Need to make all-caps text a little less shout-y? Don't feel like going through a ream of lines and fixing all the capitalisation? TextOpus, a free text-filtering web app, is a great place to start. Paste in problematic text and choose from a wealth of options, from line adders to a decent, simple "Clean Text" option to a very handy "Strip tags" that takes the HTML and forum code out of a blurb. For those who know what to do with them, there's also options to hash, hexadecimal, and encrypt text. Next time you're staring at a wealth of un-printable babble, try TextOpus before diving in with your mouse and backspace key.

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Windows/Mac/Linux (Firefox): Save yourself the time of copying, pasting, and fixing mistyped links with QuietURL, a free Firefox extension that converts URLs with typos or bad formatting. QuietURL comes with a standard set of common fixes, but users of regular expressions can get ultra-specific on what gets fixed. If you're a regular browser of a forum or site that willfully obscures URLs by messing with the link code (as in "hxxp:// ..."), QuietURL can automatically fix those as well, or pull the reverse. For those looking to fix their own fat-fingered URLs, try URL Fixer or switching your router to OpenDNS. QuietURL is a free download, works wherever Firefox does.

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A new group has started in Sydney called Geek Girl Dinners. An offshoot of a group which started in London, the Sydney group organises through a Facebook group and has already held several events.
The group exists to get girl geeks together for technical discussion, a meal and some laughs.
If you are a woman geek you are welcome and encouraged to come along - it makes no difference what kind of a geek you are or how small or large your level of technical knowledge. The intention is to learn & share some technical fu, have fun and connect with other women in IT.
 If you're a guy geeks who has a female geek friend willing to escort you are also welcome to attend.
I noticed that this month's Sydney dinner is already booked out but if you watch the blog or join the Facebook group you can go to the next one.

And for Melbourne girl geeks - well, watch this space. :)

I've just been playing with the pronunciation guide website Howjsay and really enjoying it. It has a slightly tinny English accented 'voice' which pronounces words for you from its dictionary.

It boasts over 97,000 words and it found several Spanish words for me (churros, burrito - yes I like Mexican food), as well as a couple of philosophers - the French Foucault and that German 'difficult to spell or pronounce' scallywag Nietzsche. When it looked up churros for me it gave both the English pronunciation and the Spanish pronunciation as well.

And it even had Lifehacker in its dictionary - aww!

All too often, the drive to get fit leads people to do some extreme form of torture exercise for 2 hours a day for a week, after which time they collapse and give up forever. Working up to it gradually by doing a little bit every day makes so much more sense, and helps you defeat that eternal excuse of "I have no time".
That's why I loved Dumb Little Man's list of 50 different things you can do that improve your health in 10 minutes or less. And it's not just fitness things like "do 15 situps" either. The list includes things that decrease stress (take a 10 minute break, do some deep breathing) or that improve your relationships (call your mother, invite a friend over for a healthy meal).
Of course the odd 10 minutes of something healthy isn't going to build you up to the level of health and fitness you might aspire to - so I'd take it a step further and say - do 10 minutes a day for a week, then aim to do 20 minutes the next week, and so on.
Got any ideas for a quick and healthy activity you can add to your day? Share in comments please.

50 Ideas for a Healthy Lifestyle that take 10 Minutes or Less [Dumb Little Man]

Wise Bread offers up a couple of ways to save money on petrol - and the big one is just slow down your driving speed.

On highways, the "sweet spot" for fuel efficiency is 55 miles per hour, or 90 km/hour. In fact, due to wind resistance at speed, you may use up to 20% more fuel if you speed up from 90km/hour to 120 km/h, according to figures the article quotes from Eartheasy.com.

Even on city streets, there are some ways to increase fuel efficiency - learn to take your foot off the accelerator when you can see you'll need to slow down or stop. Accelerating burns fuel - so it's wasteful to accelerate up to a red light, then hit the brakes.

Looking for other ways to save on petrol? We previously told you how to shop around online to find the cheapest petrol. Got any other tips for saving on petrol? Share in comments please.

How to save $0.54 per gallon on gas [Wise Bread]

Store all of your online contacts in one place with web application Keepm. If you've run the gamut of popular email applications across the years, chances are you may have lost track of a few contacts along the way. Keepm imports your contacts from popular applications like Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, AOL, Linked In, as well as from vCards or Outlook. When you need to search for a contact, you can go straight to Keepm and be comfortable knowing that the information you need is there regardless of where you originally created that contact. You can also export your contacts from Keepm at any time as vCards or a CSV file, which means it would at the very least work well to consolidate and export your contacts. Keepm does require you to hand over your username and password on the sites you want to import contacts from, but they do not store your login info on their servers.

