Like what? Like a company's job page, for example, or just sites you love that remain a little behind the curve. You can even adjust scanning intervals and "change thresholds" so insignificant changes are ignored. Update Scanner is free, works wherever Firefox does.

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Personal finance writer Suze Orman has made her book "Women and Money" available for free download for one day only at the Oprah website. She says that women are twice as likely to retire in poverty than men are - if you want to find out why, and how to prevent this, check out the book. [via Wise Bread]

Reader Ace writes in with a nifty customsation that will set your Mac apart from the rest. Find a desktop wallpaper image (Social Wallpapering's a good bet), save it to your desktop as background.jpg, and in the Terminal type:

You'll have to enter your password to complete the operation, and when you do, next time you log off, your logon screen will have your new custom background. Slick. Thanks, Ace!

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Fans of short messaging formats like Twitter, or people looking for more tab/bookmark management tools for Firefox, will like LinkBunch - an extension which lets you consolidate a bunch of links into one URL.

Once you've downloaded and installed the extension (drag and drop it into an open Firefox window or tab to get the Add-on installation dialog) you just need to restart your browser and you'll see that Linkbunch has become an option in Firefox's Bookmarks menu.

To bunch your current open tabs, open the Bookmarks menu and click 'Create a LinkBunch of tabs'. This will open a new tab displaying a page with the created LinkBunch. The page displays a list of all the links in the LinkBunch, and then there's my favourite link down the bottom - "Open entire bunch". As it says, if you hit that button it will open up each of the links in a new tab (after politely asking you if you *really* want to open them all).

I can definitely see LinkBunch having a place in my browser alongside TinyURL, and active Twitter users will also be interested to know that LinkBunch is also being integrated into Twitter. The feature isn't active yet, but if you follow @linkbunch, you'll be able to send it a direct message with all the links you want to consolidate, and the bot will reply back with your bunch link. Nice.

[via Web Worker Daily]

Blogger Paul Stamatiou steps through getting acquainted with and then becoming proficient downloading music, movies, and other files with Usenet. After introducing you to the basics of Usenet, Stamatiou delves into more advanced usage, describing how to start Usenet downloads by sending an email to your home computer. BitTorrent is by far the more popular (or at least well known and discussed) method of file sharing right now, but Usenet has been around forever, and its often blazing download speeds and ease of use has kept a lot of users loyal for years. If you're a die-hard Usenet user, let's hear what you love about it along with your tips for Usenet newcomers in the comments.

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If you've opted to be a canary in the Firefox 3 beta coal mine, report back to your more cautious cohorts what it's like in there. Firefox 3 offers a slew of new features and revamped look and feel, but we want to know what's made you willing to ditch the stable Firefox 2 for the new beta.

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Firefox with Greasemonkey: The Videoembed Greasemonkey user script automatically embeds any video from YouTube, MySpace, MetaCafe, and more directly into a web page wherever videos are linked but not embedded. If you stumble onto a bookmarked YouTube video on del.icio.us or a Google Video on Digg, for example, you'll no longer need to click through to watch the video. Handy! Videoembed is free, requires Firefox with Greasemonkey.

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If you're itching to give the new Firefox 3 Beta 3 a test-drive but don't want to muss up your Firefox 2 configuration, give the self-contained Firefox 3 Beta 3 Portable Edition a try (Windows only). Of course, running your current setup through MozBackup first couldn't hurt.

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Web site iWebSaver saves entire web pages to your iPhone or iPod touch by converting the entire page to a data URL, then providing that data link as a bookmark you can save to your bookmarks or your home screen. That means next time you're about to jump on a plane or hit the tunnel on the train, you can use iWebSaver to save some reading material directly to your device before you lose your signal. One would think you could do this just by loading the web pages in beforehand, but Safari often reloads pages inactive, so that's not a foolproof method. iWebSaver ensures you've got some reading material saved directly to your device. Be sure to bookmark the iWebSaver bookmarklet to save any site on-the-fly.

