Month: March 2013

By Jason Fitzpatrick, Lifehacker – April 25, 2010 at 03:00PM

It’s yard sale season and it’s a great time to buy entertaining essentials for cheap. Why serve your company on disposable wares when for the same expense and some yard sale hunting you could use funky china and retro glassware?

It’s that yard-sales-galore time of year again and a perfect opportunity to stock up on supplies to help you entertain this summer and throughout the year. Over at the design-on-a-dime blog I Like Merchant Ships, they’ve put together a list highlighting some of the great essentials you can pick up by shopping around at yard sales. Among their suggestions:

Mix and match dishes allow you to set an extra place (or five) without resorting to paper.

This $10 Meakin set [seen above] encouraged me to pick up blue-and-white in every pattern. White, of course, is always classic.

Napkins make any meal feel nicer. White goes with everything, but prints add fun to a basic table.

I paid 5-cents each for these restaurant napkins. I also pick up unopened packages of paper napkins to tuck in food baskets and meal deliveries.

Check out the full blog entry for tips on everything from budget friendly-seating to stocking up on throwaway containers for events where you might not want the hassle of hunting them down again—house-warming parties, funerals, etc.

Make sure to check out some of the previous resources we’ve reviewed to help you maximize your yard sale bounty, like Yard Sale Treasure Map and Gsalr. Before heading out you might also want to take a peek at the archives of our #cleveruses and #reuse tags to help you see yard sale finds in new light, like turning a beer cooler into a sous-vide cooker or a box of old slides into a privacy screen.

By John Herrman, Gizmodo – April 24, 2010 at 02:02PM

This week, Giz saw no less than two (two!) hard drive casualties befall our staff. So, in honor of Matt and Wilson’s data, hit up Lifehacker’s definitive guide for fixing, protecting, backing up and preserving that spinning data destroyer that lives inside your computer. Heed. More »

By Kevin Purdy, Lifehacker – April 24, 2010 at 12:00PM

You should never feel like your hard drive is holding out on you. Anyone should be able to back up, recover files, boot multiple systems, upgrade, or otherwise improve their storage space. These tips explain the possibilities and procedures.

Photo by limaoscarjuliet.

10. Quiet It Down

Over time, the moving parts and powered pieces that move your magnetic disks around at lightning speed will wear, age, and get noisy. In a desktop computer (a Windows PC, generally), you can quiet the drive with rubber shock absorbers or elastic suspension. Toting a laptop? NotebookReview has a good starter guide to cleaning your laptop, which reduces noise, removes dust, lowers temperatures, and gives your drive a bit more life—never a bad thing. (Original posts: Rubber shocks, elastic).

9. Erase It Entirely, the Right Way

There’s a huge range of tools that offer spy-agency-level data wiping—some of them are complete overkill. What software actually wipes the slate clean? Jason ran through them and picked out the good stuff, along with the physical, take-no-prisoners means of data destruction, in his advice on how to properly erase your physical media. If you need to pass on or reuse a disk, those apps and boot CDs will get you there. When you just need to make sure your credit card numbers are hidden forever, there’s always a hammer. No, seriously. Photo by scragz.

8. Make a Complete Image

Backups keep your data safe, but a complete image of your system on an external drive ensures that everything—applications, data, settings, wallpaper choice, the whole shot—make it back onto your system if things go wrong. Windows users can image their hard drives with DriveImage XML, a great free tool. Another free tool, SuperDuper, makes it easy, if not exactly quick, to mirror your entire Mac onto an external drive.

7. Convert It to an External Drive

Whether it’s an old desktop with a surprisingly large drive, or a laptop that’s getting an upgrade, you can save that once built-in storage and turn it into an external drive, one you can just plug in with a USB cable and use for backup, media storage, or whatever you need.

6. Visualize Your Usage to Free Up Space

The strangest stuff ends up clogging up your hard drive unnecessarily. Leftover files from CD rips, huge data folders from games, backup files for apps you don’t have installed—the list goes on. We’ve previously shown how to visualize your usage, but we updated with a new look at more simple tools for analyzing and freeing up space on your hard drive. Once you know what’s there, and how big it is, you can start toward getting rid of some of it.

5. Recover Files and Rescue Your System

When things go wrong with your hard drive, they usually go really wrong—lost files, no booting, and general panic ensues. Adam’s rundown recovering deleted files with free software, with a focus on Windows utilities, with a few cross-platform goodies sprinkled in. When you can’t get into your system, we heartily recommend a live Ubuntu thumb drive to grab files and fix things up, though a system rescue CD session can work wonders, too. When we put the call out, the answer that came back for the best recovery tool was Recuva, a Windows utility that can save files from hard drives, SD cards, iPods, and much more.

