lifehacker
Instructables poster Justin Seiter didn't let a slightly cheesey but expensive Hallmark card with audio go to waste. Using a glue gun, a junky set of old headphones, electrical tape, a utility knife and a mini-cereal box, he created a speaker for his iPod (or any stereo-jack-accepting device). It might not power your home theater, but it gets stereo sound from the headphone wires and might make for a geek-pride spare speaker in a bedroom or bathroom. Hit the link for full instructions on piecing your childhood breakfast favorites and throwaway electronics into modern audio accessories.
techcrunch
Microsoft and Yahoo are back at the table, Microsoft says today. In a press statement, the company says:
in light of developments since the withdrawal of the Microsoft proposal to acquire Yahoo! Inc., Microsoft announced that it is continuing to explore and pursue its alternatives to improve and expand its online services and advertising business. Microsoft is considering and has raised with Yahoo! an alternative that would involve a transaction with Yahoo! but not an acquisition of all of Yahoo! Microsoft is not proposing to make a new bid to acquire all of Yahoo! at this time, but reserves the right to reconsider that alternative depending on future developments and discussions that may take place with Yahoo! or discussions with shareholders of Yahoo! or Microsoft or with other third parties. There of course can be no assurance that any transaction will result from these discussions.
This is clearly in response to Carl Icahn’s bid to replace the Yahoo board and bring the company back to the table at Yahoo, and continued speculation that Yahoo may jump into bed with Google on a search deal.
For now, the discussions are centered on “a transaction with Yahoo but not an acquisition of all of Yahoo.” That could mean a pooling of search assets to block Google, for example. And of course, once they are at the table a full acquisition could still happen. I enjoy the jab at the end of the statement that suggests Microsoft is willing to negotiate with just about anyone who claims to control Yahoo at this point - “discussions that may take place with Yahoo or discussions with shareholders of Yahoo or Microsoft or with other third parties.”
We’re back in business on this deal, and the recent logo has been shelved for now.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
[saosis]
For those interested in the Mosley scandal and/or the wider implications into F1, this letter http://www.fia.com/resources/docume
It's a clever piece of work. Will it do the job and change the minds of some floating voters on 3 June though? 02:37 pm :: Marin headlands
I headed out north yesterday and I was expecting the place to be slightly cooler than the south bay. Just how cool I couldn't have guessed. When I arrived at Point Reyes, the summer clothing I was in looked like a bad bad mistake. It was all foggy and windy and very cold - at least for my tropical skin. :) Anyway, I managed to sneak in a few photographs...
( Photographs from Marin... )
12:00 pm :: Make Your Budget Easier to Grasp with Targeted Accounts [Personal Finance]
lifehacker
Personal Finance blog Funny About Money tweaks the concept of a "freedom account"—a single stash for irregular-but-common expenses like car repair and clothing—and comes up with targeted accounts. That means opening up a money market or similar small account for each kind of expense, based on how often it occurs, rather than track a bunch of expenses from a big fund.
For example, I look to the irregular little surprises that can happen at any time (plumbing or car repairs, vet bills, etc.), annual expenses (car and home owner's insurance, property tax, income tax), and long-term expenses (purchase of a new car, about once every ten years; major repairs or renovations on the house, which I hope don't happen more often than about once every eight or ten years).That way, the author states, big walloping expenses like car repair don't throw off your budget and give you a clearer view at what you're spending.
[banana]
Apparently one of Max Mosley's five prostitutes was the wife of an MI5 agent, who has resigned. The head of MI5 had to tell Gordon Brown that Mosley is not considered a threat to national security.
http://www.grandprix.com/ns/ns20363.htm
(3 comments | Leave a comment)
10:30 am :: The S-Biner Double Carabiner [Stuff We Like]lifehacker
Carabiners—D-shaped rings with spring-loaded clips that climbers use—have become more popular for everyday use, like clipping keys, water bottles, or even USB drives to your backpack or gear. The Cool Tools blog features an S-Biner, a modified carabiner that has dual clips so you can attach items on either side. The S-Biner will set you back 5 bucks, and is available at Amazon.
gapingvoidtest
[A little piece of graffiti, done on a picnic table of my local bar etc.]
