Bulk Rename Utility Blasts Through Your File Naming Tasks (Windows) "If you take a few minutes to familiarize yourself with the 747-dashboard of an interface that graces Bulk Rename Utility and you'll be rewarded with an enormously powerful tool."
Gladinet Mounts Web Storage Apps as Virtual Drives (Windows) "Free utility Gladinet Cloud Desktop removes the web interfaces from Google Docs, Picasa Web Albums, Windows Live SkyDrive and Amazon S3 Storage, mounting them instead as folders you can add, remove, or open documents from."
Gmail Google Desktop Gadget Now Available (Windows) "If you want access to your Gmail on your desktop (literally) without running a full-blown email client, now you can download the Gmail Google Desktop gadget."
FluidTunes Controls iTunes by Your Waving Hand (Mac) "Using your Mac's iSight camera to detect the hand gestures you make in front of it, free utility FluidTunes controls your iTunes library playback based on those motions."
Radio Beta is a web-based radio station aggregator with a host of features. Rather than simply serving as a search engine a basic playlist-builder, Radio Beta allows you to search radio stations by both region and genre, save your favorite stations, and as an extreme convenience play all the radio stations you find with an embedded player right on the Radio Beta website. If you'd like to visit the website of the station you're listening, every listing includes the country, language, genre, city, the broadcast frequency and a link back to the source of the audio stream.
Stuff Alert is a notification service for eBay keywords. Sign up for a free account, tell Stuff Alert what you're looking for, and it will continually search eBay to find the keywords you have specified. When a match is found, an email is sent to the address you specify. While Stuff Alert doesn't currently have direct support for SMS, you can easily edit your email address after signing up to the email address of your mobile phone to enable mobile notification. You'll never miss out on that limited release break dancing Pikachu again! For other handy eBay tools check out how to create custom RSS feed of eBay search terms and how to find and track eBay deals with GetItNext.
SitOrSquat is a web based index of public bathrooms. In addition to providing the basic map-mashup and rating system that other services like Diaroogle provide, Sit or Squat users can provide and browse photographs of the restrooms in question. The real selling point is the applications available for iPhones and Blackberries, enabling GPS based directions to the nearest bathroom. Currently the service is available in several US and UK metropolitan areas such as New York, Chicago, Seattle and London respectively. For more bathroom search engines, check out The Bathroom Diaries and MizPee.
Reinhard Engels over at the self improvement blog Everyday Systems, found that his weekends were astoundingly unproductive. Despite having a job that had him stuck in front of a desk every day all week, he would gravitate towards his computer on the weekends and wile away the hours.
I don't watch much TV. I don't play video games. But I fritter away endless hours in front of the computer. I tried a bunch of restrictions on home computer use. It was much harder to stick with them than I'd thought. Here's what did stick: thou shalt not touch the computer on weekends between breakfast and dinner.
If had has any ideas that related to the computer like designs for his website, emails he needs to send, etc. he simply writes them down on a piece of paper and sets it aside until he's devoted his daily block of time to analog pursuits. While it sounds like pure heresy to a die hard nerdling like myself, on the days when I devote my computer to resource hogging tasks and leave it to do it's thing I'm amazed at how much I get done without the digital distractions. For more distraction management ideas, check out Reduce Screen Time with 52 Nights Unplugged and Unplug to Avoid Online Distractions. Photo by deanj.
When trying to make new friends in a new city, Brain over at Lifehack.org has a few suggestions to get your social life on track. Among them: if you're looking for a way to foster follow up contact after meeting people for the first time, snapping photographs at gatherings is a great way to keep in touch with the new people you meet. Despite the proliferation of camera phones and cheap digital cameras many people still aren't avid shutterbugs, but most people love pictures. Make yourself some social calling cards with the address of your favorite photo sharing site on them or ask the person for their email to send the pictures out and you've got an instant in for future contact. For other tips on life in a new city, check out how to get the most out of your new town.Photo by Mourner.
