Tag: Lifehacker

Google has just release a new app called Google Sync, a tool that syncs your Google Contacts and Calendar wirelessly to your iPhone, BlackBerry, Symbian, or Windows Mobile phone.

Kamal Meattle used three just three indoor plant species to increase oxygen, filter air, and boost general health at a a New Delhi business park. You can use them, too, in any indoor environment.

Meattle’s presentation at the TED 2009 conference details a large-scale success, using thousands of plants for hundreds of workers. In any living or working space, though, the three plants—Areca palm, Mother-in-law’s Tongue, and a “Money Plant”—can be used to convert carbon dioxide into oxygen, remove organic compounds, and generally filter and freshen the ambient air. A single person looks to need a minimum of 11 total plants, and certain climates with less sunlight could require a bit of hydroponic growing, but Meattle swears by the health, productivity, and atmosphere benefits. Check out the detailed slides from his TED talk:

Got your own plant combinations for better working or living air? Give up your greenery tricks in the comments.

The Consumerist blog lets the Bargaineering blogger step in and talk bank fee strategies—specifically, the three most common little-by-little drains on your cash, and how to avoid them.

Photo by Betsssssy.

The list of culprits is familiar: overdraft charges, minimum balance requirements, and non-network ATM fees. The solutions vary from maintaining an actual paper balance book (shocking!) to finding accounts that can waive ATM fees if you satisfy certain criteria, like direct deposits. But the root of what blogger Jim is suggesting is something we’ve covered before—the power of getting more by just asking.

What’s your own best tactic for fighting bank fees and charges? Which bank has given you the most fair and square deal? Tell us all in the comments.

Over the last few years we’ve had the privilege of releasing exclusive applications, scripts, and extensions that have hopefully boosted your productivity. We’ve gathered up your favorites here.

Earlier this week we asked you to choose your favorite homegrown Lifehacker tool. After reviewing the fruits of our in-house coders’ labor, you nominated your favorites. We’ve compiled the top five contenders here.

Texter (Windows)

Texter is a robust text replacement tool. At its most basic Texter allows you to assign abbreviations for longer snippets of text you normally use. You can easily set up Texter to turn sig1, sig2, and sig3 into various email signatures or any other block of text that you use with frequency. You can also assign a trigger key, so that the replacement only occurs after you hit the tab key, for example. That way if your trigger for your email signature is sig, it will only activate after you type sig+TAB, but not when you start typing the word significant. Additionally Texter has support for scripting beyond basic text replacement, allowing you assign keyboard commands to your trigger, like tabbing to another cell in a form. For a detailed tutorial on setting up Texter, including scripting, check out the Texter homepage.

Better GReader (Firefox)

If the outpouring of votes for it during our Hive Five Best RSS Newsreaders is any indication, Lifehacker readers love Google Reader. Better GReader is a collection of scripts compiled into a Firefox extension that make life with Google Reader even sweeter. The improvements are numerous, including: maximizing the article display pane, automatically adding new feeds to Google Reader (instead of asking if you’d like iGoogle or Reader); colorization of item headers; the ability to remove unread counts; mark all entries up to the current one as read; enhanced preview, and more. If you love using Google Reader but have a few gripes, make sure to check out the full list of tools in Better GReader to see if it solves your RSS woes.

Belvedere (Windows)

Belvedere is an automated file-management tool. Using Belvedere, you can assign sets of rules to monitored folders for handling the files found there. You can assign rules to move, copy, delete, rename, or even open files based on their name, extension, size, and creation date and more. If you find yourself doing repetitive things on your computer that don’t really require your input beyond being the one steering the mouse, it might be time to turn over the house keeping to Belvedere. Everything from cleaning out temporary directories and keeping your download folder from bloating up to organizing your incoming files by type can be accomplished with a few simple rules that will free up a big chunk of your time. Automation is your friend!

Better GMail 2 (Firefox)

Like Better GReader, Better Gmail 2 takes an already awesome service and adds even more features to it. Supercharge your Gmail experience with the Better Gmail 2 Firefox extension and add these handy features: forced encryption (https), modified keyboard macros, inbox count beside favicon, better integration of Google Calendar and Reader with the Gmail interface, attachment icons that represent the actual file type, assistant for easy filter creation, folder style hierarchy on the sidebar, and more. Like all of our “Better XYZ” extensions the large list of features can be toggled on and off on a feature by feature basis so you get only the tweaks you need.

Better YouTube (Firefox)

Better YouTube is a Firefox extension that combines several great YouTube Greasemonkey scripts into one package. With Better YouTube you can enlarge videos, hide user comments, declutter the YouTube viewing page, disable autoplay, and quickly download video itself. Add it to your installation of Firefox to take control of your viewing at the mega-popular video sharing site.