[jevgenia]
( ... )
(11 comments | Leave a comment)
01:57 pm :: tenderness[crash_dragon]
11:16 pm :: finally an engineerI am now on, Vandana Merani, B.Tech!!!!!!!!!!!!!
(2 comments | Leave a comment)
09:00 am :: Healthy Eating for Under a Dollar [Health]lifehacker
Gas isn't the only thing getting more expensive, so— in the face of rising food costs—health web site WebMD sets out to highlight 10 healthy foods you can buy for under a dollar. Granted, most of the foods listed are pretty standard for any healthy eater—fruits and vegetables like apples, bananas, and baby carrots—but it's a good reminder that despite the high prices, there are still plenty of healthy and cheap foods available. But to add a little more to where Web MD left off, why don't you share your favorite low-cost and healthy foods in the comments.
[misuslovett]
hello!
Well, I got into lost like.. 4 days ago? Yeah, I finished season one and I discovered that I actually rented disc 3 and 4 of the second season.. and the video store isn't open today. Basically, I want to die. I went hunting for the episodes on youtube, I could not for the love of Sawyer find anything from season two!!
if ANYONE knows where I can downlaod or watch the episodes... just up to episode 8, I would love you eternally because I am going INSANE! I'm trying to finish all the seasons by next thursday so I can start watching it regularly. I'm pretty sure this is my favorite show ever... I'm absolutely in love with it, as is m mother!
So yes, any help would be uberly appreciated... and you are very welcome to friend me if you want... I want some lost friends!
oodles of love! ♥
EDIT: I should mention that I actually live in Canada, therefore abc.com and itunes will not let me view the episodes.
(14 comments | Leave a comment)
03:00 pm :: Bill’s Gold Watchtechcrunch
Bill Gates is sure taking his sweet time retiring. While he is busy hyping yet another Microsoft research project to the CEO Summit, Google has vaulted several huge steps ahead in the cloud infrastructure battle with Friend Connect. Mike Arrington’s audience with WonderWall given all due props, what on earth does this have to do with how to spend the 44 billion left on the table after the Yahoo meltdown?
The product manager of this gizmo is none other than Chris Pratley, the genius (seriously) behind OneNote, the Tablet product that briefly made that platform relatively salivating on my way out the door to Macland. Of course, in the OneNote days, it was impossible to get past Allchin and the Office Palace guards to encourage a free OneNote player for the browser. Now Mesh is in the oven, and Silverlight is that freely redistributable player. The times they have a-changed.
But Bill’s pet projects will just not cut it while Google methodically mows down the marketplace with these silly little social media chunks of code. It’s not that Friend Connect is going to slow Facebook down; to the contrary, it’s going to consolidate Facebook’s equity in social metadata and create a groundswell of OpenID adoption which in turn will drive Open Social app development.
Each new OpenID registration produces warm fuzzy feelings for Web site owners who become part of an expanding network of reuse of the original log-in. The terms of service for accessing social clouds will normalize over the next few months as users gravitate toward sites that leverage their original investment in OpenID registration. It’s a Frequent Flyer strategy, producing affinity based on less work, common interface guidelines, and pressure on Facebook and outside clouds to modify their terms of service to avoid having to reinitialize access to their social data over and over.
The same dynamics are starting to accelerate in real time streams over Jabber and XMPP. Facebook is soon to open access to their Chat service, eventually allowing the kind of piping currently enabled between Gchat/Talk, iChat, AIM, and Twitter, which together produce a common set of streams that all are recorded and archived in Gmail’s Chat repository and made available to a single search. Once users don’t care how or even if this aggregation is going on, they view the composite service as the application, removing the motivation for switching.
