You just sat down at the internet café, you've got your coffee, your scone, and your laptop all plugged in and ready to roll, but—you need to hit the head. What do you do? Wired's Lore Sjöberg discusses this situation—what he calls the laptop dilemma—in detail, offering five options: Leave your helpless laptop alone, ask a neighbour to watch it, take your laptop with you to the can, take everything with you, or lock it up. Obviously, for safety's sake, you should either lock it up tight or—ideally—bring it along, but we don't always do what we should. On that note, we'd love to hear how you hack the laptop dilemma in the comments. Photo by scottfeldstein.

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Canon Australia's new IXUS 80 IS digital camera combines aesthetic style with affordability to deliver superior image quality. Advanced technologies to optimise spontaneous capture include Optical Image Stabilizer, Motion Detection Technology and Noise Reduction Technology, which combine to intuitively control blurring.

The IXUS 80 IS features a 2.5-inch PureColor LCD screen, an enhanced DiGIC III image processor that includes in-camera red-eye correction and improved Face Detection with White Balance (WB). Boasting an 8.0-megapixel CCD and 3x Optical Zoom, the IXUS 80 IS ensures image quality in a compact and striking design that's available in Blue, Camel, Pink, Brown and Silver to satisfy every personal preference (RRP $379).

[IXUS 80IS via Canon Australia]

Macs may be more expensive, and Mac users more elitist (ahem), but blind Apple loyalty aside, there are a number of neat features bundled into your Mac that make it super useful and fun. We've covered dozens of Mac tips over the years in these pages, but today we're highlighting 10 lesser-known Mac tricks that come baked into Leopard. From pure eye candy to outright productivity-boosters, read on to get reminded of some of the more obscure things you can do with your Mac, fresh out of the box.

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We are giving away autographed copies of the new Lifehacker book in our current competition. All you need to do is submit your best tip, trick or Lifehack, and you'll be in the running to win a copy of Upgrade Your Life, autographed by Lifehacker founder Gina Trapani. We're giving away the first lot of books on Friday, so get your entry in pronto!
Check out the original post for details on how to enter, and good luck! :)

We've already talked a fair bit about online photo editing suite Picnik but this tip from Digital Inspiration seemed like such a great way to grab a bunch of photos for editing at once, I wanted to share it.
Basically, rather than grabbing images one by one, you can actually paste the URL of a Google image search or other photo site like Flickr photo galleries directly into Picnik. This will import full versions of each image (not thumbnails!) ready for you to edit. The free version of Picnik is ad-supported, you'll need to pay for the premium version if you want to avoid ads.

How to Quickly Grab Pictures from Web Pages into Picnik for Editing [Digital Inspiration]

Opera has taken the latest version of its mobile browser, Opera Mini, out of beta this week. The new Opera Mini 4.1 gives the browser a speed bump and offers several new features for quicker scrolling, navigation and page rendering.
One feature carried over from the 9.5 Beta 2 version of Opera's desktop browser is the ability to guess the URL you want when you enter a search term in the address bar.
4.1 also supports offline viewing, and users with Java-enabled mobiles supporting JSR-75 will be able to upload and download any file via Opera's mobile web.
Opera Mini 4.1 is not compatible with all mobile phones, so check the full list of compatible phones here. Most Java handsets are supported, including BlackBerry and Palm phones.
Opera Mini 4.1 is a beta, so the usual warnings apply. It can be downloaded here. [via]

Firefox with Greasemonkey: The Gmail Addons Greasemonkey script embeds any page you specify inside Gmail's interface. By default, it comes with Google Calendar and the Google Talk gadget. (If this sounds familiar, it is—Gmail Addons is an update to the previously mentioned Enhance Gmail script.) Add any other web pages to Gmail by following the directions on the script homepage. If you're willing to dig into manually editing the script, Gmail Addons can embed Google Reader, Notebook, Docs, Remember the Milk, or virtually any other web page you'd like next to or below your inbox. Gmail Addons is free, requires the Greasemonkey extension to run.

Now that most of the major airlines have begun charging an extra fee for checking a second bag, National Public Radio's All Things Considered tackles the art of one-bag packing, interviewing Doug Dyment, owner of previously mentioned OneBag.com. In the piece, Dyment suggests that the key to a one-bag trip is making a list of your must-haves and sticking to it. In all the story offers some good advice, but since we've covered one-bag territory a lot in the past, hit the jump for some of our favourite tips for travelling light.

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Developer David Heinemeier Hansson says that sleep deprivation isn't a badge of honour that shows how hard you work—it just makes you dumb and miserable.

Forgoing sleep is like borrowing from a loan shark. Sure you get that extra hours right now to cover for your overly-optimistic estimation, but at what price? The shark will be back and if you can't pay, he'll break your creativity, morale, and good-mannered nature as virtue twigs.