Now that you’ve see the top five Lifehacker tools that have brought a touch of productivity to the lives of you fellow readers, it’s time to vote on which one is the must-have-tool from the Lifehacker stable.

Sound off in the comments below about everything from your unholy love of Belevedere—the automation tool and the charming butler!—to what kind of tool you’d like to see us tackle in the future.

Earlier this month we showed you Gmail’s new multiple label-based inboxes. Those turn out to be a perfect match for previously mentioned GTDInbox, the label-based Gmail system for getting things done in your inbox.

While GTDInbox was pretty handy for using GTD contexts and lists from within your Gmail account before, with the introduction of multiple inboxes, you can now put all your contexts on the screen at once. GTD practitioner and avid Lifehacker reader Jim sent us a screenshot of his Gmail inbox—a cropped, privacy-padded portion shown here—showing off just how great it is to have the color coded context labels and lists that GTDInbox creates, show in an at-a-glance style. Thanks Jim!

You’ve got a mind-blowing picture, surround sound, and streaming content set up, but it wasn’t cheap. Heal your wallet with ten upgrades, fixes, and setup tips that take your system to 11 on the cheap.

Photo by chunkysalsa.

10. Hide away your discs in style

Not everybody wants their CD or DVD collection to be a proud, visible part of their living room. And a lot of people have had old-school, giant-box speakers shoved in their garages, or offered up constantly by parents, aunts, uncles, or anyone else with a formerly hi-fi system. One Instructables user put some old gear to good use by converting it to media cabinets made from broken speakers. If you’re still feeling like you’ve got too many DVDs to fit into any sized container, consider clearing out your DVD clutter.

9. Make your own speaker mounts

Once you start buying home theater components, the little high-margin items add up real quick, and speaker mounts are no different. For $2 in materials and an hour’s work, you can get your 5.1 components off the ground for better sound by hoisting them on your DIY speaker wall mounts. Because, seriously, you’re paying at least $20 for a set of brackets that don’t have to hold much, and doing it yourself also gives you more flexibility in placement and spacing.

8. Childproof your setup

This is definitely the cheapest hardware hack we whole-heartedly recommend. We know the smell of stretched plastic wrap and the thrill of getting your new gear set up, but the safety anchors that come with most every TV stand are definitely worth revisiting, or buying if you’ve already tossed them. Even if there are no tykes in the house, you never know who’s coming to visit, or which dark and tired night sends your screen crashing to its doom. Hit up the Wired How-To Wiki for more child-proofing suggestions.

7. Get the right antenna (or build your own)

You’ve probably seen more rabbit ears in electronics stores recently than since the Cosby Show was still airing (new episodes, at least). That’s because stores, and manufacturers, are anticipating a consumer scramble for antennas to pick up the the soon-to-be-all-digital signals. Before you join the herds, find the best antenna type for getting the strongest reception at your home with AntennaWeb, which gets down to street level to explain which direction and sizes you’ll need to grab your over-the-air channels. Looking for a weekend project? Try building your own antenna to feel like you’re truly getting something for nothing.

6. Calibrate your HD TV for free

You paid for those deep blacks, the contrast with real pop, and all those hundreds of vertical and horizontal pixels, but you might not be seeing them. You could pay a professional (or, uh, the Geek Squad) to swing by and stare at your set, but you may get better results by following Popular Mechanics’ step-by-step troubleshooting guide or by taking the New York Times’ advice with the DVD route. Many films come with a setup feature, and tinted glasses, dubbed the THX Optimizer—here’s the full list of discs—that can get your screen crisp and bright-looking with just a little eye-exam-style testing.

5. Create a multi-room wireless system for one-tenth the price

Controlling all the music playing across your house isn’t reserved for people living in the near-futuristic movies or those willing to shell out a grand or more for the Sonos Bundle or other one-brand solutions. If you’ve got a wireless router, and already own an iPhone or iPod touch, it’s just a (relatively) small purchase and some iTunes tweaking to turn your iPhone or iPod touch into a master music remote. Plus, you’re getting a lot more control over your tunes than you would with a single-provider setup, and you get control over your multi-room system from your computer as well. And there are a lot of good reasons to invest in an iPod touch, anyways.