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One of iTunes' most powerful and useful features is Smart Playlists: dynamic, search-based lists of songs that save you the work of grouping tunes by hand. But with almost 40 fields to search against—from Album and Artist to Bit Rate and Category—there are thousands of possible Smart Playlist combinations. If you listen to music while you work, but don't want to waste time manually creating playlists in iTunes, today we've got our top 10 favourite Smart Playlists that will keep your tunes fresh and focused automatically.

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Firefox 3 Beta only: If you've taken the plunge into testing the brand new Firefox 3 beta but your favourite extensions are disabled, that's because developers haven't updated them and may not be providing secure updates yet. If you're an impatient risk-taker who needs your extensions back NOW, here's a cheat that may get them to work. Big Honking Warning: Only do this if you're willing to deal with possible bleeding edge extension bugs and security risks!

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What happens when you take a grown man's Blackberry, cell phone, and computer away? He breaks down into tears, that's what. The Today show unplugged a Forbes magazine editor (who volunteered for the experiment!) and madness ensued. This clip is over a year old, but it's a must-see if you've been considering unplugging on a regular basis. Could you make it a week sans email and cell phone? Let us know in the comments.

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Lifehacker reader Samar liked the quick-write convenience of the GmailThis bookmarklet, but wanted to dig deeper to find a solution that would both work with his (and our own) favourite Windows keyword launcher, Launchy, and run whether or not Firefox (or any default Windows browser) was already open. We're glad he did, because he's come up with a one-line command that lets you open new Gmail composition windows from anywhere. The tip, and screenshots, after the jump.

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Moonk, a free Flash conversion application, serves as a one-stop shop to turn your photos, videos, or music into slick-looking embeddable boxes. Sure, YouTube and a wealth of other hosting sites can do much the same, but for those who don't want to add their videos or other media to a search-able site or mess with privacy settings, Moonk lets simply make your media files web-playable. New users get 500 MB of storage—pretty generous, considering the small size of the Flash output. I also like the uncluttered interface and straight-forward conversion tools, compared to similar tools of its kind. Moonk is a free service, but requires a sign-up to use.

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The CyberNet blog tackles an annoyance that any (Windows-using) iPhone or iPod touch owner likely noticed within minutes of setting up their new device in iTunes—no support for syncing Firefox bookmarks. The solution, CyberNet suggests, lies in seamlessly coordinating your Internet Explorer bookmarks (built into Windows) with Firefox. Luckily, a few extensions have this covered, including the two-way BooKKit, and SyncMarks, already pointed out by a commenter, which one-way syncs from Firefox to IE favorites. Of course, a browser-neutral solution could likely be worked up with a syncing solution as well. Got a better idea on how to integrate Firefox bookmarks into your Apple device? Share your solutions in the comments.

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Done every week, or even more frequently, grocery shopping can seem like a serious free time killer, a chore that's only reward is having to unload and put all that food away. The Unclutterer blog, however, suggests that spending a few minutes planning out your trip and segmenting your tasks can make the process far less taxing. After coming up with a few meals you want to make that week, you should then:

• Make a list from your plan: Not only will this help you remember what you need, it also discourages you from picking up things that you don't need.
• Separate the items on the list into their own sections (dairy, condiments, cereal, produce, etc.). This will reduce the chances of having to double back for something that you forgot in another section.

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PDFs tend to be the preferred format of HR managers and others who you have to fill out forms for, leaving you to print, write out, and mail or fax the paper document back to them. Skip all that unnecessary writing and printing with PDFescape, a free web app that lets you fill in PDF forms, add custom text and re-save them to your own computer. The site makes it clear that PDFescape isn't intended as a full-fledged PDF editor, but it does provide a pretty extensive toolkit for modifying other people's documents. In addition to text, you can throw in custom images, shapes, and links, and you can store the finished product on your own computer or keep it on PDFescape's server. Those basic features are free, but it seems as though PDFescape adds a logo mark to any documents you export from the site, which can be removed by purchasing "premium credits." Either way, it's significantly less expensive than buying a $300 Adobe suite.

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