Best Desktop Customization Tool? [Hive Five Call For Contenders]
Sure your computer's desktop may be functional out of the box, but some of us need to put the 'P' in PC before we really feel at home at a computer. We love looking at how our readers have customized their desktops, so for this week's Hive Five, we want you to share your favorite desktop customization applications. Keep reading for more details and to nominate your faves in the comments.
Hive Five nominations take place in the comments, where you post your favorite tool for the job. We get hundreds of comments, so to make your nomination clear, please include it at the top of your comment like so: VOTE: Desktop Customization Tool Goes Here. NEW RULE: Please don't include your vote in a reply to another commenter. Instead, make your vote and reply separate comments. If you don't follow this format, we may not count your vote. To prevent tampering with the results, votes from first-time commenters may not be counted. After you've made your nomination, let us know what makes it stand out from the competition.
About the Hive Five: The Hive Five feature series asks readers to answer the most frequently asked question we get—"Which tool is the best?" Once a week we'll put out a call for contenders looking for the best solution to a certain problem, then YOU tell us your favorite tools to get the job done. Every weekend, we'll report back with the top five recommendations and give you a chance to vote on which is best. For an example, check out last week's Hive Five Best Video Chat Applications.
Email Activity Random but Cyclical [In Brief]
Looking at aggregate data of 3,000 email accounts over a three month period, researchers at Northwestern University say that emails are responded to randomly, but the volume of sent mail follows predictable patterns. Namely, late at night on the weekends it's much less likely you'll receive any reply, for the obvious reasons — sleep and time off from work on weekends. The study suggests that the best time to contact someone when looking for a timely response, such as Monday morning, and can help network administrators plan for high-volume periods. Connectivity at home is better than it was when the data was recorded, but is it just me or do you actively avoid email outside of business hours as well?
Forkbombs and Other Things Not to Type in Terminals [Linux]
"Tell the noob to type rm -rf /," the troll types to his friend in IRC before you're a series of lulz after a friendly call for Linux tech support help turns into a formatted hard drive. If you don't know what a forkbomb is or what it looks like you might want to check this list of seven commands that could prove lethal if typed into a command line shell. If you're making the plunge into operating systems like Ubuntu but are worried about what not to do, check it out. Any horror stories you readers might want to pass along to save someone else a headache down the line? Photo by zakwitnij
Integrate YouSendIt with Microsoft Office [Microsoft Office]
Send that big PowerPoint presentation or Excel spreadsheet without clogging up your recipient's email inbox straight from Microsoft Office using previously mentioned file delivery service YouSendIt. Their new Office add-in puts YouSendIt into, appropriately, the Send to menu above the Email option. The YouSendIt Microsoft Office add-in is a free download. [via]
Process Manager Prioritizes, Kills Running Apps via Right-Click [Featured Windows Download]
Windows only: Free application Process Manager adds an entry to your right-click context menu that adjusts an application's priority or kills the app. Once Process Manager is running, the kill and priority options are only available when you've right-clicked a window's taskbar item. That's pretty much all there is to it. The app runs in your system tray and eats less than 1MB of RAM. While Process Manager doesn't do anything you can't already do from the Windows Task Manager, it does provide quicker access to a couple of handy functions and is worth a try if you do much force-quitting. Process Manager is a free download, Windows only.
Ask MetaFilter Roundup [Hive Mind]
- Of the things you spent money on for your wedding, what was most worth it? What was least worth it?
- Best ideas, recommendations, and recipes I can use to make up homemade holiday baskets as gifts?
- How does one "put aside" X months of expenses for emergencies?
- What should no good kitchen be without?
Eraser Portable Securely Wipes Data from Your Thumb Drive [Featured Windows Download]
Windows only: Free application Eraser Portable puts previously mentioned Eraser—the popular open-source secure file deletion tool—on your thumb drive for secure file deletion on the go. Like the original, Eraser Portable can wipe any hard drive, optical media, files, folders, encrypted data, the Recycle Bin, and pretty much any other data you want to kill. It may not be an app you use every day, but it's a great utility to throw on your thumb drive, iPod, or other portable device for those times you do need a quick, secure delete.
iSerenity Ambient Sounds Offer Soothing Background Noise [Distraction]
Whether you work quietly alone at home or in an office where the hum of fluorescent lights is the dominant soundtrack of your day, tune into one of the 31 ambient loops offered on the iSerenity web site. Listen to the clack of typewriters and maybe your own keyboard pace will pick up; if you miss the big city, you can have New York City as your background (at least, the safe-for-work version); expatriate Angelenos would probably prefer "Highway Hiatus." It's like selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors for your ears. Looking for more phonic tonics? SimplyNoise does white noise in your browser and does it well. Serenity now.
