Happy Halloween!
Submitted on October 31st, 2005 by admin
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Today is Halloween here in the United States, so if you’re celebrating it, happy Halloween to you! If you’ve never heard of Halloween, read all about it over at Wikipedia. We hope you all have a good time and remember, don’t get too drunk, and don’t take candy from strangers. Maybe next year we’ll have a Halloween costume contest, but until then, stay safe!
As for the haiku contest we’re having, you have until 12PM Eastern Standard Time to send your entries in. I’ve received way more than I anticipated (in the hundreds) so I will do my best to get through all those entries today, but from the looks of it, I won’t be announcing the winners until sometime tomorrow. If you are a winner, you will be contacted via e-mail prior to my announcing it on the site. Happy trick-or-treating!
Make Firefox look just like Internet Explorer
Submitted on October 31st, 2005 by admin
Filed under Browsers and Software and Windows
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I know most of you that visit our site (about 55-60%) use Firefox, but for the rest of you, here is a quick and dirty guide to making Firefox look just like Internet Explorer, if that’s what is holding you back. Let me first say that Internet Explorer is full of holes and exploits, and if you really care about making your computer safer, you should definitely be using Firefox.
I found via digg which gives you all the tools necessary to make Firefox look like IE. There is even a profile you can download which works for Portable Firefox (the USB drive version of the browser). The guide is pretty useful and will make your Firefox window fit in much better with the rest of your Windows applications.
Still looking for a 30gigs.com account? Try this
Submitted on October 31st, 2005 by admin
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We already discussed 30gigs.com, a free invite-only e-mail service which offers 30 GB of storage space, hence the name. If you’re still looking for an invite (we do NOT have any so don’t ask), then check out this page which appears to let you bypass the invite process and go straight to creating a new account. Good luck!
Free movie to iPod conversion tools for Mac
Submitted on October 31st, 2005 by admin
Filed under The Mac Side and Portables and Software and Video
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Are you a Mac user still looking for a quick, easy, and free way to convert some of your movies into iPod format? I recently put up a guide to doing this using Handbrake, but it involved quite a few steps. If you don’t want to go through all that trouble- and who does, right?- then here are two great options, both of which are totally free.
First up is a little AppleScript which will add a new menu option to Quicktime Player (Quicktime Pro is not required for this to work) which will help you convert the frontmost movie into iPod format, then sync it to your update upon next sync. You can download it right here. The second tool is a program called MoviesForMyiPod (formerly MoviesToGo) which will do the entire conversion process by simply selecting a movie and clicking one button. Both of these tools are completely free and require Mac OSX 10.4.
[Via Podcasting News and Lifehacker]
Speeding up OpenOffice startup times
Submitted on October 31st, 2005 by admin
Filed under Productivity and Software
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Even with all the improvements of the latest release of OpenOffice, the free software suite is still very slow to start. Don’t get me wrong, I love the office suite, but who wants to wait a couple of minutes for an application to start, right? You could always use the OpenOffice quickstarter, but this will keep the application in memory and so will take up system resources you might want to use elsewhere. The Inquirer (not THAT Inquirer) has a couple of useful tips to speed up OpenOffice with simple options tweaks. First off, go “into the Tools and then options management sections. In the memory dialogue box, increase graphics cache to 64MB and memory per object to 8MB. It will take Open Office a few openings before this helps.” The other tweak is to disable any Java options since, according to the article, “it takes Open Office to open Java, you can go and make a cup off coffee, go to the loo, read the online newspaper on your thin and light and return to your desktop.”
[Via OSNews]
Sync your mobile phone with iTunes
Submitted on October 31st, 2005 by admin
Filed under Audio and Portables and Software and Windows
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When rumors began surfacing of Apple getting ready to release an iTunes phone I was pretty excited because it would mean one less device I’d have to carry but the song limitation (among other factors) kept me from picking the ROKR up. Fortunately, you no longer need to get a ROKR in order to carry your music collection on your phone thanks to a new application called the Mass Storage Synchronizer.
