Once you've installed the extension, you can simply right-click on a file or folder to access the new utilities—you can open a command prompt, copy the path, search, mount folders as a virtual drive, register DLL files, or use the very useful feature to select all files of the same type in the current folder. There's also some more advanced dialogs, like the path operations screen where you can move, copy, delete based on wildcards, or the batch rename files dialog.

Lammer Context Menu is a free download for Windows, works in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows, and is compatible with UAC in Windows 7 or Vista.

Zotero is, at its heart, a citation manager. It was designed to facilitate research and to make organizing and including that research in essays and publications pain free. As such, it's an excellent tool for any scholar, researcher, or student to have in their toolbox. Its utility extends well beyond preparing to write a paper, however, as it allows you to grab nearly anything off the web and insert it into the Zotero system. The following video gives a quick overview of some of Zotero's features:

If the overview video caught your interest, read on and check out some of the other great screencasts to see the individual features in action.

Getting Items in Zotero

You can add items in a myriad of ways to Zotero. From within Firefox, just click the Zotero icon in the address bar, on the status bar, or hit CTRL+ALT+Z to activate Zotero. You can add nearly everything on the web from books—Zotero will add in all the information about the book automatically—to highlighted portions of web pages, to full out saving entire web pages for future reference. Unlike bookmarking a web page, Zotero saves the page just like you would save it to your computer. Thus when you got to reference it later on, even if it is has moved or been deleted, you still have the images and text archived. In addition to capturing information from the web, you can supplement your Zotero archive by adding files right from your computer like images, HTML documents, PDFs, and more.

Organizing Your Research

Zotero allows you to organize your research into collections. The collections are highly flexible and an item can belong to multiple collections simultaneously. They use the analogy of the playlist—and it's fitting—you can "mix" your research into as many collections as you need. Your Zotero library is the master collection of all your research, and from that research you can pull citations, clippings, PDFs and so on, and create a collection representing your current area of interest or research like "19th Century Medieval Literary Criticism" or "Potential Markets for Growth". Collections are easily modified and even shared.

Word Processor Compatibility and Citations

Although Zotero was built to facilitate researchers using Firefox and working on the web, the system—through the use of plugins—allows you to work in your favorite word processor using Zotero. They've made plugins for Microsoft Word, OpenOffice, and NeoOffice. If word processor support is a deal breaker for you, make sure to check out their word processor compatibility chart. Check out the Word integration in the video below:

As the video shows, inserting citations and even changing them in-text is easy. You're not just limited to citations in word processors however, you can drag and drop citations right out Zotero into any text box. Zotero comes with a built-in library of common citation formats like AMA, APA, Chicago Style, MLA—over a dozen by default. If that isn't enough you can dip into the style repository and select from hundreds of alternative citations styles. On the rare chance you can't find a citation style—and it would be rare!—you can hop over to the Zotero support forum and put in a request that they add it to the archive.

Syncing Your Research and Files

Nobody wants to lug around a computer or flash drive and risk losing all the research they've done. Zotero has multiple channels for syncing your data to ensure your research is safe. Zotero syncs itself to the servers, if you have it installed on multiple computers you can sync all the instances of Zotero through the Zotero servers, and to further replicate your data you can share it with friends through the Zotero group system so that your joint research stored across multiple computers.

Zotero is a complex yet easy to manage research tool. Fully intended for academic research, you can use it outside of academia to manage your research on any topic from nearly any source on the web. Our overview here highlights some of the best features of Zotero, but a quick browse through the support section on Zotero's web site will show you even more capabilities and innovative ways people are using Zotero to help wrestle with the enormous amount of information web-based research provides.

If you have experience with Zotero or just have a research tip or trick up your sleeve, let's hear about it in the comments.

Roua extended his brain-as-computer metaphor a bit further, offering five steps to defragging your mind. It may sound a little silly, but a lot of it is actually pretty solid advice. For example, in step three Roua explains how to establish priorities:

If you ever witnessed a defragmentation, you saw that the most frequently accessed information is usually moved in the first sectors of your hard-disk. That would make it easier and faster to be accessed. And you're going to do exactly that: make things easier to manage.

Identifying priorities is obviously closely related to the dominant setup. If you're going to work more than usual, then one of your priorities would probably be to have your laptop charged as often as possible. If your main setup would be traveling related, maybe the tool which should be constantly charged is your mobile phone.

The easiest way to assess the priority is to use a scale from 1 to 5, 1 being the higher point of the scale. Take the previously gathered information and run it through this filter. Just start practicing and in time you'll get better at it.

There you have it. Roua offers similarly good advice for each step in his mind-defrag process, so hit up the full post for his rundown.

Memonic allows you to move away from the model of bookmarking sites that contain data you want and instead snipping that data out of the page and saving it to your Memonic account. If you're doing research on a vacation for instance you wouldn't bookmark every page you found with interesting content about that vacation you would use Memonic to clip out the bits that were of interest to you—a specific restaurant review from a restaurant critic page, a landmark you want to visit you found on the visitor's bureau site, some photos of local street performers you'd like to keep an eye out for, and so on. All the things you clip end up in your Memonic inbox, seen below:

From there you can sort and organize your clips, edit the associated information, and share your clippings and organized portfolios with others. Memonic accounts are free and you can enter information into Memonic using a bookmarklet—see the top screenshot, the green box is the clipping border—or by emailing the information to your Memonic account or manually creating a new entry within Memonic. If you're curious to try out Memonic but hate signing up for new accounts, you can try out all the features of Memonic just by visiting the main page. If you like the service you can create a free account to save the clippings you made during your trial run.

Have a favorite service for gathering web-based clippings and media together? Let's hear about it in the comments. Thanks Mick!

WinPatrol Plus continually monitors your system and takes system snapshots to record system changes, critical spikes in resource usage, and other events you want to be alerted of. If you want to monitor your system and keep tight control over aspects of it like what programs launch at startup or run in the background—no matter how deeply buried in the system they are—WinPatrol is a great tool for doing so. You can visit the author's site for more information or jump directly to the Yahoo! store that processes the orders—in case the offer today tanks the author's site.

WinPatrol Plus is Windows only and on sale, today only, for 99 cents. Have a favorite Windows monitoring tool? Let's hear about it in the comments.

If you type in "Why are dogs so" into the Google query box, Google Suggest will give you a list of the most popular completions for that query—as of this writing the most popular suggestion is "so loyal" for dogs and "so cute" for cats.

What if you wanted to compare the suggestions for two different queries though? Web Seer takes the Google Suggest entries for whatever two partial queries you put into it and then draws a weighted chart to show two sets of information: what the two phrases have in common and the number of hits for each completion, shown via the weight of the arrow drawn. In our test of the service, in the screenshot above, we compared "Men want" and "Women want" and the wisdom of crowd via Google returned the age old pearl "What they can't have".

Have a favorite tool for mining and comparing data online? Found a particularly humorous combination in Web Seer? Let's hear about it in the comments.

Ads by Pheedo

We've featured ways to download torrents remotely before, such as with Dropbox—unfortunately, that method requires that you actually download the file to sync it via Dropbox. That's fairly simple, but if you're on a computer where you can't install Dropbox, copying and pasting is simpler. By creating a custom RSS feed in ReactorFeed and having your torrent client monitor it at home, you can begin torrent downloads instantly just by adding a torrent's link to your feed. Because it's all done on the web with simple copying and pasting, you can add torrents from anywhere—your work computer, a friend's computer, or even your smartphone. You can even make your feed public, if you so choose, so your friends with similar tastes can check out what you're downloading, or run multiple feeds to share with different people or keep certain ones private. Not a bad tool for getting your BitTorrent fix when you're away from your computer.

Lightning, the calendar add-on, and Provider, a plug-in that provides two-way syncing with Google Calendar, weren't compatible with Thunderbird 3 when it launched. These betas are. Judging from the comments in our guide to making Thunderbird 3 an ultimate message hub, many of you were waiting on them to make the upgrade. We say to you now: have at it.

Need help getting your Google account synced up to Lightning? Adam covered it in his guide to syncing any desktop calendar with Google Calendar.

Lightning and Provider for Google are free downloads for Windows, Mac, and Linux systems. I had some compatibility trouble trying to load the extensions in a daily build of Thunderbird in Ubuntu, but others are reporting successful installations in Linux.

Opinions were passionate in comments on the article, and as of the writing of this followup are approaching nearly 500 strong. From among all the comments several clear opinions emerged on the state of email and selecting an email provider and username.

