We've previously featured "Professor" Solomon's free pages featuring his 12 Principles for finding what you've lost, but now the good man is offering up his entire 67-page book, "How to Find Lost Objects," as a free PDF download. If you not only want to find a particular lost object—like, say, the iPod Touch I managed to misplace for two months—but want to learn the habits and thinking that help you find things on a regular basis, hit the link for your guide to "The Eureka Zone," "Domestic Drift," "Pocket Gobble," and more.

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Once upon a time you needed a chat client running on your computer for each and every instant messaging service you used, and since different buddies used different IM protocols, you had run different programs at once to chat with all your peeps. But that's no longer the case. Nowadays advanced chat applications work across networks, and boast plug-ins and features that put IM apps of yesteryear to shame. For this week's Hive Five, we want to know: What's your favourite instant messenger client? Your choice can be desktop- or web-based—or anything, really—as long as it does chat. Hit the jump for details on how to cast your ballot.

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Firefox with Stylish: The Gmail Redesigned user style—which requires the Stylish extension to use—skins Gmail with an attractive, well laid-out, and completely overhauled look. Everything in the Gmail Redesigned interface is darker and a touch sleeker than the default Gmail interface, which hasn't changed all that much since Gmail launched four years ago today. Right now the developer is issuing updates to this style almost every day. Once Gmail Redesigned is complete, we hope to add it to the rest of the Gmail skins in an upcoming release of Better Gmail.

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It seems like a lot of people might grumble about iTunes but they keep using it. But a Wired piece on open source music player Songbird caught my eye yesterday. Built on the Mozilla platform, it's aiming to be as customisable as Firefox, and describes itself as a "desktop media player mashed up with the web".

What does this mean? Songbird was designed for people to be able to access music from the web as well as from their own computer's music collection. So it includes a web browser for streaming and downloading music. When you navigate to a page which has embedded music on it, Songbird will display a simple playlist window of all the available music on that page so you don't need to hunt for the links. Nice.

I'm curious, and I'm downloading it right now as I type. If you've tried Songbird, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on it.

Songbird Music Player Challenges iTunes with Major Update [Wired]

If you like watching music videos online, but the poor quality of YouTube makes you sad, you may want to check out newly launched site Movideo. They're advertising "near DVD" quality (PC Authority's writeup said you can get full-screen full-screen 16:9 playback up to 720x405 and audio bitrates up to 192K) putting it below HD quality but a fair whack better than YouTube.

You'll see from the screenshot under the cut that they've got links at the bottom of the screen if you want to buy a download of the song from Telstra, or a hard copy version through J B Hi-Fi (or ringtones, although we don't encourage that). They do show ads in a separate screen, but not before each song - looks like you'll get an ad for every three songs or so.

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Readers are submitting their best life hack for a chance to win an autographed copy of our new book, Upgrade Your Life. Here's our latest winner.
When reader Jim steps away from his PC at the office, he likes to let everyone know where he is—and he uses his screensaver to do just that. But digging through the settings every time he has to change the status message is tedious, so Jim streamlines the process with a handy script that he invokes with a simple key combination. After the jump, download Jim's fabulous script and learn how to set it up for yourself.

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Blogger Samar Kamat loves keeping up with his favourite web sites with Google Reader, but noticed Reader can take forever to load feeds with longer items. His solution? Switch to List View.

The default view in Reader is the Expanded View, which is great for 80% of feeds, like Slashdot, where posts are short and concise. However, for very verbose and object-heavy posts, it takes a load off of your bandwidth to load only one page at a time. So next time you're waiting for the images on your tutorial to load, just switch to List View and enjoy the speed.

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Web developer and Zen Habits guest poster Glen Stanberry has an interesting perspective on how to keep control of your productive time - by treating the increasing demands on your time as 'feature creep' into the software of your life. These kind of time stealing features can be mobile phones, IM, social networking sites, etc.

He suggests a few tactics for cutting out or reining in some of these 'features' in our lives, including setting hard deadlines on internet usage, and importantly, weighing up the pros and cons before signing up to any new online accounts:

"Every social media account that you sign up for will require at least some attention. They send frequent emails, and ultimately try to get you on their site.If you need to set up a ton of accounts, be sure that the email settings are turned waaaay down so that the amount of email you receive is minimal."

The amount of spam that most social networking sites generate can be huge. I've reined it in by turning off email notifications wherever possible. A social networking aggregator like FriendFeed can help reduce time wasting because it centralises your notifications and friend updates - so you only see them when you choose to visit the site.

So how do you reduce 'feature creep' in your life?

Life Coding: 9 Ways to Fight Feature Creep in our Lives [Zen Habits]

Windows only: The Trinity Rescue Kit is a free Linux live CD designed to help with common Windows tasks. Among Trinity Rescue Kit's many features, it can reset lost or forgotten Windows passwords, clone NTFS-formatted Windows drives, recover lost or deleted files, and recover lost partitions. TRK joins the ranks of other rescue-based live CDs, like previously mentioned BartPE or the Knoppix boot CD. If you're using TRK to reset passwords, you may want to try cracking that password with the OphCrack Live CD method rather than hazarding with a password reset.