4. Turn Your Xbox (or Wii) Into a Media Center

Anyone reading Lifehacker for a while would know we’re huge fans of the Xbox Media Center, a free, open-source project that turns your old, first-gen Xbox into a killer media center. That alone puts streaming music, downloaded videos, feed-fed media, and other goodies into your TV and speakers, and there’s always plenty of add-ons and goodies to grab. But what if—for the kids, for the fitness aspect, for just the bowling—you own a Wii? Using the free Orb streaming media server from a Windows PC, you can use your Wii as a media center, giving you access to video, music, pictures, and lots more. You can even go a step further and hack your Wii for homebrew applications and DVD playback. Just want some remote music playing? Use a similar browser-based tweak to streaming your iTunes library to your Wii.

3. Set up your optimal theater space

You want everyone in your viewing room to be able to see and hear the show, but you don’t want feet near heads, direct window glare, covered heating vents—sometimes, in other words, you need a plan. You could take one of our clever reader’s tips and template your furniture to get a clear-eyed look at what should go where. For those with better eyes for computer layouts than floor plans, try one of the Charles & Hudson blog’s 10 virtual room planning tools. If it’s all about the screen—and, let’s face it, it probably is—than make sure you’re getting the best viewing distance for your investment with CNET’s size/distance guide for HD TVs.

2. Skip the DVR fees, roll your own

All it takes is a sub-$100 TV tuner—in plug-in card or USB form—to turn pretty much any PC into a DVR box. Whether that’s a computer you’ve already got, or a new box you grab for that express purpose, it’s truly within anyone’s reach to build their own DVR. Which app you pick to record and manage your TV is up to you—but our readers, and editor, all prefer Windows’ built-in Media Center. It gets the job done, costs nothing (more than a Windows install, anyways), and looks pretty slick sliding around the biggest of screens.

1. Wire your living room over Wi-Fi (wherever your router is)

Most of us get our internet from a cable or DSL connection, and have to put our wireless routers wherever that pipeline happens to be hooked up. But what if you’ve got devices that want (or benefit from) a hard cable connection—Apple TVs, media center PCs, TiVos, certain Xbox models, and the like? Skip buying the proprietary, huge-margin Wi-Fi adaptors and wire your living room over a Wi-Fi bridge. A bridge is less than $100, but you can also turn a standard $50-ish Wi-Fi router into a bridge with the super-charged DD-WRT or Tomato firmware upgrades. Now you’ve brought the net into your living room without a 100-foot cable, and the world’s your broadband oyster. Just need a fix for your Xbox, old or new? Consider using your laptop as a free Xbox Wi-Fi adapter.

What’s the best thing you’ve done for your home theater with a cheap purchase, or at no cost at all? What makes your living room the ultimate viewing room (other than the 60″ plasma, of course)? Swap some shop talk in the comments.

Gmail has been slowly but surely rolling out cool new features ever since they started Gmail Labs. If you haven’t taken advantage of the fruits of Labs, here’s a look at 10 Labs features you should enable.

Offline Gmail

Probably the most significant feature you can get out of Labs, Offline Gmail takes advantage of Google Gears to turn Gmail into an offline email client. You can search most of your messages, draft new messages, and do pretty much everything you can do with Gmail while you’re connected to the internet. Gmail automatically detects whether you’re connected or not to keep your offline and online Gmail in sync. (Read more)

Multiple Inboxes

Got a widescreen monitor and a lot of filters and labels you want to keep an eye on? When enabled, Multiple Inboxes displays up to eight different searches or labels next to your inbox for a king-sized dashboard of your email activity. (Read more)

Tasks

Google has taken a lot of guff for not creating a to-do list app to round out their productivity suite of apps. Tasks may not be a full-fledged app (yet), but it’s a great start. You can even turn an email into a task with a simple Shift+t keyboard shortcut. Once set up, you can add tasks to your Firefox sidebar and access it from your cell phone and iGoogle. (Read more)

Go to label

Gmail has all kinds of great keyboard shortcuts, including combo keys that take you to your inbox (‘g’ then ‘i’), starred mail (‘g’ then ‘s’), and more. With Go to label enabled, you can quickly navigate between labels from your keyboard in a similar manner. Simply type ‘g’ (Go), ‘l’ (Label), and then start typing the name of the label you want to go to. Go to label will autocomplete the label, so chances are you’ll be there in a couple of keystrokes. Go to label also works with the next Labs feature, Quick Links.

Quick Links

Quick Links adds a new sidebar to Gmail just below your labels. When enabled, Quick Links can be used to bookmark anything in Gmail, from a common search to a specific email. It’s an incredible way to set up quick access to common searches without setting up a filter and label.

Superstars

By default, Gmail ships with one yellow star to help you better keep track of and call out important emails. With Superstars enabled, you’ve got a whopping 12 different icons to choose from. You can even search for different superstar types specifically—especially handy if you want to set up some Quick Links with your Superstars!