• The username you select is vastly more important than the provider you use. Firstname.lastname@aol.com is preferred to and more respectable than sexkitten2010@aol.com—cutesy, offensive, or unprofessional nicknames are big mistakes.
• Domains are important, especially in technology-related fields. An AOL address might be just as serviceable as any other address when it comes to sending and receiving mail but to most people in tech fields it says "Hi. I'm from 1996. What is this internet you speak of?"

  As an IT exec, I definitely made judgments against prospective hires based on email addresses (as well as a wide array of other factors). It wasn't uncommon for me to have 100-500 resumes for a single open position, and I didn't care to rely on HR to sort through them, so I did it myself, and I needed some way to get down to a short-list of around 10 people. As such, it was pretty easy to toss a resume because somebody had a goofy email address. And I would certainly raise an eyebrow at a supposed IT tech who had an AOL.com address. - Mike De Lucia

  As an IT manager in the tech field, I have to say that I'm a little prejudice when it comes to using a Hotmail or AOL address for business or on a resume. AOL is a more dated personal email address. Hotmail is known as an email for kids, for people who don't care if their mail is thrown out if they don't log in for awhile, and for a spam throwaway address. - Gankaku

• More concerning than people using inappropriate emails handles on their resumes? Businesses that don't have their own domain and personalized email. SomeCompany@sbcglobal.net or SomeDude2049@yahoo.com were huge turn offs to readers and many expressed that they would question the professionalism of a company with such an unpolished image and do business elsewhere.

  I'm a photographer and also wonder when I see other photographers without a domain name email.
  It seems as though they aren't serious about their career if they haven't taken the time to create a website and therefore have a domain name email. - veronykah

• The flood of comments wasn't without dissenting opinion by any measure; many commenters weighed in pointing out that it was superficial and judgmental to make snap decisions based on an email address.

  I don't understand the prejudice against hotmail. I've had my hotmail address for like 15+ years. Though I've had it so long I was able to choose @msn.com for my address. Fortunately I took it over hotmail.com so maybe people don't look down on me quite so much. When I see a hotmail.com address, I think, 'wow, that person's been using email for a long time.' Read the rest of mrknowitall's comment here..

• One astute observation made by several readers was that it's a huge hassle to switch email providers so most people never bother. One reader even noted that the hassle-factor could be a big reason why people get defensive:

  This issue comes up every now and then, and it always gets people so riled up. People get defensive because so many e-mail services entrench their users - they can't switch to a new one without a lot of hassle. Read the rest of veblen's comment here.

As we noted in the original post, email addresses have become ubiquitous and because we hand them out so liberally in professional and social situations it is worth taking the time to assess what your email address says about you. Your cute username might have been novel back in high school or college but entering the professional world it's definitely time to retire SexyStud99 in favor of John.R.Smith.

Like your clothing, your hair style, and your manner of speaking, your email address is part of your personal image. Certainly it's a type of prejudice that a hiring manager might look over you because you have an "antiquated" email address or a "stupid" username, but that's not entirely different than a hiring manager being unimpressed that you showed up to a job interview sans a neck tie. Sure it might be unimportant or silly to you and you might say "I wouldn't want to work at a company that uptight anyhow," but it's worth taking into consideration because whether or not a prejudice—big or small!—is fair or reasonable, it is still out there.

Have an email-related story? An awkward moment revolving around an email address? Some insight as someone who handles applications or other hiring processes? Let's hear about it in the comments.

AutoHotKey allows me to automate nearly any task on my PC (it's Windows-specific). With AotoHotKey I can create shortcuts for almost any action by presetting keystrokes and specifically located mouse clicks. I can also automate a series of actions. I’ve never seen anything that reduces monotonous computer tasks or works across different programs this well.

Since I adopted AutoHotKey about two years ago, anything that I do in a consistent way on my computer is automated. An example of a frequent set of inputs and commands I’ve automated through AutoHotKey: Often when I'm on IM, a friend will use a word I don't know. In the past I used to copy the word, go to my browser, paste the word in Google, hit return and search. With AHK, I simply highlight the word, regardless of the software I'm using when I encounter it, and hit Ctrl+Win+G.

I also use AHK to expand abbreviations as I type them. For example, typing “btw” can automatically produce “by the way.” The program’s functionality goes much further than these examples. It's a great way to harness the power of your computer without being restricted by software.

-- Dominic Duncombe

While there are a number of other “always on” help programs for loading apps, mouse gestures, shortcuts, etc., I've ended up uninstalling them all for performance reasons. AutoHotKey, on the other hand, is very lightweight. It uses only a few MB of RAM and has never caused any CPU load or affected any other programs for me.

The app itself works flawlessly. I created some simple scripts to aid repetitive text entry and to load frequently used files. These two items have replaced a mess of shortcuts and text files on my desktop.

The sample scripts are where it starts to get really cool. There is one that allows you to middle click and select from a list of frequently used folders. Another lets you find and delete empty folders automatically. One lets you automatically delete files older than a certain date, which is great for log files.

-- Mark Groner

AutoHotKey
Free

GROU.PS, a do-it-yourself social network focused on moderated online collaboration has steadily gained an impressive amount of users and added compelling features to its application. The social network platform has just hit 2 million users, adding another million members in just 6 months.

And GROU.PS has amped up its offering for publishers by launching Elastic Modules, which gives publishers the ability to change the way the data is displayed to their visitors. To date, the highest reach of look and feel customization was at the template level; the
publisher could only change the skin of their site. Now publishers can actually modify the backend of the social network they’ve created.

GROU.PS counts Don Dodge, developer evangelist at Google, is among the community builders that have chosen GROU.PS as their online platform. “Don Dodge’s Startup List” is sort of a Crunchbase for Boston area.

The startup’s networks are attractive to users because it lets you run all of your group’s collaboration tools from one GROU.PS domain using a single login. The system supports wikis, photos, links, blogs, calendars, chat, forums, maps, profiles, and subgroups – each of which is available as a plug-and-play module for your community. These modules also allow users to pull in their data from other third party services (flickr, Digg, blogs, etc).

The startup, which has over 40,000 networks on its platform, also recently added ActivityRank Pipelines, a point and reward system that lets moderators of a social network measure and rank members’ content contributions and then extend moderation privileges to members based on these rankings. And the social network is launching a subscription model that will allow moderators to charge subscription fees to members (GROU.PS gets a 50% cut on any fees charges).

GROU.PS just raised $1 million in funding, bringing the startup’s total funding up to over $2 million. But while the social network is growing, it is still faces major competition form the leader in the space, Ning, which recently hit 37 million users with 1.6 million social networks created on the platform.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

• XBMC Updates to 9.11 Camelot, Brings Awesome New Look, Improved Features (Windows/Mac/Linux)
  XBMC is a killer open-source, cross-platform media center, and today they've released XBMC 9.11, introducing a whole new default look and feel, and it's very friendly on the eyes.
• Opera 10.5 Pre-Alpha is All About Speed (and Private Browsing) (Windows/Mac)
  Opera's developers have released a very unstable but promising version of their web browser into the open. What does Opera 10.5 have to offer? If a quick test is any indication, faster JavaScript speed than any browser out there.
• Songbird 1.4.2 Released, Brings New Look, CD Ripping, and Device Support (Windows/Mac/Linux)
  Previously mentioned Songbird, the open source, Mozilla-powered, supposedly iTunes-killing media player has updated to 1.4.2, bringing a host of new features, including AAC metadata support, a new feather (skin), CD ripping, and support for many mass storage devices.
• LogMeIn Express Makes Screensharing Simple (Windows)
  LogMeIn Express is a screensharing tool from the makers of the popular remote-desktop software, LogMeIn. With this new offering, sharing your desktop is as simple as sending your friend or associate a URL.
• Speed Dial Beefs Up Chrome's New Tab Page (Chrome)
  The oft-imitated New Tab button on Google's Chrome browser isn't bad, but it's not the most customizable either. Soup it up—and access your favorite bookmarked web sites quickly—with Speed Dial.
• Firefox 3.6 Beta 5 Available, Faster, and Less Buggy (Windows/Mac/Linux)
  If you've been riding the Firefox 3.6 beta train, Mozilla just pushed out the whopping fifth beta of Firefox 3.6—with over a hundred bug fixes to improve performance, stability, and security, along with several all-around improvements.
• Bodega Is a One-Stop Shop for New Apps for Your Mac (Mac)
  Trying out new software is fun. Digging around all over the internet to find cool stuff—not so much. Bodega is a download that does makes quick work of finding new apps for your Mac.
• Get the Classic Network Activity Indicator Back in Windows 7 (Windows 7)
  If you miss having a network activity icon that actually indicates if your network is active or not, this handy little hack will swap the static Windows 7 icon for the classic version.
• Googsystray Notifies You of New Activity Across Google Services in One System Tray App (Windows/Linux)
  Google has so many different services these days that installing a notification app for each one gets cumbersome quickly. Free system tray utility Googsystray watches Gmail, Google Voice, Calendar, Reader, and Wave so you can set it and forget it.
• Droplr Offers Simple Drag and Drop File Sharing for Mac OS X (Mac)
  Feeling left out because of all the neat file-sharing applications for Windows? Droplr adds drag and drop support to OS X for sharing just about everything.

