[RyeBrye] has been trying to get multitouch working on the Android based T-Mobile G1. He hacked the Synaptics touchscreen driver so that it would dump raw event info to a character device. The demo above is using example code from Google for a fingerpaint program. Polling the device is not the fastest method, but [RyeBrye] just wanted to get a demo out there to prove it could be done.
A team of five UC Berkeley engineering built this impressive Rubik’s Cube solver. The CuBear is a giant transparent cube with a servo attached to each face to rotate the cube’s six faces. The user can either scramble the cube using computer controls or show the faces of a scrambled cube to the onboard webcam, and the machine will replicate it. While scrambling the cube may take many moves, the computer calculates the shortest number of moves to solve the cube before proceeding. Team member [Dan Dzoan] is quite a fast solver himself, as you can see at the end of BotJunkie’s video embedded below.
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Everybody says there's no right or wrong way to use Twitter, but sometimes a ridiculous Twitter app comes along to make me wonder whether that's true. Right now there are two of them: Tweetstalk and Twollow. Tweetstalk lets you "stalk" a Twitter user, reading his or her tweets without formally following. Twollow automatically follows anybody who posts the keywords you specify.
I'm conflicted about these two services. Tweetstalk is a Firefox plugin that adds a "stalk" button next to the follow button on users' Twitter pages: click it to subscribe to their tweets without following them. This doesn't do anything you can't do by going to a user's Twitter page and reading it. But if you intend to do it on an ongoing basis, you might as well let him or her know you're doing it by following.
Twollow could be useful for business Twitter accounts, and marketers who want to reach out to people who are discussing their clients. Depersonalizing it by making it automatic hardly seems productive to me, though. Why not use search.twitter.com to see who's talking about a topic, and decide whether to follow them yourself? Otherwise, you might end up following some really lame people, based on only one of their tweets.
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Putting chains on your tires is illegal just about everywhere but rural American because of the damage snow chains can do to paved roads. No such restriction exists for bicycles, nor will you likely find a bike with enough weight to do any damage with chains on the tires! If you're braving a commute or keeping up a fitness routine via bicycle this winter, there is an excellent tutorial at cycling enthusiast blog Mountain Bike Riders to help you chain your tires and keep going strong through the winter. A quick trip to your workshop bins or the local hardware store for braided chain, wire and zip ties will get you started. The tutorial's author spent a scant $13.66 to outfit his bike, a significant savings over the cost of your average ER visit. For more season-appropriate biking tips, check out How to Bike in Winter and Keep Yourself Warm When Biking.
Dear Lifehacker, I always thought it was ridiculous and dangerous that Windows puts wallpapers mixed in with essential system files in the Windows folder. Is there a way or program to point the Display Properties -> Desktop tab to another folder? It would be nice if it then allowed me to organize it with sub-folders. Sincerely, Organized Papers
Dear Organized Papers,
Agreed. Now that the majority of people have expanded their wallpaper repertoire beyond the basic wallpapers included in the default Windows install, it would be a handy feature to be able to shift the default wallpaper directory. Never fear though, your new directory is a mere registry edit away! Courtesy of Windows customization blog Tweaking with Vishal, here is the simple edit you need to free your wallpapers from the /Windows/ directory:
2. In right-side pane, you'll see a string value "WallPaperDir". Its default value will be:
%SystemRoot%\Web\Wallpaper
You have to change it to your desired wallpaper directory path. Suppose your wallpapers are stored in E:\Wallpapers directory, then set the value to E:\Wallpapers.
Choose your new directory and you're all set! When you pull up the wallpaper menu again, it will display all the wallpapers in the new folder. It won't show the wallpaper in the subfolders like you requested, but hitting the Browse button starts you in the root wallpaper directory with all the subfolders right there. If you'd like to spend less time fiddling with Windows and more time enjoying your wallpaper collection, you should check out some of the robust wallpaper management programs we've reviewed like John's Background Switcher or Wallpapers from MSN. Happy customizing!
The current economic situation in the United States has made retailers extra nervous about the holiday shopping season. Many retailers are already offering deep discounts to pull in shoppers and Black Friday sales themselves are looking promising. Further, retailers are using the turnout as a barometer for the whole season.