Of course, the last time we saw this type of viral spread, it was Adsense carried on the river of the blogosphere. Now, with Twitter’s social graph being formed out of the combination of follow and filtered Track, Friend Connect can provide infrastructure to model the unique characteristics of Twitter’s dynamic graph using Facebook’s avatars. LinkedIn’s business relationships, and, eventually, Open Social widgets across high-value sites. Oh, by the way, MyBlogLog — see ya.
But don’t think that just because Google will prosper that Microsoft won’t. Live Mesh can fit into this like a glove, feeding downstream vertical versions of affinity groups to skinned Silverlight containers. We’re within weeks of offerings already from Twhirl, FriendFeed, Summize, and others we just haven’t been told about yet. All Microsoft needs to do is get Bill his gold watch and get back to work.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
Current Mood:
zzzzzzzyawny yawny 07:30 am :: Track Time Between Haircuts with Google Calendar and Spreadsheet [Calendar]
lifehacker
Googler Matt Cutts uses Google Calendar and Google Spreadsheets to keep track of how long he's gone between haircuts—a good way to make sure he doesn't get too overgrown. First he copies his regular haircut appointment calendar dates into a spreadsheet, and then he uses a date math formula to calculate the difference between each.
lifehacker
The dinner was a success, the guests are gone, and your cast iron pans—well, they've seen better days. The TipNut blog suggests pulling out a spare potato and going to town on your sauce-crusted cookware:
To remove rust, slice a fresh potato in half and cover the cut end in liquid dish detergent. Rub the rust spots away with the potato, rinse clean, dry, then apply a light layer of oil to the cookware.Hit the link below for inexpensive cleaning tips for other kinds of cookware. Photo by cybrgrl.
Current Mood:
tiredCurrent Music: Zara Sa - Jannat
it's bin almost 10days im home. first 3-4 days wer terrible... as in yes ofcourse, i was all excited to be back home nd al but da very thought that I will be away from some of my very close frends nd P fr da next couple of months ws making me go cringe in one corner!:( trust me, im havin da toughest time EVER!!
But slowly im settling down again. My sis is getting married in nov. The preps. have alrdy started.. well, actually way before I landed in pune. Since I was away, I never realy gave it a serious thought. I mean really i dint!! It was quite hard to believe my lil sister (wel nt actually lol) is actually al GROWNUP(;)) nd all set to marry da man of her dreams!! Aftr coming to pune, luking @mom's never-endin lists nd wat not.. i think, da reality is finally hitting me!! Today esp. after shopping fr one of "MY" sarees, I can't figure out how i feel. It's weird. nooo... it's jus something im not able to relate to! Well on a random note, its her b'day in 10 days. Can't believe.. it's her last b'day in our Ghanekar Household!! Gotta make smthing spl. fr her. as of now, my mind is refusing to work.(as usual!!lol) so if any of ure readin this nd have ANY kind of decent idea, then do jot it down!:)
wanted to write so mch mre, but i guess not writing it is a better option.
toodles ~ 09:33 am :: Star Wars Successories
[smwance]
Current Mood:
amusedA Star Destroyer would kick the Enterprise's butt!
10:28 pm :: Writer's Block: Anthropomorphic buddies
location: Home
I used to talk to the moon. She was called Dee (short for Diana, the moon goddess)....
And I used to sit on the swing on the terrace in my parents house at night and have conversations with her... =) 08:12 am :: Flash - Action Script - Local Folder
[joanette]
Hey guys, I'm not sure if anyone here knows much about Flash, but I have a problem.
So I'm building a drop down menu, and I'm done, almost, all I need is to link everything.
The tutorial uses action script:
on(release){
getURL("http://www.something.com",_blank)
}
so it works for me when I enter actual website (ie coldplay.com) BUT I'm trying to link everything from my computer, this to be more specific: F:\ColdplayWebFinal\coldplay.html
But it DOESN't WORK :( and I spent so much time building everything. Is there any way to make it work?