Photo remixed with help from Shandi-lee.

We've separated this little get-up-and-running guide into sections depending on whether the machine you got is Windows-, Mac-, or Linux-based, so just find the section that makes sense for you and get going.

• Windows Section
• Mac Section
• Linux Section

So You Just Got a New Windows Machine

Get to know Windows 7: Chances are pretty good that this is the first time a lot of people will be using Windows 7—and even if it's not, take this opportunity to get to know Microsoft's solid new offering with our Complete Guide to Windows 7. While you're schooling yourself on Win7, you'll at the very least want to check out:

• The Master List of New Windows 7 Shortcuts:
  Windows 7 adds loads of great shortcuts for switching between apps, moving windows around your screen, moving them to another monitor altogether, and much more. Here's a quick-reference master list of the best new Windows 7 shortcuts.
• Windows 7's Best Underhyped Features:
  It's these less sexy, but very useful features, that make me think the more I use Windows 7, the less chance I'll ever use Vista or XP again.
• Set Up and Use XP Mode in Windows 7:
  Windows 7's new XP Mode lets you seamlessly run virtualized applications alongside your regular Windows 7 applications-so your outdated software will continue to work.
• Turn Your Windows 7 PC Into a Wireless Hotspot:
  Everybody's got a wireless network at home, but if you've ever wanted to get your iPod touch, iPhone, or other wireless device connected, but all you've got is a wired network at work, school, or elsewhere, Windows 7 makes this process trivial.
• Master Windows 7 Jump Lists to Boost Your Win7 Productivity:
  For those of you that haven't yet tried out Windows 7, when you right-click on a taskbar button in Windows 7, a menu slides out with recent documents and application tasks. You can even access it with the left mouse button if you choose. Here's a rundown of our favorite Jump List boosters.
• Dual-Boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu in Perfect Harmony:
  Windows 7 and Ubuntu, despite their opposing missions, can get along like best pals on a single computer. Here's how to set up a dual boot system that lets you enjoy the best of both worlds in perfect harmony.

Get rid of the bloat: There's nothing like a fresh machine. It's free from an overloaded system tray, bloated application installs, and disorganized file structures, right?

Unfortunately that's not always the case. A lot of machines ship with a whole lot of pre-installed software that you didn't ask for and surely don't want. Our suggestion: Before you go nuts installing the software you really want, download Revo Uninstaller (a tool for getting rid of apps that's superior to Windows' default Add or Remove Programs tool) and get rid of all of the software that shipped with your machine that you don't want or need.

Install your favorite apps in a snap: Now that you've cleared out the crap, it's time to install the applications you really want. We're huge fans of previously mentioned Ninite, a simple utility that lets you tick off checkboxes of your favorite apps, then downloads them and installs them in the background. That means no more hunting all over the internet to find and download the apps, and no more mindless Next -> Next -> Finish clicking. If you'd like a little help finding the best apps around to fill up your Programs folder, check out the following:

• Lifehacker Pack 2009: Our List of Essential Free Windows Downloads:
  We feature downloads of all kinds every day at Lifehacker. Here, we've bundled all the best free downloads for new computer owners, re-installers, would-be geeks, or anyone who wants to save time installing the best stuff out there. This is our 2009 Lifehacker Pack for Windows computers.
• Top 10 Tiny & Awesome Windows Utilities:
  It's the little things that make a Windows system great—like utilities that use less than 10MB of memory to make your life easier. Here are 10 apps that pack a lot of greatness into very little space.
• 61 Free Apps We're Most Thankful For:
  As we prepared to stuff our faces with a bountiful Thanksgiving feast, we turned our Thanksgiving spirit to the gobs of free software we love to say thank you to the developers, and to give our computers a feast of their own.
• Top 10 Windows 7 Booster Apps
  Windows 7 is a big improvement over Vista, and a pretty convenient OS in general—but it's by no means perfect. These 10 downloads improve Windows 7's looks, functions, and make it easier, safer, and more convenient to upgrade to.

So It's a Mac, Is It?

Dive into your Mac: Whether this is your first Mac or your first time in Snow Leopard, we've got you covered:

• Hack Attack: A guide for switching to a Mac:
  If you're new to the Mac platform—fresh off the Windows world—this guide to switching explains how to make sense out of all the differences between Windows and OS X, highlighting how to accomplish the same things in OS X you're already completely familiar with doing in Windows.
• Snow Leopard's Four Best Improvements (for Civilians):
  Most of Mac OS 10.6's changes are deep in its underpinnings for developers to put to good use. But what do the rest of us get out of Snow Leopard? Modest, but nice, improvements to the everyday Mac workflow.

Install some killer apps, make a few useful tweaks: Once you've got a better understanding of what's going on with your new computer, you're ready to go on an application installation binge and do a little tweaking.

• Lifehacker Pack 2009: Our List of Essential Free Mac Downloads
  We've featured countless apps of all sorts over the years, but if you just want a quick look at the best free downloads for your Mac, this post's for you. This is the 2009 Lifehacker Pack for Mac OS X.
• Secrets Updates for Snow Leopard, Still Tweaks Every Dark Corner of OS X:
  If you're not a big fan of using the Terminal but love hidden features in OS X, Secrets is the preference pane for you. Secrets provides a list of hidden features (and descriptions of each) that can be easily toggled on and off with a simple click of a checkbox.
• Get More Precise Font Smoothing in Snow Leopard
  Among the many changes in OS X 10.6 was a simplification of the font smoothing options to a yes or no toggle. If your monitor text isn't quite right, here's a quick Terminal tip to get nitty-gritty control.
• SnowChecker Determines If Your Applications Are Snow-Leopard Compatible
  Free application SnowChecker runs a scan of your installed applications and tells you which may have problems running in Snow Leopard.

Linux-Lovers, This One's for You

An overview and a few handy Linux tweaks:

• First Look at Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala Beta
  Take a look at the new features in the latest major point release or Ubuntu.
• Make Compiz Run More Smoothly on Linux Desktops
  If you're running the Compiz window manager on your Linux system—known as "Desktop Effects" in Ubuntu—you might notice it doesn't slide windows around smoothly, and causes occasional video tearing. Here's the fix.
• Dual-Boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu in Perfect Harmony
  Windows 7 and Ubuntu, despite their opposing missions, can get along like best pals on a single computer. Here's how to set up a dual boot system that lets you enjoy the best of both worlds in perfect harmony.

Now let's get downloading: If you're a Linux person, you can rest assured that your system is likely running lean and mean right out of the box. (That is, without the bloat of pre-installed crapware some Windows systems start off with.) So let's get right to the downloading!

• Top 10 Ubuntu Downloads
  From Ubuntu tweaking to desktop customization and productivity boosting launchers, these apps promise to seriously enhance your machine.
• Allmyapps Bulk-Installs Your Favorite Apps, Makes System Rebuilding Less Painful
  One of the most irritating things about reinstalling your operating system is installing all the non-OS applications you love. Allmyapps lets you select all your favorite apps and roll them into a bulk installer to make rebuilding easy.
• Top 10 Cross-Platform Apps that Run on Windows, OS X, Linux, and More
  Whether your important data lives in the cloud, on your laptop, or on a different operating system, you shouldn't have to use sub-par tools to get at it. These cross-platform apps run on your Linux machine, but will also work when you've got to move to a Windows machine for work or wherever you may end up.

Happy holidays to everybody, whatever it is you may or may not be celebrating. Enjoy that new gear, and let us know what else has helped you get up and running in the comments.

Someday you will be able to continuously measure your body in a hundred ways, and this constant data will transform your health. For the past few years David Duncan has been trying out this experiment. Although he is healthy, he's subjected himself to every quantitative test he could find: multiple varieties of genome sequencing, measuring compounds in his blood, getting his brain scanned, tracking body pulses -- and then he tried to correlate all this data. He calls himself the "experimental man." The most fascinating part of his project was his attempt to measure the traces of environmental toxins left in his blood. I believe we will be following in his footsteps in the coming years. I started the site The Quantified Self just for this reason: in order to preview and discuss the tools for this kind of self-tracking (and I make a minor appearance in this book). Duncan's account covers the plus and minus of this technology. He also gives us a clear sense of the potential for self-tracking and the immense difficulties we'll have dealing with the data. I consider this book a very helpful and sobering glimpse of the future of health tools.

