Everybody gets a little ribbing at their birthday party, and we're no different. As part of Lifehacker's fourth birthday, let's take an awkward, yet light-hearted, stroll through the strangest and most controversial stuff we've posted.
Photo by tandemracer.
We're always pretty quick to jump on a video or tutorial that tells you how to assemble something new out of stuff that's cheap or already in your home, if it seems cool or useful enough. The second criteria of why you'd build it, or whether it's safe to, sometimes lags just behind the first press of "Publish." So while in posting DIYer Kipkay's turning a flashlight into a handheld burning laser does deliver a creative reuse of old DVD drives, it should have occurred to us that said creation is probably best left in a locked fire-proof box, never shown or explained to kids, and taken out only when everyone in the room is wearing dark goggles and signed off on release forms. Commenter EBone said it best in quoting Dave Attell on the game of horseshoes:
... this can only end in two ways: 1) This is boring, let's do something else, or, 2) OWWW! My eye!
After all, the last thing a blogging site supported by display ads wants you to do is lose the use of your eyes. (Kidding! Kind of!)
Cracking open the casing on batteries turned out to be a Pandora's Box for Lifehacker in 2007. We first saw, right before the new year, that you could pull three AAAA batteries from a nine-volt—but those are four As, mind you, and it's only some batteries, and not always acceptable as replacements for those tiny remote guys. But then we saw that you could get eight—eight!—watch batteries from a 12-volt battery. So along came a little video promising to help us 32 AAs from a single 6-volt lantern battery, and, well, we rushed into what we thought was pure money-saving, geeky love. And we got taken. Here's what you really find inside a 6-volt. Heads were shaken and then kept low, emails exchanged, and a vow taken to be far more cautious whenever the leprachauns of the how-to web promise to show us hidden treasure inside household items.
Just like where you work, it's okay when the Lifehacker staff jokes amongst themselves about how the only life tip left to write about is "Wipe your shoes before you enter your house." When anyone else does it, though, it stings—even it it helps remind us, occasionally, of the fine line between "Good point!" and "Well, duh." So even if detailing the (sometimes) quickest way to get your Starbucks and get out did feel like an inspiring little thought-let to some readers, scroll through the comments, and you've got a good lesson in the instant-feedback training we go through, more than a dozen times a day.
We know exactly why most of the world's web users want the occasional ability to surf without revealing their tracks—they don't want their kids to know they're getting a puppy! If that's your situation, or you've got some other crazy reason, we're sorry we ever pointed you to Browzar. It sounded convenient (plugs into Internet Explorer) and clever, and, hey, there were funny testimonials about why it was helpful! But it turned out to not cover up anything, and it was also full of adware and spammy search results. We certainly weren't the only ones who thought that a privacy-focused browser was unique and neat—this was 2006, remember—but at least two writers here put their heads on their virtual desks when it was mentioned. So, yes, we're pretty sorry about that one.
The typical Windows system is a big, unwieldy thing, stuffed full of safety features, corporate services the home user doesn't need (and vice-versa), and plenty of cryptically named features. And it's hard to tell exactly what's speeding up where, or slowing down, since every computer boot and run is different.
All that is to say we're usually cautious about making deep system changes, but we sometimes get caught up in what seems like ingenious fixes. In the summer of 2008, Vista bashing was the style (as opposed to modern-day, but related, Windows 7 evangelizing), and a setting that seemed to force Vista to use multiple cores for booting seemed like a hidden fix for a deep-rooted problem. Right? No, totally wrong, and that was my bad. Over four years of linking, we've probably ventured into, or at least not explained fully, a few other tips to "speed up Windows" that may or may not work—the catalog is too vast to index and verify. But, luckily, fake multi-core hacks and other such material inspired The How-To Geek to clear the table with a manifesto on debunking common Windows performance tweaking myths.
We saved the best/most-obvious/guranteed-flame-starter topic for last. There are those who have paid for every MP3, ripped or otherwise, and every video file they've ever had on any type of media player, and use file-sharing networks to trade public domain works. And then there's the vast majority of computer users, whose copyright values range far and wide across the rest of the legal spectrum. We try to keep both the law and its consequences, and the average user's convenience, in mind when we write about BitTorrent, peer-to-peer networks, and net-grabbing tools, and it usually pays off.
