vlc4iphone Ports VLC Media Player to... You Guessed It [Featured IPhone Download]
Jailbroken iPhone/iPod touch only: Free application vlc4iphone ports the popular open-source media player VLC—voted as the best desktop media player by Lifehacker readers—to your iPhone or iPod touch. Apart from supporting virtually any media type you throw at it (I'd recommend using an app like previously mentioned DiskAid to get media to your iPhone), the VLC port streams internet radio, and can even stream media over your network. If you're dying to play unsupported file types on your device and aren't eager to transcode them to do so, vlc4iphone can do the trick. vlc4iphone is free, requires a jailbroken iPhone or iPod touch. The app is still rough around the edges (some playback was buggy for me, and there's no landscape mode), but it's not a bad start. Thanks Niranjan!
One Minute Languages Offers a Dozen Basic Language Guides [Learning]
Want to join the polyglot set but don't have the time for foreign language immersion, world travel, or academic courses? One Minute Languages offers basic instructions in a dozen languages for English speakers including German, Russian and Japanese that will help get you started. The short lessons are released weekly as a podcast you can subscribe to via iTunes, or you can just visit the site to play back archived tips in your browser. If you want the complete package for a particular language, a full download of all the lessons is only £3.50. The Radio Lingua Network, which produces the series, also offers Coffee Break Spanish and Coffee Break French — for those of you with more than a minute to spare as you sip your java. Extend your lessons with ten new vocabulary items a day and the interactive language teaching tools at Mango.
TroopTube Video Site Connects Military Families [Digital Video]
In commemoration of Armistice Day, which marked the end to hostilities on the Western Front in World War I, Americans celebrate Veteran's Day. Military OneSouce, an online destination serving members of the United States armed services and their families, chose the date to announce the launch of TroopTube, a YouTube-like site for uploading and sharing videos. Unlike YouTube (which users of defense networks aren't allowed to access), users won't be able to embed videos on third-party sites, and the Department of Defense will moderate to make sure no videos posing potential security risks are posted. Members of the general public can sign up to post videos as well, including their wishes that those deployed come back safe and sound.
Gobby Makes Cross-Platform Collaboration a Breeze [Featured Download]
Windows/Mac/Linux: Gobby is a free, cross-platform collaboration tool that makes it easy to collaborate on text documents over the internet with anyone. Every time you start a session with Gobby, you choose a highlight color that Gobby uses to indicate which sections of the text are being edited by which users. Gobby works like a charm for any text document, but with support for syntax highlighting, it really shines for collaboratively editing source code. It's not quite as simple to get started with as something like Google Docs—for example, you'll need to be able to send other collaborators your IP address—but it's an incredible tool in its own right. In fact, it's the collaboration tool that Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth told us he uses.
Modista Lets You Browse and Compare Shoes Visually [Shopping]
If you're used to browsing the aisles of a shoe store with some idea of what you're looking for or just checking out what's available, then Modista might be a better way to shop online. You're presented with a screen full of items (currently shoes, handbags and sunglasses), and you can browse through thumbnails until you find something you like. Set filters for price, color, brand or even current discount to refine your search. Click on something you like, and the site will display a grid of similar items. Mouse-over and the brand, price, and retailer information will pop up, or click the magnifying glass next to the thumbnail to bring up more details, including a link to where you can purchase online. Somewhat similar to Like.com, except where Like.com lets you upload an image of a favorite item or style to match, Modista gives a good sense of available styles — more like walking past hundreds of shelves all at once. Thanks, NaomiSnipe!
The Unobtrusive, 10-Foot Tall Heads-Up Display [Featured Desktop]
Reader Espiox spent a little time with the popular desktop customization tool Rainmeter to create a great HUD on his desktop displaying the date and time in the upper left and weather on the bottom right. Nothing in his setup is all that new in terms of the information it's offering, but the enormous-yet-not-overbearing text is kind of incredible. Got a great desktop of your own? Submit an image or video along with explanation to the Lifehacker Desktop Show and Tell Group.
MAKE - Volume 16: Spy Tech - Give the gift of making this holiday season! [Advertisement]
No mission is impossible when makers put their minds to it. Make Volume 16 will help you get smart with a special section on spy tech. Learn how to build and use tiny surveillance devices, and how to know if a spy is using them on you. From tiny video cameras to sneaky recorders, this volume has enough cool stuff to make James Bond's inventor Q envious. Subscribe today and receive a free Maker's Notebook. After the jump, check out a sample article from MAKE Magazine.
