Lifehacker, tips and downloads for getting things done

Automatically Lock Your Computer When You Walk Away with Blue Lock

Windows only: Free, open source application Blue Lock monitors the proximity of your Bluetooth phone or device and automatically locks your computer whenever it's out of range (e.g., you've walked away from your computer). The usefulness will depend on the strength of your Bluetooth devices, since it's not really going to do its job if you've got a strong signal and receiver that keeps a connection from across the office. But if it works well with your Bluetooth devices, Blue Lock provides a simple way to keep your computer secure when you step away for a few seconds but forget to hit Win-L to lock your workstation. Blue Lock is free, Windows only. For an even more robust alternative, Mac users should check out how to automate tons of actions based on Bluetooth proximity.

8:00 PM on Wed Mar 12 2008
By Adam Pash
766 views, 5 comments

Latest by JustEaton: Whoops, sorry for being ignorant. Thanks guys. more »

Productivity

Make Time for Your Personal Goals

You may be wildly successful in your work life, but in the midst of that unbridled productivity, it's easy to push your personal goals to the back seat. To combat this common problem, weblog Zen Habits suggests several tips to make time for your personal goals. For example:

Make it your most important appointment. There are appointments we take seriously — a doctor's appointment, or an important meeting — and we will do everything we can to ensure that we make those appointments and are not late for them. But when it comes to our time for working on our personal goal, we will often push it back because of other pressing things. Don't let that happen.

If you're a master of getting things done in both your work and personal life, share your tricks in the comments.

7:00 PM on Wed Mar 12 2008
By Adam Pash
514 views, 2 comments

Latest by vered: I'm hardly an expert but I love his idea of writing down the 4-5 things that are most important to me, focusing on those and working on reducing the non-essential commitments. It never occurred to me to write down my more »

Saving Money

Increase Your Net Worth $300k in Five Years

Finance blogger FrugalTrader started strategically saving money back in 2003, and went from being $40,000 in debt to being $285,000 in the black. There's no get-rich-quick scheme here; he just used age-old saving strategies, like aggressively paying down debt and automatically transferring cash to savings, living well below his means, and renting out part of his property to pay the mortgage. Pretty amazing results in such a short time.

6:00 PM on Wed Mar 12 2008
By Gina Trapani
6,369 views, 10 comments

Latest by fuzzycuffs: This article has some great ideas, but none of them are new. Save, pay off debt, don't spend on frivolous things. OK fine, those aren't anything new. The majority of the money that this person made was from step more »

How To

Share a Link with Context with the Awesome Highlighter

Webapp the Awesome Highlighter aims to give context to shared links by allowing users to highlight text in a webpage before they send it out. Very similar to previously mentioned web site Jump Knowledge, the Awesome Highlighter creates a special URL that saves your highlighting schemes and displays them when you click through to the link. It's good to give quick context to a link, but if you want to heavier annotation, Jump Knowledge is a lot more feature-rich.

5:00 PM on Wed Mar 12 2008
By Adam Pash
379 views, Comment

DIY

Make a Corduroy Pants Purse

Tutorial site wikiHow runs down instructions for turning a pair of cords into a nifty shoulder bag. This project reminds me of a DIY jeans bag I saw live and in person at SXSW this weekend. The jeans bag—which involves no sewing at all—holds together with only duct tape and love. Neat!

4:22 PM on Wed Mar 12 2008
By Gina Trapani
687 views, 2 comments

Latest by mlhoward516: @se7a7n7: About 6 years ago I was walking around this little section of Paris with a lot of novelty shops. One store had these purses made of spandex stretched over what was more or less a triangle like you'd see more »

Featured Windows Download

Quickly Hide Any Window on Your Desktop with Windows Hidie

Windows only: Simple, freeware application Windows Hidie can hide any ~~porn~~ window on your desktop from view with a simple keystroke or through its slightly more advanced interface. When Windows Hidie hides a window, it disappears from your taskbar and from the Alt-Tab switcher, so essentially it's completely gone from the casual onlooker's view. You can hide the active window with a quick stroke of Win-Z, show all hidden windows with Win-S, or toggle the display of the graphical interface to the program with Win-A. It's simple, does one thing, and does it well. Aside from what some might consider seedy uses, an app like this could also come in handy to keep apps running in the background that don't minimize to the tray. Windows Hidie is freeware, Windows only, requires .NET 2.0. For a similar, more robust alternative, check out previously mentioned Magic Boss Key.

