Doug's Research Feed

tumblr2wp - A tumblr to WordPress Exporter

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 05:50:43 -0400

Tumblr2WP makes it super simple to transfer your Tumblr content to your own, self-hosted WordPress install. http://tumblr2wp.com/

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THIS SITE IS NO LONGER UPDATED!

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 05:50:00 -0400

Please go here instead: https://www.evernote.com/pub/dajbelshaw/ideasgarden

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Single Best Free Way to Transform Classrooms (Primary-Lifelong) of Any Size--and Fast Too! | HASTAC

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 02:35:11 -0400

Here's the single best low tech interactive classroom and lecture technique I know: Free, transformative, easy, works: http://t.co/OwA1m2yl – Cathy Davidson (CathyNDavidson) http://twitter.com/CathyNDavidson/status/189170519411662848 http://hastac.org/blogs/cathy-davidson/2012/04/08/single-best-free-way-transf....T4JCGBtZywI.twitter

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The Virtual Community: Table of Contents

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 02:35:10 -0400

People tell me that "the art of hosting good conversations online" (1998) is still useful http://t.co/kYHBMo8Z – Howard Rheingold (hrheingold) http://twitter.com/hrheingold/status/189099957138104322 http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/

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BBC News - Phonics test: NUT may ballot on boycott

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 14:20:34 -0400

Phonics vs League Tables. As @bengoldacre observes, teachers should critique data rather than hiding it. http://t.co/H5fiEuYh – Ian Yorston (IanYorston) http://twitter.com/IanYorston/status/189044499056566273 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-17651107

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The strategic nature of all ventures « discourse and notes

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 13:05:28 -0400

Reading: The strategic nature of all ventures http://t.co/pnDSqVIf – Colin Wright (colinismyname) http://twitter.com/colinismyname/status/189028758211133440 http://www.discourseandnotes.com/blog/2012/04/08/the-strategic-nature-of-all-...(discourse+and+notes)

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instaGrok: The Search Engine Made Just For Education | Edudemic

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 12:35:36 -0400

Changes look awesome! @instaGrok: The Search Engine Made Just For Education | Edudemic http://t.co/9OfhSJOj – Leah MacVie (leahmacvie) http://twitter.com/leahmacvie/status/189009814414819329 http://edudemic.com/2012/04/instagrok-the-search-engine-made-just-for-education/

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Britain's economy will thrive if computing becomes child's play | Eric Schmidt | Comment is free | The Observer

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 09:50:26 -0400

Britain's economy will thrive if computing becomes child's play - now says Eric Schmidt http://t.co/k8OecgWm #GuardianICT – Tony Parkin (tonyparkin) http://twitter.com/tonyparkin/status/188906813058588672 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/apr/08/eric-schmidt-improve-comp...

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Flight 001 | Modern and Innovative Travel Products

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 07:05:19 -0400

http://www.flight001.com/

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DSpace at Open Universiteit: Awareness Support for Knowledge Workers in Research Networks

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 05:50:41 -0400

The PDF of my PhD thesis is now available on the web http://t.co/cFfP6aiF #celstec #ounl #awareness #knowledgework #research – Wolfgang Reinhardt (wollepb) http://twitter.com/wollepb/status/188917392074752000 http://dspace.ou.nl/handle/1820/4193

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JetS3t - Cockpit

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 05:35:24 -0400

Cockpit is a graphical Java application for viewing and managing the contents of an Amazon S3 or Google Storage* account, and for managing Amazon CloudFront distributions. http://jets3t.s3.amazonaws.com/applications/cockpit.html

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Picture 4

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 04:51:16 -0400

by Mr Stacey

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WordPress - Reaction WP : Responsive, Rugged, Bold | ThemeForest

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 04:20:29 -0400

http://themeforest.net/item/reaction-wp-responsive-rugged-bold/702169

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The Next Time Someone Says the Internet Killed Reading Books, Show Them This Chart - Alexis Madrigal - Technology - The Atlantic

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 01:20:29 -0400

The next time someone says the Internet killed reading books, show them this chart: http://t.co/VFVl8jA8 – Doug Coupland (DougCoupland) http://twitter.com/DougCoupland/status/188824711847874561 http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/12/04/the-next-time-someone-say...

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Why Nozbe Is Still My Favorite Task Management System

Sat, 07 Apr 2012 17:09:48 -0400

Why Nozbe Is Still My Favorite Task Management System, http://michaelhyatt.com/nozbe.html

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Firefox Notifications

Sat, 07 Apr 2012 17:05:17 -0400

[Survey] Input required for further work on 'Push Notifications for the browser, desktop, and mobile devices' — http://t.co/I8FrRII0 – Mozilla (Pub)lic (mozpub) http://twitter.com/mozpub/status/188726749452967936 http://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/881222/Firefox-Notifications

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The rise of e-reading: The increasing availability of e-content is prompting some to read more than in the past [Pew] http://t.co/Y8z07Bq0

Sat, 07 Apr 2012 13:50:30 -0400

The rise of e-reading: The increasing availability of e-content is prompting some to read more than in the past [Pew] http://t.co/Y8z07Bq0 – DML Central (dmlcentral) http://twitter.com/dmlcentral/status/188676073255485440 http://libraries.pewinternet.org/files/legacy-pdf/The%20rise%20of%20e-reading...

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Roboethics: Three Ways To Make Sure That Future Robots Have Morals | Co.Exist: World changing ideas and innovation

Sat, 07 Apr 2012 13:05:18 -0400

Emerging issue for near future: Roboethics: Three Ways To Make Sure That Future Robots Have Morals. http://t.co/enDQR1MV – Gary Woodill (gwoodill) http://twitter.com/gwoodill/status/188656059072778242 http://www.fastcoexist.com/1679495/roboethics-three-ways-to-make-sure-that-fu...

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The Essence of Connected Learning - YouTube

Sat, 07 Apr 2012 12:20:19 -0400

What would it look like to have learning tuned to the complexity, connectivity, & velocity of our new society? [video] http://t.co/tkQ6bFgS – DML Central (dmlcentral) http://twitter.com/dmlcentral/status/188654780736995330 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91qJOimah_4

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The 21st century pedagogy teachers should be aware of

Sat, 07 Apr 2012 12:20:17 -0400

The 21st century pedagogy teachers should be aware of: Learning to know. To do. To live together. To be. http://t.co/Pc5H9UJX via @medkh9 – DML Central (dmlcentral) http://twitter.com/dmlcentral/status/188649851972620290 http://www.educatorstechnology.com/2011/01/21st-century-pedagogy-teachers-sho....T4BcZVWEDhA.twitter

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OER Visualisation Project: Exploring UKOER/JORUM via OAI with Google Refine and visualising with Gource [day 11] – MASHe

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 11:26:39 -0500

OER Visualisation Project: Exploring UKOER/JORUM via OAI with Google Refine and visualising with Gource [day 11] – MASHe

My summary of the JISC OER Programme Phase 2 Synthesis and Evaluation Summary

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 07:00:01 -0500

In my role at JISC infoNet I support the JISC Open Educational Resources programme. Phase 3 of this programme has just begun, with the synthesis and evaluation report from Phase 2 now available (authored by Lou McGill, Helen Beetham, Isobel Falconer and Allison Littlejohn).

It’s my feeling that not enough people read these, so I’m going to summarise the summary. It will, of course, be partial and miss out some important stuff, so I’d encourage you to go and read the original!

Evidence is accumulating that teachers do share content informally, but do not necessarily consider IPR, or share resources openly. Thus they are engaging in some of the practices associated with OER, but they do not necessarily recognise OER terminology, and in asking about use/reuse of OER we may be asking the wrong questions.

I think there’s a need to move away from the jargon ‘OER’ towards just ‘open content’.

While the current economic climate may promote efficiency as a motive for open release and sharing, the costs involved, and government encouragement of a competitive HE culture, mitigated against this.

It’s a curious situation we’re in: universities are supposed to ‘collaborate to compete’.

While community trust and positive recognition are clear motivators, the lack of such trust and the fear of negative recognition - content ‘not being good enough,’ being thought to be putting oneself forward by releasing material that has not been peer-reviewed, or laying the producer open to legal scrutiny - are barriers to making release of open sustainable.

This is a systemic problem but one which, hopefully, should diminish over time if open practice is seen as the way forward by younger members of staff.

When other resources are freely available for re-use and teacher awareness of IPR is low there is little incentive to use OER, especially if a google search finds relevant resources more easily than does a search of an OER repository.

There’s a huge issue around discoverability and user experience that I know Jorum are addressing (for example).

There is evidence that the openness of resources is promoting wider stakeholder engagement and community and network building… Increasingly projects have talked about the importance of broader activities around OERs - community networking, curriculum development and student engagement.

This is Open Educational Practice, something OER3 is addressing specifically.

Several projects comment that working across boundaries to develop project outcomes (business/community/academy, staff/consultants, students/teachers) has been one of the most radical aspect of their experience and has the potential to change practice more widely

Whilst it’s not the end of subject disciplines (yet!) there is a need to break down the very artificial silos that exist. Open Educational Practice allows this to happen much more readily and quickly.

Cascade strand projects noted that choice of search engine affected which resources were found and used, while collections projects found that their users expected searches to be “google-like” in their ease of use, personalisation, and production of relevant results. Users expressed frustration with the search functionality of many OER repositories. They were also disappointed in the scarcity of relevant OERs, a finding echoed by the release strand PORSCHE project. Most of the collections projects decided to include “grey” or “non” OERs to get round this problem - while clearly labelling them so that their non-licensed status was clear.

