UPDATED 10.30am, 6 March

With Apple Australia still silent on when we'll get the iPhone, the rumour mill has been working overtime about which carrier (or carriers) will get the coveted contract when it launches in Australia.  I've just spotted a job ad which should help kick the rumour mill along.
Sensis has placed a job ad seeking a Design BA for an iPhone search application on an industry website - does this mean Telstra got the iPhone contract?
The Sensis ad, listed on 3 March on the Australian Interactive Media Industry Association website, offers a 2-3 month, Melbourne-based contract.
The job spec reads:

"Are you a business analyst with experience gathering and documenting requirements for interactive web or mobile products? We’re looking for a BA with a technical front-end UI background to help us design cutting-edge search applications for the iPhone. This isn’t boring old specification-heavy BA work. This is exciting and agile BA work to help us envision mobile search applications that work great and look beautiful. Let us know if you think you’ve got the right combination of creative flair, geekiness, and detail orientation to get the job done."

I've emailed Sensis for further information - it's possible that Sensis will be developing its own search app similar to Google's iPhone  optimised search app for use by multiple carriers. Either that, or Telstra's Edge network (the only one in Australia compatible with the current  iPhone) has won the contract to bring the iPhone to Australia. Hopefully we'll know more tomorrow.

UPDATE:  Just heard back from Sensis, who say "We intend to develop iPhone applications which can be used across carriers." Ok, we'll go back to hoping that iPhone in Australia will be a multi-carrier affair. :)

CNET's Worker's Edge blog offers up a way to customise the default locations for saving or opening files in Windows XP by putting shortcuts to your favourite folders in common dialogs via XP's Places Bar.

You can use Microsoft's own Tweak UI utility in PowerToys for XP to do this. Or to do it manually, hit Start > Run and type:

gpedit.msc, and press Enter to open the Group Policy applet. Navigate in the left pane to User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows Explorer > Common Open File Dialog. Double-click Items displayed in Places Bar in the right pane, check Enabled in the resulting dialog box, and enter the folder paths in the five text fields below it.

You must enter five locations to avoid having empty default locations created, and you'll need to follow his directions for specifying the path.

He also explains how to do a similar thing in Vista using Favorite Links.

There's certainly a few ways to shortcut to your favourite locations in Windows - I use FileBox eXtender to give me one click access to my frequently used folders. Got a favourite shortcut? Please share in comments.

Place shortcuts to your favorite folders in Windows' common dialogs [CNET Worker's Edge]

Keep a watchful eye on the results of tonight's primary results with a Google Map mashup directly from the folks at Google. The map displays the results of already held primaries and will help you stay up-to-date with tonight's... Read More »

Work meetings can easily descent into directionless, timewasting chaos - but you can minimise the time you spend on them by declining unnecessary invitations, keeping it to phone or email to save time on travel, and ensuring you have an agreed-up agenda to keep things on track.

The Lifehack.org blog offers several tips for minimising the time you spend on meetings - including this simple but all too often neglected rule - when you request a meeting, nominate 2 or 3 days/time that work for you. Since you've identified when you're available, the other party or parties can simply choose one, thus decreasing the wasted time and email of going back and forth to work out a suitable time.

Got any tips for how to  maximise the effectiveness of your meetings while keeping your time investment to a minimum? Please share in comments.

10 Tips for Improving Your Appointment Setting Skills [Lifehack.org]

Ah, beer. Fans of the amber stuff may not wish to share their tipple, but according to the Wise Bread blog you can put beer to several uses in your garden - as a slug killer, and to help protect your garden visitors from bees.

Salt is a traditional slug-killer, but as the post says "that means you have to find them first":

"Instead, entice them with a little beer, which slugs love. Simply pour a little into some empty jars and place them in the soil, with the rims of the jars at ground level. The slugs will drop in for a drink, but they can’t get back out. And what a way to go; Certainly better than the salt-shriveling death."

Bees and wasps are also beer fans, apparently. So if you're entertaining outdoors, you can place some small containers of beer around the perimeter of your yard or garden, and the bees will flock to the sugary treat and leave your guests alone.

Photo by thesaint.

21 Great Uses for Beer [Wise Bread]

Windows/Linux: Free, open source application GmailAssistant monitors multiple Gmail accounts and alerts you of new mail. The application can monitor anything from your inbox to specific labels, so you can get very granular about what you want to be notified of. The biggest drawback is that GmailAssistant does not support Google Apps on your domain, but if you've only got Gmail.com accounts, that won't matter. Aside from that, GmailAssistant is highly customisable for individual accounts and works like a charm. GmailAssistant is free, Windows and Linux only, requires Java. If you prefer to keep you alerts in the browser or you want support for Google Apps addresses, check out the Gmail Manager Firefox extension.

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An ABS snapshot of how Australians spent their leisure time in the decade 1997-2006 shows that our internet usage has grown, while traditional pursuits are stagnating or declining.
The 'How Australians Use Their Time' study found our internet use has grown by six minutes a day, to an average of 19 minute a day.
While our time spent reading newspapers has declined from an average 13 minutes a day to 11 minutes a day, our TV/DVD viewing has remained at a whopping 165 minutes a day. Books also remained steady at 8 minutes a day.
The ABS (Australian Bureau of Statistics) study covers a very interesting period of time - widespread use of the internet as a leisure tool wasn't really around back in 1997. And even if you wanted to watch internet TV, the lack of available bandwidth meant it wasn't really an option - but these days YouTube represents a vast slab of internet traffic all on its own.
One thing the ABS didn't seem to account for was the 'bleed' between mediums which has occurred over that time. Many people read newspapers online these days, and ditto watching news, sport, TV and radio. Games and hobbies were also hived off in a separate category - which is laughable considering how many hours many gamers spend online gaming.

Spring is just around the corner, and financial weblog The Simple Dollar details how to save tons of money and live healthier by planting a kitchen garden.

A kitchen garden merely refers to a garden that consists almost exclusively of plants intended to be eaten. Although one might put a few decorative plants around the edges of such a garden, the vast majority of the garden is intended for food.

The post details how to plan your kitchen garden based on what you want to eat (as opposed to what seems like it belongs in a garden) and highlights the significant chunk of money you stand to save with your garden. If you're an old hand at planting a garden you intend to eat, let's hear your best tips in the comments.

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Mac OS X only: Freeware application FinderPop adds tonnes of new and useful functionality to your Mac's context menus through a highly configurable preference pane. FinderPop's main goal is to make it quick and painless to navigate, copy, move, and alias files across your filesystem through the context menu, but it does much more than that . Unfortunately FinderPop is an app that takes a little time to get your head around, but it's also an app that you could imagine being blown away by if you were watching someone who was really good with it. FinderPop is freeware, Mac OS X only.

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Lifehacker Reader Jared Valentine tried ensuring a fast internet connection by setting Quality of Service rules on his router but found that QoS just wasn't working well for his needs. To solve his problem, Jared wrote an extensive howto detailing how to set up his computer to automatically detect when he's on a VoIP call, then aggressively limit his other traffic to make sure he's got plenty of bandwidth for his voice calls. The tutorial is not for the faint of heart, but if you can pull it off, Jared calls it his holy grail of traffic prioritisation. If you're looking for a simpler way, you may want to give router QoS rules a try to see if they'll work for you first.

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• How can I grocery shop better, so that I don't have to order takeout by the end of the week?
• How do I write a winning cover letter that convinces a company looking for software engineers that I could be a great addition even though I don't want to work full-time?
• How can I output one Xbox 360 to two TVs?
• What's it like to use the internet on my laptop on a cruise ship?
• What are your favorite things to put on pasta (besides tomato sauce)?

iPhone/iPod touch only: Freeware application Touchpad Pro turns your iPhone or iPod touch into a multi-touch mouse for any operating system. You'll need a jailbroken iPhone or iPod touch, then just install Touchpad Pro from Installer.app. To get it working with your computer, you'll need to install VNC (it's already running on your Mac) and follow the instructions on the site. Once it's running, you can use your iPhone's screen like a MacBook Air trackpad, which means you get the regular mouse actions in addition to two-finger scroll, double-finger-tap right-click, and a ton more (check out the video for the full demonstration). Touchpad Pro is freeware, iPhone/iPod touch only.

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Everybody loves looking back at pictures from a party, but unless you're lucky enough to have one of those friends who brings a camera to every party and does the work for you, documenting the event can be a pain in the ass. Most of us would rather be, you know, partying. Today I'll show you a few ways you can effortlessly—but extensively—document your next party, using everything from freeware software to some cheap hardware for your camera. When you're done, you'll be able to automate your party photos or make taking pictures fun, giving everyone incentive to contribute to the documentation process.

