Lifehacker (Free subscription) | 6 hours ago
Chances are at one point or another, you've either purchased an instrument or considered doing so with the intention of learning to play it; most of us, however, never get around the the learning part. The internet is a glorious fount of freely available information, and it's slowly filling up with excellent tutorials for getting good at just about anything—including playing a new instrument. Hit...
Lifehacker (Free subscription) | yesterday
If there's one useful thing that I learned when I moved to California, it's how to slice and pit a ripe avocado. Forget scooping out the pit with a spoon and losing any bit of that precious green butter inside—tap the pit firmly with a knife to lodge it there, and twist the pit out. Hit the play button above to see how.
Lifehacker (Free subscription) | yesterday
Macworld contributor Brian Jepson isn't content with just connecting external drives, mice, scanners, and printers to his Mac—he wants to control custom hardware. He explains how to do just that with a microcontroller. Jepson writes: To show you what's possible with microcontrollers and the Mac, I came up with a demonstration project that I call BreakTimer. This system enables your Mac to detect whether...
Lifehacker (Free subscription) | yesterday
Mozilla pushed out the first release candidate of Firefox 3 early this evening, so if you're already field testing Firefox 3 , now's the time to go to Help -> Check for Updates to download the latest and greatest build. If you're wondering what to expect, check out the RC1 release notes . Looks like we're getting close! Thanks Owen!
Lifehacker (Free subscription) | yesterday
If you take a lot of digital photos but are frustrated with the strange yellow glow or green hue to your results, weblog Of Zen and Computing's guide to adjusting the white balance of digital photos is for you. Taking you step-by-step through adjusting the color temperature in Photoshop, the guide makes it easy to understand how to fix these imbalances and give your pictures the more natural look...
Lifehacker (Free subscription) | yesterday
Tim from the Daily Cup of Tech weblog has transitioned to an almost all BitTorrent TV diet, but the resulting disorganization of files left him with an unsettled stomach. He prefers to archive everything he downloads to a system of folders, but while some video files he downloads hit his hard drive as plain AVI files, others are archived RARs, and manually organizing it all became to much of a hassle....
Lifehacker (Free subscription) | 05/16/2008
Windows only: Freeware application Lebendig adds snazzy, lightweight animations to your windows—like spinning a window as you launch it or fading out when you close it. Apps like Lebendig aren't uncommon, but Lebendig does set itself apart by using very little memory while still adding a little snap to your daily computing. It's not the eye candy of Aero, but it's a good way to avoid some of that...
Lifehacker (Free subscription) | 05/16/2008
Mint, the web-based financial management application that took us by storm a few months back , is adding investment tracking to their already impressive feature set. Mint's investments, currently in beta, tracks everything from the performance of your Roth IRA to the value of your 401k, all from its attractive, easy-to-understand interface. As with Mint in general, you'll need to be comfortable trusting...
Lifehacker (Free subscription) | 05/16/2008
A steady stream of preview releases have kept our typing fingers especially busy covering the beta beat the last several weeks. From Mac virtualization software to Microsoft Office add-ons to iTunes sharing apps, there are lots of new features for eager testers to preview and try out. Beyond the most obvious best public preview out there right now—Firefox 3—which beta has your heart? Cast your vote,...
Lifehacker (Free subscription) | 05/16/2008
Windows only: Freeware application Elevator disables the User Account Control prompt for specific applications through your right-click menu, getting rid of the UAC annoyance for apps that require administrator privileges every time they run. We've shown you how to disable UAC entirely and how to disable UAC for specific apps before, but it required a little more sleeve-rolling than this simple right-click...
Lifehacker (Free subscription) | 05/16/2008
This week's release of Fedora 9 makes carrying a full-fledged Linux desktop around on a USB drive a three-click affair. Even better, you don't need Linux installed to create it, you can leave the data on your thumb drive untouched, and any files you create or settings you tweak remain in place the next time you boot up. After the jump, let's create a fully-functional desktop-to-go using a simple Windows...
Lifehacker (Free subscription) | 05/16/2008
Windows only: Adam already walked you through how to download music from your friends' iTunes libraries over the internet using Mojo , and now Windows users can get in on the fun. Install the Mojo 2.0 beta for Windows, set up an account, and swap Mojo usernames with your friends to populate your buddy list. From there you can browse their playlists, search their libraries, play and download any songs...
Lifehacker (Free subscription) | 05/16/2008
Kwiry, the text-yourself-a-reminder service, has added a potentially neat feature for shoppers, urban adventurers, and anyone who wants a visual element to their memory-activators. Snap a picture on your smart phone or standard set, email or text it to Kwiry with some explaining text (i.e. "Must check out this restaurant soon"), and it'll come up with your reminder when you head to Kwiry's renovated...
Lifehacker (Free subscription) | 05/16/2008
Windows only: Need to pull an email address from a file you can't open, or a message folder from an ancient mail client? Point E-Mail Address Extract, a free Windows utility, at the folder or specific files, and let it do its text-parsing thing. The old-school-looking app comes with some basic file filters enabled (like HTML pages and .dat files), but you can direct it to pull any type of file you'd...
Lifehacker (Free subscription) | 05/16/2008
In addition to its new ability to automatically detect what language you're trying to translate, Google Translate adds 10 more languages to its capabilities: Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Hindi, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian and Swedish.