See comments above about ‘discoverability’. The debate about whether to include ‘grey’ material into repositories is a flamewar I don’t really want to get into…

An issue emerging during this phase included uncertainties around the meaning of commercial use and the impact of this relating to CC license choice. John Roberston from JISC CETIS has generated some interesting discussion around this in relation to choice of CC licenses in his technical synthesis blog post) and Amber Thomas, JISC provides an excellent description of issues realting to licensing for phase 2 of ukoer in the ‘Importance of licensing section’ of her OER turn blog post

I think it’s the opinion of most people in the world of OER that using the NC (or ‘Non-Commercial’) part of the Creative Commons license is pretty much meaningless. Studies have shown (I should find a link to go here!) that using the least restrictive licensing increases reuse.

In some disciplines, sharing practice through a range of open technologies has emerged as important as sharing resources, and is having an impact on the way subjects are being studied and taught. Considerations of OER use cannot be divorced from these wider changes to disciplinary knowledge practices. Social science subjects, for example, are being changed in radical ways by the availability of public social and research data online as well as the rise of new social/digital practices.

This is an important point. Open content, open access and open source software/technologies go hand-in-hand. It’s a whole ecosystem.

Institutional readiness for OER can become evident through strategic level approaches and senior buy-in. Projects’ view that strategic vision was an essential factor was reflected in attention to institutional strategies and policies. Generally it was felt that strategic buy-in could ensure the development of an infrastructure to enable staff engagement and contribute to longer term sustainability.

Every project and programme says how important it is to get senior level buy-in. What I like here is the reasons for doing so are articulated: improved staff engagement and longer-term sustainability.

Alongside a strategic ‘top-down’ vision was the notion of institutional readiness at ‘ground level’. Projects described open educational practices emerging at an individual or departmental level, or being embedded into professional activities in a low-key way.

Cultural change doesn’t just come from the top of an organization, of course. Emergent practices can be rubber-stamped by senior management. Top-down AND bottom-up.

Findings from this phase confirm those from the phase 1 institutional strand, that there are different cultures of openness at different educational institutions. This is not as simple as a single dimension from closed to open: rather there are many different ways in which institutions can support open educational practices and start to move towards more open policies in relation to educational resources.

Different cultures, and therefore different cultures of openness is a reason why a successful project can’t simply be replicated in a different environment. It’s an iterative process that will take some trial-and-error.

In some senses it is easier to sustain support mechanisms (such as repositories, quality assurance processes or curriculum design practices) than maintaining and encouraging staff engagement at an institution-wide level. Staff awareness, engagement and support for ongoing staff involvement was seen by most projects as crucial and, as in the pilot phase, staff development and training (capacity building), reward and recognition and maintaining communities of practice emerged as important sustaining activities.

This is a really interesting point: it’s easier to support ‘things’ than engagement. There’s an ebb and flow to engagement that has to be respected.

Projects identified positive impacts for a range of different participants (academic staff, service staff, academic managers, students, stakeholders in other sectors) which were a direct result of involvement with an OER project, particularly increased awareness around open educational practices and increased opportunities or collaboration across institutions, sectors and subject disciplines.Projects also celebrated increased literacies of staff involved in projects, particularly in relation to IPR and technical issues. Of note is the fact that several staff saw engagement with OER as having impact on their pedagogic practice and enhanced quality of their own learning resources. Such cultural impacts were supported and enabled by impacts on infrastructure and processes, such as enhanced policies and documentation for dealing with IPR, enhanced models and workflows for developing learning materials for open release, and technical developments including new repositories, repository and development tools.

Here’s the real meat! These are the benefits of OER identified by the JISC projects. :-)

In the learning and teaching area also, a sense emerged of activities around the OERs being as important as the OERs themselves and their potential to encourage ‘pedagogically infomed use’ (SWAP) - ie good learning and teaching practice (open practices). How OERs are integrated into curriculum processes can depend on the way they have been developed or presented. Projects generally produced OERs for a particular subject discipline area, sector or student group and this impacted on intended use.

As I mentioned above, Open Educational Practice is the next big thing. Openly licensing content works in changing the culture of an institution and even a subject discipline. Now we need to expand the circle to include other components of the landscape such as open access journals.

Tony Vincent's Learning in Hand - Blog - Myths about iOS, iPad, iPhone & iPod touch

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 08:56:08 -0500

Tony Vincent's Learning in Hand - Blog - Myths about iOS, iPad, iPhone & iPod touch

@Ignatia Webs: Are #mLearning projects in Africa really successful? #ICT4D critique

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 08:55:38 -0500

@Ignatia Webs: Are #mLearning projects in Africa really successful? #ICT4D critique:

“During his seminar, John raised two major questions:

Are learning projects based on mobile devices really helping Africa forward?
How can we move ahead getting all the major, willing stakeholders around an ethical educational project development table?”

QUT | eLearning Services | Open Web Lecture (OWL)

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 06:49:51 -0500

QUT | eLearning Services | Open Web Lecture (OWL):

“

Queensland University of Technology (QUT) is currently piloting the new web-based application Open Web Lecture (OWL), a student response system that enables academic staff to encourage student engagement on a needs basis.
Features of the OWL application include:

virtual learning in physical spaces
collaborative technology which enables participants to connect via a wireless network using a laptop or mobile device
encourage student conversation and input in teaching spaces
enable student group work and interactive activities
collect and poll student responses
promote a sense of community.

Testing of OWL has indicated the potential for use in other QUT environments such as seminars, workshops and conferences.”

"The current push towards using mobile devices for learning can feel like the first days of home..."

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 06:33:26 -0500

“The current push towards using mobile devices for learning can feel like the first days of home computing. When home computers were first introduced, sales people would wax poetic about a household where children did their homework without complaint, mother kept her recipes in perfect order, and father kept immaculate spreadsheets of the family budget. The reality included children playing poor facsimiles of arcade hits while mom and dad fought about how they spent ten per cent of the family income on a toy. There appeared to be little strategy in home computing sales, just a belief that computers were the future.”

- Forming a Training Mobility Strategy by Adam Smith : Learning Solutions Magazine

Terry Anderson and Rory McGreal speak about Athabasca University and the OERu | TOUCANS Project Blog

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 06:31:03 -0500

Terry Anderson and Rory McGreal speak about Athabasca University and the OERu | TOUCANS Project Blog:

The OERu movement seems to have some big-named backers and is coming on apace!

OER Synthesis and Evaluation / OER Synthesis and Evaluation Project

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 06:28:56 -0500

OER Synthesis and Evaluation / OER Synthesis and Evaluation Project:

#ukoer Phase 2 final report now available!

ALTO UK Overview with Fruit and Veg! (by cltad)

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 06:27:06 -0500

ALTO UK Overview with Fruit and Veg! (by cltad)

Open Educational Resources infoKit / Senior Management Overview - Menu

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 06:26:43 -0500

Open Educational Resources infoKit / Senior Management Overview - Menu:

New Senior Manager overview of Open Educational Resources added to JISC OER infoKit.

Creative Commons Licence Compatibility Wizards

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 06:23:46 -0500

Creative Commons Licence Compatibility Wizards:

OER IPR Support Creative Commons License Compatibility Wizards.

Open Educational Resources | University of Oxford Podcasts - Audio and Video Lectures

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 06:23:04 -0500

Open Educational Resources | University of Oxford Podcasts - Audio and Video Lectures:

All of Oxford University’s openly-licensed podcasts.

FavOERites - Home Page

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 03:22:53 -0500

FavOERites - Home Page:

“The important points to note are - our source code is available on github (https://github.com/favOERites/favOERites), and a demo version of the system we developed is online at http://oerbookmarking.ncl.ac.uk. The site comes with a rich API that is openly available (see http://oerbookmarking.ncl.ac.uk/api/ for some examples of how to use it).”

UNESCO and COL release open education policy document for higher education - Creative Commons

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 11:22:55 -0400

UNESCO and COL release open education policy document for higher education - Creative Commons:

“

The guidelines indicate how the potential of OER can be harnessed to support quality teaching and learning by higher education stakeholders, including governments, higher education institutions, teaching staff, students, and quality assurance, accreditation, and academic recognition authorities.”

Digital Literacies for Writing in Social Media | DMLcentral

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 11:21:07 -0400

Digital Literacies for Writing in Social Media | DMLcentral:

“It’s not someone else’s job to preserve your data.” Amen to that!

"WASHINGTON — It’s been less than a month since the U.S. Labor Department announced $500..."

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 05:29:14 -0400

“WASHINGTON — It’s been less than a month since the U.S. Labor Department announced $500 million in grants for community colleges to develop job-training programs and make them free for other institutions to use, but the program is already facing a threat to its existence. A provision in the proposed House of Representatives budget for fiscal year 2012 would stop the federal government from using grant programs to develop new courses, learning materials or other related projects unless the labor secretary verifies that similar programs are not already available for purchase or “under development.””

- Shutting Down Open Resources | Inside Higher Ed

"Blackboard is supporting a common format and framework for tagging the OER so that instructors can..."

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 05:28:20 -0400

“Blackboard is supporting a common format and framework for tagging the OER so that instructors can search for and find the resources on the Web and in catalogues more efficiently. This effort builds on the principles, best practices and work completed by organizations striving to make it easier to publish and discover educational content and products online, such as schema.org and IMS Global. Also, Blackboard’s OER initiative is closely aligned with the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI), which is supported in part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.”

- Blackboard Launches New Open Education Initiatives — PHILADELPHIA, Oct. 19, 2011 /PRNewswire/ —

"The key aims of this project are as follows: 1. To develop a non-proprietary social bookmaking..."