Canned Responses

Do a lot of repetitive typing, do you? With Canned Responses, you can set up canned replies so you can quickly and easily fire off that same old reply without succumbing to the pains of RSI. Your hands will thank you. (If you’re really serious about canned responses, check out Texter [Windows], TextExpander [Mac], or Snippits [Linux]).

Custom Keyboard Shortcuts

Love keyboard shortcuts but never quite got the hang of the layout of Gmail’s keyboard shortcuts? With Custom Keyboard Shortcuts enabled, you can customize any of Gmail’s default shortcuts to your liking. Handy!

Forgotten Attachment Detector

Save yourself the embarrassment of the second whoops-I-forgot! email with the Forgotten Attachment Detector. It scans your email to determine whether or not you had meant to attach a file and alerts you if an attachment is missing.

Pictures in Chat

The Pictures in Chat feature does exactly what it sounds like: adds user icons to your Gmail Chat window. This one won’t boost your productivity all that much, but it’s a nice little tweak.

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Gmail has tons more great labs features not mentioned here, so if we didn’t cover a favorite of yours, give it the airtime it deserves in the comments.

The crafty skinners at Globex Designs have officially released Google Redesigned 0.2, a Firefox extension that gives a whole-cloth new look to Gmail, Google Calendar, and, new to this release, Google Reader.

Here’s a look at each of the sites that gets skinned under the Redesigned extension (click for the even-bigger view):

Google Reader Redesigned:

Gmail Redesigned:

Google Calendar Redesigned:

Here’s what the folks at Globex, possibly headquartered in Cypress Creek, have to say about what’s new in 0.2:

• NEW STYLE! GReader Redesigned
• Support for Mozilla Prism
• Extension options dialog support
• Support For Status Bar Icon Hide (activated in the add-on options dialog)
• Optimized update system
• Localization support for Bosnian, Czech, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish languages
• Code optimization

Users with Google Redesigned already installed should see an update ping the next time they launch, but can also manually grab the newest skins by right-clicking the Google Redesigned tray icon and choosing “Check for Style Updates.”

Wish another Google Product got the Redesigned treatment? Tell us about it in the comments, or at Globex Designs’ forums. Thanks Hanchen!

Gmail Labs adds a new Multiple Inboxes feature today that allows you to keep an eye on multiple buckets at once while you’re viewing your inbox.

Just head to the Labs tab in your Gmail account to enable the new feature. Once enabled, you’ll get a new Multiple inboxes tab in your Gmail settings. From there, you can choose up to five different panes to display to the right of your Gmail inbox, above your inbox, or below it. For label and filter junkies, the Multiple Inboxes feature is a must. When setting up your multiple inboxes, you can use any of Gmail’s supported search operators to create any sort of search you want. For example, good choices for your multiple inboxes might include searches like:

is:starred
is:unread
has:attachment

Let’s hear which labels or search operators you’re keeping an eye on in the comments.

I’ve dropped about 10 pounds so far, and a little more falls off every day. The fix hasn’t been running, lifting, or anything trendy—I’m just eating less meat, and enjoying what I eat more.

What I’m doing isn’t exactly new or original. You could call it flexitarianism, or a more regimented form of semi-vegetarianism. You could accuse me of jumping all over the latest thing foodie guru Mark Bittman said or wrote, and, given how often he shows up in my food-focused posts, you’d have good reason to bust out the fanboy flag.

However I came to it, I’m avoiding meat for all but one meal of the day. This plan has worked where a lot of other plans and diets haven’t.

First, a quick step back. I carried, in December, about 205 pounds on my 6-foot-1-inch frame. By all accounts, I’ve got a lucky metabolism, but I also love food—all of it, everywhere, in any amount—and dark, regional beers. And I’ve spent most of my career sitting down to write or edit words. So an excess of physique-softening, energy-reducing weight gradually accumulated on me, and it was defeating to think about. I’d read most of Michael Pollan’s popular eat-better-or-else books, and my family history is full of diabetes and obesity. Still, fast food drive-thru visits were written off with excuses about a tight schedule, vegetables were given the same respect as salt packets, and my sedendary life left me feeling pretty unfit.

Most diets seem to be based around broad concepts (Don’t eat carbohydrates!), ridiculously strict regiments (any crash diet focused on one type of food), or lists of “good” and “bad” foods so varied and long that scanning a restaurant menu feels like a course in advanced database queries (next stop: South Beach).