Experimental Man: What One Man's Body Reveals about His Future, Your Health, and Our Toxic World
David Ewing Duncan
2009, 384 pages
$18

Available from Amazon

Book website

Sample Excerpts:

Chris Austin believes that a much larger effort is needed, something akin to the Human Genome Project: perhaps the Human Envirogenomics Project? He and others believe that the only way to create meaningful envirogenetics data is through a large prospective cohort study, collecting DNA samples and information about exposure to a variety of environmental factors from five hundred thousand to a million participants who are followed for a number of years.

*

Hillis told me they took a picture of my proteome using the mass spectrometer--or, at least, a picture of the proteins swirling around in my blood on a certain day in April 2008, when I had my blood drawn. But it was a picture that included measurements at the atomic level of such complexity that it took about 24 gigabytes of storage space to hold all of the sample data (the picture I saw represents only about 1/24th of the total data from the sample)--that was fourteen hundred times the amount of digital space it took to store this entire book.

"It's a high-res picture of your whole proteome," said Ruderman.

We got up and walked over to an enormous flat-screen monitor on a wall of the lair, a TouchTable device invented by Hillis that models complex three-dimensional shapes on a flat screen--aircraft, buildings, cars, and proteomes. Ruderman clicked on my proteome file using his fingertips and pulled up functions that zoomed up and down the screen like an iPhone--although the touch-table technology had come first. Up popped a field of yellow dots that looked like a 3-D star field from outer space.

*

Meanwhile, huge chasms in our knowledge need to be filled before the Experimental Man will be complete down to every SNP, copy number variation, and synapse. Perhaps the biggest gap is the affect of the environment on our DNA, cells, organs, and bodies. Few of the tests I've taken for the Experimental Man project provide much useful information about how the environment interacts with genes, neurons, and proteomic systems and pathways. As cardiologist Eric Topol of Scripps told me, "You could almost say that giving genetic results without environmental data is inaccurate." The same is true about any system in the body, since the whole point of evolution has been to create defenses inside organisms to fend off the daily onslaught of the environment, from natural challenges such as UV rays and flu viruses to the thousands of toxic chemicals that we humans have unleashed into the air, the water, and the earth.

Disguised as a biography of mathematician Bertrand Russell in graphic novel form, this comic book is really about the nature and limits of logic. It takes heady, heavy, and key ideas in logic and renders them witty, visual, and dramatic. You'll learn a lot. The fact that many of the original logicians were mentally unbalanced and irrational, adds a dash of delicious paradox and spice to this entertaining book.

Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth
Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos Papadimitriou
2009, 352 pages
$14

Available from Amazon

Book website

Sample Excerpts:

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Liking that item in the top-right corner of the menu, with the dotted border line around it? That's fine, but be aware it's probably one of the most profitable items for the owner to serve. In tough economic times, many restaurants have turned to menu redesign as a means of bringing in more cash. If you're interested in getting a full read on the food, and not just letting your lizard brain give in to the highest-margin item on the menu, heed these examples:

Some restaurants use what researchers call decoys. For example, they may place a really expensive item at the top of the menu, so that other dishes look more reasonably priced; research shows that diners tend to order neither the most nor least expensive items, drifting toward the middle. Or restaurants might play up a profitable dish by using more appetizing adjectives and placing it next to a less profitable dish with less description so the contrast entices the diner to order the profitable dish.

Not that there's anything wrong with ordering a profitable item off the menu, but you want to make sure your eatery isn't sub-consciously hiding something truly appealing from your decision process.

If you've done any menu design yourself, or know the tricks of your own local eatery, let's hear about them in the comments.

Torrent Magnifier provides basic search functionality over multiple popular sites, such as BTjunkie, Mininova, and Fenopy. It orders the results by highest number of seeders, as well as providing leecher information—but not much else, like number of validations or the size of the torrent. You can, however, go straight to the torrent's page by clicking the link next to the torrent name. It's nice to have around if you're not too picky about the size of your torrent, or pretty confident in your torrent-choosing skills—otherwise, if you're going to have to go to the site anyway, you might as well use an online aggregator like Torrentz.

Torrent Magnifier is also available as a Windows gadget that works in the same way, as well as a Firefox/Internet Explorer search provider and an Internet Explorer accelerator. All iterations are free downloads—the desktop program is Windows only, the gadget is Windows Vista/7 only, the search provider requires Firefox or Internet Explorer 8, and the Accelerator requires Internet Explorer 8.

AV-Comparatives.org ran a series of real-world tests running through common scenarios like downloading, extracting, copying, and encoding files, installing and launching applications, and they also ran through an automated testing suite as well. Once the dust had settled, it became clear that not only is MSE one of only three products that both blocks and removes malware well, but it's also very light on system resources.

Out of all the products tested, Microsoft Security Essentials was the best-performing free antivirus solution, and one of only two that received "very fast" on each of the real-world tests, earning it their top award: an "advanced+" ranking. We've been telling you for a while that you don't need to pay for Windows security, and now with MSE ranked alongside the top paid apps in both malware removal and performance, you might want to consider making the switch.

Hit the AV-Comparatives link for the full report in PDF form, or check out the PC Mag story for the overview—if you can deal with some irritating in-text ads.

We've mentioned the A Bit Better RTM Greasemonkey script twice before as one of our favorite user scripts for Greasemonkey in Firefox, and the the native Chrome version works much the same way—the most noticeable feature moves the tabs over to the left, saving precious vertical space for widescreen laptop users, and making them more readable in general.

In addition, you can rearrange the lists, hide the lists you don't use, use keyboard shortcuts to switch between them, and even move an item to a folder from the keyboard. It's an extremely helpful extension, and this author, at least, is thrilled to finally have it on Chrome. A Bit Better RTM is a free download, works wherever Chrome does. Thanks, CookingCat!

Once installed you won't find much flash to SkyDrive Explorer, it simply does what it promises. Provide your login credentials for your SkyDrive account and the drive that appears in My Computer—seen above—is linked to your online storage. You can interact with it like any other drive.

If you need to access a wider variety of online storage you'll want to check out previously reviewed Gladinet which can connect to SkyDrive along with other storage sites like Amazon S3.

Have a favorite tool for integrating your online applications and storage with your computer? Let's hear about it in the comments.

Online shopping may seem like the uncluttered, no-distraction way to single in on a deal and grab it, but shopping sites have long since adapted to consumer behavior, and the subconscious thinking behind it. Ludicrously over-priced Items are put up on inventory pages that the company has little to no expectation of selling, just to make the mid-range options seem more appealing than the bargain choices. And when it comes to product shots, your mind's color associations can betray you:

Looking at a couch on a furniture retailer's Web site, you probably take no conscious notice of the green-patterned wallpaper behind the couch. Yet, Deborah Mitchell, a senior lecturer in marketing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said one study showed that green is associated with money, and got subjects' neurons firing in a way that made them sensitive to the cost of the item.

In the same study, a blue-patterned wallpaper behind the couch was associated with comfort, and got subjects' neurons firing in a way that made them sensitive to the comfort of the item.

So your mind plays tricks on you, even when there's no salesperson around to distract you. Now what? The Times breaks down the best, if somewhat basic, advice:

1. Determine what you are going to buy online, and stick to it.
2. Determine the amount of time you are going to shop online, and stick to it.
3. Determine your online shopping budget, and stick to it.

These resistance maneuvers, and the psychology angle, are all detailed more vividly at the link. If you have your own experiences and war stories about online retailers' mind games, we'd love to hear about them in the comments—mostly because our shopping is finally, thankfully over.

This list is culled from a straight listing of the most popular posts that offered a Firefox extension for download in 2009. We're not including posts about configuring Firefox, or even our own hand-rolled Firefox add-on packs—even if they were pretty popular, too. Let's get to the good stuff.

Firefox 3.7 Theme Makes Your Browser Look Awesome

One of the greatest things about Firefox is that its development happens way out wide in the open. When the design workers start coming up with preliminary sketches of a new release, anyone can peek at them and even compile them into a theme, which does just what the headline suggests.

All-Glass Firefox Enables Slick Transparency Effects

Windows Vista and 7 feature some fairly nice looking transparency effects, but if your primary browser doesn't use them, it can feel a bit disconnected. All-Glass Firefox v2 tweaks your browser to look just, well, proper in its fancy-pants surroundings.

"Vacuum Places Improved" Speeds Up Firefox with a Click of Your Mouse

You can speed up Firefox by cleaning up its fragmented database, and the Vacuum Places Improved 0.3 extension automates that admittedly pain-in-the-butt process.

