Google has revamped its Australian mobile search service - accessible at www.google.com.au/m.

The mobile search engine searches through the web, mobile web, news articles, local business listings, and image index to get the information needed and provides the most relevant results.

It also remembers your location, so once you've searched for "restaurant Sydney" it will localise your future searches to Sydney results too.

In other Google mobile search news, the Google Operating System blog reports that Google will replace Yahoo! as the default search engine for the Opera Mobile and Opera Mini mobile browsers from next month.

Whether you wake up every morning in an anxiety-driven frenzy or a sleep-deprived stupor, weblog LifeClever suggests destressing your mornings and getting more done by setting your watch to beep every night at 10 o'clock (or whatever time works for you), then getting started preparing for tomorrow. That means tackling everything from planning your breakfast and grinding your coffee beans to laying out your clothes and eying your calendar for important events the next day.

There are two main benefits to the 10 O'Clock rule. First, you're much more likely to take care of those end-of-night chores that sometimes get skipped, from washing the dishes to flossing, because you're tackling them before you've completely run out of steam. Second, you'll be much more likely to wake up on time, and have a pleasant morning.

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Dear Lifehacker,
I don't know what I did to deserve it, but I've recently been hit with an overwhelming flood of foreign-language (primarily Russian) spam. I can't even read these emails, so I have no idea what the point is, other than to make my Gmail inbox a miserable place to be. What can I do?
Signed,
Exasperated English-Speaker

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Mac OS X only: Freeware application SmartSleep adds a preference pane to your Mac laptop's system preferences to enhance the usefulness of your Mac's sleep states. It does so by dynamically adjusting the type of sleep state your MacBook will use based on your battery life. For example, as long as your Mac's battery has more than a 20% charge or 20 minutes remaining, SmartSleep will tell your Mac to sleep but not hibernate. This will sleep your laptop very quickly, but it will also keep your data in your RAM, which means your battery will still be draining slightly while you're sleeping. Below 20% will switch to sleep and hibernate mode, which saves your system state to the hard drive, thereby preserving more battery. Last, if you're at under 5%, SmartSleep will hibernate only. SmartSleep is freeware, Mac OS X only.

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In pre-Vista versions of Windows Media Center, DVDs you ripped to your hard drive with programs like DVD Rip would show up for playback in the My Videos folder. For whatever reason, Microsoft decided to disable this feature in Vista as a default, requiring a registry edit to get it working, as detailed in the linked Microsoft support page below. To be perfectly honest, though, despite making this registry edit, I'm still having trouble accessing my ripped DVDs with Vista Media Center even after making this registry modification, so if you have any luck, share your experience in the comments. I'm also very curious to know if this will allow you to stream ripped DVDs to your extenders, particularly Xbox 360 extenders, so let's hear how it's working for you. Thanks jtimberman!

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If you're a diehard photographer or videographer who leaves your equipment at home in rainy or wet conditions, this detailed, step-by-step guide to making your own waterproof camera enclosure on-the-cheap is for you. The steps are detailed and the results look great, but as an added bonus this smart tip for underwater shooting stood out:

I put two Alka-Seltzers in the bag with... the camera. In case of a leak, the seltzer foams, blowing up the bag.... You certainly notice when you get a leak.

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If you work with other people, you've invariably ended up with multiple versions of the same document. We've shown you how to compare and merge file differences with WinMerge, a desktop Windows application, but for those times you either can't install WinMerge or just need a quick comparison, weblog Digital Inspiration suggests using Google Docs to compare text online. Since Google Docs keeps a running revision history of all the saved versions of a doc, putting this trick to use is simple. Just open a new Google Doc, paste the text of one doc you want to compare, save that, delete it, and then copy the text of the second doc you want to compare in its place. Using the GDocs revision history feature (see the post for details), you can then get a nice highlight and strikethrough comparison of differences between the two docs. It's not as robust as desktop methods, but for a quick comparison, it's a clever idea.