"While Black Friday sales and promotions have been tremendously successful for the last few years, the day itself takes on a bit more importance when consumers are struggling," said Ellen Davis, spokeswoman for the National Retail Federation. "In a down economy, people are willing to get up at 3 a.m. and sit in a line outside a store."
With a mountain of potential great deals are you planning on hitting the cold streets to score some Black Friday deals or keeping a tight hand on your pocketbook? Cast your vote below, and make sure to share any deal hunting tips you have in the comments below. Photo by jocke66.
Upon the realization that even scrapbook aficionados had a magazine of their own, someone set out to gather together productivity-centric tips, tricks, and interviews to balance the publication universe. Productive! magazine gives a strong show right out of the gate with a David Allen interview and great tips from organizational gurus like Leo Babauta of the Zen to Done blog. If you're looking for a little extra productivity reading for a lazy Sunday evening, check out the free digital edition.
Windows only: If you're a fan of the music service Pandora and sporting the Windows Vista Sidebar (or a ported Vista Sidebar on Windows XP) a Pandora sidebar gadget is now available to bring your stations to the desktop. When docked into the sidebar, it displays the current song and the thumbs up and down option. When undocked users see the entire Pandora interface and are able to edit stations. Pandora Sidebar Gadget is freeware, Windows only.
The holiday season is already underway with the peak shipping days of the year right around the corner. How can you get your holiday packages to distant friends and family without breaking the bank? At financial blog Blueprint for Financial Prosperity they've put together a thorough—although admittedly United States Postal Service oriented— list of ways to save money and time when shipping.
Understand the different shipping products. Priority Mail is not guaranteed to be delivered in 2-3 days, it's simply First Class mail for packages greater than a pound! Media Mail is a shipping class that's very cheap but available only if you're shipping books or other media (they say they will check, but they never have). That same 2 lb. package from NY to CA costs only $2.58 by Media Mail but will take 7 days.
If, like myself, you're not a USPS guru the list is full of insights into shipping cheaply. If you've already used his tips on scoring cheap packing materials and you're ready to get that package out the door for as cheap as possible check out ShipGooder and Shiptool, shipping comparison engines. Photo by Willie Lunchmeat.
If you're in a pinch for a last-minute gift this holiday season, chocolate covered strawberries are a ridiculous simple and well received gesture. At the DIY blog Instructables there is a step by step guide on making them with an extra section on really pulling out the stops for presentation points: it's all about the white chocolate drizzles! The accolades a well presented platter or box of chocolate covered strawberries receives is greatly disproportionate to the actual effort involved in crafting them. Barring those gift recipients with food allergies, it's tough to go wrong. Check out last minute gift ideas and hack-friendly last-minute gifts on the cheap for more ideas.
Antique photographs have a certain warmth to them imparted by the development process that can't be replicated by simply dumping the color data from a photograph. At wiikiHow there is a tutorial on using GIMP, a free Photoshop alternative, to take the rich tones from an old photograph and apply them to a brand new photo. The process works with both black and white and sepia toned photographs, and can easily be adapted from the given steps to work with Photoshop too. The above image is a blend of the before and after sample photo from the tutorial. If you don't have any antique photos handy, the tutorial covers where to find public domain images to lift tone samples from. If you're looking to take the opposite route and inject color into a black and white photography check out how to color black and white photos and isolate colors for emphasis.
It's crazy to think that an operating system can fit every user's needs out of the box, even if we are just talking about looks. Luckily, if you're not keen on the cookie-cutter appearance of your OS, we've covered a handful of great tools for tweaking every last pixel of your desktop so it looks and acts just how you want. Earlier this week we asked you to share your favorite desktop customization tools, and now we're back with the five most popular answers. Keep reading for a closer look at the best of the best, then cast your vote for the desktop customization tool you count on to transform your desktop in your image.
Samurize
Samurize is a free system monitor and "desktop enhancement engine" for Windows. With Samurize, you can incorporate text files on your desktop and create custom desktop configurations and HUDs containing virtually any piece of information you'd like to see on your desktop. Samurize configurations can be as simple or as complex as you want, and though it has a little bit of a learning curve, a little time with Samurize can go a long way toward a killer desktop—like the Lightning at Sunset desktop.