Fri, 26 Aug 2011 04:24:57 -0400

“

The key aims of this project are as follows:

1. To develop a non-proprietary social bookmaking service to enhance resource discovery across the community. This will be designed specifically for OERs.
2. To provide an openly available and well documented API, enabling 3rd party systems to access and add to the resources and associated ‘paradata’.
3. To pilot the API and system in Dynamic Learning Maps. This will harvest resources for specific topics and add descriptors and links to these within personal and curriculum maps.

”

- Dynamic Learning Maps

GSMA Embedded Mobile - Mobile Education

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 04:13:04 -0400

GSMA Embedded Mobile - Mobile Education:

“The GSMA has published its first Mobile Education Landscape Report describing the emerging global Mobile Education and related e-Textbook Publishing markets.”

Dumpster Drive. Allow others to rummage in your (Mac OSX) Trash

Synechism Ltd. — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 15:21:49 -0400

Although potentially a security concern, used properly this is a great idea. There are files you no longer want but may be of use or inspiration to others. A bit like the items you throw into a skip or dumpster, in fact. So why not allow others to have a look and take what they [...]

Is Michael Gove ‘Noddy on acid’?

Synechism Ltd. — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 15:16:52 -0400

This is important. Instead of turning an individual into a caricature of evil, it’s better to use more subtle messages and humour to get your message across.Clipped from www.guardian.co.ukMichael Gove is not Satan – he’s Noddy on acidWith 40 years of marching under his belt, here is Fielding’s advice for striking teachers: keep a sense [...]

Sharpening your axe

Synechism Ltd. — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 01:58:42 -0400

Great quotation here from Abraham Lincoln and contextualised by the Lifehacker team. The comment by Whitson Gordon is important, “I used to wonder if I spent too much time fiddling with productivity hacks rather than actually producing stuff. Then I got a job, only to find that I hadn’t fiddled enough.” Amen to that.Clipped from lifehacker.com [...]

To-go thinking

Synechism Ltd. — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 01:55:34 -0400

An interesting quotation here shared by Chris Sessums from a Harvard Business Review article. Discrepancies are gaps between who we are and what we want to be, either individually or as organizations. If that gap is good for us (because our brains respond by ‘throwing resources at it’) then a vision that stretches us to [...]

Constellation thinking

Synechism Ltd. — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 16:23:27 -0400

‘Constellation thinking’ is making sense out of semi-random shapes, apophenia, if you will. An example of the comment thread being more interesting than the article - it’s worth clicking through and reading the whole thing.Clipped from snarkmarket.com Tim says: Okay, this is my favorite thing about constellations. Everybody knows that we carve out semi-random shapes from patterns in [...]

Kathy Sierra gets user outcomes

Synechism Ltd. — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 15:48:00 -0400

One of the biggest influences on Doug Belshaw, Director of Synechism - even after 4 years of not blogging - is Kathy Sierra. For reasons you can read about on Wikipedia, Kathy doesn’t have a blog any more. However, she has broken her silence to guest post on Hugh McLeod’s blog, gapingvoid.com. Kathy has always been [...]

Improving email by being courteous(.ly)

Synechism Ltd. — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 16:21:16 -0400

It’s far from perfect, but it’s along the right lines. A small link in your email signature linking to a page telling people whether (relative to you normal load) your email processing queue is low, medium or high. Perhaps a sparkline would be more useful? It’s a step in the right direction towards improving user outcomes. [...]

An important thing no-one will tell you.

Synechism Ltd. — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 14:28:53 -0400

Good advice here from Chris Guillebeau writing at ‘The Art of Non-Conformity’. Whilst consultants (like Synechism Ltd.) can advise, the *vision* remains something that only an individual or organization itself can come up with. You come up with where you’re headed, we’ll help with getting you there. http://synechism.comClipped from chrisguillebeau.comThe standard line is: Listen [...]

Long-term productivity vs short-term productivity

Synechism Ltd. — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 15:50:00 -0400

This is an important point. It doesn’t take a genius to pull an all-nighter and work on things at the last minute. With enough caffeine, loud music and sugar, short bursts of effort can be extremely productive. But this isn’t sustainable. As this post suggests, relationships, health and business prospects suffer if you focus too much [...]

Productivity: people love challenges

Synechism Ltd. — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 15:30:00 -0400

This is a great story from Dale Carnegie’s famous book. It’s not a panacea, but it does illustrate an important point.Clipped from kottke.orgWhen nothing else works, try thisFrom Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People (found here), an anecdote about how Charles Schwab wordlessly motivated the workers in one of his steel mills.Charles [...]

Think tanks and academic research

Doug Belshaw — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 10:23:24 -0400

There’s the same issue over here: think tank reports are (usually) available free-of-charge and are pushed out to journalists. Academic articles, on the other hand, are paid-for and not so high-profile. Although this particular study didn’t seem to suggest that think tank reports are being reported at the expense of academic articles, it remains a concern. [...]

What happened to the ERA will happen to the REF

Doug Belshaw — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 10:03:33 -0400

I’ve looked at jobs in universities. One thing they all say is a ‘track record of high-quality publications in respected journals’. Why? Because of the Research Excellence Framework, a narrow method of judging the ‘quality’ of research outputs by academics. What has it led to? Universities poaching high-output researchers from other universities and paying them [...]

The importance of ’social objects’

Doug Belshaw — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 09:52:28 -0400

I wonder what we can learn about ’social objects’ as ways of bringing people together in education? I’m particularly interested in Hugh McLeod’s mention at the end of this article that social objects don’t matter in the scheme of things, but that it’s the interaction that happens through and because of them that does.Clipped from [...]

From Box-Tickers to Frame-Makers: Transformations in the Roles of Functional Experts

Doug Belshaw — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 09:48:25 -0400

Influencers within organisations are those that can transform their tacit knowledge into “tool-generated, highly-communicable’ knowledge.Clipped from hbswk.hbs.edu [...]

The hard part (one of them)

Doug Belshaw — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 09:44:46 -0400

Doing the reading is important. It’s the reason why people who don’t go to university talk about ‘not needing a piece of paper’ whilst the people who went know exactly why it was valuable.Clipped from sethgodin.typepad.comThe hard part (one of them) A guy asked his friend, the writer David Foster Wallace, “Say, Dave, how’d y’get t’be so [...]

Don’t underestimate the messiness of learning

Doug Belshaw — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 08:28:06 -0400

Some important points made here about learning and teacher CPD. Especially important are the points the author makes about context, that learning is not necessarily sequential, and the issue of performativity. One to bring out at your next CPD session. Clipped from tur-www1.massey.ac.nzPedagogy in a Box: Don’t Underestimate the Messiness of eLearningI won’t reiterate all of [...]

Spaces for dissent and resistance

Doug Belshaw — Sun, 22 May 2011 01:30:00 -0400

A great post by Richard Hall in response to Sarah Amsler. Why don’t people speak out against things to which they’re opposed? I’d suggest: 1. We have more public outlets (such as social networks) to vent our frustration. 2. In a tough economic climate, keeping your job is Job #1. 3. A warped view of ‘failure’ as ’something not [...]

It’s the Pedagogy, Stupid (lessons from an iPad Lending Programme)

Doug Belshaw — Fri, 20 May 2011 09:31:22 -0400

It’s an awful phrase, “the guide on the side, instead of the sage on the stage” but it applies here. It’s the ability to have access to something powerful whilst on-the-move.Clipped from www.elearnmag.orgIt’s the Pedagogy, Stupid: Lessons from an iPad Lending ProgramBy Heather Beattey Johnston and Carolyn J. Stoll, University of CincinnatiWe’re Here, Now What? [...]

Living through metaphor

Doug Belshaw — Fri, 20 May 2011 09:29:24 -0400

The more you think about this, the more you realise it’s true. It’s the ‘theory-ladeness’ not just of science, but of life itself. We live through the mental models and structures we impose upon the world. That’s why it’s so difficult to judge historical characters: you can be historically *disappointed* but it’s difficult to make moral [...]

Badges: bad name, great idea.

Doug Belshaw — Fri, 20 May 2011 09:00:00 -0400

I first came across the idea of ‘badges’ as rewarding learning and bestowing recognition at the OER11 conference last week. Calling them badges belittles the idea, I think - they sound like the type of things that covered my left arm as a Cub Scout. However, the idea is a sound one if it can be [...]

Top 10 Free Download Managers [Lifehacker Top 10]

Gina Trapani — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 12:00:46 -0500

Whether you do your downloading via BitTorrent, FTP, or plain old HTTP, efficiently sucking files down from the cloud onto your hard drive takes the right tools. Whether you're a web video addict, constant software downloader, MP3 freak, or BitTorrent junkie, we've got some power downloading tools for you. Step inside for our picks of the best free download managers that get you the files you want fast and easy.

10. UnPlug

(Firefox extension)

See video, music, or images on a web page that you want right away? The UnPlug Firefox extension adds a little smiling fish to your web pages that "unplugs" embedded objects for your downloading pleasure. Click the fish (or go to Tools -> UnPlug), to suck down media files available on that web page.

9. Miro

(Podcatcher, BitTorrent downloader and more)

The video player formerly known as Democracy, Miro can subscribe to and automatically fetch video podcasts, grab clips from YouTube channel feeds or BitTorrent (in addition to letting you watch streaming video). Here's how to create your television season pass with Miro's BitTorrent capabilities, which works similar to Ted (also mentioned on this list) but without the need for a separate BT client.

8. Ares Tube / TubeTV

(Web video to iPod downloaders and converters)

Easily download video clips from the popular sites (YouTube, Google Video, Metacafe, et al.) and convert them for use on your iPod with Ares Tube (Windows) and TubeTV (Mac). For more video converters, see our top 10 free video rippers, encoders, and converters.

7. Wget

(Command line download manager)

Command line lovers who want to cron their downloads want Wget, a highly hackable command line program that can perform all sorts of difficult downloading tasks, like mirror an entire web site, automatically download music or movies from a set of favorite weblogs, or transfer huge files painlessly on a slow or intermittent network connection. Here's a primer on mastering Wget. (Along the same lines, we also love cURL.)

6. Filezilla

(Cross-platform FTP client)

Whether you're running your own FTP server or you log into your web host's or someone else's, you'd do well using the open source, cross-platform FileZilla client. In fact, if you did want to download files from your home computer via FTP, you can also set that up using the FileZilla server. When it comes to FTP clients, we also like SmartFTP (Windows, free), FireFTP (Firefox extension), Transmit (Mac, $30), and WinSCP (Windows only, free, handles SCP as well as SFTP.)

5. InstallPad / AppSnap

(Software update downloaders, Windows only)

So you're setting up yet another PC, and you're sick of manually clicking around the interwebs to download and install all your essential software—but that's not necessary any more. Desktop utilities InstallPad and AppSnap automate the software download process, by letting you set up a list of downloads in one interface (which comes pre-loaded with great, free suggestions you already love) and grabbing the latest versions for you. InstallPad is a little easier to use than AppSnap. Here's how to automatically download and install your favorite software with InstallPad.

4. Transmission

(Mac BitTorrent client)

Our pick for best BitTorrent client on the Mac, Transmission offers features like selective file downloading from inside a torrent, per-file priorities, and seeding limits. Like uTorrent, you can also remote control your Transmission downloads from a web interface with Clutch.

3. uTorrent

(Windows BitTorrent client)

Windows app uTorrent is our pick for best BitTorrent client on Windows. If you're new to BitTorrent, check out our beginner's and intermediate guide to getting your download on with BitTorrent. Once you get good using uTorrent, you can also remote control your torrents with uTorrent's WebUI. Honorable mention: Azureus (cross-platform, Java-based).

2. Ted / TVShows

(Television episode BitTorrent downloader)

Stop manually searching for the new episode of your favorite television show and automatically download the next episode when it becomes available via BitTorrent using Ted (cross-platform) or TVShows (Mac only). Here's more on how to automatically download new episodes of your favorite TV shows with Ted.

1. DownThemAll!

(Firefox extension)

Powerful download manager DownThemAll! (dTa) can queue, batch, pause, resume, and automatically detect and download a certain filetype linked on any web page. Once you've used dTa, you'll never go back to Firefox's default Downloads dialog. Here's more on how to supercharge your Firefox downloads with DownThemAll.

What's your go-to download utility? Give it up in the comments.

Remote Control Your BitTorrent Downloads with Clutch [Feature]

Adam Pash — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:00:00 -0500

You need your BitTorrent fix on such a regular basis that it could be medically labeled an addiction, so why stop riding the BitTorrent wave just because you aren't sitting at your home computer? We've already detailed how to set up a web interface for the Windows-only uTorrent, so let's turn an eye to Transmission, the go-to BitTorrent client on the Mac. Today I'll show you how to remotely control your BitTorrent downloads from any browser with Clutch, the Transmission web interface.

NOTE: ~~Although Transmission Clutch is Mac-only~~ Clutch can be run on basically any non-Windows system, but this guide focuses on Clutch for the Mac. You can control your Transmission downloads from virtually any browser on any platform, so in a roundabout way Clutch makes Transmission ~~pseudo-cross-platform~~ Windows-friendly for remote control purposes. If you're a Windows user, check out how to remote control BitTorrent downloads with uTorrent.

Grab the Necessary Apps

Before we get started there are a couple of things you need. First, if you don't have it already, download and install Transmission. Next grab a copy of Clutch, the application that runs the web interface for Transmission. Got 'em? Good, let's move on.

Give Clutch the Initial Test

Now launch both Transmission and Clutch. Transmission will end up in your dock, while Clutch will find its home in the menu bar. When both are running, point your browser to http://localhost:9091/. If all goes well, you should see an almost exact replica of the Transmission interface in your web browser—looking something like the screenshot below..

Likewise, if you know your internal IP address (the address given to each computer by your router), you could access the interface from another computer on your home network by pointing it to that IP address and appending the port (the :9091 part) to the end of the URL. For example, on my local network I can access Clutch from any computer by going to http://192.168.1.2:9091/.

From the Clutch web interface you can start new BitTorrent downloads, pause or resume others, throttle your bandwidth, and do almost everything else you can do from the actual Transmission interface.

That's a good start, and if it's enough for your needs you can stop there. But as is you can't yet remotely access the Clutch web interface from outside your home network—at work, for example—and since internal IP addresses can change over time, you won't always know where to access the interface from computers on your local network. Let's fix that.

Set a Static IP Address for Easy Bookmarking

To start off, a little router 101. To connect to the internet, your internet service provider gives you one public IP address. Unless you're only hooking one computer directly up to the internet, you need a router. The router distributes the internet connection between all of your computers by assigning local IP addresses. Those local addresses mean nothing to the outside world, so in order for your router to know which computer you want to talk to when you try to load Clutch's Transmission interface from outside your network, you need to tell your router which internal IP address should be receiving requests on the Clutch port (which, by default, is 9091).

The easiest way to do this is to set up a static (i.e., non-changing) IP address for the computer running Transmission and then forward all requests for the 9091 port to that IP address.

Whether or not that explanation made any sense to you, if you want to set up Clutch so you can access it the same way, no matter where you are, here's how:

First we'll set up the static IP address for the computer running Clutch. Go to your router's admin page and find the section for setting static IP addresses. Using the killer router firmware Tomato, which I showed you how to set up last week, that's at http://192.168.1.1/basic-static.asp. Now you'll need to find out your computer's MAC address, which is a unique combination of letters and numbers that identifies your computer to your router. In Windows, open a command line prompt and type ipconfig/all. You'll see a ton of text, but your MAC address will be listed as Physical Address. On a Mac, run the Network Utility app. Your MAC address is listed as Hardware Address. Write down the address and head back to your router admin page.

Now enter in the MAC address and then the static IP address you want for that computer. You should use an address similar to what your router has already assigned, so it'll probably look something like 192.168.1.2 or something along those lines. Just pick an address you like and save it. Next time your computer connects to the internet through your router, your router will automatically assign it that local, static IP address. That means that now you can bookmark http://192.168.1.2:9091 (or whatever address you used) on any computer on your network and it will always bring up Clutch.

Set Up Port Forwarding for Access Outside Your Network

If you want to remote control your BitTorrent downloads from outside your local network—say from work—you need to set up port forwarding. So find the port forwarding section of your router's administration page (for Tomato, you'll find it here: http://192.168.1.1/forward-basic.asp). By default Clutch uses port 9091, so you'll want to set your router to always forward that port to your newly set up static IP address. We've already walked you through the port forwarding rigmarole once before, but for the sake of completeness I'll cover the crash course here. Just enter the IP address you set up above as the internal address, set 9091 as the external port, and if you have the option, add a description like "Transmission Web UI Clutch."

Save those settings and now whenever you want to access your Clutch interface from outside of your home network—from work, for example—you can simply point your browser to your external IP address and your router will know which computer to route it to.

Top It Off with a Human-Readable URL

If you really want to step up your Clutch remote control web access, you'll want to assign a domain name to your computer using a free service like DynDNS. After you've set up a domain for your home web server, you'll be able to access your Clutch/Transmission web interface from anywhere by pointing your browser to an address like http://myclutchui.selfip.com:9091, which is a good deal easier than remember a random collection of numbers like http://76.123.456.789:9091. We've actually walked you through this process in detail in the past, so I won't go into detail here.

Set a Password

If you've got Clutch set up so you can access it from outside your home network, you'll definitely want to set up a password in the Clutch preferences. Likewise, if you plan on using it often, set it to start at login.

We've covered other methods of remotely starting or controlling your BitTorrent downloads, from the Windows-only uTorrent web interface to remotely starting new downloads over IM, but if you've got your own preferred methods let's hear them in the comments.

Adam Pash is a senior editor for Lifehacker who likes to control his business no matter where he's at. His special feature Hack Attack appears every Tuesday on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Hack Attack RSS feed to get new installments in your newsreader.

Lifehacker's Exclusive Line of Productivity Software [Lifehacker Code]

Gina Trapani — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 19:02:55 -0500

Not only do the editors here at Lifehacker feed your head with a feast of posts every day, every once in a while we put our programming chops to good use and build custom software for our readers. If you've missed any of the Lifehacker Code line of applications, scripts, and plug-ins, here's your chance to get caught up.

All of the Lifehacker Code projects listed below are free to download, and they're licensed under the GNU Public License with source available, so we invite you to use, modify, and enhance to your heart's content.

Windows Applications

Texter (text substitution)
Save countless keystrokes by automatically replacing abbreviations with commonly used phrases you define, like email signatures and common acronyms.

Swept Away (automatic window minimizer)
A simple system tray utility that automatically minimizes applications that you aren't using.

ClickWhen (timed mouse clicks)
Set up an automated mouse click to run on a window after a user-defined period of time.

Rocker (navigation utility)
A mouse navigation tool that lets you perform common tasks, like moving forward and backward in your browser, by simply rocking your fingers across your left and right mouse buttons.

Dropcloth (desktop background)
Instantly blank out your desktop and all of your running apps with Dropcloth, a Windows copy of previously mentioned Mac-only app Backdrop.