Gmail Redesigned 3.0 Focuses on Speed and Message Space

Google Redesigned, a multi-site suite that trades Google's blue/white/minimal look for a darker, sleeker feel, kept improving its transformative powers this year, adding a host of improvements in its 3.0 release, and later releasing a new version with GReader Redesigned for the RSS hounds.

Dislike 0.2 Adds a Disapproving Dislike Button to Facebook

"I'm having SUCH a bad day—the cleaning lady TOTALLY left her Pine Sol smell all over my bed linens!" That, my friends, is why clever JavaScript tweakers created the Dislike extension.

TinEye Adds Reverse Image Lookup to Firefox

Many of the pictures and illustrations you find across the web aren't in their original form—and many can be had at better, perhaps more wallpaper-worthy sizes. The TinEye extension makes it a simple right-click maneuver to search out similar copies of any image you come across.

SkipScreen Lets You Pass Go and Collect Your Download

Sometimes, great stuff has to be hosted on public download services, because the file—or the attention it's getting—is just too much for our meek little personal sites. And the download sites often make it as painful as possible to grab those files. SkipScreen acts as an automated intermediary, jumping through the necessary hoops and entering the key presses required.

FireFound Tracks Your Stolen Computer, Nukes Your Personal Data

This neat little extension, winner of the Extend Firefox 3.5 contest, utilizes lots of Firefox's built-in features, like geo-location and the extension framework, to offer wary laptop users a way to nuke their personal data, passwords, and history if necessary, track where their machine is logging on after a theft, and cull all kinds of data from the thief. FireFound is, in other words, a smart thing to install if your laptop ever leaves the home.

Gui:config Gives Easy Access to Hidden Firefox Settings

A lot of helpful stuff is tucked away in Firefox's about:config menus. Gui:config brings them into focus and offers a graphical way to manage them. As the How-To Geek puts it, it's amazing that this isn't something being considered for mainstream distribution in the browser.

Memory Fox Manages Firefox's Memory Use, Aims to Keep It Low

(Windows only): Firefox is decently light with memory on startup, but extensions and plug-ins drag it down as you actually use it. Memory Fox monitors Firefox's memory use and, once it reaches your pre-set limit, whips it back into shape.

Daum Blue Firefox Theme is Clean, Simple, and Elegant

(Windows only): Well, the headline and picture kind of say it all about Daum Blue, but it's worth noting that beyond looks, it's also fairly customizable, and looks even better on Vista and Windows 7 systems.

Decreased Productivity Helps You Browse at Work Without Getting Busted

Sure, kind of anathema for this site's stated mission, but giving your mind a break at work has real mental benefits, even if your boss doesn't think so.

UrlbarExt Adds Super Powers to the Awesome Bar

If you're likely to do more at a web site than just simply bookmark it, UrlbarExt is like a Leatherman for your AwesomeBar. Head to a site's root, search the site on Google, and do much more from a small array of address bar buttons.

Foxmarks Becomes Xmarks, Adds Search and Suggestion Features

Another headline that pretty much says it all. We weren't a big fan of Xmarks' new "discovery" features, but its growing reach into Chrome and other browsers make the former Foxmarks' expansion a good thing.

Magnetiser Downloads Torrents When No Torrent File Is Available

Given the recent legal crackdown on BitTorrent-centered sites, magnet links (explained here) are increasingly popular. Magnetiser makes it easy to track down a working torrent link to grab the file you're looking for.

Integrated Gmail Updates with Improved Looks and Handy Features

It must be mentioned that, beyond smooshing together Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Reader into one neatly-arranged Gmail page, Integrated Gmail also customizes every niggling detail of those combined apps, making it worth the try-out, even if you think you like your Google spaces separated into different tabs.

Omnibar Extension Collapses Firefox's Address and Search Boxes into One

Omnibar is one of the clever ways Firefox can make itself into a Google Chrome clone, and we love that kind of openness 'round here.

Invisible Hand Subtly Shows Best Web Prices

If you're always looking at online purchases and wondering if you could save more before pulling the trigger, Invisible Hand affirms your hunches for you, dropping down and showing lower prices wherever it can find them.

Ubiquity Sees Major Update, New Look, Better Performance

Mozilla's future-facing automation and shortcut engine, Ubiquity, continued to get awesome-r in 2009.

App Tabs Creates Permanent, Icon-Only Tabs, Firefox 4.0-Style

We dug the idea of permanent, favicon-only tabs when a helpful reader explained it to us, but the App Tabs extension took a multi-step process and made it far more simple.

Every week we pose a question to you, the computer savvy readers of Lifehacker. Tirelessly we search for the next "Which is best?" question and through the hive mind we distill down your thousands of nominations into a list of the top five candidates. You vote on the best of the best and we return the next week to declare a champion.

The following list showcases the winners in each of the categories we covered in the fourth quarter of 2009. If a particular category catches your eye and you'd like to see the other contenders, click on the name of the category to jump to the original Hive Five post, clicking on the name of the winner will take you directly to the winner's web site.

Best Twitter Client: TweetDeck

TweetDeck boasts the ability to monitor multiple social-networking services, in this case Twitter, Facebook, and Myspace. You can fight Twitter spam with a built-in spam monitor, follow topics with saved searches, and preview shortened URLs from within TweetDeck. You can use TweetDeck to manage multiple Twitter accounts from one interface and thanks to web-based TweetDeck accounts you can back up and sync your TweetDeck profile across multiple machines.

Best Weight-Management Tool: SparkPeople

SparkPeople is a comprehensive weight-loss web site. A free membership gives you access to a variety of nutritional information and calorie-tracking tools, weight-tracking tools, and the enormous SparkPeople community. Personal pages, like mini-blogs within the SparkPeople site, help you publish your progress and connect with other users who have similar goals. You'll find no shortage of ways to track and analyze everything from the types of food you eat to the amount of weight you lift-and lose!-in the reports section of the site. SparkPeople is available in a scaled-down mobile version for use on your web-enabled phone or as an iPhone/iPod touch application.

Best Windows Task Manager Alternative: Process Explorer

Process Explorer is the free and portable offering from Microsoft. Process Explorer is like the standard task manager on steroids. You still get a list of processes, you still see charts of your usage, but both give you significantly more information and control over the information. Unlike the default manager, Process Explorer makes it easy to track down which file is being held by which program and get to the bottom of computer mysteries like why a certain DLL or DOC file simply cannot be deleted. It also shows which service is performing which function so you'll never look at a long and repetitive list of Windows system executables that are indistinguishable from each other-every one will be associated with its function.

Best Software Update Tool: Synaptic/APT

The Advanced Packaging Tool, a.k.a. APT, is a free tool built into most Linux distributions and many variants that handles the installation, removal, and updating of software packages. APT is a tool that went a long way toward making Linux a bit friendlier to the masses who aren't comfortable installing or compiling software packages on Linux, but it runs from the command line, so it's still not all that friendly to folks joining Linux from the Windows or Mac worlds. That's where Synaptic comes in. Synaptic is a graphical front end to APT that makes the tool wildly more user-friendly, and—yes—it handles checking for and updating software with aplomb. (Folks using Ubuntu, <a href="the most popular Linux distribution among Lifehacker readers, take note: Synaptic will be replaced by the Ubuntu Software Center—another APT-powered update tool—in April of 2010.)

Best Portable Apps Suite: PortableApps Suite

PortableApps is the Grand Daddy of portable application sites. Between John Haller—the founder of the site—and the dozens of developers, packagers, translators, and the hundreds of people that participate in the forums, the sheer number of people working to polish the PortableApps suite has resulted in a very comprehensive package. The PortableApps suite includes basics like Firefox for browsing and Pidgin for instant messaging but also includes—in the full package—Open Office. You could download all the individual portable components separately of course, but what really ties everything together is the PortableApps menu system. Seen in the screenshot above, the menu system is clean, includes a backup utility, and makes organizing your portable apps and documents simple.

Best Application Dock: Windows 7 Taskbar

A long time coming, Windows finally enhanced the standard taskbar, creating a swanky dock system to call its own. Windows users trying out Windows 7 for the first time are in for an extra big treat-the change from the old taskbar system to the new dock is huge. You can drag and drop to pin shortcuts to the taskbar, Win+# (where the # is the numerical position of the pinned icon) launches the application, and icons also have jump lists associated with them—quick access to routine features and commands for that particular application. Hovering over the icon of a running application gives you a quick peek and the ability to jump to the application or close it. Microsoft was late to the dock party, but at least when they finally rolled it out, they remembered to decorate with streamers and bring a cake.

