If you're using Google's experimental keyboard shortcuts, auto-complete functions or other interfaces, you might have noticed a little yellow survey primer that sometimes sticks around long after you've offered up your answers. The How-To Geek points to a DIY Stylish script for Firefox that always hides the yellow box. Head to your Google search page, click on the Stylish status bar icon, choose "Write style" and "For Google.com," then enter the following:

@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);

@-moz-document domain("google.com") {
#exp_msgs {display:none !important;}
}

If you're used to the default CTRL-K or CMD-K keyboard shortcut to highlight the Google search box in most browsers, Safari's slightly different command (CMD-Shift-L) might be driving you nuts. Never fear, the 5ThirtyOne blog helpfully walks you through how to get CMD-K to bring up the Google search box:

1. Open System Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse > Keyboard shortcuts
2. Select the add button at the bottom left corner
3. Select Safari from the applications drop down menu
4. For menu title, enter "Google Search..." (... = option +
5. Focus on the Keyboard Shortcut textbox and press CMD+K
6. Select 'Add' and restart Safari

Well, you could join the Do Not Call register, or you could try playing your own evil hold music to those pesky telemarketers who just won't take "no thanks" for an answer.
Tipster Pooksterpup recorded this MP3 to play down the line to unwanted callers. It's a cute send up of those annoying hold messages punctuated with helpful tips and soothing "your call is important to us" platitudes.
I particularly liked the IVR sendup at the end: "You seem to be having some trouble ending this call and leaving with your dignity intact. Would you like some help with that?... I think you said yes, is that right?"
This gimmick would be even cooler if you could automate it - I guess you could record it as your voice mail message if you really wanted to.

Don't call me baby [Melbourne Maniacs]

Lifehacker AU is hitting the road for our first roadtrip of the year, and we'd like your tips for making it the easiest, safest and most fun drive it can be.
The itinerary is Sydney to Gundagai tomorrow, then Gundagai to Melbourne on Thursday.
Got any tips? Whether it's caring for your trusty car, hacking your Tom Tom, or how to get the most out of your your rest stops on the road, please share in comments.

Trying to cut back on your use of that energy sucking air conditioner (or maybe just don't have one)? A tipster at the Natural Living blog suggests this simple hack to get the most out of your standing fan instead:

"You need a fan, and a plastic bottle of water.
Fill the 3/4 of the bottle with water and put it in the freezer.
Once deep frozen, put the plastic bottle in front of the fan, and tadaa! Fresh air!"

Mac OS X only: If Quicksilver ain't your cup of tea but you want a quick and easy way to create keyboard shortcuts for certain tasks on your Mac, Spark's for you. Map common actions (like launching applications, playing iTunes playlists, running AppleScript) to key combinations of your choice in Spark. You can even organise your shortcuts into groups and install plug-ins (like this clipboard cleaner) in Spark. Spark 3.0 is in beta, and it's a free download for Mac only. Thanks fatherfork and Jeremy!

Read More »

Mac guy Rob Griffiths points out a few brand new command line utilities in Leopard, like the handy dot_clean command, which sweeps away Mac system files that start with a dot and annoy the hell out of you when you use that thumb drive on your PC. Griffiths writes:

Prior to 10.5, you had to manually delete them on the other system, or use Terminal trickery to remove them on the Mac prior to copying. As of 10.5, though, you can just use the dot_clean command on the directory in question. Type dot_clean /path/folder to join the dot-underscore files with their parent files. Read OS X 10.5's manual pages (man dot_clean) for more information.

Read More »

Windows XP and Vista only: Google releases an open source email uploader that moves existing email and contacts in your desktop client into your Google Apps Gmail account. (That's Google Apps Gmail account, not vanilla Gmail.) Download and install the Google Email Uploader, and choose mailboxes from Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, and/or Thunderbird to start uploading. After the jump, screenies from the process.

Read More »

Mac user Dennis Best says that using David Allen's Getting Things Done productivity system on your Mac doesn't mean you need to find the ultimate GTD application—that the tools you already have in Mail.app, iCal and Finder get the job done fine. After trying out shiny GTD-specific applications (like Things, which dazzled us too), he's settled on using those built-in tools instead. I'm with Dennis on this—instead of using a special GTD app, I stick to a calendar, email inbox, and a few text files to stay organized. Not to be all finger-waggy, but ultimately it's up to you, not your software, to work the system.