3:00 PM on Wed Mar 12 2008
By Adam Pash
2,302 views, 3 comments

Latest by alekdavis: Nice program, but has a couple of issues. One: after restoring windows, it changes order of the apps in the taskbar. The options dialog box looks corrupted to me. It would be nice if I could minimize all windows and more »

Feature

The Best of Lifehacker in Upgrade Your Life

The second edition of the Lifehacker book, Upgrade Your Life, is a compilation of the best 116 hacks and downloads from Lifehacker's archives. This dead tree version of the web site transforms dozens of blog posts into comprehensive, edited tutorials, which will be familiar to longtime readers. While an official electronic version of Upgrade Your Life isn't available, today I've pulled together links to all the past posts that informed each book chapter to give you a one-stop preview of what's inside that cover. Consider this post the unedited web version of the book. After the jump, get a ginormous roundup of all the posts that created Upgrade Your Life by chapter. And shhhh, don't tell my book publisher I'm giving this all away. More »

1:00 PM on Wed Mar 12 2008
By Gina Trapani
9,512 views, 4 comments

Latest by n00dle: Gina, I wanted to meet you at SXSW. No cashola though, I wanted your book and your autograph. Lifehacker ROCKS! Hope you're in the neighborhood again soon! more »

File Sharing

Share Large Files Instantly with EatLime

Brilliant new file sharing web site EatLime expedites online file sharing by allowing your friends to begin downloading the file as soon as you start uploading it, meaning you don't have to wait for the file to finish uploading before they begin downloading. You can share files up to 1GB with a free registration or up to 100MB with no registration. In testing EatLime, I found that eventually—once my download caught up with my upload—I was essentially downloading in real-time from the upload, which is fantastic. If you've ever shared large files online, you know what a pain it can be in terms of time. EatLime could cut a significant chunk out of the time it takes to share files online.

12:00 PM on Wed Mar 12 2008
By Adam Pash
3,726 views, 12 comments

Latest by saketini99: [drop.io] is what I've been using. it's not upload and download at the same time, but there's no registration required, totally free, and has a bunch of cool options like voicemail(!) if you're working on a collaboration. more »

Ask Lifehacker

Back to My Mac from a PC?

Reader Ryan writes to ask:

I loved your column about setting up Back to My Mac for free, but I've got a Mac at home and a Windows PC at work, so what I really want is to get Back to My Mac from a Windows PC. Is it possible to get Back to My Mac from Windows?

Since the tools we used in our setup are really just versions of VNC and FTP tools baked into Leopard, and VNC and FTP are about as old and widely supported as time itself, it most certainly is. Check out the details for getting back to your Mac from a Windows computer after the jump. More »

11:00 AM on Wed Mar 12 2008
By Adam Pash
4,412 views, 11 comments

Latest by Adam Pash: @Dominik Reinmund: It's not that LogMeIn isn't a great solution—we've written about it before. This is just another alternative that uses the tools built into Leopard. more »

YouTube Tip

Watch YouTube High Quality Videos by Default

You don't need a URL hack or Firefox extension to force YouTube to send you videos in the highest quality that's available: in your Account settings, you can tell YouTube to default to the higher-res, better audio version of clips when they're available. Apparently YouTube automatically detects your connection speed and chooses which video to feed you by default, but if you're always on a fast connection, changing this setting will hook you up straight away.

10:00 AM on Wed Mar 12 2008
By Gina Trapani
3,947 views, 7 comments

Latest by Amalas: Sweet! Thanks for the quick tip. more »

Ask the Readers

How Do You Track Your Tax Paperwork?

Finance blogger Nickel tracks receipts and other scraps of tax-related paperwork throughout the year in two places: a basket at home, and an envelope in the car. Any time a business or medical expense comes up, in the basket or envelope the receipt goes. Same goes for charitable contributions. Every once in awhile, Nickel transfers the contents of the envelope on-the-go to the basket. (Once that's done, you can easily digitize that paperwork with the right scanner.) How do you capture receipts and other tax documents as you go? Let us know in the comments.