4. Install a Drive Yourself

Tech shops and laptop sellers will charge you a good bit over the parts cost to install a new, likely larger hard drive in a computer. Whether it’s a desktop, a MacBook, or an SSD drive, you can likely take an hour and tackle it yourself. Adam explained the desktop hard drive installation, while tech blogger Dwight Silverman has explained a MacBook hard drive upgrade. Each laptop is built differently, but if a solid-state drive is in your future, this tutorial on MacBook installation should give you some general guidance on the job. It’s a good skill to have, in general, because as Silverman writes, “Whatever you have now, it’s not enough. And when you add more, that won’t be enough, either.” (Original post: MacBook hard drive).

3. Dual-Boot Windows, Mac, and/or Linux

Just because your computer only came with one operating system doesn’t mean it has to stay that way. If you’re a Mac owner who’d like a little Windows time now and again, read up on Gina’s guide to setting up Boot Camp for Mac and Windows. If Windows 7 looks appealing, and a virtualized XP Mode isn’t quite enough oomph, you can still boot Windows 7 with XP or Vista, and just choose your Windows flavor at start-up. And if you’re keen on giving Linux a real go, why not dual boot it with Windows 7 in a way that makes it easy on both systems? It’s so nice when everybody at the (partition) table just gets along.

2. Upgrade It Without Re-Installing

Maybe you’ve settled on a spacious new hard drive for your laptop, a solid-state drive for durability, or just need to rescue your stuff before your drive goes. Time to re-install Windows, right? Not so much. Using the Clonezilla Live CD, it’s possible to upgrade to a spacious new hard drive without having to completely re-arrange your operating system and applications, and tediously transfer all your media over. It’s a step-by-step process, it’s fairly straightforward, and you get to trick Windows, somewhat, into believing that nothing ever happened, which can be its own reward.

1. Automatically Back It Up

Don’t sell your computer data short—even if your documents don’t seem all that important, the time you spent installing applications and putting everything in order is definitely worth saving. If you’ve got a good spare hard drive or a web space you can FTP into, you can set up automatic hard drive backup through Windows. Most folks, though, will want to go with one or both of two routes: online backup, for the entire-house-burns-down security, and/or offline backup, for speedy backups and convenient restoring. The best tools for doing so, when we asked, were Dropbox for online syncing—even though it’s not exactly proper backup—and Time Machine for external hard drive backups. For two solutions that make the process mostly painless and care-free, try web-based, automated systems like Mozy or Carbonite. Photo by miss karen.

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What’s the hard drive tool you’d rather not live without? What blog posts or tutorials showed you something new about your hard drive? Share the good stuff in the comments.

By Erica Ho, Lifehacker – April 23, 2010 at 06:00PM

The U.S. Foreign Service Institute teaches foreign languages to government diplomats and personnel for duties abroad—and its courses are available online, for free. Which means you can access audio, texts, and tests in 41 different languages.

The FSI Language Courses web site isn’t actually maintained by the U.S. government itself, but the materials developed before 1989 are within the public domain (whether all of these materials came before then is not clear). Some languages contain more materials—for instance, the three texts on Sinhala isn’t going to beat the giant course on French anytime soon. For the most part, most major languages have student texts in PDF format, and audio in MP3 format which you can later put onto your music player. The courses also feature tests to see how well you’ve covered the material. In some cases, “headstart” courses for certain regions in the world are also available.

The only major language not covered is English, which makes sense. The site is a little reminiscent of old-school language learning, but the resources are ridiculously extensive. As a native Vietnamese speaker, I didn’t find the section archaic at all. Adios, Rosetta Stone.

By Rich Whittle, Business Opportunities Weblog – April 23, 2010 at 03:31PM

Sometimes inventions just need a little push, a little publicity to get them noticed by the public or investors.

That’s why last year Inventors Digest launched Under the Radar, a section in the print version that features new and nascent inventions that have yet to take hold in the market. Precious few publications offer inventors of all stripes this type of opportunity.

Under the Radar has proved so popular that Inventors Digest is going to experiment and expand it, both online and in the print edition.

So here’s the deal – if you’re an inventor with a new product or prototype and want some international exposure, send a description and an image to info@inventorsdigest.com and they’ll see what they can do.