Best Antivirus Application: AVG

The free offering from AVG is one of the lightest, feature-wise, among the nominations in the anti-virus Hive Five. That said, if you're looking for a basic antivirus application that will scan your computer, keep an eye out for spyware, and keep you from visiting malware and virus laden websites (via their LinkScanner protection), AVG is a solid free offering.

Best Online Backup Tool: Dropbox

Once you install Dropbox, a folder, appropriately called "My Dropbox", is placed in the Documents area of your computer. Anything you put into this folder will be synced with your Dropbox account. You can sync files, share files by making the folder they are in public, and restore a previous version of your file—Dropbox keeps a change log going back 30 days. All your files are also accessible via the Dropbox web site, which is great for those times you're at a computer where you don't have Dropbox installed, but you still want to access a document. If you want to sync a folder without putting it directly inside the main My Dropbox folder, you can do that with a little elbow grease, too. Dropbox doesn't have an unlimited option like the rest, but if all you want to back up is your most important documents, it certainly works as off-site backup, and it provides data redundancy on every computer you install it on.

Best Screencasting Tool: CamStudio

CamStudio is a free and open-source offering for the screencasting market. You can record all or part of your screen, customize cursors and text annotations, adjust the quality of the video output, and save screencasts as AVI or SWF files. The interface is easy to understand, and you won't be overwhelmed with extensive options. In a nutshell, it's a free and effective tool for creating screencasts without a lot of bulk or expense.

Best Wishlist Tool: Amazon.com Universal Wishlist

Amazon's wishlist system used to only support items that Amazon or affiliates carried—which, while limited, still gave you access to a large stable of items. When they rolled out the Universal Wishlist and its accompanying Wishlist Button, however, you got the ease of use of the Amazon wishlist system plus the ability to add items to your list that Amazon.com doesn't carry. Anything from any web site can now be added to your Amazon wishlists, both private and public, using the Wishlist Button. Creating and managing your Amazon wishlist is free.

Best Outlining Tool: Microsoft OneNote

OneNote is a note-taking and organization tool that many Lifehacker readers have called Microsoft's best product. It's versatile—it's made appearances here, in the best note-taking tools and journaling Hive Fives—and the outlining functionality is well integrated and easy to use. One of the strong points of outlining in OneNote is the way outlines support the same drag and drop rearranging found throughout OneNote. Almost every single element in a OneNote page can be dragged, dropped, or easily manipulated with a context menu—the screenshot above shows an element in the outline right before being dragged into a new slot. Note: If you're curious about the GTD context in the screenshot, read our guide to getting things done with Microsoft OneNote.

Best Startup Management Tool: CCleaner

CCleaner isn't strictly a startup management tool. Most people use it to clean out cookies and other undesirable elements and to tidy up the registry. A secondary but helpful tool in CCleaner: it also allows you to delete entries from the startup file—hence its inclusion here. It's a bit of a one trick pony, though; you can't alter, tweak, or insert entries. You can only delete them. Still, it gets the job done if the task you want isn't advanced tweaking, but just to get that annoying program to stop popping up every time you reboot.

The last quarter of 2009 was filled with all sorts of useful tools and software to help you get things done. If reading over the list gave you an idea for the next great Hive Five topic, drop us a line at tips at lifehacker.com. Make sure to include Hive Five Idea in the subject so your idea gets forwarded to gnomes at mission control.

We wish we were there to see the look of surprise on the face of the folks at nookdev when they disassembled the Nook and discovered that the customized Android 1.5 OS that powered the latest and greatest e-reader was stored on a removable microSD card. Doing what most great hackers would do, they popped out the SD card, inserted it into their Linux box and modified the system files to gain root access. With the system files now accessible and root access achieved, the sky is limit for this little e-reader. Web browser? Email? Tethering hack? While you are dreaming about all the cool things you could do on your Nook, hit the jump for some up close and personal images of the Nook with its covering removed.

[Via AndroidandMe]

Read

Whose Summit? Our Summit! Bella Center Erupts in Protest

Earlier this week we asked you to share your favorite startup management tool for Windows. You shared what you liked best and why, and we've rounded up the five most popular tools. If you've never used a startup manager before, now would be a great time to start and trim your Windows startup routine back to a more manageable form.

Autoruns (Free)

Autoruns means business. You'll find no stone unturned in your startup configuration by Autoruns, with options for delving into everything from Windows services and third-party apps that start at boot to print spoolers and more. Autoruns is definitely a tool best applied cautiously and thoughtfully, lest you disable a portion of Windows you'd really preferred to have kept on. Thankfully it has a handy feature that allows you to hide all core Windows components to limit your enabling and disabling to third-party applications.

Startup Delayer (Free)

Startup Delayer's claim to fame isn't that it helps you easily remove applications from your startup routine—it does that, but that's old hat for startup managers. The value of Startup Delayer is its ability to delay and stagger the launching of startup apps. Often times it isn't so much that you don't want the application to start when you boot up your computer—it's that you don't want 20 applications all launching at one time and leaving you waiting to reclaim control of your computer for 10 minutes. With Startup Delayer you can delete entries, edit entries, and assign a delay time to each entry to stagger the load on your CPU.

MSConfig (Free)

Microsoft System Configuration Utility first made an appearance back in 1998 with the release of Windows 98. The Windows built-in default, MSConfig is a simple utility for managing several key startup-related configurations, including which services start and which applications launch when Windows boots. Beyond simply turning things on and off using checkboxes, you won't find many bells and whistles—but MSConfig is included in every version of Windows. It's as easy to use as typing "msconfig" in the run dialogue (Win+R) and unchecking the items you don't want to launch at startup.

Startup Control Panel (Free)

Startup Runs is a simple alternative Windows startup manager. It's a mere 34k, portable, and its options are diverse enough to help you manage most startup functions without offering so many options you could mess up your boot process with some overzealous clicking. You can disable startup applications by user, whole group, or by registry entry. Deleted entries are stored for future restoration if you decide you actually did want the entry you removed.

CCleaner (Free)

CCleaner isn't strictly a startup management tool. Most people use it to clean out cookies and other undesirable elements and to tidy up the registry. A secondary but helpful tool in CCleaner: it also allows you to delete entries from the startup file—hence its inclusion here. It's a bit of a one trick pony, though; you can't alter, tweak, or insert entries. You can only delete them. Still, it gets the job done if the task you want isn't advanced tweaking, but just to get that annoying program to stop popping up every time you reboot.

Can't believe your favorite tool didn't make it? Have a tip or trick for tweaking your startup routine? Let's hear about it in the comments.

Create Your Own Sun Jar: Lifehacker Edition

Inspired by a tutorial we posted last year, we decided to make our own DIY sun jars. The trendy summer time lighting accessory retails for $30+ but we were able to make ours for around $10 each. The sun jars proved to be our most popular non-computer DIY of the entire year and readers shared their own creations with us.

The First-Timer's Guide to Building a Computer from Scratch

Building your own computer is a great way to get exactly what you want, the way you want it, without being constrained by the limits and high-prices of mass produced computers. We showed you how to build a computer from start to finish and have fun doing it.

Turn a Sharpie into a Liquid Fueled Rocket

What's standing between you and some office mayhem? Certainly not a lack of Sharpie markers and keyboard dusting spray. Combine the two with this fun DIY project and you've got one of the most awesome pieces of office-machinery we've ever featured.

Properly Erase Your Physical Media

You need to be properly erasing your physical media: all the time, every time. Our guide will show you how to get the job done and done right whether you use software to scrub your disks or you send them to the great data mine in the sky with a 21-gun salute.

Turn an Old Laptop into a Wall-Mounted Computer

Why settle for a digital picture frame when, in the same wall space, you could mount an entirely functional computer/slideshow player/TV tuner? One Lifehacker reader turned an old laptop into a super-charged digital frame.

$8 DIY Aluminum Laptop Stand

We've always been keen on DIY laptop stands, but reader Aaron Kravitz—inspired by an attractive $50 stand—went above and beyond, creating one of the most attractive DIY laptop stands we've featured to date.

Build an IKEA NAS On the Cheap

If the Hive Five on best home server software got you excited about setting up a home server but you're not keen on another unsightly PC in your home, check out this DIY IKEA NAS.

Build a DIY Portable Air Conditioner

We've shown you how to make an air conditioner (even for as low as $30), but what if you wanted something you can put in your car and take with you? While it's no substitute for a fully-charged and factory-fresh AC system, it'll keep you cool.