9:00 AM on Wed Mar 12 2008
By Gina Trapani
1,331 views, 12 comments

Latest by sparkrainfire: mine is never paper to begin with. I file online, then print to pdf. more »

Features

Interview With Ron Burley, Customer Service Avenger

FROM CONSUMERIST.COM: "There's only one leverage any consumer has with a company. And that's financial." So says Ron Burley, author of UNSCREWED: The Consumer's Guide To Getting What You Paid For. More »

9:00 AM on Wed Mar 12 2008
By Ben Popken
8,701 views, 36 comments

Exercise

Burn 600 Calories a Day Typing

Writer Jonathan Fields wants to exercise while he blogs, and he does it with the previously mentioned treadputer: a treadmill with a computer on its dashboard.

That picture below is little old me walking 1 mile per hour while blogging...at my desk. I'm there from 8:30am t 12:30pm, five day a week now. And, here's the amazing thing...It doesn't even feel like exercise! One mile per hour is the equivalent of a very slow walk. It's slower than the pace I usually follow whenever I am on the phone (I have to move when I talk or feel like I'm gonna die). You don't really get tired, you don't sweat and, at my weight... By lunchtime, I've already burned around 600 friggin' calories!

At one mile an hour, you're not bouncing around so much as to make typing impossible. Love this idea of simple multitasking, keeping the blood flowing while computing. Do want.

8:00 AM on Wed Mar 12 2008
By Gina Trapani
7,286 views, 45 comments

Latest by Opus: Fully commercialized: [www.steelcase.com] See also: [en.wikipedia.org] This is NOT supposed to be a cardio workout. Never was, never will be. It IS a way to keep moving while you talk on the phone/surf the net/type/read/etc. Also, most ordinary treadmills do not do more »

How To

Create Simple Forms for Data Gathering in Microsoft Word

Need to find out what grub your co-workers prefer for an office potluck? Trying to find out your friends' preferences on music? For simple data-gathering, building a linked spreadsheet and database can be overkill, and plain ol' Microsoft Office has a decent set of form-creating and data-gathering tools built in. CNET's Workers' Edge blog shows you how to create a form from scratch, distribute it to those you're polling, and gather all the data in a Comma Separated Value file that's readable in most any data-management program you choose. The tools used in the guide require Office 2003 or 2007.

7:30 AM on Wed Mar 12 2008
By Kevin Purdy
2,428 views, 3 comments

Latest by AnotherSadLoveSong: Holy flippamoley. You just saved me so much time w/ the google trick. I've been having to do that stuff a LOT more manually for our NPO. Horray for you. more »

Blogging

Use Google Docs to Publish Blog Entries

The bavatuesdays blog points out a publish-to-blog feature that seems to have quietly crept into Google Documents. Not much to crow about if you're perfectly happy with your blogging platform's built-in editor, but Google Docs can seemingly publish to most any blog, even those on hosted servers. Combined with linked tools like Google Notebook, it could make for a nicer thought-compiling and drafting experience for anyone who's an avid online writer. The feature can be found in the "Publish" tab on the right-hand side of a Docs page.

7:06 AM on Wed Mar 12 2008
By Kevin Purdy
1,484 views, 4 comments

Latest by jord1242: Doesn't work for myspace, at least as far as I could tell. I tried posting, no error, but it never showed up to my blog. more »

Cleaning

Clip Sponges to Separate Those Used for (Really) Dirty Jobs

The Tipnut mailbag pulls in an idea for avoiding a problem that drives some people (including a certain wife of mine) insane: Keeping the sponges and clothes used for really dirty work separate from those you run over your eating implements—especially if you buy same-color sponges in bulk. To do so, use a knife or scissors to nick a corner off the grimy ones (presumably when they're dry). This could also prevent getting counter/surface-cleaning chemicals and grime into the same sink as your dishes, though perhaps disinfecting your sponges in the microwave could prevent that as well. Photo by Conor Lawless.

6:40 AM on Wed Mar 12 2008
By Kevin Purdy
1,243 views, 6 comments

Latest by philrj: I find that microwaving sponges makes them fall apart....fast. I did this for awhile but became annoyed when little bits kept falling off after each use. So I tend to just change my sponges more often. more »