Usually. Lifehacker started its blogging life accused of corporate-backed copyright fascism for trying to state the obvious, if unlikely, risks of illegal downloads. We shared a reader's story of getting caught, and, 497 comments later, learned that our readers are all over the place on digital media and its discontents. Eventually we crafted a guide to protecting your privacy when downloading, and while we tried to explain that it wasn't 100% guaranteed and was intended for any downloads, we read the comments and track-back links and felt a strange circle-of-life nostalgia from the early days. We're pretty much expecting this kind of debate for our next four years, and beyond. Overall, that's a great thing.
Before we turn off the projector and put away the Slides of Shame and Silliness , let's give a special shout-out to the posts where someone, anyone, jumped in to suggest the solution to any problem, on any computer, was to "Get a Mac," "Switch to Linux," or even head "back to Windows," on rare occasions. We wouldn't have half the heated comments we do if it weren't for you crazy party crashers!
But wait! Before you go, we'd love to hear which Lifehacker posts struck you as crazily out of place, surprisingly controversial, or as evidence that certain bloggers were working with far too little sleep. Drop the links, and your reactions, in the comments.
Breaking News: Army Frees Windows XP Background
via Rocketboom
image via Pundit Kitchen
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Breaking News: Army Frees Windows XP Background
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I Hardly Know Her is an super simplified interface for Flickr that displays your photostream with minimal distractions, showing just the photos, with additional information when you hover over the image. Here’s what my photostream looks like.
I Hardly Know Her was created by Justin Ouellette, a photographer and the guy behind the recently re-launched Muxtape music service.
Flickr? I hardly know her…
via Ryan Carson on Twitter
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I Hardly Know Her, A Super Simplified Interface For Flickr
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The first Lifehacker post hit the tubes four years ago today. Since then, we've published thousands of tips, tricks, guides, and tools to streamline your life. Here's a brief history of Lifehacker, 2005 to 2009.
Below, we've taken a look back at all of our posts from 2005 to present and pulled out the five most popular posts of each year. Not all of them remain entirely relevant today, but they provide a nice overview of where we've been in the past, and hopefully may even introduce you to some older Lifehacker content that only our most dedicated readers may recognize. Let's get started. Photo by BohPhoto.
A Brief LHistory of 2005: In the early days of 2005, our legendary editor emeritus Gina Trapani first opened the Lifehacker floodgates, unleashing onto unsuspecting readers a bountiful array of tips and tricks the likes of which the world had never seen. By fall of '05, Lifehacker brought on its second and third editors. By November of '05, yours truly joined the Lifehacker fold. By the end of the year, Lifehacker had been quoted by the New York Times, named one of Time magazine's 50 Coolest Web Sites of 2005, and landed on oh-so-many more lists. It was a year of considerable growing pains, a whole lot of imageless text, and some considerably cool hacks, including the following five most popular posts of 2005:
The iPod has always been a popular item at Lifehacker, especially considering how many restrictions Apple places on your ability to actually use the thing in perfectly reasonable ways. That's why it's no surprise that the most popular post from our first year of existence is our guide to copying songs from your iPod to your PC.
Of course, a lot has changed since 2005, which is why we've since put together a new, much more up-to-date guide for copying music from your iPhone or iPod to your computer for free.
Way back in 2005, Gmail was still an invite-only beta service (oh wait, it's still in beta), but our simple little guide to using Gmail as your SMTP server made a big splash.
In its earliest days, Lifehacker was primarily a compendium of very short tips and tricks, without much long-form content. In September of 2005, Gina wrote a fantastic, step-by-step guide detailing how to set up a personal home web server—and thus, the Lifehacker feature was born. Since then, we've published countless in-depth guides features, but this web server feature continues to be one of my favorites.
Simple Windows tips were our bread and butter back in the day (and, let's be honest, still very popular now), so it's no surprise that this relatively barebones post on how to reset your Windows XP password did so well. (This is pre-Vista, y'all!) Since then, we've covered all kinds of Windows password-related content, including our guide to cracking Windows passwords and our more comprehensive guide to recovering lost passwords with free tools.
Hot on the heels of the home server feature, Gina came back to show the world that it doesn't take a computer engineer to set up a home FTP server so you can access your home files from any computer. We've since updated that feature with an even better guide to building a home FTP server with FileZilla.