Deadline Webapp Schedules Important Reminders [Calendars]
If you're looking for an easy way to set up reminders by date for everything from tasks to complete to events to attend to birthdays to remember, Deadline can help. You can set up reminders via email or instant message simply by typing a phrase like "Book proposal due next Tuesday," and Deadline will parse the text into a dated entry and then send you a reminder the day before. Since a calendar and schedule is only helpful if you actually use it, Deadline might be a way to get into the habit since it's fairly easy to email upcoming events to the webapp in order to receive reminders. In fact, once you've set it up, you don't really need to remember to visit the site. As someone who's set up countless calendar systems online and off and then promptly ignored them, I might have finally met my match.
Google Launches Voice and Video Chat Inside Gmail [Video Chat]
Today Google starts rolling out voice and video chat inside Gmail—which requires a free browser plug-in download, and, obviously, a webcam or microphone. Googler Justin Uberti explains:
Once you install the plug-in, to start a video chat, just click on the "Video & more" menu at the bottom of your Gmail chat window, and choose "Start video chat." You'll have a few seconds to make sure you look presentable while it's ringing, and then you'll see and hear your friend live, right from within Gmail. You can click the "pop-out" icon to make the video larger, or click the fullscreen icon in the upper left-hand corner for a fully immersive experience.
Check out the new video chat in action in the video below.
Video isn't yet enabled in my account, but the Googlers say rollout is happening gradually over the next two days, to vanilla Gmail as well as Google Apps accounts, for Mac and Windows. What's your favorite webcam model and video chat service? How does Gmail's video chat stack up? Let us know in the comments.
Hive Five Winner for Best Remote Desktop Tool: LogMeIn [Hive Five Followup]
Remote desktop service LogMeIn secured the top slot in this weekend's Hive Five Best Remote Desktop Tools. The default Windows Remote Desktop Connection client came in a close second, followed by the open-source VNC application UltraVNC.
Microsoft Introduces Four Windows Live Mesh Apps, Won't Let You Play with One [Windows Live Mesh]
We've heard plenty about the potential of Windows Live Mesh, but ZDNet reports that Microsoft has finally developed some real live Live Mesh apps that put the system to use. The four apps—called the MeshPack—include a collaborative crossword app, a digital bulletin board, a list sharing tool, and a collaborative group-polling tool. Unfortunately you need a PDC code to actually download any of them. [via]
Found Your Company with MyCorporation, Free Today Only [Entrepreneurship]
If you've been thinking about starting your own company and establishing a corporation or LLC, today's the day: Intuit's MyCorporation, a service which normally costs $149 to file all the paperwork for you, is free today only until 6PM Pacific time. Use the coupon code FREE149 when you order your LLC or Corp processing. You'll still need to pay state filing, publication, and shipping fees as usual, even with the discount, but you'll be starting off your new venture on the right fiscally-responsible foot. We have not tried MyCorporation ourselves, but as Intuit's the maker of popular financial software Quicken, QuickBooks, and TurboTax, they're probably a safe bet. If you found your new company today with MyCorporation, let us know how it goes in the comments. Thanks, Jeromy!
Hide Google Reader's Unread Counts [Featured User Style]
If the high unread item counts in Google Reader are making browsing your feeds feel more like a chore than relaxed browsing, hide them using the Remove Unread Count user style, for use with the Stylish or Greasemonkey extension. The style hides all individual subscription and folder unread counts—only the count in the title bar remains—and developer says he built it to get rid of Reader guilt.
How to Conditionally Show or Hide Excel Charts [Excel Tip]
When you've got a chart-heavy Excel spreadsheet, you can display one chart and let the viewer switch to see the others from a drop-down. The Pointy Haired Dilbert blog runs down the details of this nifty Excel trickery, which uses a formula and an image to conditionally show or hide the chart—neat stuff sure to impress the boss.
iPhone 2.2 Release Slated for November 21 [IPhone]
According to the gadget junkies at Gizmodo, the iPhone 2.2 release is set for November 21—just ten days away. The software update promises several new features for your iPhone or iPod touch, including Google Street View, emoji icons, walking directions, and over-the-air podcasts. Even better: You'll probably be able to jailbreak it the same day it's released.
A Few Handy, Hidden OS X Shortcuts [Keyboard Shortcuts]
It's easy to consider yourself a keyboard shortcut master until one morning you hit the wrong key combination and something exciting and new happens. Just this morning, I discovered a handful of new keyboard shortcuts on my Mac that I had never heard of but that I plan to integrate into my workflow ASAP.