We've already shown you how make a single layer stencil using Photoshop. After following the stencil tutorial at DIYer blog Instructables you'll take your stencil making to a whole new level. By using the cutout filter in Photoshop on each layer of color and/or highlights you want to include you can build a series of templates for your multi-layer stencil masterpiece. Perfect for those times when a simple one color stencil won't cut it. Want to show off your stencil making chops without having to run from the police? Use your new found talent to stencil your own t-shirt.
When friends push friends onto Gmail, it usually involves talking up the seemingly limitless storage space, the fast-moving interface, or its inter-connectedness with other Google applications, like Calendar. Those features are all fine and good, but Gmail does a lot of helpful things that some users never get to dig into. From one short web address, you can video chat Skype-style with contacts, ensure you didn't leave yourself logged in elsewhere, help mom gradually migrate from her old dial-up-era email address, and pluck a single message out of tens of thousands. Let's dig in and take a look at Gmail's less-touted features for power users.
10. Change Gmail's look entirely with themes.
Adam did the yeoman's work of compiling screenshots and thumbnails of Gmail's new Themes, accessible through a Settings tab, and one can see that they're more than just a font switch and background image. Gmail's themes cover a nice range of aesthetic choices, geekiness, cute-overload, elegant color tweaks, and, for those who put a lot of time in on the screen, dark-themed schemes. If you haven't checked them out yet, they're certainly worth a look, if only to give your eyes a rest from all the variants of light blue.
9. Launch video and audio chats, no Skype required.
It's Windows-only at this point, and still requires a little browser plug-in, but it's surprising how little fanfare Gmail's native video chat application has received. It's comparable quality to most software-based solutions, it's got a full-screen mode, and, well, if the person's not all that intriguing, you can minimize them and get back to your email.
8. Back up your email from any system.
Just because Google wants you to put your digital life in the cloud doesn't mean you can't have your own copy of your own messages and attachments. There are lots of ways to get your entire Gmail dump onto your desktop. We're currently into Gmail Backup, which is graphical for Windows and command line for Linux and Mac OS X. You can also grab it with the command-line-based Fetchmail, grab them via POP with Thunderbird, or use the web-based StashMyMail for 99 cents, if you don't mind the third-party-ness of it. To back up another email account using Gmail's generous storage space, you can always BCC: your outgoing messages to a Gmail account to make sure you've always got an online searchable copy of your mail.
7. See all the places where you're signed in, and remotely sign out.
Friends' and significant others' computers, work, public terminals—people sign into Gmail from all kinds of places, and don't always remember to hit that privacy-ensuring "Sign Out" in the upper-right corner. At the very bottom of any Gmail inbox, though, is a text line showing where else the account is open, along with a list of sign-in times and IP addresses and a button that signs you out of everything but the browser you're in right then. No need to worry, then, that your friends' willpower will ever be tested by discovering you're still signed in on their system.
6. Serve as a central, synchronized, smarter contact list.
Used to be that Gmail put everyone you sent five emails to went into your contacts, but they've wised up and created two lists: Your true contacts, and those oft-mailed but not well-known folks into "Suggested" contacts. That makes Google a much nicer, cleaner place to sync your computers and devices from. Mac users can pull Google Contacts into their Address Book with or without an iPhone, Blackberry owners can hook up too, and fans of Thunderbird have got their own tool as well. Oh, and the Google-centric Android platform does it too, of course.
5. Consolidate all your email accounts.
Gmail eliminates the need to ever have to send one of those very late, apologetic "Don't check this email often" replies from your ancient accounts. Gina's explained how straightforward it is to consolidate multiple email addresses into Gmail, with full importing of messages from any POP or IMAP-compliant account (almost all of them are) and the ability to keep sending emails from your old address, eliminating the need for mass pleas to update address books.
4. Help friends find their own Gmail messages or bookmark your own.
"You honestly do not have my email explaining how to take care of my dogs and disable the alarm system? Okay, no, it's no big thing, Steve. Hit this link, it should take you to the right message: http://mail.google.com/mail/#search/buster+alarm+code+Pedigree" That kind of universal search link is pretty helpful, but the addresses of any email you open in Gmail are also permalinks for the account owner, meaning you can create lists of emails you need to get back to, bookmark an important thread in your browser favorites, and save them for any other purpose or list.