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Geeks joke about having Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) all the time, and ADD expert Dr. Edward Hallowell says that's not too far off. In his book, CrazyBusy, Hallowell argues that Crackberry culture leads to ADD-like symptoms in people that don't officially have the disorder—a problem he calls Attention Deficit Trait (ADT). While Hallowell's fondness for making up words like "gigaguilt" and "screensucking" can be annoying, the overall message of CrazyBusy is that we all need to slow down and think in order to innovate instead of being constantly on the go in a frenzied (dumb) state of mind.

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Microsoft Outlook user and GTDer Scott Hanselman uses flags and search folders to clear his inbox. Scott writes:

I also try to get to ZEB (Zero Email Bounce) every day or so. This is when you "bounce" up against zero emails in your inbox... This doesn't mean that you've done all your tasks, instead it means you know what your tasks are. [...] Remember that your inbox is not storage, it's a list of what hasn't been categorized yet.

Hit the link to see the folders Scott uses to categorize his messages—in fact, his system isn't far off from my Trusted Trio.

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Internet Explorer 7 might have some chops when it comes to handling and organizing RSS feeds, but dedicated Google Reader fans don't get much love from the browser—there's no option in the interface for adding a feed anywhere but inside IE7's "Live Bookmarks," leaving the copy-and-paste job to the user. Alex at the Google Operating System blog points out two makeshift solutions: Install Google Toolbar 5, or add a nifty "Subscribe" bookmarklet to your Links toolbar, provided on Google Reader's Settings->Goodies page. Both seem far more convenient than digging to find the address of a site's feed and pasting it into Google Reader's "Add Subscription" dialog.

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Many, if not most, of the newest and updated Linux applications out there are crafting Ubuntu/Debian-ready .deb packages that require just a double-click to install, but many apps are still available only in the .rpm files used by Red Hat and Fedora-based distributions. The Ubuntu Unleashed blog has a quick and simple tutorial on installing the Alien conversion tool and using it to convert packages to .deb format. Once you've got Alien installed, the command is simply:

sudo alien -k name-of-rpm-file.rpm

Note that this won't work for programs that are designed to utilise specific Red Hat/Fedora functions, but will save you a good deal of digging for alternate files.

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The Simply Recipes blog pulls a tip from one of the best resources around—a mom, of course—that can make using that awkward-to-clean but nifty kitchen tool, the blender, a whole lot easier. Many blenders can snugly fit a standard or wide-mouthed mason jar at their base. Knowing this, you can use your blender as a spice or coffee grinder, make jarfuls of whipped cream or other concoctions that are ready to store, or just make single- or double-serving amounts of smoothies (or margaritas) without having to shove your hand into that tall glass container later on. The writer's mother even suggests that a Hellman's mayonnaise jar might work in a pinch, but I'll wait until a commenter confirms it before trying that out.

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Google's offline-enabling project Gears released a version for Windows Mobile 5 and 6 devices last night, and mobile web apps like online document editor Zoho Writer and money manager Buxfer have already thrown their hats into the not-always-mobile ring. It looks like documents are read-only in Zoho at this point, but, like its desktop brother, Zoho Writer Mobile will likely upgrade to full online/offline sync soon. Similarly, Buxfer lets you check account balances and see transactions, but not make any account changes. It's a nice start, however, and more mobile apps, and functionality, are likely to follow. Visit gears.google.com from your Windows Mobile 5 or 6 device to install Gears.

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Windows only: Free utility Capster is an amazingly small (5K!) program that turns your Caps Lock key into a kind of startup mode switch. Choose a few programs that you sometimes would like to have started at Windows login, and Capster will place them in your Startup folder but launch them only if you hit Caps Lock before you arrive at your desktop. The obvious benefit is to folks who use their systems in two different modes—like wanting to have your email, calendar, and productivity apps opened when you're working, but not when you're doing some weekend Wikipedia wandering. Capster is a free download for Windows systems only.

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Need to put new names to a batch of files and still have the names make sense? You could learn a scripting language, download a software tool for Windows or Mac, or just use Windows' built-in F2 utility, but for real control, all you need is a spreadsheet, whether desktop-based or online. The Digital Inspiration blog illustrates a three-column technique for giving your files unique names, using whatever criteria you want, and adding unique names, dates, or other factors to the name. For Excel novices like myself, it's also a nice introduction to simple formulas and column wrangling.

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