A Brief LHistory of 2006: Lifehacker alum Keith Robinson finished his 7-month tenure at Lifehacker, and in came the skilled Wendy Boswell to add her web search expertise to the team. In November, we also added a fourth editor, the talented Rick Broida. Lifehacker received a Wired Rave Award, was nominated for three Bloggies, and made a splash in the dead-tree world with the first edition of the Lifehacker book, Lifehacker: 88 Tech Tricks to Turbocharge Your Day. Photo by Sister72.
I headed to the first annual Maker Faire in April of '06 and came back with only one project in mind: to turn my $60 router into a $600 router with the free, open-source DD-WRT firmware. Since, I've changed horses in the open source router scene to the equally awesome Tomato firmware—once again detailing how to turn your $60 router into a user-friendly super-router.
After battling blue screens of death and bloated software installs you just can't seem to clean up, sometimes there's not much you can do but format your drive and install Windows from scratch. We showed you how, and clearly you appreciated the favor.
Love it or lump it, when Windows Vista beta hit the tubes in June of '06 we couldn't wait to try it out. Still, we weren't quite ready to ditch our old installation of XP, so our guide to dual booting XP and Vista showed you how to dip your toe in Vista without leaving the comfort of XP. Believe it or not, it's the same basic process as dual booting Windows 7 with XP or Vista.
You may not believe it today, what with all your fancy tools and web sites that make ringtone creation a breeze, but there was a time when getting a new ringtone on your phone without paying for it was kind of a chore. Our guide to making a ringtone from any MP3 walks through editing an MP3 and getting it to your phone in a few easy steps that still hold up today.
Ubuntu's first release may have been way back in 2004, but the open-source Linux distribution made a splash in a big way in 2006, prompting us to dig in and write up our ten favorite Ubuntu apps and tweaks. Many of them still hold up today, but our much more recent list of the top 10 Ubuntu applications definitely offers a fresher look at what Ubuntu has to offer.
A Brief LHistory of 2007: The productivity-powered Lifehacker engine continued hitting on all pistons in '07, with shoutouts from Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, PC World, and other prestigious names in the biz. We also secured our first Bloggie for Best Group Weblog. Apart from all the attention, we were changing things on the site, too. We started our Lifehacker Code project, in which Gina and I released a handful of Firefox extensions and Windows applications into the open-source world. On the masthead, we said goodbye to old friends, hello and goodbye to Kyle Pott and—that's right—we brought in our current senior editor, Kevin Purdy.
High price of an entry-level Mac gotcha down? Our guide to building a Hackintosh Mac for Under $800 put Leopard on your desktop for less than the cost of any Mac on the market. The resulting machine benchmarked admirably next to real Macs, and a few months later the process got that much easier when we showed you how to install OS X on Your Hackintosh, No Hacking Required.
You know that crazy Lifehacker Code project we started in 2006? Well, Gina's Better Gmail 2 Firefox extension was far and away the most popular creation of the bunch, supercharging your Gmail inbox with custom tweaks and features.
Back in the early days of the iPhone and iPod touch, jailbreaking was the only way you could get third party apps running on your device. Things changed when iPhone 2.0 hit the streets, but the jailbreaking scene is still as alive as ever, and we're still showing you how to jailbreak your iPhones.
It's never been all that easy to burn just any old video to a DVD unless you were willing to shell out a little cash for a shareware app. When we showed you how to burn almost any video file to a playable DVD, we stepped through putting those hours of AVIs onto DVDs with a free, open-source app called DVD Flick.
Love your iPod but not terribly thrilled with iTunes? Our guide to adding music and movies to your iPod from any computer without iTunes will free you from the shackles of iTunes while still letting you enjoy the goods your iPod has to offer.
A Brief LHistory of 2008: Hopefully '08 isn't a distant memory to anyone yet. The second edition of the Lifehacker book, Upgrade Your Life, hit shelves; Lifehacker won it's second bloggie for Best Computer or Technology Weblog; and we continued to get mentions across the cultural landscape at places like TIME, PC World, The Wall Street Journal, and a few other familiar places. We made a splash on CNBC in about 45 seconds of Holiday GTD, and expanded and contracted to the tune of the recession—namely, our bench added intern-turned-editor, Jason Fitzpatrick.
Our first guide to building your own Hackintosh went up in late 2007; our second guide, which detailed how to install OS X on your Hackintosh PC, no hacking required, attracted the clicks in similar fashion in early 2008.