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PicLens is a browser addon for Firefox, Internet Explorer or Safari which lets you view images from a number of popular sites including Flickr and Google Images, in a full screen, 3D environment.

Apart from being a pretty way to browse images, it's also practical - it lets you view large number of images very quickly.

The way it works is when you're on a page which supports PicLens (and it's a lot of the major ones, including Google Images and Picasa, Flickr, Facebook, MySpace and Deviant Art) or any site which supports Media RSS, you can mouse over any image and click the PicLens button that appears. This will bring up a 3D gallery called "The Wall" which stretches into the distance. You can rapidly scroll through it, then click on an image to see it in full size.

I get the feeling my description is not doing it justice, and I know the screenshot doesn't do it justice (hit the jump to see it). Check out the demo video to get a feel for just how beautiful it looks and how beautifully it navigates.

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Yesterday I had the great pleasure of being a guest on G4's Attack of the Show, where I got to talk about what the heck life hacking is and the new Lifehacker book, Upgrade Your Life. As promised, a video clip of the interview with my pal Chris Hardwick is after the jump.

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Windows only: Freeware plug-in Call Graph integrates with the popular VoIP application Skype to record your Skype as MP3s and organize those recordings with a simple interface. Once installed, you can set Call Graph to automatically record all of your Skype calls, or you can choose to start and stop recording manually during a call. After you record a call, you can rename and add relevant information to the call data—which comes in handy when you use Call Graph to search your index of recorded calls. There are many Skype recording tools out there, but most come with a price or limitations. The freeware, Windows-only Call Graph has no limitations, and while its current interface is spare, it's simple to use and does the job.

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If you've finally succumbed to the email tractor beam that is Gmail but still have email sitting around in other accounts, it's not hard to suck in those old messages into your Gmail archive. The Official Gmail blog runs... Read More »

Web site NSFW.in is a URL-shrinking web application à la TinyURL with a twist, allowing users to share Not Safe For Work (NSFW) links without fear of compromising your poor, unsuspecting friend. When you follow a NSFW.in link (like this one, which actually is safe), you've got to confirm that you are indeed ready to view a web page that's potentially not safe for a work environment. Confirm, and you're through, reveling in the work-unfriendly filth of the dirty, dirty link. Now disperse, and share NSFW links across the internet with impunity!

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Auto-complete is one of those features that gets more and more convenient the more you use it—so losing it completely on a new system, or just new Outlook installation, can be a shock. The Tech Recipes blog details the process for hunting down, copying, and pasting your .NK2 file from system to system, saving you the trouble of re-training your email mind. For most users, the file can be found in your "Application Data" (XP) or "App Data" (Vista) folders, nested inside "Microsoft->Outlook." For help on actually editing and removing entries from Auto-Complete, check out NK2View.

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The Re-Nest blog gets its list on in a serious way, offering 27 uses for lemons and other citrus fruit around the house. We've gone there before, but one item stood out as a great idea: Whitening tennis shoes, or any white athletic shoe, by spraying them with lemon juice and placing them in the sun. For runners living in cold and often salty climates or wishing their kicks looked a bit less muddy, it's worth a try.

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When you're installing Windows in a virtual machine or on old, slow hardware, you want the leanest, meanest and fastest-running configuration possible. Most of the time, you want the best from your operating system, including all the bells and whistles. Other times, you don't want the default, bloated Windows installation, with every single built-in feature slowing you down. Luckily, whether you want to put Windows on a diet in a virtual machine or you want to get Windows up and running all snappy-like on older hardware, you've got a handful of excellent and free options at your disposal. Let's take a look at a few ways to trim down your Windows installation so that it takes up less space on your hard drive and eats less RAM while it's running.

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There's nothing like the feeling that you've just paid far too much for something — or, even worse, nothing — to get your adrenaline pumping and your mind spinning up angry emails and phone calls. Trent at The Simple Dollar blog, however, writes that that's the easiest way to waste time and get a worse resolution to the problem. He suggests taking time to write down exactly what the problem is and detail the entire situation, but, more importantly, consider how important it really is before you start yelling. If it is a major migraine-maker:

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Windows only: See just how much time the kids are spending on the Internet, or dad is spending on Facebook, with Access Monitor, a free monitoring utility for Windows systems XP and later. The app's purpose is simply to offer a more user-friendly way of seeing who's coming and going on a multi-user system than digging through system logs, with assignable icons for each user and scalable, printable log reports. The software—which runs in the background but can be hidden and password protected from non-admin users—claims to be designed with XP in mind. I got it installed and running on my Vista system, but had some trouble accessing the administrator panel. Access Monitor is a free download for Windows systems only.

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