The diet suggested, or at least discussed at length, in Mark Bittman’s new book, Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating, is simple, and centered around a rule a four-year-old can understand: Don’t eat meat before dinner. It might sound like sacrilege to those who truly relish a good meal, or foolishly restrictive to anyone raised on bacon with their breakfast, meat in their sandwiches, and a dinner plate with starch, vegetable, and entree. But for this Lifehacker editor, it’s an easily-defined, sensible challenge, and one that’s paying off the more I rise to it. It doesn’t punish you for dreaming of applewood-smoked pork ribs, it shouldn’t turn you into a waiter’s worst nightmare, and it makes it harder for you to overeat.

Bittman’s diet suggestions stem from a wider-focused concern about the earth’s ecology, the food production demands of our modern diet, and other pressing topics of the day. If vegan, organic, or locally-sourced foods are what you’re into, a daytime vegetarian diet can certainly accommodate. But the weight loss that’s worked for me and the New York Times food writer is more due to how scaling back on meat—dense with calories, a great hider of fat, and easily eaten too quickly—tricks you into consuming less. It almost goes without saying that avoiding the processed, mass-produced meats in burgers, re-heated chain restaurant meals, and packaged entrees is better for you in any situation. But avoiding \any kind of meat forces you, or at least me, to get creative with your daytime diet, and makes the evening meal something you really want to enjoy, not just scarf down.

Here’s how I’ve made a flexitarian/daytime-vegetarian/Bittmanist diet work for me as a day-to-day reality:

• Broaden your food base: Hide these from your friends with the “Meat is murder—tasty, delicious murder” T-shirts, if you must, but there are tons of great cookbooks, websites, and idea wells to grab meat-less meals or snacks from. The Meat Lite recipe series from the foodie blog Serious Eats, and a cookbook from the authors of that series, Almost Meatless, are just what they sound like—scaled-back quantities of meat that use it for good flavor. Sites like VegKitchen, 101 Cookbooks, and others have creative takes on meals that work great at breakfast, mid-day, or dinner. My personal source for endless inspiration? Asian cookbooks—any cuisine, any recipe. You can swap in tofu, if you dig it, or beans, fresh vegetables, or pretty much anything for most dishes, and you’ll find a few that work great with any ingredients.
• Don’t get held hostage at restaurants: If you’re sitting down for breakfast or lunch and the vegetarian offerings are unappealing, consider getting a salad and an appetizer, two appetizers, two salads, or asking the waiter for a plate with a few of the menu’s appealing sides. Last resort? Ask the waiter (gasp!) if the chef recommends any vegetarian substitutions. In a lot of cases, you’ll pay less than if you grabbed a full-fledged meal, and if you end up eating less, well …
• Re-think your hunger: As Bittman notes in Food Matters, most of us can’t (or, at least, don’t) have sex every single time we think about it—we’ll wait for you to finish up whatever wisecrack you got going with there. But hunger, real or routine, is something many of us satisfy with an unnatural level of urgency. You can fight off some of those pangs with a slow, steady stream of healthier stuff, like popcorn, almonds, or snacks that don’t come in thin foil, but it’s easier to engage in something, anything time-consuming when your body feels hungry and you can’t remind it that dinner’s only an hour away. There’s a reason critics always swipe at artists by referring to the work of their “young and hungry” days—being a little hungry is far from a bad thing.
• It’s a guideline, not a religion: Your buddy’s in town, and wants to meet at Texas Jack’s House of Steak for lunch. Go for it, try to eat just a reasonable amount—about the size of a deck of cards, and switch to vegetarian fare for dinner. But your spouse planned a great chicken dish! Okay, eat a healthy amount of that too, tell her you’re stuffed from lunch, and eat as many veggies as you can. This plan isn’t about quick results, or proudly waving a trendy diet flag in everyone’s face. Eat as realistically vegetarian as you can in the day, eat small amounts of (really good!) meat at night, and you’ll eventually adapt to eating smaller portions. You could eat nothing but Snickers bars all day and technically be eating vegetarian, but that’s not the point—use your meatless day to inspire your diet, not constrain it.

Photo by moriza.

This is, of course, just one man’s plan for losing weight, and anyone picking it up has to do a bit of research into what kind of meat-less meals are nutritious and relatively painless to cook and eat. It should be accompanied with real exercise; I’m just putting it off that part until spring because, well, it’s 12 degrees here on days like today. And results will vary, based on a lot of factors. But feeling good about what you’re putting in your body, and having a simple rule to manage it all, has worked out great so far.

Anybody in the crowd made a switch to lower-meat diets? Got any suggestions for staving off hunger and replacing those big hunks o’ flesh? Gather ’round the kitchen and offer some tips in the comments.