And if someone wants to see the tutorial here's the link to youtube, it is done at the very end. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHVYWcNit
(2 comments | Leave a comment)
04:10 pm :: 18.05.2008ng_photo
Afar Herdsmen, Danakil Desert, Ethiopia, 2005 Photograph by Carsten Peter
A group of Afar nomads leads camels through Ethiopia's Danakil Desert. The Afar regard themselves as one ethnic group, though their population of about three million is divided among Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Djibouti. "We are the people who move," said one Afar woman. "From the beginning that has been our way."
(Text adapted from and photo shot on assignment for, but not published in, "Africa's Danakil Desert: Cruelest Place on Earth," October 2005, National Geographic magazine)
12:31 pm[astryal]
[001 - 040] Lost 4x10 Icons
[041 - 068] Prison Break 1x15 Icons
Teasers:
Here... 09:43 am :: Hit Pause On The Evil Button: Google Assists In Arrest Of Indian Man
techcrunch
These stories are becoming more common as Internet companies operate under the laws of many counties.
In February A Moroccan man was arrested for pretending to be the Moroccan king’s younger brother, Prince Moulay Rachid, on Facebook. Facebook complied with Morrocca information requests about the man, leading to his arrest. The man was granted a royal pardon after his sentencing, and was out of jail by mid March.
Today we’re hearing of another arrest, this time in India. 22-year-old IT professional Rahul Krishnakumar Vaid. His crime was writing in an orkut community named “I hate Sonia Gandhi.” Sonia Gandhi is a prominent politician in India.
Vaid was charged under section 292 of Indian Penal Code and section 67 of the Information TVechnology Act because he created a profile and then posted content in vulgar language about Sonia Gandhi in the community.
During investigations, the cyber crime cell of Pune police communicated with Google (which owns Orkut) seeking details about the who formed this forum and circulated the obscene content. It was known that the vulgar message about Sonia Gandhi was circulated through an email address – Rahulvaidindia@gmail.com . The owner of the email id Rahul Vaid was traced, using information supplied by Google, to Chakarpur in Gurgaon city of Haryana.
He was thn charged under section 292 of Indian Penal Code and section 67 of the Information Technology Act because he created a profile and then posted content in vulgar language about Sonia Gandhi in the community. If he’s convicted, he can be imprisoned for up to five years and may have to pay a fine up to Rs one lakh.
This is an issue that needs to be addressed everywhere, but the hot spots right now are areas where extreme laws make what would be legitimate actions in the US or Europe into fairly serious crimes in their jurisdictions. Our companies have to decide if they’ll defy the law and take the consequences. On the upside, users will flock to them knowing their data is secure.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
ripleys_feed
04:06 am :: Tweets for Today- 04:12 Posted: Tweets for Today tinyurl.com/6g7xoj #
- 10:18 Saved: Twitter + Bash == Bad Idea tinyurl.com/ytq9qt #
- 11:18 Saved: FeedFlix.com: analytics, basically feedflix.com/ #
- 11:18 Saved: Impure Mathematics: The Adventures of Polly Nomial tinyurl.com/6lzz8y #
- 14:18 Saved: Facebook Developers | Thrift: (tightly coupled) framework for scalable cross-language serv.. tinyurl.com/2lgwxd #
- 14:48 Saved: Thrudb: (naive) provides indexing and document storage services for building and scaling web.. trac.thrudb.org/ #
- 14:58 I'd hoped to add bezier curves to OpenLayers first-thing, but it needs discussion; there doesn't seem to be a GIS standard for them... #
- 16:32 slowly wandering towards Artomatic www.artomatic.org/ #
[vinay_ks]
Hi All,
My immediate neighbour wants to rent out his ground floor to a pizza place. Me and a couple of our other neighbours really dont want it - I mean imagine a pizza place next to your house - the smells from the kitchen, the crowds etc in a residential neghbourhood.
