PropertyShark is an astoundingly detailed real estate search engine. By aggregating public records, it provides an in-depth look at individual homes, and the real deal on your potential new neighborhood.
Enter an address into one of the markets currently covered by PropertyShark—it’s unfortunately a little coast-centric at the moment, without much middle-of-the-country coverage. If PropertyShark can access the direct records of the property it will do so; if not, you get a summary of the surrounding area using a nearest-neighbor system. You can review a dizzying amount of information, like the current owners, most recent sale, sales history, assessments, and taxes. There are multiple maps that show how the building you searched for stacks up against the surrounding area, how tall surrounding buildings are, how frequently buildings have been sold, and much more. You can also review charts of the neighborhood with all kinds of breakdowns, such as percentage of households with families and age distributions.
PropertyShark is a handy tool for getting a feel for the neighborhood before investing the time and footwork into actually visiting it. It’s a free service, based on public records.
Dozens of fancy point-and-click task managers promise to organize your to-do list, but so often power users find that nothing outdoes that trusty old classic: the todo.txt file.
If you’re a command line lover who skips checkboxes and drop-downs to dash off notes and tasks in a regular old text file, or you’re intrigued by the idea and wish your todo.txt chops were stronger, read on.
I’ve been a heavy todo.txt user for years. Back in 2006, I started developing a command line interface (CLI) to my todo.txt which lets me add to and check off items without launching a full-on text editor. Three years of daily (or at least weekly) use later, version 2.0 of the script is now available. It offers basic to advanced commands for managing your todo.txt and other text files you might use to capture information, like ideas.txt or maybelater.txt. Let’s take a look.
Who This Is Meant For: If you’re comfortable working in the terminal, changing permissions on a file, and working with Unix-style text commands, then the todo.txt CLI is for you. If you don’t spend a good amount of time at the command line—either in the Terminal on your Mac, or using a Unix command line or emulator on Windows—you’re going to think this whole thing is arcane and confusing. (In that case, we highly recommend getting organized with Remember the Milk. If you want to boost your command line chops on Windows, check out our introduction to Cygwin.)
You’ve already got CLI religion? Good. Let’s get started on some hot todo.txt command line action.
Quick Start Guide:
Download the Todo.txt CLI 2.0 zip file and extract it. You’ll get two files. Place both todo.cfg (the configuration file) and todo.sh in your home directory.
Open the todo.cfg file with your text editor of choice. Set the TODO_DIR variable to the right path for your setup. For example, on my Windows PC, this line reads: TODO_DIR="C:/Documents and Settings/gina/My Documents" On my Mac, this line reads: TODO_DIR="/Users/gina/Documents/todo"
Make the todo.sh file executable by using the command: chmod +x todo.sh
(OPTIONAL) Alias the letter t to todo.sh to save keystrokes while you use it. In your ~/.bash_profile file, add the line: alias t='~/todo.sh'
Now you’re ready to put this script to work!
Basic Usage
Before we start, keep in mind that this CLI isn’t trying to reinvent the text editor. If you want to do big bulk edits to a lot of items in your todo.txt, just open it up in your favorite text editor to do so. But for quick, one-hit access to add items, mark items as complete, or slice and dice your list by project or priority, todo.sh is for you.
For example, to add a line to your todo.txt file, at the command line, type:
$ t add "Pick up milk"
Add a few more items for good measure:
$ t add "Pick up the dry cleaning" $ t add "Clean out the inbox"
Now, to see all the items on your list, use:
$ t ls
The output will look like this:
$ t ls 03 Clean out the inbox 01 Pick up milk 02 Pick up the dry cleaning -- TODO: 3 tasks in C:/Documents and Settings/gina/My Documents/todo.txt.
Now, you can reference each item by its ID—which is actually the line number it lives at in the todo.txt file. For instance, to prioritize task 1 to the highest level—priority A—use this command:
$ t pri 1 A
To mark task 2 as complete, use todo.sh‘s do action:
$ t do 2
Since a video is worth a million words, see this in action in this screencast demonstration of a to-do list you might find for a crew member on Battlestar Galactica. (Go full-screen to see what’s being typed more clearly.)
Once you’ve got the basics of working with your todo.txt down, it’s time to dive into more advanced tricks. Here are a few more things this CLI can do.