Note: disclosing your idea in public starts the clock on when you can file for a U.S. patent, and can derail foreign patent applications. When in doubt, check with your local inventor club or your patent attorney.

Photo by Photofunia.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.

By Scott Merrill, TechCrunch – April 22, 2010 at 06:00PM

I often wonder if plumbers reach a point in their career, after cleaning clogged drain after clogged drain, that they begin to hate plumbing. They hate pipes. They hate plumber’s putty. They hate all the tricks they’ve learned over the years, and they hate the need to have to learn tricks. It’s plumbing, for goodness sake: pipes fitting together and substances flowing through them. How complicated can it be?

I hate computers. No, really, I hate them. I love the communications they facilitate, I love the conveniences they provide to my life, and I love the escapism they sometimes afford; but I actually hate the computers themselves. Computers are fragile, unintuitive things — a hodge-podge of brittle, hardware and opaque, restrictive software. Why?

Continue reading…

By J.D. Roth, Get Rich Slowly – Personal Finance That Makes Sense. – April 22, 2010 at 04:37PM

In my posts last summer about understanding the federal budget and the truth about taxes, I pointed to Jess Bachman’s Death and Taxes poster. This monster 24-inch by 36-inch graph shows you just how the government spends your tax money.

From the site:

“Death and Taxes” is a large representational graph and poster of the federal budget. It contains over 500 programs and departments and almost every program that receives over 200 million dollars annually. The data is straight from the president’s 2011 budget request and will be debated, amended, and approved by Congress to begin the fiscal year. All of the item circles are proportional in size to their funding levels for visual comparison and the percentage change from both 2010 and 2001 is included so you can spot trends.

The Death and Taxes poster costs $24, but Bachman has is offering a “buy-one, get-one-free” special for GRS readers. If you use the code slowly at checkout, you can pick up two posters for the price of one (so they’re twelve bucks a piece).

Last year, Bachman sent me a copy of the 2010 poster, and I can attest that it’s a stats-geek’s dream. It’s not art — you won’t want to hang this in your living room — but if you’re curious about government spending, this poster is a keen tool.

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Related Articles at Get Rich Slowly:

• Understanding the Federal Budget
• Is There an Online Alternative to Quicken?
• Personal Finance Mags for Twentysomethings?
• Weekend Update: Get Out the Vote Edition
• Roth IRA Conversions Made Easy

By Kevin Purdy, Lifehacker – April 22, 2010 at 11:00AM

You want to use secure passwords, but you can’t remember random numbers and letters. You’d also like a fail-safe plan, in case your computer password system goes bad. PasswordCard provides the best of both worlds, offering strong passwords with a wallet-based backup.

The PasswordCard itself is printed in color, and has different symbols heading each column, and a different color for each row. You generate the card’s random characters by typing a number into the field above the card and generating it anew. Store that number printout somewhere very safe—a fireproof safe in a deep closet, perhaps—and put the PasswordCard in your wallet. It might take some time to get used to “Note symbol, green” being how you remember where to find your iTunes password, or “Smiley face, purple” for Facebook, but it’s a secure system, and even if your wallet is lost or stolen, it’s useless to the thief without your number, or knowing your exact scheme.

PasswordCard is free to use. For a double-check on how secure its password suggestions are, read up on how a hacker would break your weak passwords.

By Franky, ForeverGeek – April 22, 2010 at 06:12AM

Some things are part of the human’s race history and really need to receive much more attention than we actually give them. So even if that means we might have to educate you guys a little more from our ForeverGeek HQ, then we will.

Let’s start today with a little quiz.

If I say Star Trek, you say?
No, not Spock! Of course Spock is ace, but Star Trek wasn’t just Spock, right. Let’s try this again.

If I say Star Trek, you say?
*sigh* I should have known you were all going to answer ‘Scottie, beam me up’. How could I have been this naive. Ok, let’s try it differently.

If I say Gene Roddenberry, you say?
‘STAR TREK!’

Finally. Now we’re getting somewhere.

Now if I say Rod Roddenberry, you say?
‘Uh?!’ That’s exactly what I thought. Of course the name Roddenberry rang more than a little bell in my head, but Rod?

So it appears that Rod Roddenberry Gene’s son is. And for some years already he has been working on Trek Nation, a documentary about Star Trek and his father.

By Ben Blanquera, Techlife – April 22, 2010 at 12:05AM

Great presentation on an incredible culture – thank you Brian Link for tweeting about this presentation