What I want to know is how exactly do we fight this? I think he needs a no-objection certificate from us, which he wont get from any of the neighbours. But just in case he still goes ahead and rents out the place - how do we fight it? Should we approach the health department in the corporation? Is there any other department in the BBMP we need to go to?
Any inputs will be much appreciated.
Thanks a lot all!
(2 comments | Leave a comment)
06:32 am :: CBS Centralizes Its Superdistribution of Videos on the Webtechcrunch
When it comes to Web video, CBS has been one of the most promiscuous media companies out there. And no, I am not talking about its $1.8 billion acquisition of CNET (which does have some video assets). Rather, CBS has taken a strategy of superdistribution when it comes to spreading its videos across the Web. It wants its videos everywhere. Thus CBS has struck distribution deals with more than 300 sites—including YouTube, AOL, MSN, Joost, Veoh, Bebo,and TVGuide.com. These are collectively lumped together into the CBS Audience Network, against which CBS sells its own ads.
Now the CBS Audience Network also has its own site, where it highlights its top partners and the most popular CBS videos on each of them. You can see how many times each video has been watched and the number of comments for each one. (An iPhone demo and a Borat interview on Letterman are the two most popular, with 8.9 million and 5.7 million views, respectively). Right now, though, only the top videos from YouTube are visible. But it looks like AOL, Bebo, MSN, TV.com, and Joost will be coming soon.
It is not clear how appealing a destination the site will become for consumers, although you can watch the videos without leaving. It feels to me more like a site that CBS is putting up for the benefit of advertisers, almost as brochureware so that they can easily see at a glance CBS’s video reach across the Web. Superdistribution (which basically means putting your content everywhere) sounds good in theory, but perhaps it is not such an easy sell to advertisers who like to see exactly what they are buying.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
techcrunch
Scribd, the “YouTube for documents”, has announced that it will be removing all pornographic material from the site beginning May 21.
Here’s the announcement from the site’s blog:
Over the next month, we will be updating Scribd’s Terms of Service to prohibit pornographic documents and images. It’s become clear that adult content is limiting Scribd’s usefulness to educators, parents, students, and publishers - exactly the types of users that benefit the most from our site and services.Starting today, there will be a one week grace period to allow users with adult content on Scribd to download it to their local computer before it is removed from the website.
So how will this affect the YCombinator startup? The site has seen impressive growth since its launch in March 2007, and now says that it has 17 million monthly visitors. It’s also recently been adding new features including an API and iPaper, a replacement for FlashPaper that allows authors to monetize their documents. But there have been claims (NSFW) that much of Scribd’s traffic is generated by pornographic and pirated material (the “Adult” group is one of the largest and most active on the site).
Should we expect Scribd’s traffic to take a nosedive? Unlikely. Porn may have helped Scribd gain momentum in its infancy, but the site has long since proven its use as a blogging tool and a document repository. If anything, it’s surprising that it took Scribd this long to make the switch.
Other players in this space include edocr and Docstoc (both of which are porn-free).
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
[alien_x_stream]
( +++ )
(14 comments | Leave a comment)
11:37 pm :: My Daily Tweets- 16:15 Playing taxi driver (no, iPhone: not taco) to three house guests without {motor,bi}cycles. I hate cars and parking. #
- 17:17 I love this city: sitting in dolores park, I just signed a petition to rename our sewage treatment plant after George W Bush. #
(4 comments | Leave a comment)
11:06 am :: my 2nd baby - a brand new one!:)Current Mood:
goodSo yeah, I saw my last year's post on my 'brand new baby 1'... I never thought id hav to luk out for another baby in less than a yr. My Moto Rizr sumhow gave up on me last month. it has proved lucky fr me in oh so many ways!!:( but anyway, yestd. while shoppin wit mom nd dad, i ended up taking Sony K530i. It's not at al expensive or too cheap, its moderate but its jus so me!!:D I saw a no. of mobiles but none seemed to click, esp. nokia ones!:P dun noe why.. but i jus luved da moment i saw it witout even openin it frm da pack nd i got it hooooooooomeeeeeeee! And as it is, im not a big fan of havin 'so nd so' functions, memory etc. My mom was bent on taking nokia but ah well!!!