Replace or delete a task; append or prepend text to a line. When you want to re-word a task or add a context, project, or additional info to it, use the replace, append, and prepend actions to do so. For example, add “ready at 3PM” to your “Pick up the dry cleaning task” with this command:
$ t append 2 "ready at 3PM"
See all the contexts and projects in your list. If you’re using the + and @ sign format to signify projects and contexts, use the listcon and listproj (or lsc and lsprj for short) commands to see a short list of all your contexts or projects in your todo.txt.
Move items from your todo.txt to another text file. Say you’ve decided that the “Learn how to speak French” task is actually something you’re not quite committed to doing—yet. Use todo.sh‘s mv command to zip that task from todo.txt to another text file in your todo directory. For example, this command will move it into a maybelater.txt file:
$ t move 10 maybelater.txt
List the contents of another text file. Since I got so used to working with todo.txt this way, there’s now support for working with other text files. For example, you can list the contents of your maybelater.txt file using the command:
$ t listfile maybelater.txt
Likewise, you can add a line to another file using:
$ t addto ideas.txt "My bright idea"
You can also search the contents of another text file by adding a keyword after the list command, ala:
The todo.txt CLI has lived over at its official homepage, Todotxt.com, for years now, and although I haven’t posted an update there since 2006, an active mailing list of over 500 members is still going strong. Since this project is open source, happily several other todo.txt projects have sprung up over the years, including Task, which offers even more features than my little script does.
If you’re a programmer who wants to add to this script or a user with questions or ideas about the todo.txt CLI, either post them here or consider joining the mailing list for support. For a full history of this script’s development—including its three-year hiatus—see its full changelog.
Think using a command line interface to a text file is insane or fantastic (or both)? Tried out todo.txt? Tell us what you think in the comments.
Gina Trapani, Lifehacker’s founding editor, is still married to her todo.txt file even after a sordid affair with Remember the Milk. Her weekly feature, Smarterware, appears every Wednesday on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Smarterware tag feed to get new installments in your newsreader.
Money management site Mint now lets you track all your physical assets—your house, your car, Aunt Gerdie’s brooch in the safe—along with your finances, giving you a rough look at your total net worth.
The biggest change to Mint.com, the money management webapp we’ve toured and polled as a reader favorite, is that you can now add any asset you’ve got, in addition to your cash and investment accounts, to the site, helping you determine your overall net worth. That might not be such an appealing statistic to have on hand of late, but it does make Mint a more robust manager of your monetary life.
The one apparent drawback to Mint’s asset handling, at least from what I see, is that there’s no depreciation built into it. Especially for cars, that could lead to a misleading sense of what you have on hand. Perhaps Mint will ask you after a year or so if you have a new value for your assets, but it’d be nice to see that kind of assurance up-front.
Check out Mint’s new features, including the opening of the (advertising-partner-driven) Ways to Save area to non-account-holders, in the gallery below:
What do you think of Mint’s entry into the all-your-assets arena? What other tools do you prefer for keeping tabs on your valuables and possessions? Trade the links and feedback in the comments.
Free service TrapCall reveals caller ID information from blocked calls, unmasking numbers of blocked calls from telemarketers and prank callers with virtually no extra effort on your part.
TrapCall works like this: When you reject or miss a call, your phone forwards those calls to TrapCall’s toll free number (you have to follow TrapCall’s setup guide to do this). Once sent to TrapCall, the service works its magic on the missed call and then re-routes the call back to you, this time with the caller ID unblocked. If you reject the call a second time, it’ll go straight to your normal voicemail. On the caller’s end, all they hear during this whole process is ringing.
TrapCall offers three tiers of service. The free version does caller ID unmasking and lets you set up unwanted caller blacklists. The other two pay versions offer more features, including voicemail transcription, caller ID names, support, incoming call recording, and more. You’ll need to check with your carrier to see that it supports TrapCall (and also to verify whether or not the service will cost you anything from their end—as call forwarding sometimes does).
The unmasking of blocked calls is great for people frustrated with telemarketers and prank callers, but there is a troublesome side to this service. Namely, as Wired discusses, victims of domestic violence count on caller ID blocking as a form of protection. It’s a serious outside case, to be sure, but for general use, TrapCall does what it says, and it does it well.