3. Keep your Gmail account(s) on your desktop.
More than one of the Lifehacker editors had gotten used to keeping Gmail and Lifehacker's Google Apps email open in two browser tabs, clicking over when a new message hit the title bar. With the just-launched Google Desktop Gadget, though, all the basic actions of email—read, star, label, delete, respond—can fit into a corner of your desktop. If you're good with Gmail's keyboard shortcuts, the gadget works with those, too, and can be opened in multiple instances for different accounts. Pretty neat stuff, but if it's not worth installing the whole Google Desktop suite for, check out the other ways our readers get their Gmail notifications.
2. Give you total search power.
It's easy to forget that the company providing Gmail is, by and large, a search specialist, and has given its webmail app some serious search, filter, and organization tools. Don't waste time scrolling through page after page of your mom's email—find that one email she sent a few months back, with the attached JPEG file and mentioning that cat, Mr. Nibbles or Snibbles or whatnot--from:Stacey after:2008/09/01 has:attachment (nibbles OR snibbles). You can start at learning the basic operators, then take Adam's tips on building advanced filters and persistent searches
1. Do much, much more with Gmail Labs experimental features.
It started out as a modest set of tweaks and small Oh Neat items, but Gmail's Labs section has become a powerhouse of email features. From Labs' increasingly-long list of tools, you can set up canned responses for standard replies, stop yourself from forgetting attachments, get your Google Calendar agenda and Remember the Milk tasks, get at all your various attachment types with Quick Links, and many, many more tweaks. Labs isn't particularly hidden away or obscure, but if you haven't taken the time to scroll down the list of options, you're almost certainly missing out on something that makes your webmail home a bit more comfortable.
Those are our picks for ten tricks that Gmail pulls off without a lot of praise, but everyone uses their webmail differently. Let's hear your own hidden (or obvious) Gmail tricks and glad-hands in the comments.
Let's face it. The news is terrible. The economy, it's badness, the sheer scale and depth of it is enough to send anyone into a great depression. I've gotten to the point where I don't dare read the news. My New York Times alerts are the same every day. NYSE craters. Nikkei in midnight free-fall. There's no escape. Forget brokers and mortgage-backed derivatives, give me buddies and beer-backed bourbon. It's in times like these (sad, broke) that I strongly believe in making your own cheer. Back in the bust years I found that spreading goodwill and getting people together was the perfect emollient to era's hard times. I'm talking about throwing a "Rent Party." Photo by JoelWashing.
Simply put, one throws a Rent Party in order to pay the rent. It was a Harlem Renaissance tradition that died along with prohibition (and some say, because of it). Here's an excerpt on Rent Parties from the Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance:
During the 1920s and 1930s (and even into the 1940s), such parties formed the backbone of Harlem nightlife, and became for many working people not only an enjoyable and affordable way to dance and socialize but also an economic necessity. For the reasonable admission price of between ten cents and a dollar, plus the cost of liquor and food, guests could dance, drink, flirt, and gamble, while the hosts collected enough money to pay the landlord for another month.
So if you're having trouble paying rent, go for it.
I can recommend Rent Parties for a few more reasons. Charities are having a terrible time getting donations right now. Nobody's taking tax breaks because everyone's losing money this year in the market. Donations are down umpteen percent at the same time that demand is rising for services that such charities provide. It's a vicious cycle.
A Rent Party would do nicely to bring your friends into a small circle of do-gooders. Call up the charity you normally donate to and ask them if you can get friends together on their behalf. They'd love to come, help you spread the good word and pass the hat around for donations. Every buck counts. To maximize attendance, pitch it as a party first and make sure you talk up the talent. Sell the sizzle.
I can also recommend Rent Parties for your friends who are away from family for the holidays. Last week I got an email from Gary, a Texan who did not go back to Ft. Worth for Thanksgiving. He roasted a turkey and invited everyone he knew to come by. While he didn't take donations for a charity, he's spreading goodwill for those of us too poor or too fed up to go home. I guess you could say he opened his house up a friendly soup kitchen to those of us too concerned about paying the rent.