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As the HDTV continues its march into living rooms, the New York Times points out that most new HDTVs need to be calibrated if you want to the best picture. The article points out several options for how you can go about calibrating your HDTV, from paying your electronics store to do it for you (the expensive way) to DIY calibration using the THX Optimizer, a tool built into many DVD menus. Since many of you have probably gone done this road already, let's hear how you calibrated your HDTV—including what tools you used and how you feel about the results—in the comments. For a more granular approach to fixing specific picture problems, check out how to troubleshoot your HDTV picture.

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Blogger Darren Rowse finally got fed up with multiple inboxes stuffed with thousands of unprocessed email messages and took a day to clear them out. First he consolidated five accounts into a single Gmail inbox. Then he unsubscribed from newsletters he didn't read, put some heavy-duty filters into place, and topped it all off with a heavy lean on the Archive button. Not bad for a Sunday morning's work.

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If you've ever copied a folder's worth of files in Windows, you've come across the Confirm File Replace dialog, which asks you if you want to replace an existing file with a new file. You have the option to answer Yes just for this file, Yes to All—which will just replace all the originals with the new copies—or you can say No; what's missing is a button to say No to All. Rather than clicking No countless times if No to All is what you really want, tech weblog Online Tech Tips points out that Windows simulates the No to All response if you hold the Shift key and then click No. It's a strange feature, and actually one that we covered years ago, but it's worth a second mention. Vista changed this dialog entirely, but if you're still living la vida XP, it's a good shortcut to know.

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Mac OS X Leopard only: Reader Ben points out that there's a lot more to Mac OS X's built-in Dictionary than definitions. He writes in:

I just noticed that in Dictionary.app (at least in Leopard), under to "Go" menu, there is an option labelled "Front/Back Matter." Clicking this brings up a whole slew of useful reference material, including a language guide (complete with a list of clichés to avoid), a list of the chemical elements, and the text of the Constitution. Next time I'm on a place, I think I'm going to brush up on the Bill of Rights.

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Web site YouTube Fast Search dynamically searches for new YouTube videos and creates playlists while a video is playing. If you've got a list of videos you know you want to queue up after the current one finishes, YouTube Fast Search will do the trick. Aside from the dynamic search, it also all happens through a really nice drag-and-drop interface. It could still use some work on playback controls, though, which were buggy for me.

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If you've done any more than cursory text editing using Windows' built-in Notepad application, you know that Notepad is at best sorely lacking in the features department and at worst downright buggy. Several free, simple Notepad alternatives are available for download, but which one has your heart? After the jump, vote for your favourite powered-up Notepad replacement.

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• How can I listen to NPR on my office PC when audio streaming is not allowed?
• Which Wii games require the most physical activity?
• How does one treat, eliminate, and prevent ingrown hairs and red bumps from from waxing?
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Managing the daily onslaught of incoming email with filing systems, keyboard shortcuts, and batch processing will only get you so far. When a flurry of new email snows you in within an hour of every inbox sweep, it's time to dig in and get to the source of your email traffic. You've accumulated a sizable email archive over the years, and a new breed of analysis tool can extract meaningful statistics from that data to help you conquer email overload. Who sent you the most email messages last year? What hour of the day do you receive the most new messages? Which of all the mailing lists you're on are the most active? A new command line tool called Mail Trends works with Gmail over IMAP and can give you all that information and more.

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Windows only: Add Firefox-style address bar shortcuts with IE Alias, a free add-on for Internet Explorer 7. While address bar alias shortcuts—as in typing "lh" to get to Lifehacker.com—have been available in packages such as IE7Pro (original post), IE Alias' tool adds the nifty ability to open multiple URLs with the same shortcut, giving Internet Explorer the same kind of "Open All in Tabs" convenience of, well, Firefox. IE Alias is a free download for Windows systems and Internet Explorer 7 only.

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Microsoft Outlook has three "risk levels" it can apply to attached files, which determines whether it warns you before downloading, tries its best to block you entirely, or just lets a file be grabbed without comment. If it doesn't know what kind of file is attached, however, it prompts, which can be annoying for workers who regularly pass around certain file types. The gHacks tech blog explains how you can set Outlook to see files of any kind as low-risk, through a registry hack. Details of the hack after the jump, but be sure to back up your registry before marching forward.

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Windows/Mac/Linux with Adobe AIR: Keep updates on all your friends' social network activities with Alert Thingy, an application for Adobe's AIR platform that brings FriendFeed functionality to the desktop. We've shown that social aggregator site FriendFeed can make it faster and easier to keep tabs on friends, and while you could track those updates with a private RSS feed, Alert Thingy lets you keep it in an buddy-list-like window, available for quick browsing and, best of all, searching. If you can't keep yourself from digging through your various social memberships to see what's new, Alert Thingy might at least make it quicker to do so. Alert Thingy is a free download for Adobe's AIR platform, which runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

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