Daisy Chain Knots Resize or Store Spare Cords Without Clutter : Productivity weblog Silver Clipboard details how to daisy chain your computer cords and demonstrates how doing so can be extremely handy for decluttering your cords.
Los Angeles, 7:52 PM Mon Nov 23 23 posts in the last 24 hours AU | JP Suggest a post: tips@lifehacker.com Team Editor: Adam Pash Email | AIM | Twitter Senior Editor: Kevin Purdy Email | AIM | Twitter Weekend Editor: Jason Fitzpatrick Email | Twitter Contributing Editor: The How-To Geek Email | Twitter Founding Editor: Gina Trapani | Twitter Interns: Dustin Luck Email Whitson Gordon Email | Twitter Lifehacker Shop Upgrade Your Life Buy our new book! Upgrade Your Life SUBSCRIBE TO Lifehacker RSS New: Breaking news and daily top stories via email 15512 Subscribers Lifehacker * By Jason Fitzpatrick Send a link to this post 'Five Best Screencasting Tools' via email: Your Name: Please enter your name. Your Email Address: Please enter your email address. Please enter a valid email address. Recipient's Email Address: Please enter your recipient's email address. Please enter a valid email address. Your Message: Please enter your message. sending request Nov 22, 2009 9:00 AM [Views] 34,881 [Comments] [Comments] 82 Edit » Set to Draft » Invite » Slurp » Copy this whole post to another site Slurp cancel sending request more about #screencast Best Screencasting Tool? Customize MediaWiki into Your Ultimate Collaborative Web Site read more: #hivefive, #screencast, #screencasting, #screencasts, #screen, #feature, #top, #videodemonstration Five Best Screencasting Tools
Some commercials are worth their short time commitment, but sometimes you just want to watch exactly 24 minutes of condensed television. Windows Media Center plug-in Lifextender does the job inside your hooked-up PC, while DVRMSToolbox runs through Media-Center-recorded files independently, and can then export them to more generally usable formats than Windows' somewhat locked-down system. (Original posts: Lifextender, DVRMSToolbox)
SmillaEnlarger is an open-source and portable application designed to help you intensively massage an image enlargement to keep it from looking jagged and filled with artifacts. You can select the level of zoom using the zoom slider and the location of the zoom via the selection box.
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]]>Windows/Mac/Linux (Firefox): Fireclip, a free plug-in that monitors specific sections of web pages, puts the at-a-glance convenience of the OS X widget screen in a Firefox tab. Using Fireclip is darned easy. Activate with a shortcut (Alt+Q) or from the Tools menu, and its sidebar pops out. Hit "Select Clip," and you can mouse around to see the pre-defined sections of the page. Click once, and you'll be asked to re-size your selection with the familiar two-directional arrows at the edges of your are
After registering at FilePhile's site with an email address and password, you grab and install a copy of the Java-based app, launch it, and add email addresses to your buddy list. Sending a file is a simple right-click on someone's name, but you can limit the bandwidth eaten up by FilePhile in its preferences. The transfers themselves are encrypted, and, as the site boasts, can be any size. That's about it, but that's probably all you need.
It is often necessary to merge multiple sound files into one recording. This need may arise for various reasons: merge ripped CD tracks into one, combine multiple chapters of an audiobook, etc. There are many great programs to achieve this, but very few of them are actually free. I've discovered that while all of these programs perform the task well, they also contain lots of other features, making them too complicated for the tasks
The application is tiny, the interface familiar, and it will allow you to drag-and-drop MP3 files onto a playlist, change the order, preview the audio, and then mix them all down to a single MP3 files along with APIC images and ID3 meta-data. Perfect for creating a mix or joining files from an audiobook you've ripped from multiple CDs. Merge MP3 is a free download for Windows.
MuvEnum Address Bar Replaces the Quick-Launching Taskbar in XP SP3 Windows only: Service Pack 3 for Windows XP removed the ability of that operating system's users to keep a quick-launching address box on their taskbar session after session. MuvEnum Address Bar aims to address that shortfall, but also adds a few neat conveniences to the package. There's a customizable global hot key (Ctrl + Shift + A by default), bookmarks and history pulled from Internet Explorer, Firefox, and/or Google Chrome, auto-complete convenience, and a key to clear out MuvEnum's history without wiping out your browser's.
Windows only: Create and mix your own file and media playlists with Freepath. Users can create file playlists from a variety of sources: files from their own computers, video files found on YouTube, photos from Flickr, nearly anything you can drag and drop from the web or your own computer can be dumped into Freepath. Once the files are placed within a playlist, users can opt to keep the list as spartan or create a slideshow complete with transitions and extra effects. One of the more unique features of Freepath is that files remain editable once they are embedded into the playlist.