In short, the hitherto unknown-to-me shortcuts align very closely with Emacs, one of the five most popular text editors. Emacs is full of untraditional (for most) and handy little shortcuts that can come in incredibly useful under the right circumstances.
Emacs Shortcuts for OS X
The shortcuts I've tested on my Mac this morning are:
Ctrl+A: Beginning of line (like Home)Ctrl+B: Backward one character (like hitting the left arrow)Ctrl+D: Forward delete (like the Forward Delete button on Macs)Ctrl+E: End of line (like End)Ctrl+F: Forward one character (like hitting the right arrow)Ctrl+H: I'm not entirely sure on this one, but it looks like it just does a right-to-left delete (like the regular delete key on Macs).Ctrl+K: Kill/remove text between cursor and the end of the line.Ctrl+N: Next line (like down arrow)Ctrl+P: Previous line (like up arrow)Ctrl+U: Remove/delete current lineCtrl+V: Page down
When Would I Use These?
As you can tell, you probably won't be using most of these shortcuts all that often—for example, most people would probably find it easier to just hit the right arrow than perform a Ctrl+F keyboard combo, and some duplicate other shortcuts that are already ingrained in your muscle memory—but others can come in very handy. For example, the Home/End keys don't always work how you'd want them to—even after remapping them. Running Gmail on Firefox in OS X, for example, neither Home/End nor Cmd+Right/Left work in emails when I'm in Rich Formatting mode. You know what does, though? Ctrl+A/E.
There's a good chance you may not adopt many (or any) of these extra shortcuts, but it's always good to know your options. Whether you've been using these shortcuts forever on OS X or not, let's hear your favorites and any I missed in the comments.
How MozBackup Insures Your Mozilla Profiles [Backup Utilities]
What with experimental extensions, themes, about:config tweaks, and user scripts and styles, we're always encouraging you to do strange and unholy things to your Firefox installation—things that you should only do after you back up your current profile for easy restoration. We've already mentioned MozBackup a few times in passing, our favorite program for backing up your Firefox profile. But our Firefox tweak-crazy intern Asian Angel offers a detailed tutorial on using MozBackup—what bits of your browsing data it backs up (and doesn't), what Mozilla programs it works with beyond vanilla Firefox, and how it works. Hit the link to get the full rundown.
BeatMyPrice Finds Deals, Integrates RetailMeNot [Price Comparison]
Just-launched price comparison engine BeatMyPrice comes from the folks who brought you BugMeNot and RetailMeNot, and puts those two services' "people-powered" ethics to good use. Here's how it works: you see an item you want to buy online at a certain price, but want to know if there are better deals out there. You enter the item name, URL, and price into BeatMyPrice.com, and hit the "Beat that!" button. BeatMyPrice lists results from various sources (including other users' searches), and includes better, the same, and higher-priced items than your entry—and it integrates coupon codes and promotions (like free shipping) from its sister site, RetailMeNot.
You can narrow down the results to only the sellers and target price you want to see. Check out a video clip from the founder which shows you BeatMyPrice in action.
As I'm on the hunt for a widescreen monitor, I plugged in a couple of listings from NewEgg into BeatMyPrice, and it did find me a cheaper (albeit smaller screen) price, but the result listing was a lot sparser than the one shown in the video. As more people use BeatMyPrice, the more results it will have to offer. Right now it desperately needs a BugMeNot-style bookmarklet for use while you shop for holiday gifts online.
Parallels 4 Released, 50% Faster than Parallels 3 [Featured Mac Download]
Mac OS X only: The original Windows-on-Mac virtualization software Parallels—which we've used to run Windows and Mac apps side-by-side, set Windows programs as defaults on a Mac, and boot our Boot Camp partition from inside OS X—has just updated to Parallels 4. The good news: Parallels 4 boasts 50% faster performance than Parallels 3 (according to their site, at least), while promising to use 15-30% fewer resources. Other new features include:
- SmartMount: Access removable storage devices from both Windows and Mac at the same time.
- SmartConnect: Instantly connect USB devices to Windows or Mac based on your set preferences
- iPhone Remote Control App: Start up and shut down Windows, Linux or any other VM directly from your iPhone.
- Modality View Mode: View Windows in a scaled view on your desktop for transparent viewing.
- Clips Tool: Share several Windows or Mac screen captures to the Mac's clipboard to paste into Apple Mail, iChat or Pages.
