Technologist and well-read fellow Kevin Kelly lists the books that have changed his life. Life-changing books are not just your favourite books, he explains, but "books that altered your behaviour, changed your mind, redirected the course of your life. Books as levers." His list is a great one, and has at least one overlap with my own (Leaves of Grass, baby—English majors, unite!). Other books he lists include Gandhi's autobiography, the Bible, and The Fountainhead. What books have been levers for you, and changed your life and way of thinking? Please share in the comments, so we can all load up our libraries. br />

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Free A/V website Wirewize takes most of the guesswork out of hooking together your television, DVD player, stereo speakers, and other gear. After a free sign-up, enter in the model and make of each component, and Wirewize will offer up which cables are needed, and diagram how they should run. Not every bit of equipment will be listed, especially those no longer sold, but the site has PDF manuals for some of the goods it does have. For A/V neophytes and those trying to troubleshoot friends' systems over the phone, it's pretty helpful.

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Windows only: Browse web forum threads and posts like RSS feeds with Web Forum Reader, a free Windows application. Adding forums you frequent to the app is done through an easy-to-grok wizard, and the program parses through the topics you haven't looked at with better speed than you'd find on often ad-loaded forum pages. You can also have the program track and alert you to changes in certain threads, and load your forums into tabs for quicker navigation. Web Forum Reader is a free download for Windows systems only.

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Update: Several readers point out the ferrite beads are not necessarily magnets—just hunks of iron. Our apologies! Do your speakers buzz and crackle whenever a new text message or call is about to come in on your nearby phone? What has come to be known as "GSM Buzz" happens because the wire in poorly shielded speakers acts as an antenna for the frequency the phone operates on. Rather than shell out a lot of money for better shielded speakers, you cancel out the speaker buzz with pieces of metal—the tube-shaped ferrite beads commonly found on USB cables. Harvest them from the round block at the end of an old USB cable with a pair of scissors, or just buy a few on the cheap from an electronic supply store. Tape the ferrite bead to the cable of the offending speaker, and the magnet should provide enough passive frequency suppression to do away with the horrible buzzing and popping.

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Despite persistent rumours, 3 maintains that it has no current plans to sell the iPhone -- but that doesn't mean it wouldn't like to. The company will roll out a site on July 27 at www.three.com.au/iphone where customers can petition Apple to provide the iPhone through the carrier. "While we've been engaging with Apple to secure the iPhone for 3, we don't know whether we can range it," 3 sales director Noel Hammil said in a statement announcing the site. "We want Apple to see just how much our customers want the iPhone." 3 customers can also text the word iPhone to 333 000 to receive a phone-based feedback form. If you're already a 3 customer, your contract is current and you're tempted by the iPhone, sending in a petition couldn't do any harm.

There's a useful thread at Whirlpool today discussing how to get hold of a copy of Windows Vista Home Premium without paying over the odds. If you are in the market for a standalone copy, there's good advice on how to go about getting the academic or OEM editions without messing with the licence conditions. Vista pricing was lowered at the start of the year, making it one of the most quickly discounted versions of Windows, but there's still no reason not to try and get the best price.
Buying Vista home premium problems [Whirlpool]

The BBC has compiled a list of 10 suggestions to help cure insomnia, based on suggestions from site visitors. Some are familiar (counting backwards, not using computers close to bedtime) but others are more esoteric:

Eat a sandwich, thickly filled with lettuce, about half an hour before going to bed. You should sleep like a log.

The news earlier this week that Apple was finally selling TV shows through the Australian iTunes Store was welcome for people keen to legally purchase and download television using the familiar and well-regarded iTunes interface. But as several readers have pointed out in emails, downloading shows will use up much more bandwidth than music. With virtually all Australian ISPs enforcing some sort of bandwidth cap, what tactics can you use to minimise the impact of a spate of TV downloading? See our suggestions after the jump.

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Nintendo is releasing Cooking Guide: Can't decide what to eat?, a cookbook application for its DS handheld, on July 3. The 250-recipe package can be browsed by ingredients, country of origin, number of calories or degree of difficulty, and there's a shopping list feature to track the ingredients you'll need. While you could of course download recipe documents onto any number of portable devices, the package has one neat trick: you can advance through the stages of the recipe using voice commands, ensuring you don't get sauce all over the screens. If you've got another high-tech tactic for accessing recipes in the kitchen, tell us about it in the comments.