By early 2008, third-party apps for jailbroken iPhone and iPod touches had grown from simple tools to seriously cool status. At that point, we published our list of the 20 best iPhond and iPod touch applications. In July, Apple officially opened the App Store for business, which meant a whole new list of excellent free apps for the iPhone and iPod touch—but that's another story.
Despite all the developments on the web in the past four years, at the end of the day we all still end up back at the Google search box. Our top 10 obscure Google search tricks introduced you to the Google-fu you need to create laser-precise search terms for your daily queries.
Nothing says good times like a little harmless prankery, so it's no surprise that our list of top 10 harmless geek pranks—published the day before April Fool's—garnered some serious clicks.
The iPhone's great, but if you don't feel like shelling out the monthly fee to Apple, we showed you how to turn your iPod touch into an iPhone using a jailbroken iPhone, a custom mic, and an iPhone app called SIP-VoIP.
We've already seen some serious change in 2009, most notably the transition of Gina from editor to weekly contributor (you can expect to hear more from her starting next week). I'm tasked with attempting to fill Gina's shoes, Kevin Purdy is already doing a standup job at Senior Editor, Jason Fitzpatrick is coming into his own on the weekend and with more weekday posting, and the How-To Geek has joined us as a contributing editor to round of Team Lifehacker 2009. We're stronger than we've ever been, have all kinds of plans for improving, and hope to make 2009 the best year of Lifehacker yet.
Thanks for reading, and thanks for four fabulous years with us at Lifehacker. Here's to four more great years!
Got any Lifehacker favorites over the years? Let's hear them in the comments.
Driving is a fact of life for most of us, but it doesn't have to be just another chore. Make the most of your driving time with these ten tips for streamlining your time in the car.
Photo by 96dpi.
We really dug the Dollar Stretcher blog's recipe for DIY de-icer—simply 3 parts vinegar to 1 part water in a spray bottle, applied before a cold and wet night. But our commenters have a few of their own solutions for cold-weather cars. Among their suggestions: A cup of cold water and a good scraper; simply covering your windshield with cardboard; and even using the A/C and heat simultaneously. While you're assemingly your anti-ice weapons, keep a little water-free hand sanitizer handy—it can de-ice a lock.
Those whose factory stereo decks lack a frontal input for an iPod or other MP3 player know that FM transmitters are no substitution for a simple wire. But you can limit the number of audio break-ins from radio stations and other cars' devices with Sirius' FM Channel Finder, which finds the most empty radio spots in your ZIP code. On the other hand, if you're not afraid to yank the stereo out of the dash and add your own stereo inputs, it's actually pretty simple; we've previously pointed to two solutions, one with soldering, the other without (scroll down to "Wire Your Car Stereo for an iPod"). If none of that takes, you've always got the "nuclear option," at least if you've got an easily removable exterior antenna—just yank it out and fire up the newly empowered FM transmitter.
You'll hopefully never need to pull out your emergency kit in a real life-or-death situation. Any time you're in your car and not going anywhere, though, you'll be glad you're prepared. Edmunds.com has a extensive, always-prepared kit list, which seems a little OCD until you've ever tried to call a tow truck company in unknown country, finally getting an answer of "later this afternoon" (seriously). Our tech-savvy, road-ready readers also have a lot of great suggestions for travelers with all kinds of needs.
You can't control traffic and road conditions across your entire commute, but you can control the way your mind takes it in and deals with it. We're not talking about a vague, everything's-gonna-be-just-fine sense, either—there are some simple, thought-by-thought improvements you can make, as explained by driving expert Tom Vanderbilt. One of the key changes is releasing your anger at "late mergers," and curtalining your own rapid lane-changing:
And changing lanes is counter-productive. It increases the risk of an accident, makes a driver more stressed and doesn't make much difference. When tested in Canada, the driver that changed lanes at every opportunity only made four minutes in an 80-minute drive.
Photo by Nicholas_T.
Yahoo Autos/Greencar.com wrote it first, and we agree—you probably don't need an oil change every 3,000 miles. Crack open your the owner's manual for your vehicle—no, seriously, reach into the glove box for it—and you'll often find inside a recommendation for changes every 5,000, 7,000, or, in some cases, every 10,000 miles. Giving into social/corporate pressure just pulls cash from your pocket, and gives the environment more dispensed oil to deal with. Be brave instead and drive right past the 15-minute quick-lube joints with your little "secret." Photo by vanlaar.
For those long, multi-state hauls or the (sober) drive home after a late night, you might think a quick nap in a parking lot or rest stop might be the best thing for droopy eyelids. Not so, according to French researchers, as caffeine wins out over naps for every age group, but especially among those 30 and older. Of course, there's a middle ground for nap lovers and French roast drinkers—the clever caffeine nap, which requires drinking a cup of java right before a nap no longer than 15 minutes. You'll wake up with the dual benefits of a recharging nap and alertness-boosting caffeine, and you're ready to stare past another set of mile markers.
It's always great when one of our differently-obsessed sibling blogs stops by to drop some science, and Jalopnik's visit during the days of super-expensive gas proved no different, offering up five ways to use less fuel and still get where you're going. Here's the simplest, no-tools-required tip:
Fill up your vehicle during the coolest part of the day. With older pumps that don't have a temperature-compensating flow meter, fuel is denser when it's cool, so you actually get more for your money when you pump gas in the early AM instead of filling up at 5:30PM on your way home from work.
Gas may not cost more per gallon than a value meal these days—well, depending on your chain of choice—but it's still not cheap, so use it wisely.
If you secured your license without getting the hang of the wheel-cranking parallel parking routine, Ann's Driving School has some specific parallel parking tips for getting more comfortable with parking between cars. Nothing beats real-world practice, of course, but Ann's offers a systematic approach—and, as some readers pointed out, is based in San Francisco, where speedy street-parking is kind of a life necessity.
Dentist, plumber, and mechanic—everybody needs one of each they can trust (though accountant wouldn't hurt, too). On the car front, ask your friends, co-workers, and neighbors for recommendations, and use a comparison site like the previously mentioned RepairPal to see how close to the mark your estimates are. Can't build up the courage to debate what your car really needs? Try simply bringing your maintenance manual to the shop and insisting on what's necessary. Finally, check out VideoJug's demonstration of five repairs a slightly shady shop may try to pressure you into:
Nothing, aside from a time machine, can get you out of a traffic ticket every time, but there are ways to improve your handling of the whole situation. During the stop, for instance, don't try to impress by quickly grabbing your license, registration, and insurance paperwork—just sit with your hands on the wheel. It's one of five do's and five don'ts compiled by Car and Driver with the help of state troopers. Once you've got the ticket, don't grab the checkbook and stamps right away. Consider, for example, that we mentioned, even a trooper's messy handwriting can beat that traffic ticket.
For more tips on making your car run better and turning it into a better place to be, check out our Top 10 DIY Car Hacks.
What tweaks, hacks, or simple change of routines has made your driving life better? Share your road warrior wisdom with all of us below.
Don't be alarmed if it looked like the entire internet was infected with something earlier this morning—Google apparently tagged every search result, including its own sites, as something that "may harm your computer."
The glitch seems to be fixed now (11:50 a.m., EST), and the tips we received from watchful readers came in between 9:52 and 10:20 a.m. EST. We'll update if any official word on what happened comes out of Mountain View. Thanks to Jim and Andy for the screenshots, and to all the readers who tipped us.
Here's the page you saw if you actually clicked through to a result:
Creator of previously mentioned mind.Depositor and Lifehacker reader Patrick Ng has updated his killer DIY GTD notebook design with a more streamlined, all-leather mind.Depositor 2.
Why the update?
After creating the original mind.Depositor with clips and using it for a while, I found a small problem but it bugs me on regular basis. To insert and pull out the cards, it requires force, no matter how small it is, it creates stress. That's why superior Japanese stationery designs often put into considerations how to reduce user efforts. They call the practice "Universal Design."So I set out to do a simpler version by using two pieces of leather only. I also have a practice to carry a small notepad or Field Notes to capture to-do inputs temporarily before transferring them to GTD index cards. So I'm adding a slit for the notepad and a slit to store extra blank index cards.
Check out Patrick's full post or his Flickr guide for the detailed rundown of how he created this attractive and GTD-packed notebook from two pieces of leather. Whether or not you like the design of the new mind.Depositor, you may still want to give his mind.Depositor GTD index cards a try, a printable index card template for GTD enthusiasts.
The latest Big Fat Whale comic by Brian McFadden features “Internet Anti-Memes & Non-Sensations”. Maybe all of these should join forces and start a NotROFLCon.
via Chris Glass
image via Big Fat Whale
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Internet Anti-Memes & Non-Sensations on Big Fat Whale
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