We’re barely past Halloween and people are already working on their next LED based holiday decorations. For Hanukkah, Gizmodo pointed out the PCB menorah pictured above. It uses a set of DIP switches to control which LEDs are lit. A couple years ago, Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories put together a tutorial for building a more minimal LED menorah. Each of the nine LEDs are soldered directly to the legs of an ATtiny2313 microcontroller. Every time you power up the device an additional LED is lit. [Ori] liked the project and decided to take a slightly different approach. He used an LM3914 DIP18 LED bar driver. A potentiometer controls how many of the LEDs are illuminated.
This is one of the more bizarre bugs we’ve ever heard. The T-Mobile G1 has an open root shell that interprets everything you type as a command. It was discovered when a user just happened to type the word ‘reboot’ in a conversation and the phone immediately rebooted. A patch has already been rolled out to fix this issue. It also buttons up the earlier telnetd SUID problem.
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When you work from home or as a freelancer, one aspect of business life you may be giving up is your own professional development and training. But the trouble is that keeping up with the latest in your industry—and growing knowledge in other areas—may be more important than ever. Fortunately, there are ways to effectively and efficiently train yourself, growing your education on your own. Here are some tips about how to use even the smallest moments in your day to add skills and knowledge to your work. Photo by tuexperto_com5.
Begin each month with a learning project: It can be easy to get overwhelmed with all of the business topics out there. Just one trip down that aisle of a bookstore can make you dizzy. That's why every month you could focus on just one area. Maybe you want to learn more about leadership or creativity or finance. Make sure the books you read, the web sites you visit and the videos you watch focus on your chosen subject. You'll be surprised how much you can learn in just 30 days.
Read books quickly: Do you want to learn what the latest bestsellers are saying, but can't commit the few days it would take to read the whole thing? Follow this technique to get through a book fast, while still understanding the key points.
Read the table of contents, glossary and index first. With that you will learn about the most important topics are in the book.
Next, go through the book and read anything in bold, any titles and any subtitles. That will give you a good idea of the structure and the main ideas of the book.
Finally, read the first line of every paragraph of the book. This will get you all of the specific points and none of the filler.
With that technique, "reading" a business book shouldn't take more than an hour and you will be able to refer to it in your conversations and implement some of its ideas. If something is really interesting to you, you can read deeper into that section of the book to find out more.
Keep learning (with paper): Don't be afraid to rip out magazine and newspaper articles and keep them in a "To Read" folder that you can keep on your desk or take with you on business trips. Read in those moments you are waiting for a meeting to start or flight to board. But in order to keep current, throw out anything that is more than 30 days old. If you haven't read it, it's already old news.
Keep learning (on the web): If you are staring at your computer during the day, make your idle time more productive. Have a few spare minutes? You can start watching a lecture from some of the top business schools in the country on YouTube. Download lectures off of iTunes and plug them into your player and listen while you work. There are so many good ones — start by searching YouTube or go to oculture.com, which has some great overviews. Another good site is the Personal MBA, which recommends good books and has an outline for areas of business to study on your own.
Hold yourself accountable: Tell your friends and family what you plan on learning each month. Twitter your progress. Start a blog to share what you've found out. Before you know it, the people around you will see that you and your business aren't content with staying still.
Jason Womack travels the world teaching people and their companies about workplace effectiveness and productivity. He is a small business entrepreneur, a former teacher, a busy business traveler, and an active triathlete. He can be reached at 805-640-6401 and by email at jason@jasonwomack.com.
Windows/Linux: Spend some time searching for free software to manage recipes, and you'll end up spending a lot of time in your uninstaller utility, removing the cruft of bad interfaces, weak features, and general abandonware. Gourmet Recipe Manager, a free, open-source download for Linux and Windows systems, is easy to navigate, imports and exports in a wide array of formats, and can generate nutritional data and shopping lists from your favorite home cooking recipes. The app has a lot of small but convenient features, like a list maker that understands you just need "potatoes," not "diced potatoes," an ingredient entry form that allows for no-look typing, and an attractive recipe card maker. It can also import recipes from Epicurious.com, Recipezaar, and other web sites with little problem. Gourmet Recipe Manager is a free download for Windows and Linux systems. It's included in many Linux repositories, while Windows users should look through the stable releases for the most recent .exe package. Know of another free, robust recipe manager? Tell us about it in the comments.