Windows/Linux: Elisa Media Center doesn’t go in for swooshing sound effects or social networking. This open-source media center puts your music, pictures, and videos on your screen, period. See it live in screenshots below.
We’ve given Elisa a shout-out before, in our guide to operating your computer with Wii controllers, because it works surprisingly well. And it’s gotten a shout-out or two before. But we’re overdue for a look at how Elisa simply puts your non-protected videos, music, and pictures onto your computer or TV screen.
Click on the thumbnails below to get a larger look at how Elisa looks on your screen, along with captioned details on Elisa’s features:
Elisa is a free download for Windows and Linux systems. I couldn’t get it working on my Windows 7 beta, or (seemingly) activate the plugins in Ubuntu 8.10, but Windows XP worked just fine out of the box. Drop any tips, favorite plugins, or other Elisa advice in the comments.
Windows only: Sure, almost all the offerings on NBC Direct can be watched at streaming site Hulu. But if you’re an HD fiend and want offline access, NBC Direct’s player might be worth checking out.
NBC Direct is definitely powered by DRM and ad-powered software, so if you’re not cool with that, well, you probably know a few other places to look (like, er, Hulu). But if you dig the idea of subscribing to, and downloading higher-quality videos of your favorite NBC shows, it’s not a bad way of getting them guilt-free.
About NBC’s definition of HD:
Standard Quality videos are available for download at 360p resolution while registered myNBC users will have the option to download High Quality video at 720p resolution.
Installing NBC Direct means downloading a little applet, which then puts an add-on into your Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox browser, and runs a system tray applet to download and watch shows offline. When you’re connected, it seems, you’re also a peer source for other NBC Direct users:
Once the installation starts rolling, you’ll be asked to close down your browser. NBC Direct downloads and plays its shows through your browser, and it plugs in a rights-restricted media handler to do so (pictured at right).
When you launch NBC Direct from a shortcut or by heading to nbc.com/video, you’ll get a pretty easy-to-follow menu of offerings. The full episodes and clips offered tend to follow the Hulu model—usually a few episodes back from the most recently aired episode of current marquee series, and fuller archives of kitsch/nostalgia shows, like Miami Vice. From any video, you can click to download, subscribe to the series (which starts downloads automatically, assuming you haven’t killed the NBC auto-starting tray applet), and switch to bigger views:
Even when you’re “offline” to watch a show, though, you’re getting some ads. The one complaint I’d make about NBC’s video site, versus Hulu, is that they take “fullscreen” to mean something less than literal. Here’s an episode of The Office, in HD, set to “Fullscreen.” There’s actually a bunch more space at the bottom and right-hand side, but I clipped it for Lifehacker page constraints:
If you’re planning to be away from a net connection for a while and want to catch up, NBC Direct’s not a bad option, and it does offer good quality shows for free. It’s free to use, sign-up required.
PropertyShark is an astoundingly detailed real estate search engine. By aggregating public records, it provides an in-depth look at individual homes, and the real deal on your potential new neighborhood.
Dozens of fancy point-and-click task managers promise to organize your to-do list, but so often power users find that nothing outdoes that trusty old classic: the 
If this video clip isn’t clear enough for you, try this 
Money management site Mint now lets you track all your physical assets—your house, your car, Aunt Gerdie’s brooch in the safe—along with your finances, giving you a rough look at your total 
Free service TrapCall reveals caller ID information from blocked calls, unmasking numbers of blocked calls from telemarketers and prank callers with virtually no extra effort on your part.
Windows/Linux: Elisa 
Windows only: Sure, almost all the offerings on NBC Direct can be watched at streaming site Hulu. But if you’re an HD fiend and want offline access, NBC Direct’s player might be worth checking out.
Once the installation starts rolling, you’ll be asked to close down your browser. NBC Direct downloads and plays its shows through your browser, and it plugs in a rights-restricted media handler to do so (pictured at right).
Even when you’re “offline” to watch a show, though, you’re getting some ads. The one complaint I’d make about NBC’s video site, versus Hulu, is that they take “fullscreen” to mean something less than literal. Here’s an episode of The Office, in HD, set to “Fullscreen.” There’s actually a bunch more space at the bottom and right-hand side, but I clipped it for Lifehacker page constraints: