WordPress 2.7 (”Coltrane”) has just been released. The new version of WordPress includes a completely redesigned dashboard and posting screen with drag-and-drop customization.

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WordPress 2.7, Featuring a Completely Redesigned Interface

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After a pulled-back launch back in late October, Google has re-released SMS capabilities in Gmail Chat.

It's still an "experimental feature" in Gmail Labs, but presumably after the false start it'll actually work this time—in the U.S., anyway. Googler Leo Dirac writes:

We're just trying it out for cell phones in the United States right now, but you can send texts to your friends with US phone numbers from anywhere in the world. You can start by just typing a phone number or into the search box in the chat window on the left, then select "Send SMS." You can also select the contact you want to SMS first and then add their phone number.

Recipients will be able to respond to you, and you'll get their message in the chat window.

On the receiving end, when you get a text message from Gmail on your phone, it will come from a number in the 406 area code. (The l33t folks in the crowd will note that this spells G0O.) You can reply to this text on your phone just like you'd reply to any other text. The reply gets routed back to our Gmail servers and shows up in your friend's Gmail chat window. Each of your friends' messages will come from a different 406 number so you can reply to any message and it will get back to the right person. Messages from the same person will always come from the same number, so you can even bookmark it in your phone.

Not only is this a great way to get to friends on the go when you're at your computer, but it'll also save you sent message charges on your own phone bill.

guest post by Aaron Muszalski

NIMBY (the DIY art space that was recently shut down following a small fire) has secured a new location, but $22,000 $14,700 $12,900 is still needed for the deposit. The deposit is due by December 15th, and NIMBY is in urgent need of additional donations. Please consider giving them your support.
 

NIMBY NEEDS MONEY FOR DEPOSIT ON NEW LOCATION THIS WEEK!!

NIMBY – the Bay Areas largest DIY/ Industrial Art Space was shut down by a city inspection following a small fire. Community support has poured in and new location secured. NIMBY will move December 15th – but $22,000 is still needed for the deposit.

What is NIMBY?

For the past five years NIMBY has been a space where artists, craftsmen and tinkerers can create the new, the impossible, and the never seen before. Many of the pieces at Burning Man, Coachella, the Maker Fair and The Crucible’s Fire Arts Festival are created and stored at NIMBY.

NIMBY not only offers space to create, but supports its artists with resources, assistance in sourcing re-purposed material, as well as logistical and technical guidance. Snook, the founder of NIMBY, is known in the community as the guy to call when technical or logistical issues seem insurmountable. This supportive culture shared by all members of the NIMBY community is at the root of the amazing art that emerges from its doors.

NIMBY has been the birthplace of Dance Dance Immolation, the Steam Punk Tree House, Colossus, The Kinetic SteamWorks steam ship, Spike’s Vampire Bar and so much more. NIMBY has hosted such epic events as Lost Vegas, Eat Drink and Be Mary, Fight Night, Thunderdome, and the NIMBY Circus. At the new NIMBY we are working to create a 30,000 square foot event/ gallery space with permanent installations of Michael Christian’s IT, The Steam Punk Tree House, Colossus and the Big Rig Jig.

The City of Oakland has rolled out the red carpet to help. Trucking, architectural drawings, contractors, and materials are all lined-up to move in and build-out the new space. We also have 5 years of heart, gumption and making it work behind us – but we need your support of a donation.

Be a part of keeping NIMBY alive – DONATE.

HOW YOU CAN HELP:

PayPal: NIMBYLLC@yahoo.com
website: nimbyspace.org
Contact Rachael at rachael@nimbyspace.org for info on tax-deductible or in-kind donations.

WHY DONATE?

NIMBY has served the community as Bay Areas largest DIY/ Industrial Art Space. Most Bay Area artists who create large-scale work depend on NIMBY for support.

Created at NIMBY:

Colossus - http://zacharycoffin.com/colossus/
Steam Punk Tree House - http://www.steamtreehouse.com/
Kinetic Steam Works - http://www.kineticsteamworks.org/
Dance Dance Immolation - http://www.interpretivearson.com/projects/ddi/
Cleavage in Space - http://images.burningman.com/index.cgi?image=12425
Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea - http://www.switchbacksea.org/

And the current home of:

Flaming Lotus Girls Serpent Mother - http://www.flaminglotus.com/serpent_mother/Serpent_image_gallery/
Michael Christians IT - http://www.michaelchristian.com/

Check out more of our photos:
http://www.nimbyspace.org/?page_id=46

And artists:
http://www.nimbyspace.org/?page_id=32NIMBY

For a more poetic account of the role NIMBY plays in the Bay Area arts community, here is a comment from noted showman (and former Mayoral Candidate) “Chicken” John Rinaldi:

The space that I use from time to time to build got closed. From [their email] you would think boy scouts ran the place or something. Well let me tell you that NIMBY has always been dirty rotten. Dangerous. Stupid. Filthy. Drunk. Stacked. Sharp edges. Broken truck. Shit everywhere. Flat tire. Tweeker going through the dumpster. Dog bite. Cute girl fucking nuts. Weighs too much. Mountain of bullshit. Can’t find a tape measure. Young  dudes sunglasses at night. Toilet from hell. Motorcycle. Cheap rent. Don’t block the fucking driveway. On fire. Closed down.

Wow.

It’s an art space run by a catastrophe, God bless it. We need things like this. We need things like this more than we need a sushi lunch. NIMBY and places like it are part of the infrastructure of our city of Art and Innovation. Without it and other places like it, possibility gives way to consumer culture. The very reason we have the ability to manufacture the culture that we do (and we do), is that people have stepped up and made dirty rotten art spaces.

Give NIMBY $43 today. There are thousands of people on this list. Give NIMBY some money, then go there and make a fucking mess someday. Park in the driveway. Step in dogshit. Or make some art. Help a project. Do a thing. Invest. Win. Gloat.

Or do nothing and complain that our city used to be cooler.

Our city is going to get better because of people who believe, invest and activate. Economic downturn my entire ass. Gavin will cut the budget for arts first to make up for all the cushy do-nothing jobs that he gives people who help him politically… so the “underground” is going to be where all the art is in the next 3 years. Our next mayor will run on an art platform and on and on… but for now, the arts are going to need some energy. And it’s NOT going to come from the DeYoung fuckers who control the SF Art Commission. It’s going to come from me and it’s going to come from you. And it’s going to come now or the window is going to close and we are going to lose more artists and more innovators and we are going to wonder what the fuck we are still doing here.

Get involved. Please be generous with your time or resources with places like NIMBY and other spaces and support cool happenings and people. And they will be supporting you.

Think of it as a bailout, if you’d like… just wind it up, and watch it go.

Also worth reading is Cecily Burt’s recent article for the Oakland Tribune, entitled “Fire arts devotees getting bigger Oakland warehouse“.

See Previously: Save NIMBY! Help The DIY Art Space Relocate After Their Fire

image via Nimbyspace
photo by Scott Beale
photo by Jake Appelbaum
photo by Eddie Codel

This is a blog post from Laughing Squid For more content like this, subscribe to the RSS feed, Twitter & FriendFeed.

Refuse To Live Vicariously - Please Help Support NIMBY

Related posts:

- Save NIMBY! Help The DIY Art Space Relocate After Their Fire

- NIMBY Halloween Celebration & Relocation Project Benefit

- Fire at NIMBY Art Space in Oakland

- NIMBY & ArtFag Mafia present: MOB

- Kinetic Steam Works Pre-Coachella Steam-Up

newVideoPlayer("/Money_Time_Adam.flv", 506, 423,"");Everyone's talking about budgeting money in the face of a bleak economic outlook this holiday season, but if there's one thing we never have enough of during the holidays, it's time.

Yesterday I was lucky enough to join CNBC On the Money's Carmen Wong Ulrich to offer a few helpful tips for saving time over the holidays. The segment—embedded here—was cut short for time (I would have loved to have a little more time to talk Lifehacker), which meant that the original list of five holiday timesavers plus some was cut down to a quick three. Keep reading for our full list of the five best holiday timesavers.

1. Do Your Shopping Online

Not only will you avoid the long lines, but you can also save a lot of money by doing your shopping online. Amazon is an obvious favorite for online shopping, and for good reason, but you can also find also find incredible deals with our savvy shopper's guide to online deal finders. Just remember—if you're doing your shopping online, you need to be aware of shipping deadlines. Most sites prominently display these deadlines, but this previously mentioned list of holiday shipping deadlines nicely aggregates them if you're looking for some eleventh hour shipping. Photo by The Pug Father.

2. Tackle Work Commitments Early

Be aware of your upcoming workload and plan accordingly. Identify any projects or other work-related issues that could fall in your lap at the last minute and take time away from your family; then do what you can to address those issues ahead of time so you're not celebrating the season in your cubicle.Photo by Photo Mojo.

3. Get Ready for Guests Ahead of Time

Again, it's all about preparation. Do the necessary shopping, plan out your meals ahead of time, and know when your guests will arrive. Last minute errands can be a huge holiday time-sink—especially when you have to run them at the same time as all the other last-minute errand runners. You're bound to forget something, but the more prepared you are going in, the better off you'll be. Photo by Editor B.

4. Limit Your Commitments

We have a tendency to overestimate how many social commitments we can squeeze into our lives, especially around the holidays. Just remember: You don't need to attend every holiday party of and buy a gift for every single one of your acquaintances. The holidays are about spending time with the people you love; you don't need to do everything, and limiting your commitments can take a lot of stress out of the holidays. Photo by goodrob13.

5. Take Extra Time for Travel

Make sure to budget plenty of time for your travel to save time in the long run, especially if you're flying. Everyone's heading to the airport during the holidays, and if you don't budget your time for traffic delays and long lines, you'll find that missed flights and baggage drama will ultimately cost a lot more of your time time than building in extra time to your travel on the front end. Photo by dougww.

Thanks again to CNBC for having me. Share you secrets for saving time over the holidays in the comments.

All platforms with Firefox: Just uploaded new version 0.5 of the Better GReader Firefox extension, which includes new features and fixes to all the stuff that Google's recent Reader redesign broke.

In this new version you'll find Dustin's popular Absolutely Compact skin, plus the Remove Unread Item Count, and Mark Until Current As Read scripts. The Minimalistic skin has been fixed (thanks Scott!) and the extension is now compatible with Firefox 3.1 Beta 2.

The only sad news is that we lost the excellent OS X skin, which hasn't been updated to work with Google Reader's redesign. I'm also hearing reports that the Preview button script isn't working, but it is in my tests; if it isn't for you in version 0.5, please post what version of Firefox you're using on what platform (XP, Vista, Mac, or Linux) and I'll continue to try to get to the bottom of the problem. Update: The Preview button is now working; Automatic Preview only works in list view, not expanded. Thanks, Chrismith! In the meantime, Better GReader is a free download for all platforms with Firefox.

Only around five percent of Lifehacker's visitors are using the open-source Linux operating system when they stop by, according to our traffic charts, and only one of our editors (ahem) is regularly using it every day.

Having said that, when we get to write about great Linux-based tweaks or downloads, we get pretty excited—and, apparently, so do our readers and visitors linked in from across the web. Today we're looking back at the Linux-related posts that got the most attention in 2008, so read on to see what you might have missed, and what the open-source crowd is down with. Photo by Ypsy.

