February 2009Monthly Archives

what he said. one hero talking about my most beloved of heroes.

There are lots of options for designers and developers to show off their work, ranging from setting up their own website to communities for sharing portfolios. Whobuilt.it takes a simpler approach, establishing what is essentially a whois that associates designers and developers with a given domain name.

I’ve seen a few posts over here regarding problems with an unmaintained WordPress installation. It definitely can be work to manage software that is not covered within the supported repositories (WP is in the repositories, but its not updated as frequently as upstream). I thought I would cover how I maintain my installations and hopefully they can help others simplify their process.

Remember that story Bobby Jindal told in his big speech Tuesday night — about how during Katrina, he stood shoulder-to-shoulder with a local sheriff who was battling government red tape to try to rescue stranded victims?

Turns out it wasn't actually, you know, true.

Over at Instructables, Lifehacker reader Matt Lumpkin has posted a detailed guide to how he mounts his laptop on the back of his monitor for an iMac-like all-in-one PC. Obviously this isn't limited to Macs, but if you want to save some space, declutter your desk, and create a nice, clean monitor-only look, the results speak for themselves. The idea and setup is incredibly simple.

Sixth Doctor Colin Baker made a joke in his column for This Is Local London about how young new Doctor Matt Smith is, saying:

“As if David Tennant hadn’t already proved the visibly beneficial power of time travel on the genes, the imminent new one, Matt Smith, we are told, is so young that he is likely to be asked for ID if he tries to purchase an intergalactic gargle blaster in licensed premises either side of the Atlantic.”

Welcome to the Bushfire portal, specially designed to be accessible via any web-enabled phone. Below you will find useful links and telephone numbers to assist with the Victorian bushfire emergency.

Tumblr has long been a site that promotes outside-of-the-box blogging with inside-of-the-box restrictions. Originally just a short-form way to tumble across the web and quickly post photos, videos, audio, text, and quotes, Tumblrs everywhere now appear in all shapes and sizes. One very popular niche approach is to focus tumblelogs around celebrating the art form that is music.

Its not just about bullying. Look at images of women in games. Realistic, much??? Was every game developer bottle fed and over compensating now?

Live CDs (and DVDs) are versatile tools, allowing you to boot into an operating system without installing anything to your hard drives. Let's take a closer look at the five most popular live CDs

Does the African nation of Zimbabwe really possess the holy grail for Doctor Who fans? A British newspaper is claiming that the country may have the last remaining collection of the series' 1963 first season.

If the only purpose of cookbooks were to teach people how to create decent meals, they would take up no more space in the average home than do baby books.

YOU are what you eat, or so the saying goes. But Richard Wrangham, of Harvard University, believes that this is true in a more profound sense than the one implied by the old proverb. It is not just you who are what you eat, but the entire human species. And with Homo sapiens, what makes the species unique in Dr Wrangham’s opinion is that its food is so often cooked.

Microsoft says it made an accounting error when it laid off some employees last month and now feels the best way to correct the error is with what will likely add up to a public relations blunder.

Description

Query_posts can be used to control which posts show up in The Loop. It accepts a variety of parameters in the same format as used in your URL (e.g. p=4 to show only post of ID number 4).

Delicious, a powerful social bookmarking tool, has been around for what seems like forever, and while it may not get as much press as Digg, it still has an extremely active and loyal group of users. There are a number of tools out there that cater to these users, some of which still even stick by the old del.icio.us moniker.

Anthropologist John Hawks is interviewed in the latest issue of Nature talking about how humans have been undergoing accelerated evolution over the past 40,000 years, largely due to cultural shifts affecting our genes.

part of a great series.

Ever had one of those moments when you really wished you knew how to do something specific? If only there were someone you could ask…

This is the first post in a series on The Power of Measurement. In this economic climate, these posts are designed to cover ways to make your website as successful as possible. Over the course of the next few weeks, our in-house Analytics guru, Avinash Kaushik, and others will demystify the world of website analytics and offer tips for getting the most out of your metrics. -Ed.

Something is about to happen on Saturn that's so pretty, even Hubble will pause to take a look.

"On Feb. 24th, there's going to be a quadruple transit of Saturn's moons," says Keith Noll of the Hubble Space Telescope Science Institute. "Titan, Mimas, Dione and Enceladus will pass directly in front of Saturn and we'll see their silhouettes crossing Saturn's cloudtops—all four at the same time."

Whatever the reason for ending our Facebook friendship, I figured that many people would benefit from a thorough overview on how to protect your privacy on Facebook. Below is a step by step process for protecting your privacy.

Linux only: Blueman, the Bluetooth manager for many Linux desktops, has update to provide a friendlier, easier means of connecting your phones, earpieces, and even 3G-connected devices to your system.

Dozens of fancy point-and-click task managers promise to organize your to-do list, but so often power users find that nothing outdoes that trusty old classic: the todo.txt file. If you're a command line lover who skips checkboxes and drop-downs to dash off notes and tasks in a regular old text file, or you're intrigued by the idea and wish your todo.txt chops were stronger, read on.

Windows only: If you're looking for a fire-and-forget video converter to help stock your iPod, iPodME is a dead simple and lightweight tool for bulk converting your video files.

The new British movie Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel bills itself as "Doctor Who meets Shaun Of The Dead." But this trailer makes it look more like Primer meets The Goodies.

Lindsay Duncan, who's currently starring as Margaret Thatcher in the BBC2 drama Margaret, will be Doctor Who's next companion in the show's second 2009 one-off episode. She'll be the most strong-willed and cleverest companion yet, according to the show's producers.

Can it be constitutional to exclude from public service or service as a witness in a state court any and all atheists? Such a practice is so throw-back in nature, that it reminds one of the Spanish Inquisition. And yet, when I read the first part of this Washington Post piece, I was flabbergasted to find that Arkansas is one of a half-dozen states that does so. Read on and be flabbergasted (or not) yourself.

Here's a little guide that will help you install and run WordPress locally on your XP box in less then 10 minutes

nasa edge podcast, for all us space geek freaks!

Web Development

Adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools.

Picnik makes your photos fabulous with easy to use yet powerful editing tools. Tweak to your heart’s content, then get creative with oodles of effects, fonts, shapes, and frames.
It's fast, easy, and fun.

Vodafone just scooped planet earth with the first touchscreen-only Android phone: HTC's Magic.

A mobile phone that is a GPS or a GPS that is a mobile phone. Of course, the mobile phone has everything you can expect from a such a device these days, including a 3-megapixel camera (with a real shutter button, like it should be) and a music player, everything tied to the GPS. This seems to be the main point of the Garmin G60: Everything revolves around geo-location.

Colors Palette Generator turns a picture with a pleasing look into a palette of equally pleasing colours for your web site or design project. You can upload any PNG, GIF or JPEG that is less than 1MB in size and Colours Palette Generator will extract colours from it. The application creates three basic palettes of the light, medium, and dark colours, as well as a grid of 49 shades from the image if you're not satisfied with the palettes it has created. Once you've got the look you like, you can export it as either a Photoshop swatches file or as a CSS stylesheet. Free to use, no sign-up required.

The popular cross-platform file-syncing application Dropbox is a hit among Lifehacker readers, but it has one major drawback: It only syncs files placed inside the My Dropbox folder. Here's how to get around that limitation.