Web site Humyo offers 30GB of free online storage with a small and inconsequential catch: 25 of the 30GB must be media files, like music and videos. The remaining 5GB are reserved for non-media files and documents. Since most of our hard drive space is eaten by media, this won't likely be a problem. Once uploaded, files are organized in Humyo's user-friendly interface, which identifies filetypes and even organises media by metadata (e.g., music can be sorted through by artist, album, etc.). Humyo offers a Windows client that maps a network drive directly to your Humyo account for drag-and-drop uploads and downloads, but you can use Humyo from any platform through your browser.

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Windows only: Free, open-source application KDE Window-Sizer resizes and moves windows when you click anywhere inside the window while holding the Alt key. To move a window, then, hold Alt and left-click and drag anywhere in the window to move it—this behaviour mimics the move behaviour available in the KDE Linux desktop environment. Likewise, to resize a window from anywhere, just hold Alt and then right-click and drag anywhere in the window. Additionally, the application will snap any window to the edge of your monitor by Alt-right-clicking or Alt-resizing the window, which really helps maximise screen real estate. It may sound confusing at first, but give it a try and you'll quickly appreciate the new functionality, or check out the video demonstration of the similar, previously mentioned WinMover. KDE Window-Sizer is free, Windows only. Thanks Paul!

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Firefox only (Windows/Mac/Linux): Firefox extension Surfkeys scrolls web pages, switches tabs, and executes common browser actions from the comfort of your home row. Once installed, you can scroll web pages using the k (down) and i (up) keys, move to new result pages in Google with m and n, page up and down with p and the semi-colon, and tons more. Surfkeys takes some time getting used to, but if you have a real disdain for your mouse, it's a killer extension. Surfkeys is free, works wherever Firefox does.

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Reader Oshayr has been making all kinds of about:config tweaks to Firefox after reading our power user's guide to Firefox 3, but he's discovered that all that tweaking is a lot easier with the about:config window in your sidebar. So Oshayr created a new bookmark from the about:config page and ticked the box next to Load this bookmark in the sidebar. Now, when reading through a post dedicated to about:config tweaks, Oshayr selects and drags tweaks to the filter box. Simple, yes, but way more useful copying, pasting, and switching between tabs or windows when you're tweaking Firefox.

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If you've waited patiently for new experimental Gmail features in your Google Apps account since they were announced for Gmail, your wait is over. Just click Settings -> Labs to get started. Thanks David!

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Microsoft releases the Open XML File Format Converter for Mac 1.0, a free download which lets you open Microsoft Office 2007 and Mac Office 2008 documents in Office 2004 for Mac. [via]

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Good money management is a mental exercise in self-regulation and focusing on the long-term goal, even when you're sure you just can't go on another day without buying that Kindle or MacBook. Even the most uber-organised and priority-minded people can stumble when it comes to money—how to save more of it, how to stop spending it, and how to keep doing both over and over again. While every person's financial needs are different, anyone can set up simple systems to help themselves stop buying what they don't need and almost automatically save money they'll need later. Let's take a look at 10 ways you can cut costs and do right by your money without much effort, after the jump. Photo by Darren Hester.

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Windows only: Total Organizer is a lightweight personal information manager with a surprising number of features for its diminutive size and memory footprint. Total Organizer has the basics covered: scheduling, to-do lists, notes, and contacts. More advanced features include a tree based organisation structure and tagging system. Need to see only the tasks, notes, appointments, and contacts related to a specific project you're working on? Just look in the sub-folder for that project, such as /Global Domination/Early Planning/Carrot Top Election Plans/ and Total Organizer displays all the data related to that project in the main window. Total Organizer is a free download for Windows only.

Windows only: Recover deleted files with freeware program UndeleteMyFiles. More than just a basic file recovery tool, UndeleteMyFiles includes a secure file eraser, a set of file recovery tools, a database recovery tool for popular desktop email clients such as Outlook and Eudora, and an emergency disk image maker. The disk image maker is especially handy for recovering data from camera memory cards: you can save an image of the card to continue recovery efforts at a later date and still use the card in the present. For more file recovery options, check out our feature on the best file recovery freeware. UndeleteMyFiles is a free download for Windows only.