Turn a Bookshelf into a Secret Passage

Who hasn't dreamed of having a mystery-story-style secret passageway? While a trick bookshelf is pretty awesome in itself, this secret passage hides a home office with clever style. One industrious Lifehacker reader and his girlfriend had grown tired of seeing their office from their living space, so they hid it behind a wall of books.

Wire Your House with Ethernet Cable

You've ripped a movie on your laptop, and now want it on that fancy new home theater PC next to your TV. If you've got the time, wiring your house with Cat-5e cable could make transfer times a distant memory.

Rain Gutters as Cable Management Tools

We're all about creative cable management here at Lifehacker, so we were instantly drawn to reader Seandavid010's rain-gutter cable management setup. He was awesome enough to send detailed photos and step by step instructions to help other readers recreate his setup.

Build Your Own DTV Antenna

The lights went out on analog television this year and we were there with a guide to help you build a great DIY antenna for boosting your reception and getting that crisp digital picture you crave.

DIY Laptop Rack Hack Turns Your Monitor into an iMac

Lifehacker reader Matt Lumpkin saw our monitor stand from door stoppers post and thought we might like his laptop rack hack as another space-saving desktop solution for laptop-lovers. He was right.

Build Your Own Pizza Oven

Suppose you were inspired by the cheap DIY home pizza oven—but weren't so sure your home insurance would cover oven modifications. It's time to build a safer, more eye-pleasing oven, and we've got a thorough guide.

Crack a Master Combination Padlock Redux

Two years ago we highlighted how to crack a Master combination padlock for those of you who may have lost the combination to your bulletproof lock; now designer Mark Campos has turned the tried-and-true instructions into an easier-to-follow visual guide.

DIY Invisible Floating Bookshelves

We've covered the invisible floating bookshelf once or twice before, but if you liked the idea but weren't keen on ruining a book in the process, weblog May December Home's got you covered.

DIY Inverted Bookshelf

Instead of storing your books upright on top of the shelf, the inverted bookshelf holds all of your books in place using elastic webbing so you can hang them below the shelf—all the while allowing you to still take them out and put them back on as needed.

Build an Under-the-Cabinet Kitchen PC from an Old Laptop

Inspired by our guide to giving an old laptop new life with cheap or free projects, Lifehacker reader Brian turned his aging Dell laptop into an incredible under-the-cabinet kitchen PC.

Turn Storage Containers into Self Watering Tomato Planters

If you'd like to have delicious home-grown tomatoes but lack a garden to grow them in, you'll definitely want to check out this ingenious and inexpensive self-watering system.

Deter Thieves by Uglifying Your Camera

A few years ago, blogger Jimmie Rodgers's camera was stolen while volunteering in an impoverished Brazilian community, so he did what any sane person would do: He bought a new camera and made it ugly. With his uglified camera, Rodgers was able to snap pictures freely during the rest of his trip without worrying too much that his ostensibly crappy camera would end up stolen.

DIY TV or Monitor Stand from Door Stoppers

Nothing adds space to a desk or home theater setup like a simple monitor or TV stand, and weblog IKEA Hacker details how to build your own stand on-the-cheap with a few inexpensive items from IKEA.

Repurpose Your Analog Television

You don't need to run out and buy a new TV because of the DTV switchover. If you did anyways, Make Magazine has put together quite a guide to giving old TVs new life.

Use Ping-Pong Balls to Create Diffused Party Lights

If you need some cheap and novel ambient lighting for your next party, you're only a box of ping-pong balls and a string of lights away from solving your lighting worries.

Build a Custom-Made BoxeeBox

DeviceGuru blogger Rick Lehrbaum, inspired by the cheaper set-top boxes, made his own higher-powered "BoxeeBox" for the free, open-source media center. He posted all the parts, the how-to details, and lots of pictures.

Build a Sturdy Cardboard Laptop Stand

You already shelled out your hard earned cash for a swanky laptop, why drop more cash on an overpriced laptop stand? Cardboard alone can do the trick, as detailed in this step-by-step tutorial.

Install Snow Leopard on Your Hackintosh PC, No Hacking Required

Earlier this year we put together a wildly popular guide to building a Hackintosh with Snow Leopard, start to finish, and then followed it up with an even easier guide to install Snow Leopard on your Hackintosh PC, no hacking required. Computers + DIY is all sorts of geeky fun waiting to happen.

Have a favorite DIY from 2009 that wasn't highlighted here? Sound off in the comments with a link to your favorite project. Want to see more popular DIY guides courtesy of the ghost of Lifehacker past? Check out our huge DIY guide roundup from 2008.

Avi sez, "The design firm IDEO has made it's 'Human-Centered Design Toolkit' available for free download. This is essentially a complete methodology to power millions of garage innovation factories and should be the necessary component of any high-school kid's education."

Work - Human Centered Design Toolkit - IDEO (Thanks, Avi!)

Maker Media has just published a new book called Make: Electronics, by Charles Platt, and it's the best electronics primer I've ever come across (admittedly, I'm the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Charles' friend, but I really do think it's the best).

Here's what Gareth Branwyn (the book's editor) said about it:

I'm thrilled to announce our latest offering from O'Reilly/Make: Books, Make: Electronics, by Charles Platt. This is a book that we've wanted to do for awhile. Many of us at Maker Media have had an interaction that goes something like this: You're at a talk, Maker Faire, or elsewhere, and someone spirits you aside, like they're going to confess to a petty crime or some marital indiscretion. What they want to whisper sheepishly into your ear is that they love MAKE, all of the excitement they see over open source electronics, and the cool kits we sell in the Maker Shed, but they have NO IDEA how electronics work, and the "beginner" books and resources they look at online zoom quickly over their heads and frustrate their efforts to learn. Ultimately, they find themselves too embarrassed to admit their lack of high-tech smarts or to ask questions (which is why they've taken you behind a dumpster to confess their ignorance).

So we decided to make it our mission to create a book that would patiently guide readers into the world of electronics in a way that was fun, clear-spoken, graphical, and experiential. Charles dubbed it "learning by discovery." He has you experimenting with parts right out of the gate, licking batteries (really), breaking and frying stuff, and then you learn what happened and why, the theories behind the parts and processes, and how to do the experiment correctly. For all of those would-be makers and wireheads who've been looking for a book that will finally let them in on all the fun, we made this one for you!

In 340+ pages, Make: Electronics takes you from the most basic aspects of electronic components and theory to essential techniques, such as soldering and using a multimeter, gathering basic tools and setting up a workshop, all the way up to working with integrated circuits, microcontrollers, and building sophisticated devices such as robots. The book is full-color, with hundreds of photos, illustrations, schematics, even fun cartoons. Charles Platt, being the true Renaissance man that he is, did all of this himself. So the book has something of a charming, handmade feel to it.

To give you an idea of what the book feels like, we've put together this 40-page PDF. It contains the cover, table of contents, two complete projects from the book, and the index.

The deluxe kit, shown above, has many of the tools you'll need to make the projects in the book.

Make: Electronics

]]> Fri, 11 Dec 2009 19:47:00 GMT 683f91c08aaebe03b2340925d912ec7c 838 Sat, 12 Dec 2009 00:15:48 GMT 683f91c08aaebe03b2340925d912ec7c Hellooo Onkyo. Sure, it's just a rebadge of the Japanese Kohjinsha DZ-series dual-display rig we've already seen. But Onkyo's DX raises the bar significantly by delivering a pair of 10.1-inch 1,366 × 768 pixel LCD displays (as promised at CEATEC) that easily trump the 1,024 x 600 panels used on the Kohjinsha without increasing the portable's overall size. While we're still looking at the same 1.6GHz Athlon Neo MV-40 CPU, ATI Radeon HD 3200 graphics, 802.11n WiFi, Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR, and 3x USB jacks, Oknyo's offering starts with 2GB (not 1GB) of memory standard expandable to 4GB, a 320GB 5,400rpm disk (not 160GB), Gigabit Ethernet, and 32-bit Windows 7 Home Premium. Here's the best part: it's priced at just ¥84,800 (about $966) compared to the Kohjinsha which lists for ¥79,800 / $909 on Kohjinsha's retail site or a steep ¥100,800 / $1,148 premium if purchased through the GeekStuff4u exporter. Guess which one we'd choose?

Gallery: Onkyo's DX dual-screen laptop

Onkyo's DX dual-screen laptop is a far better deal than Kohjinsha's DZ originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 10 Dec 2009 04:11:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

I teach a lot of courses, and collecting information to keep them relevant takes time. If I'm on the Internet, I might come across something good. The old way: I'd save it to my desktop, drag it to the relevant folder, and hope to remember the file (and what's inside it) when the time comes to teach the course again. This process requires that I'm at the same computer every time--otherwise those files get lost. It took too much time, and required that I use my brain. I hate that.