Mufin Music Recommendation Engine Finds Tunes You'll Like [Music]
New music discovery search engine Mufin finds music you'll like by analyzing songs for similarities. We've seen several tools offering similar results from these sort of "audio fingerprints," but according to tech blog TechCrunch, Mufin's analysis actually works really well. Apart from the basic search engine available on their homepage, Mufin also offers different software and widgets to integrate the app with other music tools—including Facebook and MySpace apps, a Windows-only iTunes add-on (that sort of challenges the sometimes off-the-mark Genius tool), and a Windows-only Music Finder. Mufin is created by the Fraunhofer Institute—the people who brought us the venerated and time-tested MP3 compression algorithm, so it's definitely got some cred going in. If you give any of Mufin's new offerings a try, let's hear how it works for you in the comments.
SnapTell Explorer Instantly Looks Up Any Product via Photograph [Featured IPhone Application]
iPhone only: When you see a book, CD, DVD, or game at a friend's house you want to look up and bookmark instantly, fire up SnapTell Explorer on your iPhone and take a photo of it. Similar to a bar code scanner (except you photograph the item cover, not its bar code), SnapTell automatically looks up your item and gives you links to Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Wikipedia, and straight-up search engines so you can compare prices and find out more about it. SnapTell's results aren't 100% accurate—once it gave me a strategy guide result when I photographed a video game cover—but everything else I tried it on, the results were spot-on. Here's what the result for the Halo 3 photograph looked like.
SnapTell pulls in the official product image and gives you links to look it up in places like Amazon and Wikipedia. If you hit the "Share this product" button you can email the item to someone. (What it needs to do—and maybe in a future iteration—is display prices and details here, with these links below them.)
Your SnapTell results get stored in a single list, called "My Snaps." It would be nice to set up multiple lists (like "wishlist" or "gift ideas for my sweetie") but right now it's only a single list.
One of the most impressive apps we tried on the G1 phone running Android was the Compare Everywhere bar code scanner that does photo-lookups just like this. While SnapTell doesn't offer the same amount of detail and on-the-spot price comparison, for iPhone owners, it's a fast and easy way to instantly capture products of interest. SnapTell Explorer is a free download for the iPhone and iPod touch.
MiniTube Adds Music Videos to Winamp [Featured Windows Download]
Windows only: Winamp plug-in MiniTube adds YouTube videos to your music playlist. Fire up MiniTube when you want to see your music as well as hear it, and it searches YouTube for a video that matches the metadata on your MP3 file, and starts playing it along with the music automatically. In theory this is awesome, but MiniTube's implementation falls short in one main way: the video often starts after the song does, so it's not necessarily synced with what you're hearing. If you can't stand being a few beats behind, however, you can opt to listen to the YouTube audio instead of your MP3 file. MiniTube is a free download that works with Winamp. Update: Apologies for the déjà vu.
Mozilla Serves Its One Billionth Add-on [Firefox]
Mozilla announced yesterday that they've served up their one billionth add-on since 2005—and that only includes add-ons hosted on Mozilla's servers. Mozilla applications like Firefox and Thunderbird have earned a place in many of our hearts thanks to their extensibility, and the one billionth add-on milestone in conjunction with Firefox earning 20% of the market share has us thinking: These crazy open-source/extension ideas just might work.
Challenge/Response Beats IM Spam [Featured Mac Download]
Mac OS X only: Free Adium plug-in Challenge Response prevents instant messaging spam by requiring unknown users to answer a quick challenge question before interrupting you with their message. Challenges would look something like, "What is the square root of 49 in numerical form?" which requires a response of "7," but you can customize your own question and answer. Once a user answers correctly (i.e., verifies intelligence), Challenge/Response adds that user to a whitelist and they won't be challenged again. There's always the chance that the challenge and response might confuse an actual human enough that they'll just give up on IMing you, but if you're used to a lot of IM spam, Challenge/Response is a must. Challenge/Response is a free download, Mac OS X only, requires Adium. Thanks Jason!
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