Belvedere (rules-based file processor)
Automatically runs user-defined actions on folders and files (like deleting files X weeks old from your Downloads folder.)

Firefox Extensions

Better Gmail
Enhance Gmail with some of the best available Greasemonkey scripts which add over 30 additional features like keyboard shortcuts, saved searches, secure access, conversation previews, attachment icons and more. Translated into over 25 languages.

Better Gmail 2
Enhance Gmail's new interface with a collection of the best Greasemonkey user scripts available, which add keyboard shortcuts, secure access, attachment icons and more.

Better GCal
Enhances Google Calendar with a collection of the best Greasemonkey user scripts available in a single interface.

Better GReader
Enhances Google Reader with a collection of the best Greasemonkey user scripts available in a single interface.

Better Flickr
Enhances Flickr with a collection of the best Greasemonkey user scripts available in a single interface.

Better YouTube
Enhances YouTube with a collection of the best Greasemonkey user scripts for YouTube available in a single interface.

About This Site Bookmarks (dynamic, page-based bookmarks)
Quick access meta lookups about the web page you're viewing. (Featured in PC Magazine)

Bookmarklets

Supercharged GmailThis! Bookmarklet (bookmarklet for Gmail)
If you click the bookmarklet, it'll open up a compose window in Gmail with the page's title in the subject, along with the link and any highlighted text quoted in the body. But it gets more fun from there. Once set up as a keyword bookmarklet, you can use this bookmarklet to add tags to the subject, re-write the subject altogether, add text to the body of the email, and add a recipient to your email all from your address bar.

Command Line Tools

Todo.sh (shell script to-do list manager)
Manage that todo.txt file sitting on your desktop with a simple shell script that makes adding, prioritizing, editing, and marking tasks as complete simple from the command line.

Capture and Share Images Instantly with Skitch [Featured Mac Download]

Gina Trapani — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 23:15:57 -0500

Mac OS X only: Dead simple screenshot and image-sharing service Skitch, formerly in private beta, is now open to anyone to download and try out. Skitch is a Mac desktop application that talks to a webapp: sign up for a free account at Skitch.com, install the app, and publish, share, screengrab, and annotate images from your Mac instantly. Great for sharing and discussing images with friends and co-workers online, it's hard to explain just how easy Skitch is to use, so hit the play button above to see it in action. I just started playing with Skitch, and in about 15 seconds I took a screenshot of my desktop, annotated it, and uploaded it to my public Skitch page. Neat. Skitch is a free download for Mac only. (We can't wait to see this one for Windows.)

Skitch.com [via doctorparadox]

Different Ways to Use Twitter [Twitter]

tamar weinberg — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 13:00:07 -0500

While some people argue that Twitter is not a productive use of one's time, others strongly disagree. Blogger Maki provides a list of 17 different things you can do with Twitter to make it worth your while. By actively engaging on Twitter, you can self-market and build your personal brand. This allows you to have a say in what Google knows about you. You can also ask a question and get almost instantaneous feedback from hundreds of people. Twitter is excellent for building a network of friends, for taking notes, for setting up meetings, and for keeping a log of what you do every day. After reviewing this list, do you still think Twitter is a complete waste? Let's hear your take in the comments.

17 Ways You Can Use Twitter [Dosh Dosh]

Tiinker is Like a Personal Digg for Feeds [Feed Readers]

Kevin Purdy — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 11:00:00 -0500

News feed aggregator tiinker aims to help those feeling overwhelmed by their news portals and their own feed readers chop down their lists. Using Digg-style "thumbs up" and "thumbs down" controls, tiinker "learns" what types of news and sources you find relevant and interesting and mixes its content for you accordingly. Tiinker's technology page reshaped itself pretty quickly to a little test-voting with an eye for Linux items, but what's missing right now (and used to be offered) is a way to bring in RSS feeds not offered by the tiinker mix. Still, for those seeking out a decent, customized news portal, Tiinker might be a good way to keep on top of what's happening.

tiinker [via eHub]

What's Your Favorite Workout Music? [Ask The Readers]

(author unknown) — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 16:00:00 -0500

The New York Times sets its sites on the workout playlist, discussing how a good playlist is proven to improve your workouts and explaining what kind of song makes for a good workout song.

Generally speaking there is a science to choosing an effective exercise soundtrack, said Dr. Costas Karageorghis, an associate professor of sports psychology... One of the most important elements, Dr. Karageorghis found, is a song's tempo, which should be between 120 and 140 beats-per-minute, or B.P.M.

Photo by Geff Rossi.

The science of the workout playlist is interesting, but in the end personal taste has a lot to do with it, so with that in mind, we want to to hear your favorite workout music. Give us your favorite tunes to exercise to in the comments—whether it's individual tracks or playlists. When you're done there, check out your fellow readers' favorite music for studying.

They're Playing My Song. Time to Work Out. [NYT]

Edit PDFs Online with PDFHammer [PDFs]

(author unknown) — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 20:00:00 -0500

Online PDF editor PDFHammer reorders, deletes, and combines PDFs from the comfort of any web browser. That means you don't need to install anything to do a bit of simple PDF editing, and when you're done you can simply download the finished product to your desktop. Granted, you may not be comfortable uploading sensitive material to their servers (despite their privacy policy), but if all you need is to make a quick edit to a PDF and you don't want to pull out the big guns, PDFHammer is worth a bookmark. The site is currently in beta with promises of page rotation and watermarking in the future, but the features already implemented are impressive.

PDFHammer [via MakeUseOf]

Download and Listen to Free Music on the Web [Feature]

(author unknown) — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 12:00:00 -0500

Hey, I know you. RIAA lawsuits have scared you off P2P, but the iTunes DRM is both too expensive and too restrictive for your tastes, right? Then it's time you head to the web. In the past year the number of web sites linking to free downloads and streaming music has exploded, meaning there are more ways than ever to get your music fix. Today I'll highlight the best web sites—and best search kung-fu—for finding free music online. Photo by MarS.

We covered this territory over two years ago, but believe me, a lot has changed in that time.

MP3 Search Engines and Streaming Sites

First I'm going to take a look at sites that make it easy to both stream and download music, starting with my favorite of the bunch: The Hype Machine.

The Hype Machine aggregates MP3s from the vast world of music blogs. Searching for an artist in The Hype Machine returns tons of results, and you can stream the songs inline in the results. The site itself provides links to buy music at Amazon or in iTunes if it's available, but you can also click through the read the original blog post containing the song and download music directly from that site. The handy player at the bottom of The Hype Machine's page creates a playlist of all the results on a page so listening to the results is easy. You can also choose favorites to build playlists. Most of the sites in the section are brand new, but Hype Machine has time on its side, having been around since 2005. (Read more)

SeeqPod is a straight up MP3 search engine at first glance, but after you perform your first search you'll notice a fancy Flash app that makes it easy to create playlists in your browser via a simple drag-and-drop interface. SeeqPod doesn't have easy to find download links for the songs, but the URLs are readily available if you're willing to do the typing. Even cooler, though, SeeqPod has an iPhone/iPod touch-optimized interface for streaming any song directly in mobile Safari. (Read more)

SkreemR is another simple, barebones MP3 search engine. Like Hype Machine, SkreemR pulls its content from across the internet and can stream any song in your browser. Unlike Hype Machine, SkreemR has simple download links for every file you listen to so you don't need to follow it to the source if you want to download it. (Read more)

Thesixtyone has positioned itself to be a Digg-like community for music, which makes it a great place to discover new music (though it still handles search like the rest of them). Some songs on Thesixtyone include direct links for downloads, while others only provide links to buy the music on Amazon MP3. (Read more)

Deezer is a well designed site with more of a focus on building playlists, rating songs, and other more advanced features for registered users (though you don't have to be registered to use the site). You can even view and listen to entire albums on Deezer. Like the others listed above, you'll find tons of great music there, but download links can be hard to come by. (Read more)

BeeMP3 isn't really about streaming music or making playlists—it's more of a straight search and download site, providing details like bitrate, format, and frequency of the encoded music file. You can't preview music, but you can sure download it. (Read more)

Most of the music you'll find on Songza consists of live recordings, which is excellent for finding rare songs or performances, but unfortunately Songza isn't much for providing download links—but at least their player embeds nicely (as you can see above). (Read more)

For those of you who want to make sure that you're not downloading any copyrighted material, CCHits aggregates Creative Commons-only music so you can download anything you want, guilt-free. (Read more)

Tools to Streamline Your MP3 Downloads

Now that you know where to download all that music from your browser, you'll probably need a few tools to streamline the process.

If you're an iTunes user, might I recommend the Windows-only add-on Tunestor, which adds a "Download Directly to iTunes" option to you right-click context menu in both Firefox and Internet Explorer so that you don't have to go through the rigmarole of the save-and-move-to-iTunes process every time you find a new song you like. (Read more)

Alternately, iTunes lovers may also want to check out iTunes Folder Watch, a freeware Windows app that can monitor folders of your choosing (your Downloads folder, for example) and automatically add your new songs to your iTunes library. (Rea more)

If you just can't seem to find a download link but you'd kill to get a hold of the song that's streaming in your browser, stream rippers like StationRipper and Screamer Radio can easily do the dirty work for you.

Tools to Download and Listen to Your Music Over the Internet

Finally, they may require a bit more work on your part than the options above, but if you're willing to take a few minutes you can easily access your own music library anywhere with one of the following tools.