The only downside: Parallels 3 users will need to pony up $40 for an upgrade. If you're totally new to Parallels, a full license will set you back $80. We haven't been able to compare the latest Parallels with its biggest competition, VMware Fusion, yet, but if you've tried both, let's hear if you've noticed performance differences in the comments.
Keep Your Headphones Tangle-Free with a Toy Capsule [Video Demonstration]
We've all struggled with tangled headphones at one point or another—we've dedicated several posts to different headphone wrapping techniques—but the Berkeley Innovation student group offers their own clever and cheap solution to the common problem. Rather than requiring you to adopt a complicated wrapping technique, they use a plastic toy capsule (the kind you get for $.25 with a toy inside) to help the cord maintain its shape. The capsule-encased headphones don't tangle regardless of your wrapping method, since nothing can disturb the wrapped cord. Handy!
Magic Number Machine Graphs Calculations [Featured Mac Download]
Mac OS X only: Mac users envious of Windows 7's new souped-up built-in calculator can take solace in Magic Number Machine, a free, advanced graphic calculator for OS X. Features include 25 digits of precision, hexadecimal, binary, decimal and octal display including fractional, scientific notation and negative numbers in each, complex numbers, array functions, and a whole menu of scientific constants. It's been a long time since I've needed a calculator this advanced and complex, so mathletes and scientists, let us know how it is. The Magic Number Machine is a free download for Mac only. Thanks, enderwiggin7!
Treesize Free is a Simple Disk Space Visualizer [Featured Windows Download]
Windows only: We've previously highlighted some disk space visualization tools with all kinds of neat graphics, but Treesize Free shoots for just the opposite—a clean, simple interface showing how much of your hard drive is filled by which folders. As you might guess, it stacks up the root folders by size, then lets you collapse them in nesting trees to see which sub-folders are eating up that 160GB drive you thought you'd never fill. You can adjust for KB/MB/GB viewing, scan CDs and removable drives, and switch to percentages instead of data bits, but one of Treesize's really cool features is simply giving you all the same tools you have in Windows Explorer's right-click menu on its tree view pane—delete, copy, cut, etc. Treesize Free is a free download for Windows systems only.
Rescue a Word Document from Multiple Editors [How To]
If you share a nicely-formatted Word document with one or more folks and ask them to make "just a few edits," you're more than likely to get back a document with inconsistent italics/bolding/underlines, crazy font differences, and whatever size looked best on each person's screen. The Microsoft Word Team explains in a blog post how to use the Styles pane and a few (not-so-obvious) options to get everything back into alignment, rather than highlighting, clicking, and slowly building a grudge against Sally in Accounts Receivable. Helpful stuff, and there's also a quick lesson in creating a consistent style in the first place.
EchoPic is a Dead Simple Picture Sharing Site [Photo Sharing]
Webapp EchoPic is a no-frills online photo storage service, which has no albums or advanced features, but offers a fast way to get pictures on the web painlessly. Registration isn't necessary to use the basic features; unregistered users have unlimited storage and a file size limitation of 1MB. Registered users have the same generous storage plus an increase in file size limit to 4 MB. One minor caveat: there is no resizing feature, so make sure to resize or crop your photos before uploading them. If my test picture piqued your interest check out how to make your own stealthy keyboard.
Get Around Academic Paper Restrictions [Google]
The Google Operating System blog points out that Google's integration of Scholar results means that students and researchers have to settle for "subscription required" firewalls when trying to pull up a paper. Hit the "All (x) versions" link, and you'll often find a readable copy on Google's servers.
Transmute Transfers and Backs Up Bookmarks Between Browsers [Featured Windows Download]
Windows only: Some browsers stash all your bookmarks and their metadata in a single folder that's easy to import to any other browser. For everything else, Transmute makes the work of shuttling bookmarks between Windows browsers much simpler. The simple but powerful application, also available as a no-install portable folder, supports nearly every major browser for Windows—Chrome, Chromium, Opera, Safari, and, of course, Internet Explorer and Firefox. You can set Transmute to export bookmarks to a particular folder, with or without timestamp dates, and have it create its own backup files in case things get messy. That's about it, but that's certainly no small feat. Transmute is a free download for Windows systems only, requires .NET 2.0 framework to operate.
Add Control Panel to Windows' Right-Click Menu [Windows Tip]
Are you constantly jumping into Windows' Control Panel to adjust startup programs, firewall settings, or other system variables? The How-To Geek offers a how-to (and a double-click registry hack) that puts it right on your desktop right-click menu. Probably more helpful for XP users, since Vista's search-by-Win-key gets you there nearly as fast.
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