Oh, you little cars, how you vex us. Teeny, bite-sized vehicles — cute and efficient, fun to drive, mod-retro-glamorous, and almost as adorable as Hamster on a Piano. We can’t eat look at just one. Fortunately for us, there’s the Microcar Museum, complete with virtual tour and videos. Every day is a big day for little autos online thanks to The Bruce Weiner Microcar Museum in Madison, Georgia, where they house the world’s largest collection of microcars defined as, “late 1940’s- pre-1964 range with Engine sizes of 700cc or less (many are 250cc and 50cc) and 2 doors or less.”

World War II came to an end in 1945 and Europe lay in ruins. A shell-shocked population came out of the bomb shelters and faced an unimaginable scene of devastation and ruin.

As if the seemingly endless task of clearing away the rubble wasn’t enough, there were crippling shortages of food, raw materials, electricity and gas. Value and worth were measured in Chesterfield cigarettes.

The population collectively rolled up its sleeves and went to work. The astonishing rebuilding of an entire continent over a period of ten years was accomplished through a unity of spirit and purpose unimaginable today. Bright, talented engineers, many out of the former aircraft industry, put their minds to the problems of mobilizing the population under adverse conditions. It’s said that the true master reveals himself within limitations and so this focusing of energy and talent resulted in an enormous variety of small vehicles; some successful, others less so - but all of them interesting!

The microcar or “bubble car” came to symbolize this period of renewed energy and pulling together.

The bubble car boom lasted only a decade, but the period left a lasting impression even on those who abandoned their Kabinenroller for a “real” car. The cars continue to be found in barns and collections throughout the world but are particularly meaningful to the Europeans, whose lifestyle was, in part, made possible by these tiny cars.

The Bruce Weiner Microcar Museum “hopes to bring this brief, colorful flowering of talent and ingenuity to the attention of a new generation of automobile enthusiasts” And to bring back that totally awesome shade of turquoise. Check the info page for in-person admission ($5!) and visiting hours.

images via Microcar Museum

Thanks for the tip, Don C!

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The Bruce Weiner Microcar Museum Is Actually Big Fun

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Interactive marketing agency AKQA sends this year’s Christmas greetings in the form of a viral video featuring microwaves.

via Neatorama

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AKQA Presents A Microwave Christmas

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We've featured gobs of great Mac freeware over the course of the year—now it's time to check out the best. Keep reading for a look back at the 10 most popular Mac downloads of 2008.

NOTE: This list is based on the popularity of posts we've published in 2008 only, regardless of the original release date of the app. Many were brand new this year, while others were solid updates to popular software. If you took a look at yesterday's Most Popular Free Windows Downloads of 2008, a few of the cross-platform favorites may look familiar.

Firefox 3 Is Released for All Platforms

Oh Firefox, what a journey it's been. We've seen all sorts of competition spring up in the browser market over the past year, but no browser excited readers like the third major release of Firefox. If you're living la vida Firefox, make sure you're taking advantage of the top 10 Firefox 3 features, then school yourself with our power user's guide to Firefox 3.

Mojo Downloads Music from Your Friends' iTunes Libraries Over the Internet

iTunes may be one of the most widely used desktop media players on the block, but that doesn't mean it can't be better. Mojo lets you browse through your friends' iTunes libraries and download any song directly to your computer. Sounds like an improvement to us. If you haven't used Mojo, check out our guide to getting started with Mojo.

OurTunes Makes a Comeback, Still Snags Music from Shared iTunes Libraries

What's that? Two iTunes-related apps back-to-back? That's right, the dormitory classic ourTunes is back at it. It's got a new developer releasing updates semi-regularly, it's still open source, and it still downloads any song from any shared iTunes library on a network. (Original post)

PwnageTool Jailbreaks the Hell out of Your iPhone and iPod touch

Mac users jumped all over the opportunity to jailbreak their iPhones with the dead simple PwnageTool this year (the official download is a torrent from The Pirate Bay). Though Apple continues to battle jailbreaking with every new software update, the iPhone Dev Team has so far managed to push out new jailbreaks through PwnageTool within a few days of each update. Using PwnageTool is dead simple, but if you'd prefer a little reassurance, check out our guide to jailbreaking your iPhone with PwnageTool.

XBMC Moves to the Mac in a Serious Way

XBMC made its first official appearance on the Mac back in February, and since then the popular media center application has made the move to all platforms and found a huge following along the way. Mac lovers have been especially lucky: XBMC's move to the Mac has come in many different forms, including Plex and Mac-supported spinoff, Boxee.

