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This Week's Best Posts
Posted by Lifehacker US Edition at 10:00 AM on May 10, 2008
Too busy for Lifehacker this week? We forgive you. Have a recap of this week's most popular posts:
- Turn Your Point-and-Shoot into a Super-Camera
"If you're using a consumer grade point-and-shoot Canon digital camera, you've got hardware in hand that can support advanced features way beyond what shipped in the box." - Make Windows More Productive Without Installing a Thing
"The most common complaint we get from Lifehacker readers in Windows IT lockdown is that the majority of our tips require installing third-party applications—which you can't do if you don't have the right permissions on your PC." - Best Online File Sharing Services
"Whether you're trying to share megabytes worth of music with a friend or send an important document to a coworker, nothing outshines a fast, easy-to-use file-sharing service." - Determine If Your ISP is Throttling Your BitTorrent Traffic
"Web application Glasnost simulates BitTorrent downloads on your computer to determine whether or not your internet service provider (ISP) is throttling your BitTorrent transfers." - Top 10 Tools to Get Blogging Done
"Writing your blog should be a fun way to stretch your mind and stay connected to trends, friends, and the greater world, not another computer task that takes far too long to get done." - How Wil Wheaton Gets Things Done
"In 1988, if you'd told my Star Trek-loving 12-year-old self that someday I'd get to meet Wil Wheaton—and that he'd know my name—my preteen head would have exploded." - How to Buy a Digital Camera and Ignore Expensive Hype
"Wired's How-To Wiki takes a group-edited look at the digital camera market and how a newcomer (or, more likely at this point, a buyer replacing their first, outdated model) can parse all the features and statistics to come out with a reasonable bargain." - Creative Ways to Reuse "Disposable" Items
"We asked earlier this week what disposable items you had found clever re-uses for, and the answers are in. Not surprisingly, some of you have some pretty crafty uses for household goods that usually end up at the curb." - Get 91% Off Microsoft Office Ultimate
"A Microsoft student promotion that slashes 91% off a copy of Office Ultimate applies to anyone with a .edu email address—and most universities offer .edu addresses to their alumni for free." - Slipstream Service Pack 3 into Your Windows XP Installation CD
"Next time you wipe your PC's hard drive clean and reinstall Windows with that old installation disc, you don't want to connect your fresh, unpatched and vulnerable system to the internet only to download 176 new updates from Microsoft."
iPhone/iPod touch only: The lamest omission in the whole of iPhone development is the lack of sync for Notes. Let's be honest—the iPhone keyboard is nice, but you don't want to have to use it for all your notes. That's where RemoteNote comes in, a donationware iPhone application available through Installer.app. Whenever you run it, you can view, edit, create, delete, back up, and even print your notes through your web browser. Similar shareware tools have been available, but RemoteNote is the first no-cost option I've seen. RemoteNote works with both the iPhone and iPod touch, requires installation of the Jiggy Runtime (also from Installer) and a 
Web site Mac OS X Hints details how to create an iTunes audiobook (i.e., an M4B audio file) from any text in just a couple of clicks. The process involves installing a new service to your Services menu, then selecting your to-be-audiobooked text and choosing AppName -> Services -> Speak to iTunes Audiobook. When the conversion is complete, the resulting audio file is automatically imported to iTunes in the Audiobooks section. The service uses the new Alex voice in Leopard, and the results are actually very listenable.
iPhone/iPod touch only: You may be familiar with Orb for its 
Whether you're flying a jumbo jet at night or working on a crossword puzzle in the dark, the Pilot's Pen is a nifty solution. The LED-powered penlight illuminates the page while you write, or you can retract the ink and just use it as a mini flashlight—useful for checking a map or locating something in the night driver's glove compartment. The Pilot's Pen will set you back 20 bucks, and it's available at Amazon.
Firefox only (Windows/Mac/Linux): Firefox extension YouTube Comment Snob filters comments on YouTube videos that don't meet your snobbish standards. It does so using a combination of criteria, like a user-defined threshold of spelling errors (using Firefox's spell-checker), excessive punctuation, and excessive capitalisation. You can enable or disable any of the filter options if you don't mind capital letters, for example, and you can view any hidden comment by simply clicking Show. It's a pretty saucy little extension, but now it's hard not to want a full-on Internet Comment Snob.
Once upon a time, gigabytes of storage space and message labels and IMAP access in web-based email was unheard of—until Gmail raised the industry bar and user expectations of what you get with your free webmail account. But now that we're all used to Gmail's goodness, it's time to cast a critical eye at the little niggly things that are missing from Gmail's web client. This week I spent two hours wrestling two Gmail accounts to the ground trying to hack together a filtered auto-response that only goes to certain annoying senders. (The approach 
You've just finished carefully control-selecting all those files you need to move off your desktop and into a container folder, and then, one hand slip later, you have twice as many to deal with. The How-To Geek finds the fix, both inside Microsoft's Swiss-Army-Fixer, 
No matter how meticulous your programming, or how smart you might think your TiVo is, random scheduling changes can cause you to miss an episode of your favourite series and not realise it until your co-workers give away the plot. mytvrss, a free no-subscribe RSS generator, provides an aggregate feed of air date announcements for the shows you choose, which can be edited later. It's not for those suffering from an acute case of feed overload, but it could make for a pretty helpful iGoogle gadget or other embeddable feed.
