At some point nearly everyone has had a collection of empty bottles and fast food containers riding shotgun with them. Take a few tips from Sue Brenner, a new contributor at the organizational blog Unclutterer, and have your car in order in no time. Her tips range from diving the car into quadrants and working systematically through them to sorting all the material you find into three bags.

Along with your trash and recycling bins, bring three grocery bags with you when you clean out your car. Label the first one "Does Not Belong Here." Write on the next one, "Give Away/Return," and label the final one, "Storage." Each bag will serve as a receptacle for the variety of things that found their way into your car. The "Does Not Belong Here" bag, for example, would be good for tossing in the spoons, client folders, and other items you want to keep but don't belong in your vehicle. Return these items to their homes after you've completed your car uncluttering project.

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The CyberNet blog has posted a seriously helpful cut-and-paste script that anyone can turn into a shortcut to turn Windows' hidden file showing on and off. Normally, showing hidden files—like folders named with a starting "." and configuration files—is accessed through the options in Windows Explorer windows or shell extension tools, but this Virtual Basic script can be stashed anywhere and accessed from a keyboard shortcut. Great solution for those who alternate between showing and hiding hidden files.

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Linux with Firefox only: Free Firefox extension Tomfox does exactly what a fan of the Tomboy note system might think. Adding a "Create Tomboy note" option to Firefox's right-click menu, it creates a new note from selected text. Even better, it puts the title of the web page at the top, and a link to the page at the bottom of your new note, helping you remember just where you grabbed that text from. Tomfox is a free download, works with Linux/Firefox and the Tomboy note program.

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Windows only: EjectUSB could be considered the nuclear option of USB drives that just won't property eject in Windows, because there's an "application or process" accessing it. Put EjectUSB on your thumb drive and run it, and the program will mercilessly kill every program, process, or anything else touching your drive, letting you safely remove it without any fear of data loss. It's obviously something you don't want to use when you've got important files open, but it's also a lot more convenient than restarting the computer. EjectUSB is a free download for Windows only; hit the via link below for a command line alternative for Linux systems.

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Standalone Outlook users suffer a little when it comes to getting their calendars and contacts into the cloud. Google offers a synchronisation tool for its Calendar, but the software is (at least in my experience) far too unstable to use. Now Microsoft itself has entered the fray, launching a beta version of release 12.1 of its Outlook Office Connector, which lets you sync information from Outlook into Live (Hotmail). Microsoft has offered this service before, but used to charge for it; now it's on offer for free. Beta is very much the word; we had trouble getting anything to sync at all. If you've had more success, let us know your experiences in the comments. [Microsoft via Official Outlook Team Blog]

Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth (who we interviewed last year) announced that he's out to make Linux a better-looking operating system than Mac OS X—within two years. An ambitious goal! At O'Reilly's OSCON conference this week, Shuttleworth said:

"I think the great task in front of us in the next two years is to lift the experience of the Linux desktop from something stable and usable and not pretty, to something that's art," Shuttleworth said. "Think of the way the iPhone uses a pure software experience, it abstracts away all the hardware," he said. "You can paint anything on the screen because it's all software."

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ABC iView (called Playback during its beta period) has now been opened up to all Australian Internet users, offering access to a fair chunk of the national broadcaster's output on full-screen streaming video across six channels. Unlike the Windows-only ABC Shop Download, the site is accessible on any browser supporting Flash (so Windows, Mac and Linux users all have options). There's plenty to keep you entertained: a rough calculation suggests there's already about 80 hours of programming on the service, the news channel will be updated on a daily basis, and the ABC has promised additional channels in the future. iView is free to access (via an Australian connection; the service is blocked overseas). As with all streaming media, you'll need to keep an eye on your download cap if you use the service extensively -- unless you're with iiNet, which is excluding iView from its quota.

Windows only: The free Orca Browser is a web browser based on the Firefox 3 core with the same speed and features of Firefox in addition to a handful of extra features. Those extra features include a built-in ad blocker, flash blocker, auto form-filler, and perhaps most useful, an online storage account that syncs your bookmarks, auto-form information, and more with an online account. Orca is made by the same folks who developed the freeware Avant Browser, which is based on Internet Explorer with an emphasis on speed and improved features.