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Dock any internal SATA hard drive in this USB dock to turn any internal drive into an external drive on-the-quick. If you've got a few old hard drives hanging around that you'd like to put to good use but they aren't really worth installing in your computer's innards and you don't feel like taking the time to convert that old drive into an external hard drive, this simple dock, which appears to have taken swappable inspiration from your SNES, seems like a brilliant idea. The dock will set you back $42, but I couldn't actually find a store where they're in stock, so if you have better luck, please share in the comments. UPDATE: You can find it cheaper and in stock from good old, reliable Newegg for $32. Thanks pinion!

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Take a look at all the devices in your life, and which one seems the most resistant to DIY improvements, repairs and useful tweaking? The answer, most likely, is that four-wheeled gadget resting just outside. But while many of us lifehack fans aren't as comfortable in our driveways as our desktops, there are lots of cheap and (mostly) simple ways to get more from your vehicle and make driving and owning it a bit more enjoyable. Today we've rounded up 10 of our favourite car-related tips and tricks that work whether you're at one with your engine or regard your ride as a mysterious four-wheel transporter. Photo by World Resources Institute Staff.

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Ever wonder how some people can get a grounding in a foreign language in the two weeks before they travel, but your own long-term efforts haven't paid off? Part of it is natural ability, but another aspect is the enforced budgeting of a crash course. Learn it lists, a free language-learning web application, gives you just 10 words each day to learn the translations of. Granted, speaking and writing a language is more than just knowing vocabulary, but making a small but committed effort every day to building your skills will likely be far more helpful than that two-language dictionary gathering dust on your bookshelf. The site requires a free registration to start using, supports 15 languages (at the moment) and can have its widgets embedded in an iGoogle page.

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Few things can be as frustrating to non-expert Linux users as seeing the phrase "... or compile from source packages" on the download page of that killer app to try out (and we know that's often the case for you patient non-Ubuntu users out there). If you're looking for a nuts-and-bolts guide to installing software from those strange-looking Whatever.tar.gz files, Tuxfiles.org has a pretty good one. While the link takes you through the unpacking, compiling, installing, and cleaning up, there's a basic command line method for almost any package (replacing "package" with the appropriate downloaded file name):

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Want to create an easy-to-navigate home page for the browser on your Wii or any other? Wii Browser, a free page creation tool, lets you create a page full of big, easy-to-click links to set as your homepage. You can also easily edit or rearrange your links from inside your Opera-powered Wii browser, as the site uses a number-based passkey system instead of requiring a login/password, which can get a bit tedious with a Wiimote-controlled keyboard. The main value here is in being able to edit your links from your computer browser rather than through slow screen typing, but it also gives you a Wii-friendly page you can browse to from any system. For another Wii homepage idea, check out Google's Wii-formatted Reader.

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The Tech-Recipes blog posts a relatively simple, two-software-program method for grabbing the video from your DVDs and converting them to a PS3-playable MP4 format. Depending on the size of your PS3 hard drive, this method might only work for a handful of DVDs, but you could tinker with the video quality settings to make your console a jukebox of films, no Blu-ray burning required. The tutorial uses the same DVD Decrypter program Adam highlighted in his guide to copying DVDs to your iPod, as well as a lesser-known tool dubbed PS3 Video 9. Have an easier, quicker solution for transporting your own movies to your console? Offer them up in the comments.Photo by DeclanTM.

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With Easter and spring breaks coming up fast, many families are looking ahead to travel plans, whether heading to warmer weather, to the house the Walt built, or just to visit relatives across the country. Whether you've already experienced the challenge of getting kids onto and off of a plane or are new to that kind of fun, the Dumb Little Man blog has lots of advice on making everything run a bit smoother. One must-do I had no clue about, for example:

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Mac only: The new MacBook Pro models released Tuesday brought new processor power, more hard drive space, and a little-heralded but kinda nifty feature: The addition of a right Alt key (and dropping of the mini Enter key), giving keyboard enthusiasts access to "third-level" characters and a wider array of shortcuts. For those with MacBook models older than 48 hours, free remapping utility KeyRemap4MacBook can help you reassign that tiny Enter or other under-utilised keys for similar shortcut happiness. Definitely worth the effort for programmers and coders, but potentially helpful for anyone who wants to assign Mac environment shortcuts (like Spaces, for example) to non-default keys. KeyRemap4MacBook is a free download for Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5 only.

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