Anywhere.fm lets you upload your entire music library to their servers using their uploader application (for now it's free), stream, and manage it using a very iTunes-like browser-based Flash player. It also has a great social aspect that allows you to stream music from other users' libraries. Not too shabby. (Read more)

If you'd rather not put the keys to your music in someone else's hands, Orb, a freeware, Windows-only application streams music from your home computer to any other computer through your web browser. It takes a little setting up, but we walk you through it here.

Googling You Free Muisc

No discussion about finding free music on the web would be complete without mentioning the classic Google search that can yield tons of results of directories full of downloadable MP3s. First, there's the straight-up Google search chock-full of operators to find those music files in open directories:

Just replace the "artist|album|track|etc" section with whatever you're searching for... like this one. You can also tweak the search to yield other search results, looking for other filetypes (it's looking for WMAs and MP3s above).

If you don't want to go through the hassle of remembering that long URL every time, turn it into a Firefox keyword bookmark.

Alternately, there's the free, open source application Google Hacks, which is designed specifically to do the dirty work of searching for whatever files (music, video, or otherwise) available in Google-land. (Read more)

Surely we've missed a favorite or two, so if you've got a resource for finding free music on the web worth mentioning, let's hear it in the comments.

Adam Pash is a senior editor for Lifehacker who's methods for finding free music know no bounds. His special feature Hack Attack appears weekly on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Hack Attack RSS feed to get new installments in your newsreader.

PSTAM.com: Behind the Scenes

Paul Stamatiou — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 01:36:40 -0500

Over 300 people have suggested via Skribit that I chime in on what’s involved with maintaining, writing and developing for this blog. With this post I aim to cover every aspect of how I work and keep PaulStamatiou.com rolling. Some things might be common sense while others might make you wonder. Enjoy.

Workspace

As part of my 2008 new year’s resolution, I plan on maintaining a clutter free workspace. When I got back to Atlanta for the new semester I threw out things I didn’t need, sent home several boxes of clothes I didn’t wear, gear I didn’t use and stuff I just didn’t need at this point. You can see what I’m left with in this quick video below. If you’re reading this in an RSS reader, you might want to click through if the video doesn’t show up here.

Video is 20.85MB with an original resolution of 720×405. It’s kinda cheesy too.

Some of you might be asking what happened to my 30-inch Dell display. It’s still boxed up in my closet from finals week when I put it away to reclaim my desk. I’m actually in the process of selling it. After reassessing my needs, I think it’s just too big for what I do (however, it was great for watching movies from my bed). I have been doing well on just my MacBook Pro’s screen with Spaces in Leopard. At most I’ll sprout for a 24-inch Dell that has multimedia inputs so it can serve multiple purposes (Vudu, Blu-ray player, et cetera) as the older 30-inch only has a single DVI input.

Personal Technology

As I’ve mentioned many times here and there, my main and only computer is a 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo 15-inch (glossy) MacBook Pro with 4GB of OCZ DDR2 and OS X Leopard. I’ve ditched my Logitech MX Revolution mouse for my older Logitech G5 mouse. The MX Revolution battery life was slowly getting worse and the charger was just thing to add clutter.

I have two chargers for the MacBook Pro - one stays wired up in my desk and the other is wrapped up and ready to go with me should I find the need to head out with the MacBook Pro. For long flights to California and road trips I also have another battery. On trips, I always bring a Nikon D80 digital camera with a 4GB SDHC card and if necessary a Panasonic HDC-SD5 camcorder with an 8GB SDHC card. Unfortunately, the SD5 is now out of date.. blasted CES salting my game.

While I can live with the resolution on the MacBook Pro, I can’t make due with the internal speakers for too long. Whenever I’m back in my room I always plug in my Logitech Z-2200 2.1 speakers (discontinued). I’ve had them for 5 years and they have been working well ever since and were very affordable. The same goes for my trusty HP LaserJet 1012 (discontinued). It prints fast, doesn’t take up too much space and was cheap. I recommended its replacement in my realistic back to school guide for college students.

I have an old external FireWire Maxtor OneTouch 300GB drive for storing media only, with most of this being purchased TV episodes and movies from the iTunes Store that I no longer need taking up space on my MacBook Pro. There might be a hundred gigs of Top Gear and Fifth Gear episodes on there too. I only access my external drive maybe once every 3 months so things on there are not really vital.

The Online Life

Everything else not on my external drive is in an Internet cloud. I don’t keep much, except for things I am currently working on, on my local machine. All of the pictures I take are immediately uploaded to my Flickr account and then deleted from my computer. To date I have around 9,300 photos on Flickr.

I have roughly 24.4GB of personal documents, server backups, iTunes music and more on my Amazon S3 account. Of course, an Amazon S3 account is only as secure as the password on the Amazon account tied to the AWS account, so my Amazon password changes very often.

This particular S3 bucket on the right is where I store my miscellaneous school-related work.

I interact with Amazon S3 exclusively with Panic’s Transmit app. As you might imagine, the problem with storing files online is that it will take some time to upload. Most documents I have on S3 are small and several megabytes at most, with the larger 100MB+ zip and media files I have on there being uploaded from campus with a much faster Internet connection. Music is backed up to S3 with the help of Bandwagon, although people with large media collections will probably be better off just backing up to an external disk occasionally.

I keep the same online mentality with my email. I have Google Apps Premier edition for my email account and write emails with the web interface only. I’ve tried using Mail and Thunderbird, but I’m just too used to the web interface. One of the things people might have an issue with Google Apps is remembering the longer URL to check email: https://mail.google.com/a/[DOMAIN]. You can get around this by setting up a CNAME record for your domain - for example, mine is http://m.pstam.com. The only problem with that is it just redirects to the longer URL which takes some time and it goes back to using HTTP and not HTTPS. Regardless, it’s not too big of a deal.

I spent a few days replying to email to clear out my inbox for the new year.

I have IMAP enabled with Google Apps so I can use the same account from my iPhone easily. I also have the Google Apps setting that allows me to have the newest version of Gmail first. As for organization, I make use of several labels and have filters setup to automatically sort emails. Steve Rubel has a few articles dedicated to living the online life by keeping organized online.

Just as I enjoy the web interface for checking email, I also use the WordPress admin panel rather than OS X blogging software. I also enjoy the clutter free feel of not having to install extra software on my computer.

OS X Things I Can’t Live Without

I’ve mentioned Spaces in Leopard numerous times and this post is no exception. Spaces has honed my productivity quite a bit. Back in the summer of 2006, I wrote an article called Why I’m More Productive on a Mac that got around quite a bit. If I had to add one thing to that article since its publication, it would be Spaces. I still use ExposÃ© just as much, but Spaces let me setup playpens for various tasks and keep related items in their proper place.

Safari, iTunes, Development Env (Firefox, Textmate, Terminal)

Spotlight in Leopard is like lightning. I actually stopped using QuickSilver for it. I know QuickSilver can do a billion and a half things but I only ever used it for changing songs in iTunes and launching apps. Spotlight can launch apps just as well and I can use Spotlight as a spell-checker of sorts. Going along with my whole clutter free ideal, QuickSilver one less application that needs to be running.

Type a word in Spotlight and you’ll be greeted by the dictionary entry if spelled correctly.

The Inquisitor plugin for Safari 3 is quite dandy as well.

Ron Paul messed up my #2 Google spot. I wonder who’s not getting my vote.

This seems to be turning into a more of why I love Leopard piece but QuickLook and its hacks are also massive timesavers. And of course I need all of the regulars: Adobe CS3 Suite, TextMate, Transmit, Adium, Firefox for Firebug debugging, Safari 3 for browsing and Google Notifier for checking my Google Apps email 24/7.

Server & Blog Stuff

PaulStamatiou.com has been hosted by Media Temple for over 2 years on their dedicated-virtual box. It gives me the control I need to tinker with the OS to my liking. I have written a script to backup server files and databases to a backup bucket on Amazon S3. Updating the blog CMS I use, WordPress, is as easy as a single command with SVN.

Last year I left Mint stats tracking for Google Analytics for speed issues - particularly database lag.

However, Google Analytics only updates stats every midnight PST so I don’t get the live information I did with Mint. Fortunately, all that information is stored in the Apache web server’s log and is easily accessible if you know a lick or two of Linux.

Before going into the details, I’ll say that a lot of the server maintenance and tinkering I do is over the SSH protocol. That is, I fire up Terminal in OS X (PuTTY for Windows users) and enter in something like

ssh username@domain.com

and then the password. Upon a successful connection, I have the command line for my server at my disposal - basic stuff for anyone that has messed with a server at least once. After a while, typing out username@domain.com gets annoying which is why I edited the local SSH config file for OS X.

By adding an alias to ~/.ssh/config I no longer have to type out my long username and domain name and can just type in something like ssh ps. If you want to try it out for yourself, open up the Terminal in OS X and run:

vi ~/.ssh/config

and add an alias in this form:

Host aliasname HostName yourdomain.com User yourusername

If you were to save that in your local SSH config file, you would be able to ssh into your server with just ssh aliasname instead of ssh yourusername@yourdomain.com. With a long name like mine, it saves quite a bit of time in the long run. It’s also a good idea to disable root login via SSH and enable key-based SSH authentication for security.

Once I have a command line for my server, I can run a small script to show the top 20 referrers in the day so far (logs are rotated everyday automatically). This script also takes out certain referrers like bloglines that would otherwise dominate the top 20, and unlike JS analytics services it shows all requests making it helpful for finding hotlinkers. (Note: the script is only 2 lines should you paste it and it be broken into more. Also, the location of your access_log will vary.)

