Last Week’s Top Ten Posts

You wanted a fair deal with warranties, protection for your Wi-Fi, and good deals on used cars and group buys. Get the new week going by checking out the ten most popular posts from Lifehacker Australia over the last seven days:

1. Use A Fridge Magnet To Test Used Cars For Damage
   After we posed the question yesterday, Lifehacker readers came through with plenty of handy tips for buying a car. One particularly useful notion? Take a fridge magnet along with you to check for rust and filled areas.
2. Apple Store’s Warranty Approach Contradicts Australian Consumer Law
   Nationwide consumer protection laws entitle you to take a product back to the place that sold it if there’s a problem and seek either a fix or a refund. However, Apple seems to want to ignore that requirement
3. The Pros And Cons Of Qantas’ New Dallas Routing
   From May 16, Qantas will begin direct flights between Australia and Dallas Fort Worth (DFW), marking its first non-stop route to the USA that doesn’t land on the west coast. Road Worrier looks at the good and the bad consequences that will flow from that decision.
4. Which Deal Aggregation Site Rounds Up The Most Bargains?
   There’s so many deal-of-the-day and group deal sites in Australia, it’s not surprising that there’s also been a boom in services which aggregate the deals from those sites on a single page. But which offer the most comprehensive coverage?
5. How Can I Find Out If Someone’s Stealing My Wi-Fi?
   Dear Lifehacker, Lately it seems like my high speed connection is bogged down, and I’m getting a creepy feeling that someone’s stealing my bandwidth on my Wi-Fi network. How can I find out if other people are leeching my Wi-Fi, and how do I stop them if they are?
6. 10 Tech Facts From The Australian Open
   The Australian Open is one of the four key Grand Slam events in the international tennis calendar. IT plays a vital role in helping the players prepare and providing information for spectators on the ground and TV viewers at home. Here’s some of the more crucial applications for technology at the event.
7. How To Create A Portable Hackintosh On A USB Thumb Drive
   There are tons of awesome live, bootable Linux systems, but what if you need to run OS X? Reader Will shows us how to put a portable version of OS X on a thumb drive and boot it on (most) Intel computers.
8. Extreme Tactics For Earning Frequent Flyer Points
   Apart from points earned through flying itself, many of us rack up additional frequent flyer points through credit cards and supermarket reward schemes. If that doesn’t make your total rise up fast enough, there are weirder options on offer.
9. Don’t Try To Dry Damaged Hard Drives
   There’s a lot of flood-damaged computers out there right now, and a lot of people hoping their data can be recovered. That’s likely to require specialist skills, but you can make sure that the process has the maximum chance of working by not trying to dry the drives beforehand.
10. How To Avoid Mistakes With Apostrophes
    You don’t have to wander very far on the Internet before you encounter examples of apostrophes being used in entirely the wrong way. Here’s a basic guide to making sure you’re not responsible for howlers like “The problem with it’s design is that it let’s you send a message too easily”.

Picture by Conrad Bakker