Stanza Turns Your iPhone into a Kindle [Featured IPhone Download]
iPhone/iPod touch only: If recession budgeting meant choosing an iPhone/iPod touch over a Kindle when the dust cleared this holiday season, you're in luck: Stanza is a free and fantastic ebook reader for your iPhone.
The free application comes pre-loaded with several sources for downloading free or public domain books (including the entire Project Gutenberg library), so you can easily download books like The Art of War, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, or Walden in just a few seconds without spending a dime.
However, if you want to get new books, Stanza also comes with a bookstore with which you can purchase popular new titles as well. Prices range from $8 to $15 based on the books I browsed. The reader itself is fully customizable, so if you don't like the standard black text on white background look, you can just as easily pick something that suits you. Stanza is a free download for the iPhone or iPod touch.
If you can't imagine reading from your iPhone or iPod touch in public, consider turning your iPhone into a Moleskine book so it still appears to onlookers like you're reading dead-tree style.
Popular Medical Myths Put to Rest [Mythbusting]
With the recession causing enough stress for all of us, the British Medical Journal decides to bust several common medical myths—for example, reading in dim light won't ruin your eyesight, so go nuts.
Among the myths busted, BMJ notes that:
- Sugar does not cause hyperactivity in children.
- You don't lose excess body heat from your head. (You can leave your hat at home if you don't want to muss your hair!)
- Eating at night does not make you fat. (Though the obvious rules still apply—you can't eat more calories than you burn.)
- Unfortunately, there is no scientific evidence that you can cure a hangover.
- Shaving does not cause hair to grow back faster, darker, or coarser.
- Reading in dim light will not destroy your eyesight.
- You don't need to drink eight glasses of water a day, so save yourself the bloat.
Any old wives' tales you'd like to add to the list? Let's hear it in the comments. Photo by bald_eagle89.
VerbaLearn Boosts Your Vocab [Learning]
Whether you're gearing up to study for the SAT, ACT, GRE, or you just want to bolster your vocabulary, web site VerbaLearn is an excellent free resource for polishing your lexicon.
The demo video walks through the VerbaLearn feature set in detail, which includes customized study lists, custom MP3s of words on your list, and much more. In fact, VerbaLearn even offers customized podcast feeds that'll download your study list directly to your podcast app of choice (like iTunes, for example) so you can listen to and study your words offline and sync them to your MP3 player. VerbaLearn's impressive and free feature set is a definite winner for anyone looking to improve her vocabulary.
DIY IKEA Digital Photo Frame [DIY]
Digital photo frames are nice, but they're not always terribly attractive. DIY weblog ikea hacker details how to spice up your new digital photo frame with an inexpensive but good-looking picture frame from IKEA.
The simple mod doesn't take much doing, but the nice black frame goes a long way toward classing up a cheap digital frame. The author used the IKEA frames to improve digital picture frames he was giving out as Christmas gifts, but if you received a digital frame over the holidays, it's a nice way to make it work with your decor.
Bail Out of Your Cellphone Contract by Trading It [Cellphones]
Buried in the fine print of many cellphone contracts is a bit about how you can transfer your plan to someone else—and you can find that someone online.
The NY Times reports on Celltradeusa.com and Cellswapper.com, two web services who match up people who want out of their contracts with folks who want in.
Why exactly would you want someone else's cellphone contract? Simple: you can get fairly new devices and accessories, often free, without having to swallow a two-year commitment or pay an activation fee of $35. This is especially useful to those who are waiting for a new device to hit the market but do not want to spring for a new phone in the meantime.
The two sites charge a service fee, but one that's a lot less than the penalty for ending your contract prematurely. Anyone use either swap site to get out or into a cellphone contract? Let us know in the comments.
Turn on Half-Star Ratings in iTunes [ITunes]
All-things-Apple weblog TUAW points out a simple Terminal trick to enable half-star ratings in iTunes for finer grained control over your iTunes rating system. The same functionality is available with the simple tick of a checkbox in previously mentioned OS X tweaker Secrets, but if you don't want to install another preference pane for this simple hack, this Terminal tweak will do the job:
defaults write com.apple.iTunes allow-half-stars -bool TRUE
I did a little searching without any clear results, so if anyone knows how to enable half-stars on the Windows side of the fence, let's hear it in the comments.
The "Don't Break Your Resolutions Just Yet!" Open Thread [Open Thread]
It's January 2nd, and you're munching on carrot sticks longing for that box of leftover holiday candy. Come on inside and we'll talk.
This is our weekly open comment thread, where you get to talk productivity with unbridled abandon. Ask your tech questions, post your New Year's musings, and help out your fellow reader by clicking on the arrow on the bottom right hand side of their comment to reply to it. Happy January 2nd! Photo by JoshBerglund19.