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Add email, calendar updates, RSS feeds, and more to your "Slide to unlock" home screen with IntelliScreen, a free application for jailbroken iPhones and iPod touches. Similar to the widgets of Windows Mobile's "Today" screen, the app lets you order and customise what info, and how much of it, you see on your wake-up screen, including new SMS messages and local weather conditions. Better still, you can bring up that email message or check out that feed item in Safari by swiping over the widget and pressing the button that pops up. The app's makers warn that IntelliScreen has run into restoration-required conflicts with a few other third-party apps, so back up anything you can't afford to wipe clean. Intrigued enough to try unlocking your iPhone/touch? Check out our guide to unlocking with ZiPhone.

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In the age of social bookmarking and blogs, old fashioned browser bookmarks (or "Favourites," as Internet Explorer refers to them) are teetering on the edge of obsolete. When you can save a bookmark at, say, del.icio.us, tag it, and have it accessible from any computer, storing a link in your browser seems almost archaic. Adam uses Gmail to save and search his bookmarks; I use Firefox's toolbar for bookmarklets and I'm partial to Firefox keyword bookmarks that turn the address bar into a command line. What about you? Is your bookmarks manager stuffed full of links, or has bookmarking URLs become a thing of the past? Fess up your bookmarking habits after the jump. Photo by WordRidden.

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Windows only: Want to direct your non-torrent-savvy friends or relatives to a download they really need to check out? Free web utility Torrent2Exe takes torrent download links—the kind you'd normally pass to your favourite BitTorrent client—and creates tiny .exe programs that do all the download work for whoever double-clicks them. You can also grab a link to post on your own site (or Twitter stream) that lets others download the same self-running torrent grabber. Great for distributing your own files to a select group of downloaders, or helping Linux-curious friends grab the right disk images. Torrent2Exe's downloaders are for Windows systems only.

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• Should I bother trying to buy eco-friendly furniture?
• Is there a way to subscribe en masse to a few hundred web sites without knowing the feed URLs?
• How do I learn new programming languages and start using modern webapps without getting frustrated and angry?
• Should I legally change my often mispronounced name?
• How do I go from out-of-shape to a baseline level of fitness in a relatively short time without giving myself a heart attack?
• What are the best alternatives to PayPal?

Windows/Mac/Linux (Adobe AIR): Free, open source application ReadAir syncs your Google Reader feeds to the comfort of your desktop. ReadAir—whose three-pane interface looks and feels much more like a desktop newsreader than Reader—also retains a lot of Google Reader features, like starring items and adding and tagging feeds. The biggest missing feature in ReadAir is its lack of keyboard shortcuts; you won't be j/k-ing your way through your unread items in ReadAir the same way you can on the web—at least not in this version. That said, the app's to-do list includes offline mode and keyboard shortcuts, so if you'd prefer Reader had that desktop look and feel plus a killer web interface when you need it, ReadAir is a great option. ReadAir is free, all platforms, requires Adobe AIR. Thanks StevieB!

Since most of you said you've stuck to Google Docs over Zoho Suite because you already have a Google account, Zoho Suite added the ability to log on with your existing Google or Yahoo account. You can even import your contacts from Google or Yahoo into Zoho.

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Windows/Mac/Linux (Firefox): Brief, an in-browser RSS reader for Firefox, adds a clean Google Reader-type feed reading interface to your browser, and makes Firefox's default "Live Bookmarks" system far more useful. The stand-out feature for GReader users is the starring system that lets you tag posts for later viewing, but I also like the "X" boxes put on each post—instead of marking a post "read" and scrolling past it, you can actually remove it from your view. It's a lot like Sage, but with a more robust set of features and customisation. Brief is a free download and works wherever Firefox 2 and 3 beta do.

Linux only: Free IP-filtering application IPlist protects your BitTorrent downloads from third-party snoopers and blockers by controlling which IP addresses can and cannot connect to your system. The default blacklist installed with IPlist is a pretty good start to protecting your torrent privacy, and an "Update" button adds the latest known addresses with bad juju behind them, but the app also lets you add ranges, specific addresses, and other kinds of traffic to allow and block. Simply fire up IPlist before running your BitTorrent client, and the app will do its work. IPlist is a free download for Linux systems; hit the link below for prerequisites and installation help with Debian/Ubuntu and Fedora systems.

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Google Documents rolls out two features that make collaboration easy, even amongst friends and co-workers that don't have Google accounts. Spreadsheets now have an "Anyone can edit this document without logging in" option in their share tab, turning your document into a wiki that tracks changes in real time and can email you a summary. Also, those who dig the custom input forms can now embed them on any web page, and users who don't like your choices can submit their own answers with a new option. Great tools for those who want to collect opinions and data, but don't want to spend a lot of time setting up the web pages to do so.

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Windows/Internet Explorer only: Yahoo has released a beta version of their browser plug-in for social bookmarking tool del.icio.us for Internet Explorer. It'll look pretty familiar to anyone who's used their del.icio.us Bookmarks Firefox add-on (original post), with toolbar buttons for quick bookmarking and tag browsing, and complete integration and syncing with local bookmarks. It's still faster and more convenient than heading to del.icio.us or utilising tag-required bookmarklets, however. The del.icio.us add-on runs on Internet Explorer 6, 7, and even the IE8 beta on Windows XP and Vista.

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