I lurrrrrrrrrrrve my brand new baby nd i hope to get my moto rizr repaired soon as wel so it's al gud. 12:07 am :: Opps?
[afitrazz]
Because I'm bored I decided to re-watch Lost. I'm in the first season watching White Rabbit. In the begining Charlie is yelling for Jack to save someone who is drowning (Boon and . Charlie shouts out that he can't swim! But...BUT...He CAN swim! He volunteers to do so in Through the Looking Glass (I Think)!
Anyway. Just thought I'd throw that out there. I searched and didn't see anything. Sorry if it's been brought up before. Heh.
(14 comments | Leave a comment)
04:39 am :: Facebook’s Friends Data Has Already Left the Barntechcrunch
How much are your friends worth? That is the question behind the big debate going on around social networks and data portability. In the last ten days, Facebook, Google, and MySpace have all announced ways to let people access their data (including friends lists) from other sites, except that what they are really trying to do is erect new walled gardens by positioning themselves as the primary repository of that personal and social data. This is valuable data and none of the big players want to cede any more of it than is necessary, which is why Facebook banned Google from tapping into its members’ social data.
But here’s a little secret. All of this data is already leaking out in ways that Facebook and other social networks can hardly control. Startups are finding ways around their official APIs to get the data consumers want into their own systems. For instance, Zude, a personalized Webpage service, recently launched a feature called SocialMix that lets people import friends lists, photos, profile information, status updates, comments, and other data from Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Orkut, and hi5. (See the screen shot below, which shows my Facebook friends on Zude). “What we are doing is taking the information and normalizing it and making it available in any manner you want,” claims Zude CTO Steve Repetti. He was tired of waiting around for true data portability to arrive, so he figured out a hack to offer it on his own (and it doesn’t involve screen scraping).
Taking a different approach, Minggl has found a way to access your social data through a browser plug-in. And Media6° is placing cookies through the ads themselves on Facebook to collect social data for advertisers. If you click on an ad with one of its cookies, then the same ad will be shown to all of your friends, who supposedly are two to ten times more likely to click on the ad than other people. Media6° also should be able to target Facebook members as they wander across the Web (as long as a cookie has been placed in their browsers and they come across an ad with the Media6° Javascript code embedded in it).
I’ve come across other startups who claim to be able to pull profile and friend data from Facebook. Facebook can go after them and shut them down, but it is rightly more concerned about Google gaining free and unfettered access to that data. Google is the bigger competitor and the bigger threat. But in the meantime, all of these little startups are finding ways to get at the same social data being so ferociously guarded by Facebook. In fact, they already have it, and Facebook is going to have a hell of a time trying to put it back in the barn.
(Photo by Larry Wilder).
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
location: Bangalore
Current Mood:
happyCurrent Music: Her hairdrier!
Start -> All Program -> Life -> Year -> Config
Choose optimal.
Save.
Close.
More later!
-N
PS: Actually so many goooood things have happened that I am not finding time to update! Hint:
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
darkch0c0lat3 does nag me about that and *that* nagging is also a Good thing™! ;-)(4 comments | Leave a comment)
09:10 am :: beer mug
found an old pic from my trip to Nagaland in 2007.
This is a giant stone structure of a beer mug. Its about 2.5 times the size of a human.
The mug is made of bamboo, and one drinks rice beer from it. Most potent rice beer i must say! I hated it!
[enchantedteacup]
[33] LOST
[9] Evangeline Lilly
Previews:
More here.
Please comment, it makes me happy. :)
Noms = ♥
Credit is nice, but optional.
All textless icons may be used as bases with credit.