#!/bin/bash sudo awk '{print $11}' /var/www/vhosts/paulstamatiou.com/statistics/logs/access_log | grep -v 'paulstamatiou.com' | grep -v 'bloglines.com' | grep -v '"-"' | grep -v 'feedburner.com' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -20

The same goes with another frequently used script that shows the number requests for the past day:

#!/bin/bash TODAY=$(date +%d/%b) sudo grep "$TODAY" /var/www/vhosts/paulstamatiou.com/statistics/logs/access_log | awk '{print $1}' | sort | uniq | wc -l

Mike Malone has an article detailing how to grep through your web logs. However if it’s live stats you want, I’ve come to like apache-top. It’s like the Linux command “top” but for Apache as you’ll see.

Apache-top shows pretty much everything and you can cycle through screens with “d”.

I usually don’t fire up apache-top unless my site makes it on digg or del.icio.us popular and I want to see requests/second or other such metrics. I used to login to SSH so frequently that I wanted to maintain my sessions and began using the screen command that David Ulevitch showed me how to use.. but I’ve since forgotten all the keystrokes and only SSH in nightly or so.

WordPress

Back-tracking to my WordPress setup a bit, I’ve received numerous questions about what plugins I use. I try to keep it light but there are several plugins I’ve become accustomed to using.

Custom Query String
Full Text Feed - How I can use the <!––more––> tag in posts to truncate them after a few lines and still have full posts in my RSS feed
twitterRSS for my Twitter bar
Subscribe to Comments
WP-Cache - Although I would be using WP-Supercache if I had the time to install it
Show Top Commentators
Related Posts
Random Redirect - for the button to show random posts
WPhone - for moderating comments on the fly on my iPhone

Images in Posts

Most images I publish are slightly touched up in Photoshop CS3. If an image seems slightly blurry and could benefit from “crisping” up a bit, I’ll run an unsharp mask filter under Filter » Sharpen » Unsharp Mask…. I usually set the amount to anywhere from 50 - 100% depending on the degree of “crispness” desired with a radius of 0.5 pixels and a threshold of 0. This is for images only as it can make screenshots look worse.

I also tinker with Levels and Brightness/Contrast. I often resort to using Auto Levels, Auto Contrast and Auto Color but sometimes their results are too dramatic and I’ll go in manually and fine tune things. For very dark photos, I will increase the brightness while decreasing contrast. However, this result can be achieved better in Levels if I have the time to accurately play with the sliders.

Keeping Up with Tech News

One of the most frequently asked questions I get is how I manage to keep up-to-date with all of the tech news out there. Do I spend all of my time reading feeds? Nope. This might be a shock to some of you, but I hardly use RSS. I have many RSS subscriptions in Google Reader that I might check if I am absolutely bored and/or can’t think of anything to write about.

Instead, I follow a handful of influential tech news websites and manually visit the blogs of friends and so on. However, if you’ve been reading for a while you have probably noticed that more and more of my content is less news-based and more original content like this post and other reviews. I don’t like being one in a pack and would rather differentiate myself from what everyone else is talking about. Although there are those big tech stories from time to time that my geekdom can’t help but cover.

Here are some of the larger sites I follow regularly.

I also get wind of interesting articles from people that send them my way on del.icio.us by tagging them for:pstamatiou or through people I follow on Twitter. And not to mention through the press releases that land in my inbox from time to time.

I follow too many blogs to list so here’s my OPML, which you can easily import into Google Reader or your preferred RSS aggregator. Is your awesome blog missing from my subscriptions? Leave a comment and I’ll be sure to check it out.

What Else?

Is there anything else you’d like to know about what is involved with running PaulStamatiou.com? Now to get back to the OLPC..

OLPC Story: My friend Mike Wozniak (who knows enough about Linux to reverse engineer router firmware and cross compile the kernel) got in on the Give One Get One OLPC deal. On Saturday we went out to a bar with the OLPC obviously left back in his room. He checked Twitter later on to see that his roommate twittered “Just kernel panic’d an OLPC“. The moral of the story being that you need to hide your OLPC from your computer science major roommates.

If you enjoyed this post, let me know by leaving a comment.

YouTorrent, Your New Favorite BitTorrent Site [BitTorrent]

Adam Pash — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 20:00:00 -0500

Searching public BitTorrent sites for that special torrent can be challenging, particularly if you're looking for something more obscure. Web site YouTorrent simplifies the process by searching for torrents across the most popular BitTorrent sites in real-time, then dynamically returning and sorting the results by number of seeds. YouTorrent's results are fast and its pages are ad-free (for now). YouTorrent is reminiscent of previously mentioned Scrape Torrent, which does the same thing but has since turned into a pop-up blocker's nightmare. For the time being, YouTorrent is an excellent place to start your BitTorrent searches.

YouTorrent [via TorrentFreak]

Open Source Blogging: Feel Free to Steal My Content

Leo — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 19:34:14 -0500

I consider that the golden rule requires that if I like a program I must share it with other people who like it. - Richard Stallman

Editor’s note: This post isn’t directly related to the main topics of Zen Habits, so feel free to skip it if you’re not interested.

I get a lot of emails asking me for permission to reprint Zen Habits articles on other blogs, in newsletters, in conferences and in classrooms. I get requests to translate certain posts, or my entire blog, into dozens of languages. I get requests to translate Zen To Done or republish it in another format.

Until now, I granted limited permission, mostly for non-commercial use.

Now, I’m granting full permission to use any of my content on Zen Habits or in my ebook, Zen To Done, in any way you like.

I release my copyright on this content.

From now on, there is no need to email me for permission. Use it however you want! Email it, share it, reprint it with or without credit. Change it around, put in a bunch of swear words and attribute them to me. It’s OK. :)

Credit and payment
While you are under no obligation to do so, I would appreciate it if you give me credit for any work of mine that you use, and ideally, link back to the original. If you feel like spreading a copy of my ebook, I’d appreciate payment. I’d prefer people buy my ebook, but if they want to share with friends, they have every right to do so.

Why I’m releasing copyright
I’m not a big fan of copyright laws anyway, especially as they’re being applied these days by corporations, used to crack down on the little guys so they can continue their large profits.

Copyrights are often touted as protecting the artist, but in most cases the artist gets very little while the corporations make most of the money. I’m trying this experiment to see whether releasing copyright really hurts the creator of the content.

I think, in most cases, the protectionism that is touted by “anti-piracy” campaigns and lawsuits and lobbying actually hurts the artist. Limiting distribution to protect profits isn’t a good thing.

The lack of copyright, and blatant copying by other artists and even businesses, never hurt Leonardo da Vinci when it comes to images such as the Mona Lisa, the Last Supper, or the Vitruvian Man. It’s never hurt Shakespeare. I doubt that it’s ever really hurt any artist (although I might just be ignorant here).

And while I’m no da Vinci or Shakespeare, I can’t help but wonder whether copyright hurts me or helps me. If someone feels like sharing my content on their blog, or in any other form for that matter, that seems like a good thing for me. If someone wanted to share my ebook with 100 friends, I don’t see how that hurts me. My work is being spread to many more people than I could do myself. That’s a plus, as I see it.

And if someone wants to take my work and improve upon it, as artists have been doing for centuries, I think that’s a wonderful thing. If they can take my favorite posts and make something funny or inspiring or thought-provoking or even sad … I say more power to them. The creative community only benefits from derivations and inspirations.

This isn’t a new concept, of course, and I’m freely ripping ideas off here. Which is kinda the point.

Counter arguments and all that
There are a number of objects that will likely be brought up to this idea, and while I can’t possibly answer all of them, here are a few of my responses in anticipation:

1. Google rank will go down. My understanding is that Google penalizes pages that have exact duplicates on other sites, when it comes to PageRank. I don’t know how much of a penalty that is. If people duplicate my content (which they already are, even without permission), it’s possible that my PageRank will drop and people will have a harder time finding my content on Google search. If that’s the case, I accept that penalty. I’ve never been one to go for SEO techniques anyway, so this is nothing new to me.

2. You’ll lose ebook revenues. If people buy my ebook and then distribute it to 20 people, and each of those distributes it to 20 more, and those to 20 more … I’ve lost $76,000 in ebook revenues. Perhaps. That’s if you agree with the assumption that all those people would have bought the ebook if it hadn’t been freely distributed. I don’t buy that. In this example, thousands of people are reading my work (and learning about Zen Habits) who wouldn’t have otherwise. That’s good for any content creator.

3. Who knows what people will do with your work? Someone could take my work, turn it into a piece of … baloney … and put my name on it. They could translate it with all kinds of errors. They could … well, they could do just about anything. But that kind of thinking stems from a mind that wants to control content … while I am of the opinion that you can’t control it, and even if you can, it’s not a good thing. What if someone takes my work and turns it into something brilliant, and becomes the next James Joyce? Or more likely, what if they take the work and extend the concepts and make it even more useful, to even more people? Release control, and see what happens. People are wonderful, creative creatures. Let’s see what they can do.

4. You’re making other bloggers look bad. Perhaps, if you want to see things in a negative light. But I’m not doing this as a challenge to other bloggers, or as a comment on their policies. I’m doing it simply to stay in line with my values. And who knows? Maybe others will be inspired by this in some way. Or maybe they won’t. Either way, please don’t judge others based on what I do.

5. What about when you write that print book you’re always talking about? When I get published by a major publisher, I probably won’t be able to release copyright. I accept that as a cost of getting published in print, which is a dream of mine. If I contradict myself, very well … I contradict myself. [Edit: I should have attributed this before, but the last sentence is a paraphrase of Whitman.]

6. What if someone publishes a book with all your content and makes a million dollars off it? I hope they at least give me credit. And my deepest desire is that they give some of that money to a good cause.