Dropbox Makes Cross-Platform, Instantaneous File Sync a Breeze

We saw several exciting new file-syncing applications in 2008, but none more popular than Dropbox. It's fast, it's free, and—if you need it—it makes for a helluva password syncing utility. (Original post)

iTimeMachine Backs Up Leopard Over Your Network

Mac OS X Leopard's Time Machine may offer one-click backup so simple that you've got no excuse not to back up, but unless you like carrying an external hard drive with you everywhere you take your laptop, it's not always terribly convenient. iTimeMachine backs up your Mac using Time Machine to any hard drive on your network. (Original post)

Top Draw Generates Psychedelic Images

The Official Google Mac Blog released a crazy little utility called Top Draw that creates killer wallpapers and other trippy psychedelic images. (Original post)

Songbird Challenges iTunes

Songbird is a free, cross-platform music player built using the same bricks as Firefox. That means it's open source, extensible, and looking to innovate. Songbird has been incubating for a while, but now that the official 1.0 release has hatched, it's sparked all kinds of interest. If you're just trying Songbird for the first time, check out these killer add-ons that make Songbird sing. (Original post)

Secrets Presents an Easy Way to Tweak Leopard's Hidden Features

Developed by the Mac philanthropist who brought us Quicksilver, Secrets rolls every hidden feature of Leopard into an easy-to-use preference pane in your System Preferences. Tweaking hidden features that would normally require obscure Terminal hacks is as simple as ticking a checkbox with Secrets. (Original post)

Whether or not your favorite Mac download of '08 found a top spot in this list, let's hear more about your favorite download of the year in the comments.

Apple has just announced that it will not longer be returning to Macworld. In addition to that, Steve Jobs will not be giving his annual keynote at Macworld 2009, instead it will be Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing.

photo by Scott Beale

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Apple Announces That This Will Be Their Last Year At Macworld

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i'll be posting a series of thoughts over here in an attempt to clear my mind for the new year. I'll keep posting links that catch my eye over here tho, so keep sending me things, yes yes?

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has produced this great animated holiday greeting “The 12 Days of EFF” recapping some of the battles they fought in 2008. Help EFF continue doing all of their great work by giving a gift membership or buying something from the EFF store this holiday season.

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

The 12 Days of EFF, Helping The Internet Be Rights Based & Free

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Web-based to-do list Remember the Milk's streamlined interface and excellent shortcut key support are great out of the box, but there are a few useful fixes and tweaks, too.

I've compiled a short list of user styles and scripts that can be used with the Stylish or Greasemonkey extension in Firefox to make RTM much friendlier. Let's take a look.

If you haven't used user styles with Stylish before, check out Lifehacker's complete guide (along with some functional Firefox user styles). All set? Now onto RTM tweaks with useful Stylish user styles.

Add Keyboard Shortcut Reminders User Style

The powerful keyboard shortcuts in RTM are the main reason I made the switch (well that and the Remember the milk Gmail Gadget). The only problem is there are so many keyboard shortcuts, and it takes a while to learn them all, so this user style adds the keyboard shortcuts next to each function so you can learn them.

The C-S shortcuts in the header stand for Ctrl+Shift, so Ctrl+Shift+/ will focus the search box, for instance.

Some of the shortcuts do clutter up the interface a bit... but you can use that as incentive to learn the shortcuts!

I have the style installed, but I only enable it when I need to remember a shortcut that I'd forgotten.

Install the Display Keyboard Shortcuts User Style.

Longer Search Box User Style

One of the most annoying things about the default RTM interface is the really tiny search box, which makes it almost impossible to use their rich searching functionality. Until I found this style I would create my search criteria in Notepad and then paste it into the box.

The only problem with this style is that sometimes it will conflict with the status messages, if they are double sized (which they usually aren't).

Install the Longer Search Box User Style.

Only Show Smart Lists User Style

If you are a serious GTD user you likely have created dozens of lists to track all of your projects, which leaves you with a cluttered mess of tabs that simply can't be good for productivity. This user style hides all of the regular lists, leaving only the Smart Lists (otherwise known as saved searches), and shrinks the tabs down a bit as well.

I've found this one to be quite useful if you are a big tag user, as you can create custom "lists" that exclude items that are scheduled in the future, or only show items tagged with next action, etc.

Install the Smaller Tabs, Smartlists Only User Style.

WideScreen RTM User Styles

I personally don't mind the size of the RTM screen, but if you want to utilize more space on your widescreen monitor, there's a number of user styles that will increase the width of the lists.

You can choose between the different sizes based on your monitor, or you could download it and customize yourself.

Remember The Milk widely(1200px)
Remember The Milk widely(1000px)
Remember the Milk(1440 px)

A "Bit" Better RTM Greasemonkey User Script

This script is the best of the bunch, in my opinion, as it adds a bunch of new keyboard shortcuts and fixes my biggest gripe by moving the cluttered tabs into a list over on the left side, and even lets you hide lists that you don't want to see. Here's the full list of features:

• Move List Tabs to the Left
• Add Count to List
• Shift + j/k Switches Between Lists
• Ctrl+G - Go to list
• Ctrl+M - Move to list
• Hide Lists

You can see here how much more clean and organized the view is with the lists over on the left side.

The ability to move items to another list with the keyboard is a really nice touch... just hit Ctrl+M and a little dialog will show up, with auto-complete as you type.

If you go into Settings \ Lists you'll see a new "hide" link on each list, which will let you hide it from view.

Unlike the others in this list, this script requires the Greasemonkey extension.

Install the A Bit Better RTM User Script.

What other tips and tricks do you use for Remember the Milk? Tell us in the comments.