Fedora 9 Puts Your Desktop on a USB Drive

There are many tools one can use to create live-booting Linux desktops on a USB drive, including the multi-distro UNetbootin. Back when Fedora 9 was officially released, though, the Red Hat spin-off made a splash by giving us an easy-to-grasp, Windows-based tool for automatically downloading the latest Fedora release and putting it on a USB stick, along with allowing for extra space for storing changes you made to your system and documents you worked on . The Live USB Creator still works with Fedora 10, and very well might have inspired Ubuntu's 8.10 release to include a similar tool.

Seamlessly Run Linux Apps on Your Windows Desktop

There's probably a few Windows-only apps that make living in Linux pretty hard for even those intrigued at the idea—but there's also some Linux apps that would be great to have on your Windows system. Adam detailed how you can put what's basically a full Ubuntu installation onto your desktop with andLinux, using it to enable and launch apps like Amarok, the Akregator RSS reader, or whatever else you're into. For the flip side of that Win/Linux coin, see our guide to using Virtualbox to run Windows apps seamlessly inside Linux

Hardy Heron Makes Linux Worth Another Look

Looking at everything newly available in the popular Ubuntu distribution's 8.04 release, your humble editor jumped on the soapbox and made a case for it being a great reason to give Linux a shot. You could actually install it only as a Windows boot option without messing with your system's boot record, or easily access both Windows and Linux-formatted drives from either system. You could share settings between open-source apps like Firefox, Pidgin, and Thunderbird, and your ability to customize your desktop was pretty boundless. We try not to rant too often here, but sometimes it's worth letting fly with the links and inline pictures.

First Look at Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex Beta

There wasn't half as much new in October's 8.10 release of Ubuntu as there had been in the majorly re-spun 8.04, but a bunch of seriously helpful usability tweaks made it worth the upgrade. Much-improved network and wireless management (including baked-in 3G card support), a graphical indicator for the installation partition editor, and hardware and dual-monitor managers that explained more of what was happening. Ubuntu-savvy author Keir Thomas also gave us a more in-depth, user-focused look at 8.10.

Lifehacker Faceoffs: Battles of the Thumb Drive Linux Systems and Linux Distros

We describe, you decide. We couldn't pretend to cover every desktop Linux operating system or live-boot-able, portable-minded distro out there, so we offered up a few popular, prime examples and polled our reader for their preference. As of this morning, Ubuntu held a commanding 49 percent in the desktop poll, followed by Ubuntu variants like Kubuntu/Xubuntu, then PC Linux OS (surprising!) and Fedora. In the thumb drive wars, Ubuntu still rules the roost at 29 percent, followed closely by Puppy Linux at 24 percent, then Fedora and Damn Small Linux at 13 and 12 percent, respectively.

Five more popular Linux posts

• Five Tweaks for Your New Ubuntu Desktop—Taken from the first things your editor always finds himself doing upon a new install. Switching to mirror servers, disabling or throttling index services, and setting up automatic home folder backups.
• Make Your Linux Desktop More Productive—Windows and Mac fans thinking about making the switch can benefit from checking out how to give their desktops a familiar, quick-task-switching feel, using dock programs like Avant Window Navigator, quick-launchers Gnome-DO or Launchy, and system tray indicators galore.
• Ask the Readers: Would a Prettier Linux Make You Switch?—Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth said he wanted to take an Apple-like focus on creating an elegant, eye-pleasing desktop for Linux distributions, and we wondered if that was a big missing link in Linux adoption. Readers seemed to agree it was important, but, well, another Mac trait—usually seamless hardware compatibility—was more key to your minds.
• Ubuntu 8.10 Gets Optional DarkRoom Theme—Looks like a lot of Ubuntu users are getting a bit tired of the orange/brown theme, and like the eye-relaxing looks of darker-hued desktops.
• Linux Desktops Dressed Up as Macs—For those who don't mind the mental schism between an ultra-proprietary desktop look and open-source guts, there are plenty of tools and tutorials for getting a strikingly Apple-like look on your Linux deck.

What was your favorite Linux app, tweak, or discovery from 2008 (or, if you're not calendar-minded, in recent memory)? Tell us about it in the comments.