Controlling Your Attention is the New Work Ethic [Attention]
Tech writer Mike Elgan brilliantly argues that while our parents taught us hard work and long hours will lead to success, in the internet age the ability to control what you pay attention to is the key.
A person who works six hours a day but with total focus has an enormous advantage over a 12-hour-per-day workaholic who's "multi-tasking" all day, answering every phone call, constantly checking Facebook and Twitter, and indulging every interruption. It's time we upgraded our work ethic for the age we're living in, not our grandparents' age. Hard work is still a virtue, but now takes a distant second place to the new determinant of success or failure in the age of Internet distractions: Control of attention. Hard work is dead. Are you paying attention?
His points about the merging of work and play onto our computers—which we are on all day, which can make play look like work—are well-outlined and spot-on. Read this whole article; it's a great kick in the pants for getting focused in the New Year.
Free Video Converter Edits and Converts Your Video Files [Featured Windows Download]
Windows only: We've already highlighted the best free video conversion tools, but if you want to both edit and convert a video, those apps aren't up to it. That's where Free Video Converter comes in.
Free Video Converter lets you choose sections of any video and join or split clips so that once you're ready to export or convert the video, you get final say on what you see.
Free Video Converter supports most popular file formats, offers simple, one-click settings for converting videos for your iPod, iPhone, HDTV, or YouTube, and it does it all with a friendly, easy-to-use interface.
If all you need is a strong video converter, you've already got plenty of excellent options, but if you also need to edit your video, Free Video Converter is a great little tool. Free Video Converter is a free download, Windows only.
Bookmarklet Add-on Stand-ins for Google Chrome [Bookmarklets]
The ReadWriteWeb blog bemoans the lack of browser extension support in Google Chrome (so far), and offers a list of handy bookmarklets that can tide you over for now.
From Gmail This, to Dictionary, to Delicious 'marklets, this collection looks a lot like our top 10 useful bookmarklets. Of course, bookmarklets don't take up the memory or require installation like add-ons do, so these are worth dragging to your Firefox toolbar as well.
Hidden "Bells and Whistles" in Google's iPhone App Revealed [Easter Egg]
iPhone 2.0 only: My most-used app on the iPhone, Google Mobile, has a hidden settings panel called "Bells and Whistles" that lets you customize the colors and sounds. To reveal the new pane, go into Google Mobile's Settings area, scroll to the bottom of the page, and swipe up several times until the "Bells and Whistles" entry appears. Then tap it to set the app's theme color, sounds (chicken or monkey), and turn on a live waveform for voice search. Neat!
VLoud Boosts Your Audio Volume [Audio]
If you need to increase the volume of an MP3 or WAV file and you're either away from your regular suite of audio-tweaking software or don't have one to begin with, webapp Vloud can help.
The web site is incredibly simple, with a single page and a very straightforward function. Upload an MP3 or WAV file, up to 10MB in size, and then select how much you'd like to increase the volume. There is no numerical scale, which might strike some users as entirely unscientific but the "light, loud, louder and loudest" designations get the job done. Selecting loudest will return an MP3 with a significant increase in the base sound level. If you need to adjust the volume on a large number of audio files, check out the leveling section of our guide to whipping your MP3 collection into shape.
Free Mac Screensavers [Screensavers]
Macworld's Dan Frakes shows off his favorite screensavers for Mac OS X in this video clip and many (but not all) are free, including AlphaBabySaver, Big Time Screen Saver, Econ, and Euphoria.
Hit the Macworld site to get the full list of recommended 'savers. Personally I'm a huge fan of the built-in Word of the Day 'saver on my Mac. Do you use screensavers any more? Which is your favorite? Let us know in the comments.
How to Measure Your Body Fat at Home [New Years Resolutions]
You're out to lose a few pounds in the New Year, so you braved the scale to record your starting weight—but what about your body fat percentage?
The Health Central site offers an online calculator that lets you calculate your body fat percentage at home. All you need is your current weight and a cloth tape measure. You enter your age, weight, gender, and a few measurements (for women hips, thighs, and wrist) and you get back your body fat percentage along with where you stand amongst most Americans. If you're like me this home test will be just as sobering an experience as just getting on the scale, but it's another way to record the "before" numbers you can compare your progress to as you shed pounds and inches.
Yellowsn0w Unlocks the iPhone 3G (for Some) [IPhone]
iPhone 3G only: The iPhone Dev Team responsible for jailbreaking tools like QuickPwn and PwnageTool release the unappetizingly-titled Yellowsn0w, unlocking software that makes using a different carrier on your iPhone possible. In theory.
Gizmodo reports that the unlock didn't work on their handset, as well as a significant percentage of other users (though it did for many, too). To try it out, take a deep breath, jailbreak the phone, and install yellowsn0w via the Cydia or Installer app.
Did you give the unlocker a try? How did it go for you? Post up your experience in the comments.
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