Last, we all need a shoulder to cry on. As the old adage goes, misery loves company. So if you're recently laid off, pissed off, or just plain grumpy, get on the phone and start calling your friends. There's never been a better time to let loose. While we're revisiting the less-desirable parts of the 30's on the markets, let's revisit the fun parts, too.
Guest contributor Kelly Abbott's weekly post, Ungeek to Live, highlights all the ways you get can stuff done without (gasp!) a computer.
Need to spend less time on blogs during the holidays? Don't unsubscribe from all our daily posts—switch to our trimmed-down top stories feed to skip the extras and get right to the good stuff. Don't care about Windows-only downloads or the iPhone? Customize our URLs to see only the posts you want. This week's most popular posts include:
Most Popular Top 10's of 2008 "Almost two years later, our weekly listicle, the Lifehacker Top 10, still proves to be one of the most popular posts that publishes here. Since our top 10-making bot is off this weekend, take a gander at 20 of the most popular Top 10's that have published in 2008 so far."
Five Best CD and DVD Burning Tools "The internet has made it easier than ever to share media and data with friends, family, and co-workers, but that doesn't mean burning your own CDs and DVDs is a thing of the past."
Best New and Improved Software of 2008 "Mobile phone operating systems and a reheated web browser war: that's how we'll recall the year 2008 when it comes to software. From brand new to revamped browsers and mobile platforms and apps, 2008's been good to technophiles who like their data in the cloud and accessible wherever they are."
First Look at Opera 10 "Opera 10 is looking to offer stiff competition with the blazing rendering engines in the upcoming Firefox release (Tracemonkey) and Google Chrome (V8) with an update to its rendering engine, Presto."
SkyDrive Upgrade Goes Live with 25GB of Space "Windows Live, intended to be a landing page for social activity and Microsoft's cloud-connected apps, is rolling out a host of redesigns and upgrades today, but none so exciting (to our eyes, anyways) as the anticipated jump of the SkyDrive online storage service to 25GB capacity."
Engima-Inspired Desktop Roundup "Desktop customizer extraordinaire and Lifehacker reader Kaelri showed us how to customize your Windows desktop using a setup he called Enigma (pictured above), and since then the Lifehacker Desktop Show and Tell Flickr Pool has been overflowing with killer Enigma-inspired desktops."
Cut Your Phone and Cable Bills by $100 "PC Magazine columnist Sascha Segan got sick of paying for cable and phone services every month he knew were over-priced and under-utilized."
Featured Desktop: Festive but Productive December Desktop "Reader reb wanted something festive to dress up her Windows desktop this December, so she used a combination of visual tweaks and strategic customizations to add both holiday cheer and productivity tools to it."
We understand that in order to really burn fat and calories you need to sufficiently raise heart rate, which can take around 20-30 minutes alone, but for those days you don't have an hour to spend exercising, Yahoo Health offers a workout plan that—they claim—gives you an hours worth of calorie burning in roughly 20 minutes. The key, according to the article, is small bursts of high-intensity exercises. While you should always be skeptical of too-good-to-be-true workout plans, the suggestions in the article still may be worth a try this holiday season, when you're available time for exercise is inversely proportional to the availability of sweets. Photo by Celso Flores.
Windows only: Despite what its name would imply, free application KLS Mail Backup backs up popular Windows web browsers and address book apps in addition to email applications—including Mozilla Firefox, Thunderbird, and Seamonkey; Windows Live Mail, Contacts, and Messenger; along with Windows Mail, Windows Contacts, and Internet Explorer. Backups are automatically zipped, can be stored locally or on a networked hard drive, and are kept under version control. Apart from the backing up, the application also restores any of your archived backups. According to the Download Squad post, it can also run off a portable device, so you can make and restore backups from your thumb drive. In short, if you're looking for a solid backup solution for your browser, email, or contacts app, KLS might be up your alley. KLS Mail Backup is free for personal use, Windows only.
The New York Times pats Amazon on the back for linking to rivals like eToys within their Toy storefront. It's not a bad start, but you can do even better by installing browser plug-ins like previously mentioned PriceAdvance or BookBurro, which offer price comparisons to competitors (or in the case of BookBurro, links to your local library) on product pages. Every penny counts for the online power shopper this financially grim holiday season.