Now, when I come across something, I copy it into Evernote.com. I’ve been using Evernote for about six months. It lets me manage research files and web clippings -- something that sounds easy but isn't. If I'm at a school or library computer, no problem. I go to Evernote.com and paste it there. The note gets copied to my account and synched to all the computers I use. Evernote keeps track of where and when I got it, makes it searchable, and keeps it organized. It even presents clips nicely using a notebook (or scrapbook) metaphor.

Evernote is a like great digital filing cabinet or scrapbook--and it's easy to use, cheap and powerful. It acts like a good archive should, too: It organizes the information, preserves sources and presents it well.

Fabulously, Evernote reaches off the computer and into the paper world. If you upload a picture or scan a piece of paper, Evernote will process the file to extract the text and make whatever text it finds readable.

If I have my own ideas or something not on the web, I go to the desktop application. I can enter text, pictures, video and even audio there. The desktop app is a junior word processor. I can also drag and drop files from other applications, such as Word. These too get searched and synched between all of my computers.

I tried Google Notebook (not flexible and now defunct), DevonThink (not easy to use, not everywhere), and Zotero (not flexible). Evernote is head and shoulders above these others.

I don't have an iPhone, but I do have an iPod Touch. Evernote works really well on it. It only lacks an easy way to input handwriting, but that's easily worked around with a third-party scribbling program. I understand that an iPhone works even better: you can upload snapshots easily.

If, like me, you have to manage many files on many projects, you may find that Evernote does a lot without requiring much. It's cheap, too. There's a free version, a $5 a month subscription, and a $45 a year subscription.

-- Adam Norman

My favorite way to keep track of recipes is with Evernote. When I’m on a webpage that features a recipe I like, my first click is the Evernote button in my tool bar and then typically my second click, “Done,” is my last. This file will then be searchable by every word on the page, and the source URL is also automatically attached. Default presets can be chosen for virtually every option for saving and tagging the file with keywords for easy retrieval. Also, if there are multiple recipes on a page, I can select just the portion of that page that I want saved to Evernote, or the entire page.

Some of the many ways I’m able to save recipes to Evernote: I can take a picture with my Blackberry of a dish I’d like to recreate in the future, and among the toolbar’s save options is “Add to Evernote.” From my Blackberry, I can also upload a file or audio note (sudden salad dressing idea I had while driving) and add to Evernote. I can also use email or a DM note in Twitter to add text to my Evernote notebook.

When the time comes to look up a recipe, Evernote is very fast at searching, and if there’s some identifying characteristic about a recipe, I’ll note it with keywords when I initially save it, for example: “healthy,” “freezes well,” “vegan,” “dessert,” “try with tofu,” or “pressure cooker.”

Evernote's outstanding for acquiring and filing recipes, but it can be used for everything, and that's how I use it. For example, I researched a tire purchase and into Evernote went the Consumer Reports ratings and info, the data sheets from the manufacturer of the tires I was considering, the pages about these tires from Costco.com, the special offer information ($70 off 4 tires), a picture of my tire sidewall showing the tire size and finally, the purchase receipt after I ordered the tires from Costco. I am sure you can see how much time and hassle this saved me and how when I shopped, instead of a stack of papers, I just used my Blackberry.

-- Kim Price

Evernote.com
Free

Evernote Premium
$5/month; $45/year

This is the best source for buying small quantities of chemicals -- always a challenge in these days of chemical hysteria. Elemental Scientific will sell to individuals, online, with no paperwork or license needed. They have a very respectable selection of about 300 reagents and compounds. More than enough for most educational purposes, or for most basement experiments. You can purchase all kinds of acids, corrosives, poisons, explosives and dangerous stuff that you can not get elsewhere -- but only in small quantities. That's fine, because a small amount is often all you want for doing experiments, and many chemical supply outfits will sell only larger quantities if they sell to you at all. Elemental also offers glassware, lab equipment, and general experimental paraphernalia. They cater to homeschoolers and hobby experimentalists. If you've ever tried to buy chemicals elsewhere you'll recognize what an incredible resource this place is. Most chemicals will be shipped UPS, but a short list of 18 especially hazardous chemicals need extra hazmat protection, which is an added charge.

Elemental Scientific

Actually, rating these extensions by "worth the slowdown," as is often the case with Firefox, doesn't seem applicable here. Chrome renders pages just as snappily on a Linux install with eight extensions loaded, and the memory use seems not all that different. Your mileage may certainly vary.

We pulled out extensions from the gallery for highlighting that do something a bit different from widely-available bookmarklets, or at least fill a crucial need for those who use the web productively. You can disagree with our picks or tell us how blind we must be to miss a great one—do so in the comments, and if we missed a really great one, we'll update the post.

You need to be running either the Windows dev version of Chrome, the just-released Linux beta, or a daily build that supports extensions. Mac users are, unfortunately, left out of the add-on party for the moment.

Google Mail Checker: Just what it sounds like. It sits in your address bar, keeps track of your unread messages, and opens Gmail when you click it. Take note that the author states it "does not yet work well" with Google Apps mail.

RSS Subscription Extension: Puts an RSS icon in the address bar when standard feeds are detected, and delivers the feed to a reader selection page when clicked. You can add custom readers beyond the standard five using URL syntax.

Xmarks for Chrome Beta: Just like the early Chrome alpha, this extension ties Chrome into your Xmarks bookmark account, synchronizing you between Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, and across multiple profiles, if needed.

iMacros for Chrome: We haven't had nearly enough time to discover what this cool tool is capable of, but it seems like a nice solution for anyone missing their crucial Greasemonkey scripts and other Firefox-only helpers.

Aviary Screen Capture and Picnik Extension for Chrome: We've already spilled some digital ink on the neat Aviary extension, but Picnik does the same type of instant web page capture—and also lets you pick a particular image from a quick list that pops down.

Flash Block and FlashBlock: Both do the basic task of turning off Flash on all web pages, until you turn it back on for all pages from that domain. FlashBlock uses a keyboard shortcut, while Flash Black has a settings dialog with a list you can edit.

AdThwart and AdSweep: As you might guess, they both block ads, though they use different blacklists to do so. We've previously covered AdSweep in its early days, and AdThwart looks like a fledgling sibling.

Brizzly: The helpful, time-saving, at-a-glance Twitter/Facebook client for the web integrates smoothly into Chrome. Click the button, and you get a quick read on what's happening in your social streams, with images automatically shown and videos embedded. You can, of course, also tweet or update Facebook from here.

Google Voice Notifier, Google Wave Notifier, and Google Alerter: The first two do just what you'd think they do, but make lots of sense for services you want right away and might only occasionally check, respectively. The last is a kind of uber-notifier that checks Gmail, Wave, and Reader for new items. If you're a heavy Reader user, you'll obviously want to turn those pings off in the settings.

Chromium Delicious Plugin: All your recent bookmarks from the Delicious bookmark service, as well as quick saving of bookmarks from selected text/links or manual creation.

ChromeMilk: There are many, many tools that bring to-do manager Remember the Milk into your browser, but this one's notable for popping up your task list right from the address bar—and offering Remember the Milk's very slick iPhone interface as an option for pro membership owners.

LastPass: As previously mentioned, this extension fills in the gap that Xmarks' lack of password syncing leaves on Chrome.

Fittr Flickr: Adds keyboard shortcuts, additional photo information, lightbox-style galleries, and more to Flickr photo pages, in the style of Gina's own Better Flickr for Firefox.

Latex gloves and the better purple nitrile gloves can be irritating to the skin, reduce the ability to feel what you're doing and are easy to drag, pinch, and tear when working on mechanical things. If you've ever tried to wind a wing nut or fiddle with a fastener with those thin, sticky gloves you know what I mean. With Invisible Glove, I can work with my hands directly on the job in front of me.

A tube of Invisible Glove for less than ten bucks will last months. You put it on once and work all day -- just one more application after you wash your hands to have a meal. With latex gloves, you're going to go through several pairs in a day and end up spending more money.

I do a lot of different things, some of them greasy and grimy like working on an old engine or painting and yard work, and others like client meetings and dinners out where nasty hands with grease under the nails just don't fly.

Invisible Glove is a simple, cheap solution. It goes on like a hand lotion -- just a bit greasier. It only makes your hands slippery if you put too much on. It works exactly like it says, though. Oil, grease, dirt, paint, solvents, and pretty much anything else just washes right off when you're done. No more greasy black fingernails and paint-stained hands.

BlueMagic 5215 Invisible Glove Protective Hand Coating
5 oz. Hanger Tube
$3

Available from Amazon

Manufactured by BlueMagic