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Following a restricted beta which began last December, Google has made its Wikipedia competitor Knol open for general use. While Knol borrows the general concept of "anyone can contribute" common to most wiki projects, it has a slight twist, as Google's software engineers explain:

With Knol, we are introducing a new method for authors to work together that we call "moderated collaboration." With this feature, any reader can make suggested edits to a knol which the author may then choose to accept, reject, or modify before these contributions become visible to the public. This allows authors to accept suggestions from everyone in the world while remaining in control of their content. After all, their name is associated with it!

Knol is free to use, requires a Google account to sign in. [Knol via Official Google Blog]

DIY weblog Hackosis details how to fix your scratched LCD monitor after a scarring encounter with a sharp object. The post offers two different methods for addressing the LCD scratches, from a temporary fix involving a little petroleum jelly to a more difficult but permanent solution that involves removing the scratch and re-lacquering your monitor. I've also heard the pencil eraser method works for simple scratches, though I haven't tried it. If all this LCD talk has got you in the mood for more LCD maintenance, check out how to clean an LCD monitor, fix your LCD's stuck or dead pixels, and remove LCD image burn-in. Photo by liewcf.

Web-based music search tool Mix Turtle creates playlists of songs you find online. Working from an index of millions of songs, Mix Turtle supplies suggestions to your search terms as you enter them. Covering a broad spectrum of time and tastes, Mix Turtle returned impressive results for diverse searches such as Miley Cyrus, Robert Miles, and Miles Davis. Once you find songs you would like to listen to, you simply click on them to start playing or click on the plus symbol next to the song to add it to your playlist. Create an accoung and log in to save your playlists, but a login is not required to use the service. The playback applet has no control for volume or jumping about within the track that is playing, but otherwise the playback is clean and the quality of the tracks high. While not a replacement for more robust service like Pandora, song selection was easy and playback enjoyable. Mix Turtle is free to use.

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Our brothers in gadgetry Gizmodo make the case for why jailbreaking your iPhone is worth it even with the App Store. Here's why we still need the iPhone app black market.

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Windows only: Free, open-source application Halite is a BitTorrent client with a focus on a small memory footprint. With Halite running and actively downloading on my system, I never saw the memory usage crest 10MB of RAM—which, as BitTorrent weblog TorrentFreak points out, is about half the memory consumption of the popular-for-its-small-footprint uTorrent. Granted, Halite doesn't have near the advanced features of uTorrent, but it does support most basic features, like encryption and selective file downloading. If all you want is a no-nonsense BitTorrent client that can grab your downloads with the best of them, Halite may be just what you need. Halite is free, Windows only.

There's a reason there's still so much paper around in this hyper-connected, everything-online age: the stuff is cheap, portable, compatible with all your applications, and everyone masters the interface by the time they're out of the first grade. Ingenious hackers and productivity thinkers, however, have taken paper to the next level in a huge variety of ways, creating templates for pocket organisers, super-handy calendars, thoughtful gifts, and even makeshift tools. Fire up your printer and let's take a stroll through some of the best printable productivity tools out there. Photo by Cirofono.

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Windows only: Backup utility Double Driver lists all the hardware drivers installed on your system and creates backups of both the actual drivers and lists of the driver names. While handy with any computer, Double Driver really shines if you have a computer that came with pre-installed drivers that are hard if not impossible to come by. With a few clicks you'll have those archaic laptop drivers backed up and ready to put back to work after a fresh install. Double Driver is a free download for Windows only.

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Firefox with Greasemonkey: The Google Reader for Wider Screens Greasemonkey script uses all the horizontal space available in GReader for better viewing on wide monitors. Install the script to take advantage of a wide browser window and scroll up and down less than you have to. The Google Reader for wider screens user script is a free download for Firefox with the Greasemonkey extension installed. Thanks, Andy!

Windows only: Free virtual archive tool Pismo File Mount can help you cut down on unnecessary CD burning and folder space by mounting compressed and ISO files as virtual drives. There are lots of utilities and means to do this, of course, but Pismo offers the simple route. Just right-click on a disc image or zipped file and choose "Mount" or "Quick Mount," and you can assign the folder to, say, drive Z:, or just have its contents pop up in a window. Grab what you need, close it down, and you're done. Pismo File Mount is a free download for Windows systems only.

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