By default Mac OS X's Finder displays only the current folder name in its title bar, but if you'd like a little more detail, The Unofficial Apple Weblog details how to enable path view in Finder to display the full folder path in the title. All it takes is a couple of seconds and a quick Terminal command.
Windows/Linux only: Firefox extension OpenXML Viewer opens Microsoft Word 2007 DOCX files directly in your Firefox browser. Granted, Gmail and Google just started converting DOCX files to HTML for easy viewing, but if you don't use Gmail or you stumble onto a lot of DOCX files linked elsewhere, this extension is a winner if all you want is a quick way to view a DOCX file. OpenXML Viewer is a free download, Windows and Linux with Firefox only. Be sure to check the README for instructions on how to enable OpenXML once it's installed.
Thanks to this week's sponsors: Chevy Fuel Solutions, Cingular, Energizer, Gyration Air Mouse, HP MediaSmart Server, ING Direct, Livescribe, MSN, The New York Times Magazine, New Egg, Nokia E71, Pernod, Rovio, Samsung, Zune. Click here to advertise on Lifehacker.
You survived Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and layoffs that continue to bring holiday cheer this past week—so now's your chance to rant, rave, question, and philosophize in the comments alongside your fellow readers. Post your tech dilemmas, favorite new tools, screenshots, reader surveys, and questions about the meaning of life in this open thread, where anything (even closely related to software and productivity) goes. Don't forget to reply to a specific comment by hitting the arrow at the bottom right hand side of it. Now get to chatting, and chin up! It's Friday, people. Photo by aturkus.
In the midst of the financiapocalypse, layoffs are an inevitability. Just this morning, in fact, a close friend lost her job to the insatiable beast that is our current financial meltdown—leaving her with all kinds of questions about what she should do next. Since we're all likely to be touched in some way or another by the far-reaching and widespread layoffs, we're wondering: Even if you've been doing your best to recession-proof your career, what steps should you take toward recovery if worst comes to worst and you've been laid off? Let's hear your strategies—whether you've been there before or you just like to be prepared—in the comments. Photo by conorwithonen.
YouTube switched to widescreen format a week and a half back, and now the popular video sharing site appears officially to be streaming videos in HD. From the look of things, most videos that were uploaded in HD should now have a watch in HD link to the bottom right of the video for high quality HD viewing. The site has offered a watch in high quality option for a while now, but the new HD option looks like they're serious about moving into high definition for their streaming video. Here's a before and after version look like:
Non-HD Version
HD Version
It's tough to say if what we're looking at is actually true HD (Chen from Gizmodo thinks not), and I'm not sure if the content is considerably different than what the old high quality links were offering, but it's still a good sign for users. Want to try more options? A quick search for HD on YouTube will net a lot of HD-quality uploads.
Now that you've seen all the big names and launches of 2008, it's time to give a nod to the apps that didn't get the attention they should have this past year. If you're sick of hearing about Firefox and the iPhone and Gmail and Chrome, you're in the right place. Let's take a look at the least hyped software that launched or saw great improvements in 2008, and give 'em the love they deserve. Photo by ckroberts61.
Songbird
The open-source, cross-platform music player Songbird was supposed to do for your tunes what Firefox did for your web browsing: free you from the claws of iTunes and offer extensibility and general awesomeness. Back in November, the first release candidate of Songbird didn't quite deliver, but the final 1.0 release this week absolutely did, now that the bird plays iTunes Store purchases and ironed out its major wrinkles. Songbird was the application most readers cried foul about for being excluded on our first list of best apps in 2008.
Dropbox
Cross-platform, file-syncing-via-the-cloud web service and application Dropboxdebuted this year, offering 2GB of free storage for non-paying users. If that's not enough space for all your documents, Dropbox at least is a fabulous tool for syncing your passwords across all your computers.