Read More »

Group scheduling web application When Is Good makes picking the best time for everyone easy as pie. Similar to previously posted Doodle, no registration is required at When Is Good: simply fill in the calendar with your proposed times for a conference call, meeting, or family reunion. Then enter your email to get an invitation message with a unique URL to your event. Send that sucker out to your invitees, who choose which times work for them. When Is Good is smart about time zones, too—your cross-country invitees will see the available times in their local time zones. Much better solution for figuring out what time works for everyone than that endless email thread.

Read More »

If you're sick of Firefox 2 eating up over a gigabyte of memory only to freeze up and crash, it may be time to move onto Firefox 3. The new version of our favourite browser has seen its fifth and final beta release, and Mozilla says its for testing purposes only. However, the Firefox 3 beta is leaner, meaner, faster, and just plain better than Firefox 2—and don't tell Daddy Mozilla, but even at this early stage, we've found it to be stable enough for full-time use. There are a few ways you can start using Firefox 3 without blowing your browser setup to hell or losing your most important extensions. Here's how.

Read More »

You can get around Firefox fast without taking your fingers off the keys, but mouse fans will be happy to know there are a whole lot of ways you can get things done in the 'fox by dragging and dropping text and images as well. For example, you can drag and drop:

• a URL (hyperlinked or not) onto an empty area on the tab bar to immediately have that URL opened in a new background tab.
  
• an image onto the address bar to immediately have that image open in the current tab.

Read More »

Windows/IE7 only: Nothing's better than heading to a web page to find some information and being greeted with a slow-loading, over-the-top Flash intro, right? For distracting, crash-causing, or otherwise troublesome animated pages, Toggle Flash, a free Internet Explorer 7 add-on, soothes the pain pretty quickly. Once you've installed the toolbar button, a single click turns off Flash functionality in the background; click again, hit refresh, and the videos, animations, and other Flash elements return. It's small, it uses no background memory, and it just works. Toggle Flash is a free download for Windows systems and Internet Explorer 7 only; hit either link below for help getting the button to show up on your toolbar.

Read More »

Lifehacker reader and blogger Clara posts a tip she picked up from a Taiwanese life hack television show on keeping papers together without using staples or binder clips. The technique requires scissors, a steady hand, and the patience to really learn the method on one's first few tries, but Clara notes that she's kept up to 15 sheets firmly together with the trick. Not applicable to documents you can't afford to have clipped, obviously, but it makes for an eye-grabbing way to deliver documents, and perhaps a shot at a MacGyver moment if you find yourself without office supplies—the two notches could be hand-ripped, after all, if you were crafty about it.

Read More »

Opera has released a new beta version of their Mini browser for cell phones and PDAs that includes pretty serious improvements for anyone who's serious about their hand-held browsing—namely, actual file downloading, uploading to select online services like Flickr and Gmail, and saving of web pages for offline access. Previous versions of Mini, like most mobile browsers, could only handle files that the browser or the device itself knew what to do with, but Mini now lets you save files and web pages to the device's storage, assuming it has a working version of the JSR-75 access protocol running in the background. Opera also threw in page-based "Find" searching and claims its server-based page cache is running 50 percent faster in recent tests. Opera Mini 4.1 beta is a free download for most devices that work with Java.

Read More »

Windows only: For some time now, Google Talk has been more appealing as a web app than in its rarely updated desktop version. That changes, somewhat, with the release of Google Talk Labs Edition for Windows. The desktop client, which looks a lot like its web counterpart, includes the same group chat, emoticons and tabbed talking as the web, and puts pop-up notifications for Google Calendar, Gmail and Orkut events in the corner of your screen—which is a nice, consolidated way of getting that Outlook-like functionality. The big trade-off, however, is the lack of voice calling or file transfer through the Labs Edition, so if those are regular features, you'll likely want to stick with whatever version you're using now. Google Talk Labs Edition is a free download for Windows systems only.

Read More »