The How-To Geek is a tech writer and geek enthusiast who loves to control every aspect of his computer from the keyboard. More of his tips and tweaks can be found daily at Howtogeek.com.

The Hong Kong office of Zendesk (the help desk service we use) worked with the web design studio Beansbox to create the wonderful FM3 Buddha Machine Wall. The project is based on the FM3 Buddha Machine and was inspired by the Sam Poh Buddhist Temple in Brinchang, Cameron Highlands, Pahang, Malaysia.

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

Zendesk FM3 Buddha Machine Wall

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for all you cute animal haters :: NSFW

Around my house, hacked email accounts were something that happened to other people—relatives with weak passwords, generally, or Dateline story subjects. Until yesterday, when my wife emailed everybody about "gps ,TV LCD,cell phones ..."

She didn't really blast-mail everyone about a spammy electronics site, of course—whoever broke into her Gmail account did. They also changed her signature to incorporate the same poorly-worded pitch, and turned on a vacation auto-responder to reply with the same. The mailings and confused replies started at 12:49 p.m., and we had her account cleaned out and, thankfully, password changed by 1:10 p.m. But we both learned a few important lessons about email security, and dealing with lapses in it, during the short but intensely aggravating break-in.

The first was that we had no idea how someone got her password and got into her account. Her old password wasn't up to NSA standards, but it was a phrase not found in a dictionary with a few numbers after it, which we'd both figured was good enough for a site run by a legitimate firm like Google. Our home wireless network is encrypted (WPA2) and restricted by MAC hardware addresses, so it's doubtful it came up there. Still, though, somebody we didn't know got in, and we could only guess at a few possible causes:

• "Open" wireless networks: Often times, my wife or I will jump onto a random, non-secured wireless point from my iPod touch or one of our laptops to check email. While we were on vacation in Europe recently, this was definitely a daily occurence.
• Staying logged in on other computers: Friends and relatives are often nice enough to let us log into our Gmail accounts on their own desktops or laptops. If they don't have their own accounts with the big G, and we forget, we could stay logged in on their systems long after we leave.
• Phishing attack: The wife uses Internet Explorer 7 on an up-to-date Windows XP system, so there is supposedly both an anti-phishing tool and firewall to prevent sites from pretending to be a Gmail log-in screen or key-logging her. Still, though, a distracted mind might not notice a single curious link—good reason to have us both check our phishing IQ.
• The password just wasn't good enough: Entirely possible, if someone hit on the right combination of username and password, or perhaps tracked it back from being used in similar form on another, less-secure site (which my boss definitely recommends against.

Then there's just general fears about net security and passwords. A few domain administrators fell victim to email-related attacks recently, and being unable to convince my wife to switch browsers leaves me regularly concerned.

But there's no real way, it seems, of knowing how her password got out, and so it's just an embarassing fluke for my wife, and her tech-obsessed husband is more than a little red-faced as well. And one feels seriously vulnerable knowing that someone with experience busting into webmail accounts had access to years of messages. But in dealing with the break-in, we've picked up a few good practices to deal with, and hopefully prevent, something similar happening in the future.

Clean out your contacts: Assuming the hacker(s) really did just want to get their stupid link in everyone's face, the worst part of the experience for my wife was having to send out an email to everyone in her contacts, since the hacker hit everybody in her "suggested" contacts (people she's emailed at least once, auto-saved by Gmail) with the spam. That meant people she'd only mailed once or twice for online auctions, lost acquaintances she hadn't planned on chatting with again, relatives, in-laws—you name it. I'm definitely weeding through my own contacts now, deleting anyone I really don't email anymore, and who I certainly wouldn't want to spend time replying to after receiving a message akin to "What is this? Who are you?"

Be short, but courteous, in your clean-up email: After quickly changing the account password and turning off all the trickery, I set up an email with everyone in her contacts put into the BCC field. We spent a good ten minutes thinking of ways to explain, apologize, and maybe elicit sympathy, but realized that people had already been annoyed once, so a quick message was best: Account compromised, don't click that link, apologies, thanks.

Use Gmail's mass sign-out tool: I knew about Gmail's multiple session info and remote sign-out tool because, well, I write for Lifehacker. My wife didn't, however, and it would've come in handy whenever she thought she might've been signed in elsewhere. And had I thought to screenshot the session info during the break-in, I might've had some help in figuring out where the compromise came from.

Keep passwords and accounts out of your email: Luckily, a few quick searches reveals that my wife never sent an account password, or even account number, over her email. The seemingly unlimited storage and search-ability of Gmail makes it a tempting place to stash your life's details, but once someone gets in, that can work against you in some pretty dire ways.

Use the https:// connection: This goes for Gmail or any other webmail account. In Gmail, switching to the encrypted version is a setting on the first page of your "Settings." If you're using a Google Apps account that doesn't have that ability enabled, try our Better Gmail 2 Firefox extension, which can force it.

That's my little morning tale of woe and warning. Have you ever had your own or friends' accounts, email or otherwise, compromised? What did you learn from it? Got suggestions for a non-tech-obsessed spouse in building better security into their day? Tell it all in the comments.