Ubiquity
The most impressive prototype that came out of Mozilla Labs this year, the Ubiquity Firefox extension is an ambitious attempt at offering smart and extensible keyboard access to data between applications, so you can, for example, include a Google map to an address inside a new Gmail message without ever switching tabs. Users have complained that the still-fetal Ubiquity prototype slows down Firefox, but the Quicksilver-like concept behind Ubiquity is way impressive. Hopefully we'll see a more fleshed-out and speedy implementation in the coming year.
Picasa 3
Our favorite free software for managing your photo library on your desktop, Picasa, got an upgrade to version 3 this year that added several new features and reduced the need for a separate photo editing tool even more. Picasa's the software you want to install on your parents' computer over the holidays so they can make a photo-mosaic of the grandkids.
Note-taking tool Evernote is one of the best ways for a student or human with an overactive frontal lobe to capture ideas and randomata on any platform—from computer to iPhone to back of the napkin—wherever you are. See more on how to expand your brain with Evernote.
Fedora
Always living in the shadow of the more popular Ubuntu distro must be hard for Fedora, yet the user-friendly Linux package soldiered on this year with two new releases (Fedora 9 and this week, Fedora 10). Fedora came in a distant fourth in our battle of the Linux distros, but it's user-friendly live USB creator and attractive desktop makes it a worthy contender for the Windows user interested in trying out a flavor of Linux.
OpenOffice.org 3
Often poo-pooed for its slowness and bloat, free, open-source office suite OpenOffice.org's 3.0 release this year did impress. While it's not Microsoft Office 2007, it IS the go-to solution for poor students and starving artists who just need to edit that Word document.
What does your list of most underhyped apps in 2008 look like? Discuss in the comments. (Special thanks to all the readers whose "other" responses to this poll helped inform this list.)
Google is giving away a free (plus the cost of a stamp) Gmail-related sticker kit, including a page of stickers for your keyboard to train your fingers with the popular email client's handy keyboard shortcuts. According to the blog, the adhesive from the shortcut stickers "is a bit more removable than standard stickiness, so you can take them off once you've trained your fingers." To get some of your own, just send a self-addressed stamped envelope (old-school, right?) to:
Send me some Gmail stickers already P.O. Box 391420 Mountain View, CA 94039-1420
If you're not already using Gmail's keyboard shortcuts, you can enable them in your account by navigating to Settings and selecting the Keyboard shortcuts on radio button. In no time you'll be well on your way to becoming a Gmail master.
Windows only: Zscreen is one of a long line of screenshot tools we've checked out at Lifehacker HQ, but it's got a few unique features that set it apart. First off, it's an open-source project, helmed up mainly by one programmer. More important to most, however, is its flexibility in working with other screenshot and image tools, both through its configurable hot keys (working Shift, Alt, and Ctrl keys to good effect) and being able to send screenshots to an FTP server, the clipboard, a custom-named file, or any other image program you've got. If you're pushing your screens to a file, you can set its JPEG capabilities to scale—after a pic is 100K, for example, you tell ZScreen to scale its quality down to 80 percent. ZScreen lacks the features that blog publishers might want baked-in, like annotation and highlighting, but for straight-up grab-and-edit, it's hard to beat. ZScreen is a free download for Windows systems only.
The Dealhack site has compiled a seriously comprehensive list of shipping deadlines that will get your purchases to anywhere in the U.S. guaranteed by Dec. 24. The chart covers standard, expedited, and king's-ransom-level shipping, as well as gift card and e-certficate options. [via]
Ready to buy a great holiday gift, but not sure if it'll drop just a bit more before the season is out? ShoppingNotes.com is a simple, useful price watch tool that isn't confined to a single site. Give it the URL (or Google search and choose from its page) of any product page at an online merchant, hand over your email address, and verify the alert over there. If you just want emails whenever the price drops at all, that's all you have to do. Signing in or editing your alerts, however, lets you get specific on how much of a discount should trigger an alert, and change the number of days to watch (the default is 30). There are, of course, many other price-watch services, but ShoppingNotes is notably clutter-free, and not too annoying with the ads. ShoppingNotes.com is a free service, requires an account to manage and edit multiple alerts.
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Windows/Linux only: Firefox extension OpenXML Viewer opens Microsoft Word 2007 DOCX files directly in your Firefox browser. Granted, Gmail and Google 
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