RocketDock
RocketDock brings a Mac OS X Dock-style application launcher to Windows for free. With RocketDock, you can minimize apps to your dock to thumbnails, tweak any of your icons, view real-time window previews from the dock (in Vista), and quickly launch any app. Like many of the other apps mentioned here, RocketDock doesn't exactly blow you away out of the box, but the app is fully customizable, so you can make it look however you want. For example, check out theseRocketDockdesktops to see just how good (and different) RocketDock can look. RocketDock also made our list of five best application launchers.
Rainmeter
Rainmeter is another free system monitor and desktop enhancement tool for creating a fully customized desktop HUD on Windows. Like Samurize, you're only limited by your imagination with Rainmeter. The default Rainmeter skins may seem underwhelming, but with a little elbow grease and a creativity, Rainmeter is capable of incredible customizations—like the Enigma desktop we featured last week.
Emerge Desktop
Emerge Desktop is a free Windows shell replacement that swaps out the default Windows taskbar, start-menu, and right-click menu with its own alternatives. As we said when we first covered it, Emerge creates a clean, minimalist desktop that's great on its own or a perfect starting point for more customizations. For example, many of you who voted for Emerge touted it as the ideal companion for either Rainmeter or Samurize. For more, see how you can use Emerge Desktop to spice up your desktop.
AutoHotkey
AutoHotkey is an open-source scripting language for Windows. While the language itself is capable of a lot, customization lovers enjoy AutoHotkey's ability to easily transform window transparency, add keyboard shortcuts to anything, and more. There's a bit of a learning curve to tackle if you want to make your own AHK scripts, but it's a great starter language if you want to try your hand at a little coding. If you'd like a quick look at a few ways you might use AHK for desktop customization, be sure to check out the Enigma desktop tutorial and download.
Now that you've seen the best, it's time to vote for your favorite desktop customization tool.
This week's honorable mentions go to Linux customization tool Conky, Windows shell replacement LiteStep, and 3D Linux window manager Compiz.
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Putting chains on your tires is illegal just about everywhere but rural American because of the damage snow chains can do to paved roads. No such restriction exists for bicycles, nor will you likely find a bike with enough weight to do any damage with chains on the tires! If you're braving a commute or keeping up a fitness routine via bicycle this winter, there is an excellent tutorial at cycling enthusiast blog Mountain Bike Riders to help you chain your tires and keep going strong through the winter. A quick trip to your workshop bins or the local hardware store for braided chain, wire and zip ties will get you started. The tutorial's author spent a scant $13.66 to outfit his bike, a significant savings over the cost of your average ER visit. For more season-appropriate biking tips, check out 
Dear Lifehacker,
The current economic situation in the United States has made retailers extra nervous about the holiday shopping season. Many retailers are already offering deep discounts to pull in shoppers and Black Friday sales themselves are looking promising. Further, retailers are using the turnout as a barometer for the whole season.
Upon the realization that even scrapbook aficionados had a magazine of their own, someone set out to gather together productivity-centric tips, tricks, and interviews to balance the publication universe. Productive! magazine gives a strong show right out of the gate with a David Allen interview and great tips from organizational gurus like Leo Babauta of the Zen to Done blog. If you're looking for a little extra productivity reading for a lazy Sunday evening, check out the free digital edition. 
Windows only: If you're a fan of the music service Pandora and sporting the Windows Vista Sidebar (or a 
The holiday season is already underway with the peak shipping days of the year right around the corner. How can you get your holiday packages to distant friends and family without breaking the bank? At financial blog Blueprint for Financial Prosperity they've put together a thorough—although admittedly United States Postal Service oriented— list of ways to save money and time when shipping.
If you're in a pinch for a last-minute gift this holiday season, chocolate covered strawberries are a ridiculous simple and well received gesture. At the DIY blog Instructables there is a step by step guide on making them with an extra section on really pulling out the stops for presentation points: it's all about the white chocolate drizzles! The accolades a well presented platter or box of chocolate covered strawberries receives is greatly disproportionate to the actual effort involved in crafting them. Barring those gift recipients with food allergies, it's tough to go wrong. Check out 
It's crazy to think that an operating system can fit every user's needs out of the box, even if we are just talking about looks. Luckily, if you're not keen on the cookie-cutter appearance of your OS, we've covered a handful of great tools for tweaking every last pixel of your desktop so it looks and acts just how you want. Earlier this week we asked you to 