♣ enchantedteacup 06:02 am :: Sunfeast 10k run
location: Office, Bangalore, India
Current Mood:
awakeCurrent Music: Sunday Theme
I got my goodie's bag on Friday. I, along with my other colleagues went with our Manger in his car to collect them from the Kanteerava Stadium. We got our Running Number also, Mine is 18803.
The Goodie bag contained
1) 3 biscuit packets,
2) 1 Chips packet,
3) 1 Soap
4) 1 Stress Ball
5) Chilly powder packet
6) 2 Mint packets
7) 1 Pasta packet
8) Water Bottle
9) Lots of promotional vouchers....
Shocked... so was i, never expected that we are going to get such stuff for an event like this. At least not a "CHILLY POWDER PACKET", We were actually expecting something like a t-shirt or a cap....
Any ways after that we were taken out for Lunch by our manager. The hotel name is "Kudla". Its a Manglorean Style Hotel. We had Fish Tali.
As soon as we came back to Office, our T-Shirts were ready. This time it's of a better quality, it's white in color and had our company logo on the front and web address on the back side.
Photos:
 |
 |
lifehacker
- OrbLive Streams Live TV to Your iPhone or iPod Touch (iPhone)
"You can now stream live television to your device, in addition to music, videos, photos, and everything else Orb is known for." - DExposE2 Like Mac Expose but Better (Windows)
"Freeware application DExposE2 is a clone of Mac OS X's Expose feature for Windows XP and Vista." - Alliance Creates Private P2P File-Sharing Networks (All platforms)
"Alliance, a free, open-source, cross-platform peer-to-peer application, takes nearly all of the security and privacy concerns out of peer-to-peer file sharing by putting you in charge of your own network." - DriveSpacio Finds What's Filling Up Your Hard Drive (Windows)
"Analyze your hard drive usage and find out what's eating up your disk space with freeware application DriveSpacio." - XBMC Turns Your Mac into the Ultimate Media Center (Mac)
"You don't have to mod your classic Xbox to run the best free media center application around anymore: Dedicated developers have ported the Xbox Media Center (XBMC) software to the Mac, and its killer features will convince you to abandon Front Row forever." - WorldWide Telescope Visualizes the Night Sky (Windows)
"Microsoft Research releases astronomy application WorldWide Telescope, software which offers "terabytes" of detailed telescope images of the night sky for exploration right on your desktop." - iTunesVolume Displays Album Artwork, Controls iTunes (Mac)
"Freeware application iTunesVolume is an attractive iTunes controller for your Mac desktop." - IntelliScreen Adds Widgets to iPhone's "Slide to Unlock" Screen (iPhone)
"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." - ReadAir Brings Google Reader to Your Desktop (All platforms)
"Free, open source application ReadAir syncs your Google Reader feeds to the comfort of your desktop." - Gmail Addons Embeds Any Webapp in Gmail (Firefox with Greasemonkey)
"The Gmail Addons Greasemonkey script embeds any page you specify inside Gmail's interface." - Swiftword Plants Text in Your Memory (Windows)
"When you absolutely have to commit your presentation notes, interview points, or other words to memory, a Tachistoscope, which rotates images at varying speeds, can be the next best thing to a neural FireWire port."
lifehacker
Planning a long, leisurely trip through the wilderness, down the highway, or maybe around Thailand, and want to return home with some killer pictures to look through? David Hague, managing editor of Australasian Camcorder magazine, has been there, and back, many times. Hague keeps three separate backpacks for varying degrees of roughing it, but his list of potentially equipment-saving stuff is good for any on-the-go kit. Among the provisions, for still or video cameras (and yourself):
- Sealable plastic bags as emergency camera 'raincoats'
- Lens cleaning kit
- Jeweller's screwdriver kit
- Small table top tripod (from eBay - around $10)
- Dry socks
Good points all, since you're less apt to stop and shoot great scenes if your feet are killing you. What gear would you add to a must-have photo-shooting pack? Drop your gear in the comments. Photo by ToastyKen.