Windows/Mac/Linux (Firefox): FfChrome, a free add-on for Firefox browsers, lets users who do a lot of link-grabbing, picture saving, and other right-click-type operations decide exactly what they should see when they right-click anything in their browser. Once the extension is installed, users can check or un-check particular context menu items, such as the "Email this" tools, to and create a trim right-click box with just the essentials. Hover over the "Show All" option, though, and everything rolls out. FfChrome doesn't appear to support right-click items brought in by other extensions, though, so hopefully the developer will work the add-on into those options.
Windows only: Microsoft recently released a "Filter Pack" that adds in-document searching to the Windows indexing service. That means you can find Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other Office 2007 documents based on their text contents from the Windows Vista search bar, or Windows Search 4.0 on XP. Adding the filters also adds the search capabilities to any program that relies on Windows baked-in indexing service. The Filter Pack is a free download for Windows systems only
Windows only: Free application Virtual CloneDrive mounts any common disk image file type as a virtual drive that you can browse as though it's a normal hard drive without burning a disc. The app supports popular disk image types like ISO, BIN, and CCD, and mounting an image once you've installed CloneDrive is as simple as double-clicking the file. We've covered similar tools in the past, but CloneDrive is the simplest implementation we've seen, and it's made by SlySoft, the folks who develop the popular DVD decryptor, AnyDVD. Virtual CloneDrive is a free download, Windows only.
Instantly Locate Yourself on Google Maps Firefox with Greasemonkey (All platforms): The Google Maps & Geode Greasemonkey user script adds a small Current Position link next to the Google Maps search box that instantly locates you on a map using Firefox's new geolocation technology. To use this script right now, you'll need to install the previously mentioned Geode Firefox extension—but as soon as Greasemonkey supports Firefox 3.1, which itself supports geolocation natively, you won't need any extra extensions. Since so many Google Maps searches start at your current location, whether you're getting directions or looking for nearby businesses, this quick link cuts out the work of entering in your address each time. Handy!
Linux only: QuickStart, a free automation utility for Ubuntu Linux systems, makes it easy to perform partial or full system backups of any partition, synchronize folders and update them on a schedule, and take care of other tasks a beginner would normally need to spend serious time researching. The tiny app opens a simple interface listing your choices, although dialog prompts guide you through any steps requiring input. The tools for installing DVD playing codecs, backing up your Master Boot Record, and creating synchronized backups seem particularly helpful, and while I haven't tested every function, a handful of them completed without any problems. QuickStart is a free download for Ubuntu systems only; both links below carry non-terminal installation instructions for the script.
our screenshot tour of the photo manager's new features. The most wonky among them is a color search tool, which, as Gil points out, is only so helpful without percentage scaling. On the more useful side, "Show duplicates" helps you weed out carbon photo copies, and you can save searches and compile tagged photos as albums. Hit the link for a screenshot roundup of the not-quite-ready-for-primetime features. 5 Obscure Picasa Features You Probably Didn't Know About [Gil's Method]
Search site and aggregator VideoSurf isn't perfect at what it tries to do, but it can be occasionally, surprisingly good at spotting particular faces inside videos. The indexing engine (currently in beta, of course) sorts through videos from most of the popular Flash-based sites and lets you search to find only videos with, say, Jerry Seinfeld's actual image in them. A few of my searches turned up false positives, but others yielding surprising accuracy, and VideoSurf's interface lets you skip right to the sections featuring your searched man or woman. VideoSurf is a free to use, though you can sign up to save your searches.
Xtranormal, a free 3D animation creation and sharing tool, is a seriously addictive sandbox for crafting miniature dramas, comedies, or whatever you can tell your little actors to do. The clip editor works like a storyboard that you drag story changes onto. So in one "scene," for example, you can have the camera switch to a close-up view, have your character wink and then recite some decent text-to-speech dialogue, then have them cross their arms and make the camera go for an overhead shot. You can add another character, change the backdrops, turn the camera positioning to automatic, and generally spend way too much time being an online Hitchcock (or Scorcese, or Tarantino, or any other name you care to drop). Building the movies takes a good chunk of time, and sometimes fails entirely, though that might be due to early-discovery traffic. Xtranormal is free to use, requires a sign-up to save your clips for later editing. Feel free to share links to your own mini-epics in the comments.
Quite a few suggestions on putting those old boxes to use, including a home FTP server, an always-available MP3 jukebox, a remote-controlled BitTorrent monster, and many more. But we're always intrigued to see what our creative readers are doing to get the most out of their systems, new or old. Tell us what kind of server you're rocking in the poll below, and share the glorious details in the comments—how it's networked, what it can do, whether you can shut it down from your cell phone, and the like. And if you want to point us to any guides you used to create your trusty sidekick, all the better.
WANTED: your ikea hacks. whatever they may be - a funked up klippan sofa, an ingenious idea for your pax wardrobe, a creative twist on your kitchen countertop, or even advice on how to finally stop forby stools from wobbling, i'd love to see your ikea hacks