Dear Lifehacker, Help! I used to read Lifehacker very day, but fell behind on my daily dose after my personal life got extremely hectic. I got the BEST tips ever from you guys, Launchy, VLC, and countless little fixes that made using my Windows XP machine the most comfortable experience in my computing life. So you might understand how I crave those 10 months of lost knowledge. OH! How much have I missed! I don't even know. What can I do to get caught back up? Sincerely, Playing Catch Up
Welcome back! There are several ways you can catch up on the Lifehacker goodness. I'll show you several techniques for making sure you don't miss anything from your hiatus. By using tags, URL tricks, and a little Google magic we'll have you up to speed in no time. The following tricks are ordered based on how much time you have to devout to your reading.
This is Good - Our monthly compilation of the most popular posts, the "This is Good" tag will help you get caught up on the most popular posts from each month you missed.
Highlights - Every week we give our readers the most popular articles for that week via the Highlights. Browsing through the history of the Highlights tag will give you a meatier overview than the monthly highlights alone.
Top - If you don't quite have the time to read everything you missed, but you're craving more than just highlights, the Top tag is an excellent tool. Every day as our writers slave away in the productivity workshop, they stamp their best posts of the day with the Top tag. There are usually three or so top stories per day, which should keep you busy reading for some time. Editing the ?refID=0 portion of the URL to a higher number will take you further back in time. Changing the number value from 0 to http://lifehacker.com/tag/top/?refId=1300 for instance would kick you back those ten months you missed.
The Time Machine - If you want to make sure you don't miss a thing, you can use the ?refId=000000 portion of the site URL to transport yourself back into the annuals of life hacking goodness. Unlike the value for the Top tag, the number value for the full post list has a quirk. Instead of changing it to a higher number to push yourself further back into the past you instead specify a specific post ID number to start the list at. If you'd like to jump back to February of 2008 for instance, you need an article from that time. Pull an article from the monthly highlight via "This is Good" or search Google for a date in the past using the following format: site:lifehacker.com feb 1 2008 , for our example we stole a post ID from Kevin's How To write up on grouping taskbars in Ubuntu. The number is located here: http://lifehacker.com/351568/group-windows-on-the-taskbar-in-ubuntugnome By sticking that number into the ?refId, you create the following URL, http://lifehacker.com/index.php?refId=351568, which will take you to the bottom of pile back in February of 2008. You can pick any post as your starting point via the post code.
With these tricks at your disposal you'll have caught up on your reading list in no time!
Tabbloid is a free web based service designed to turn RSS feeds into a PDF newspaper. The web site requires no registration and the process is straight forward. Single or multiple RSS feeds can serve as the source for your PDF. You can opt to have the site compile the PDF immediately or delivery it by email at a future date based on hourly, daily or weekly frequency. In the dozen test feeds I threw at Tabbloid the service performed as advertised, however a few of the feeds generated a glitch that caused the articles to appear in duplicate within the PDF. For another method of converting RSS feeds to PDFs, check out RSS 2 PDF.
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Windows/Linux: Spend some time searching for free software to manage recipes, and you'll end up spending a lot of time in your uninstaller utility, removing the cruft of bad interfaces, weak features, and general abandonware. Gourmet Recipe Manager, a free, open-source download for Linux and Windows systems, is easy to navigate, imports and exports in a wide array of formats, and can generate nutritional data and shopping lists from your favorite home cooking recipes. The app has a lot of small but convenient features, like a list maker that understands you just need "potatoes," not "diced potatoes," an ingredient entry form that allows for no-look typing, and an attractive recipe card maker. It can also import recipes from Epicurious.com, Recipezaar, and other web sites with little problem. Gourmet Recipe Manager is a free download for Windows and Linux systems. It's included in many Linux repositories, while Windows users should look through the 
Dear Lifehacker,