Mass Storage Synchronizer is a little piece of add-on software for iTunes which basically turns your phone into a portable version of iTunes and best of all, there is no 100 song limit as you’re only limited by the amount of storage on your phone. The software works with Sony-Ericson Walkman phones, Palm Treo 600 and 650 and Nokia’s XpressMusic and Samsung MP3 phones. It’s Windows only, requires Java, and is totally free.
TipMonkies turns 6 months!
Submitted on October 28th, 2005 by admin
Filed under Announcements
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So as I mentioned yesterday, today marks our six months on the web. As a result, I’m taking the day off from posting and relaxing at my in-laws house for the day. I want to thank everyone for helping us get to this point- contributors, tip submitters, and all readers- and for helping us grow so fast. When I started this site on April 28, 2005, I never thought it’d be as big as it’s gotten, at least not so quickly. We hope we can continue to bring you the latest and greatest information for many years to come. Don’t foget that we’re having a contest with some cool prizes. I’ve already received 200+ entries, but keep sending them, and remember, you’re not limited to one entry either. Deadline for entries is Monday morning, and I’ll announce the winner sometime Monday afternoon. So about the growth…here are some stats to show you where we stand today:
- Unique visitors per month, from 65 in April to nearly 50,000 in October so far.
- Monthly hits have gone from 1,400 in April to nearly 2,000,000 in October.
- According to Alexa.com, we’re the 110,000th most popular site on the web (last I checked there were several billion websites). We started out at around number 2,995,000 six months ago.
Thanks again to everyone, and we’re looking forward to many more months and years to come. I’m already hard at work planning some things for our one year celebration!
Can your computer run that game? Analyze it
Submitted on October 27th, 2005 by admin
Filed under Resources and Software and Hardware
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As new technology rolls out every year, PC game manufacuters are constantly adding new stuff to their games which means that it might not necessarily run on your system. I prefer console gaming nowadays because of this, but many people are still hardcore PC gamers and would have it no other way. If you’d like to know whether your PC can handle the latest and greatest (like maybe Half Life 2 or Battlefield 2), then check out System Requirements Lab, a free tool which lets you pick a game and analyzes your PC components to tell you if you’re good to go, or are overdue for an upgrade. You do need to download a small Java applet to this to work, but the service is entirely free and provides some really accurate results. The one problem I had was that it didn’t recognize my CPU as a notebook chip so it failed my system on processing power (mobile chips are usually equivalent to much more powerful desktop chips). Now that I know how much better my laptop is than I thought, I may just have to start gaming on it!
[Via digg]
Major search engines add trip planning services
Submitted on October 27th, 2005 by admin
Filed under Resources and The Mac Side and Services
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Both Google and Yahoo! just rolled out new services to help you find flights and other trip planning services to their ever growing list of products. Google’s offering is found directly in their search engine and allows you to find airline flights by doing a search with airport codes. You will then be given 2 new boxes so you can input dates for your trip, and are then transported to Expedia, Hotwire, or Orbitz (Expedia is the default). Here’s a sample search from San Frascisco to New York.
Yahoo’s offering is a full fledged service called Trip Planner which offers much more extensive information, and if you have a Yahoo! account, you can use it to plan your entire trip. Just create a trip, then start finding cities, and Trip Planner will help you find stuff to do in the area including restaurants, entertainment, and shopping. It’s still in beta, but looks pretty promising. I’d love to see flight and car rental information along with the rest of the offerings, but a combination of this with Google’s flight search could be a good resource.
Voo2do, making list management more productive
Submitted on October 27th, 2005 by admin
Filed under Productivity and Services
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We’ve talked about quite a few web-based to do list management services before and I’m a big fan of quite a few of them. Jeff, over at Thrashing Stinks informed me of a new service called Voo2do which looks great and is really one of the better services available of its kind.
Voo2do offers all the features we’ve come to expect from a to do list manager including unlimited lists, the ability to organize tasks by project, and event notification via e-mail all wrapped up in a clean and simple AJAX powered interface. The main feature which I liked and which sets Voo2do apart from the rest of the services is the ability to track the length of time a project is taking, something no other to do list service offers. This will ensure you can accurate and easily manage your schedule. There is no ability to share lists with other users yet, so all lists are private and for your eyes only. Voo2do is completely free.
[Thanks, Jeff]