7. But … but … they’re stealing from you! You can’t steal what is given freely. I call this sharing, not piracy.

Inspirations: Free Culture, by Lawrence Lessig; and GNU by Richard Stallman

Edit: Just to clarify, this post is an official notification that my writing here at Zen Habits and in the Zen To Done ebook are now in the public domain. I hereby waive all claim of copyright in this work; it may be used or altered in any manner without attribution or notice to the me. Attribution, of course, is appreciated.

If you liked this article, please share it on del.icio.us or on Digg. I’d appreciate it. :)

Time Machine Over the Network with iTimeMachine [Featured Mac Download]

Gina Trapani — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 17:00:03 -0500

Mac OS X Leopard only: Back up your Mac with Time Machine not to a local hard drive but to a shared network disk with iTimeMachine. This simple two-button desktop utility makes your shared network drives show up in Time Machine's possible backup destination list. But it isn't as user friendly as it could be.

To set things up, first, mount the network disk onto your Mac. Just browsing Network in Finder won't do it; make sure you hit "Connect to Server" from the Finder Go menu and mount the shared folder as a drive on your Mac. (Here's more on sharing files across the network with Leopard.)

Once you've got a shared drive mounted, download iTimeMachine and install it. When you launch it, you'll notice it's just a dialog with two buttons, as shown.

Press the "Enable Airdisk/Network Disks" button. But don't be surprised when nothing happens. iTimeMachine doesn't give any indication or confirmation that it's done what you asked. The two buttons remain unchanged regardless of which you hit or how many times you hit them. (iTimeMachine developers: make that a single button that toggles.)

Nevertheless, once you've hit the Enable button once, you can quit iTimeMachine and go into Time Machine's settings in System Preferences. From there, hit the "Change Disk" button and your network disk will appear in the list of possible backup disks, as shown.

The first time I tried this out on my MacBook Pro, I got nothin'. It took a few retries and remounts to finally see the network disk in Time Machine's options. So, while iTimeMachine's interface could be smarter and friendlier, it does get the job done. iTimeMachine is a free download for Mac OS X Leopard only.

For more Time Machine tweaking, see also Schedule your Time Machine backups with Time Machine Scheduler. Thanks, John!

iTimeMachine [Xiotios Software]

Early Look at Office Live Workspace Beta [Screenshot Tour]

Kevin Purdy — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 11:30:00 -0500

Let's just get it out of the way—Office Live is, at the moment, only worth your time if you prefer to edit words, spreadsheets, and other documents in Microsoft's Office products. Google Docs, Zoho, and most any other online office suite gives you more freedom and functionality on the web, but Office Live's value proposition is its semi-seamless integration with desktop Office apps. But if you're one of the many, many people who spend a lot of time inside Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, Office Live can be a set-and-forget way to back up, share, and (kind of) collaborate on documents. I spent some time looking around the beta version and brought back a few screenshots to share, after the jump.

To get started, you need to sign up at the Office Live Workspace site, and probably wait a bit. I pre-registered for a beta account in early December and received my login about a month later. You also need a Windows Live account (which you already have if you use Hotmail, MSN Messenger, or Passport services). Once you're past the usual info/password/captcha forms, you arrive at a fresh, clean "Workspace." It's a surprisingly minimalist page with just a few necessary buttons. Here's how it looks after uploading a few sample files (click to enlarge):

First things first: The "New" button doesn't let you create new Office documents; those have to be created in a desktop Office app and synced to Office Live. To do that, one hits the "Install Office Add-In" button and runs a small installer. You'll then see a new toolbar in your Office apps, which gives you new web-enabled "Open" and "Save" options, as well as a link to the Office Live site (yours will likely look better than mine, as I'm running an old copy of Office XP—the oldest that Office Live supports).

Once you open a document from Office Live, saving changes locally will sync them to the online document. You can view it online (and, obviously, Ctrl+C copy it), download a copy, add a viewable comment, as well as "share" it with other people (which we'll get to in a bit). As of this writing, you can store 500MB in files at Office Live. Here's what a document opened online looks like:

Note the explanatory line appearing right above the text—you're supposed to be looking at this thing in Word if you want to make changes. Click "Share" and you can enter email addresses to give other people access to your online documents. There are, however, three caveats, one of them temporary:

The contributors must also have Office software installed (big surprise, I know).
Since Office Live is an invitation beta at the moment, there's a good chance the recipients won't have an account, and so can't quickly import the document even if they do have Office software.
There's no same-time collaboration—if one person is editing a document, others are locked out.

Like its desktop counterparts, Office Live has a leg up when it comes to project templates and organization. Creating a new "Workspace," which is basically like creating a new container folder, gives you some handy templates to choose from, if that's your thing.

Beyond documents, Office Live integrates Microsoft's ShareView application to give users the ability to share their whole screen, or just certain applications, with up to 15 other users. Of course, those you share with must also have Live accounts and install the ShareView application, which runs on XP or Vista. Here's how the controls look from ShareView:

While you can't create entire new documents, Office Live does have a small, semi-helpful "Web Notes" tool that lets you create basic text files for sharing and placing in Workspaces. There's no spell check and no instant Word importing, however, so it's mostly for on-the-go lists and the like.

Put it all together, and you've got either a kind of online training wheels introduction to storing and sharing documents online, or an online collaboration tool for those who swear by their Office apps.
Have you gotten your Office Live sign-up and found it useful? Does the Office integration make it more appealing than other online suites, or do Google Docs, Zoho, and the like have you covered? Share your impressions in the comments.

Publish Google Docs Presentations on Your Site [Google Docs]

Gina Trapani — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 13:27:23 -0500

Google Docs adds another way to share presentations online: by embedding them, YouTube video-like, onto your web site. To do so, go to the Publish tab in a presentation and copy and paste what they call the "Mini Presentation Module" code onto your web or intranet page. Google released a few more feature tweaks to Presentations, like the ability to drag and drop images onto slides, to import selected slides from another presentation, and to rearrange slides. Above check out a slideshow Google put together describing the upgrades.

New features for 2008! [Official Google Docs Blog via Google Blogoscoped]

Write a Cover Letter [Job Search]

Tamar Weinberg — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 13:00:52 -0500

Looking for a job? Your cover letter, which is typically the first letter that any prospective employer reads, must be well-written. Ensure that your cover letter reflects that proper research was conducted into the job or industry. Boost your chances by writing about the company and detailing the value you can add to the available position based on your background or interests. Look at the qualifications listed on the job description and write check marks next to those requirements you meet. When writing the letter, make sure the letter is written professionally with the right heading elements. Briefly (in three to four paragraphs) explain how you meet the criteria for the job based on you research.

Include a positive statement in the final paragraph of your letter that will prompt the employer to take action. After your letter is written, proofread carefully. Do not rehash your resume. Let the cover letter speak for itself. Since your resume is likely located on a stack among hundreds, avoid being wordy. Get to the point quickly and make yourself shine.

How to Write a Cover Letter [WikiHow]

Accounting 101 for Freelancers [Freelancing]

Kevin Purdy — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 08:10:00 -0500

The Freelance Switch blog tackles a few of the most important money management practices for those just starting out in a freelance venture. Along with getting a good billing/invoice system in place and getting serious about your expense tracking, guest writer Allan Branch drops one of the most important tips to ensure your security as an independent worker:

Step 4 - Don't use your personal bank accounts to make purchases for the business.
Have at least one business bank account and use it exclusively. If you violate this rule you risk "piercing the corporate veil." Which means you lose your business and your house and your car and money if you got into legal hot waters.

Sound advice, and it makes sense organizationally, too. For more Freelance 101, check out previous tips on pricing freelance work and the 7 Habits of Successful Freelancers. Photo by miguelb.

Accounting Basics for a Freelancer [Freelance Switch]

Top 10 Obscure Google Search Tricks [Lifehacker Top 10]

Gina Trapani — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 12:00:06 -0500

When it comes to the Google search box, you already know the tricks: finding exact phrases matches using quotes like "so say we all" or searching a single site using site:lifehacker.com gmail. But there are many more oblique, clever, and lesser-known search recipes and operators that work from that unassuming little input box. Dozens of Google search guides detail the tips you already know, but today we're skipping the obvious and highlighting our favorite obscure Google web search tricks.

10. Get the local time anywhere

What time is it in Bangkok right now? Ask Google. Enter simply what time is it to get the local time in big cities around the world, or add the locale at the end of your query, like what time is it hong kong to get the local time there.

9. Track flight status

Enter the airline and flight number into the Google search box and get back the arrival and departure times right inside Google's search results.

8. Convert currency, metrics, bytes, and more

Google's powerful built-in converter calculator can help you out whether you're cooking dinner, traveling abroad, or building a PC. Find out how many teaspoons are in a quarter cup (quarter cup in teaspoons) or how many seconds there are in a year (seconds in a year) or how many euros there are to five dollars (5 USD in Euro). For the geekier set, bits in kilobytes (155473 bytes in kilobytes) and numbers in hex or binary (19 in binary) are also pretty useful.

7. Compare items with "better than" and find similar items with "reminds me of"

Reader Adam taps the wisdom of the crowds by searching for like items using key phrases. He writes in:

Simply search for, in quotes: "better than _keyword_"
Some example results:

Results 1 - 100 of about 550 English pages for " better than WinAmp".

Results 1 - 57 of 57 English pages for " better than mIRC".

Results 1 - 100 of about 17,500 English pages for " better than Digg". (Wow. Poor Digg.)

The results will almost always lead you to discovering alternatives to whatever it is you're searching for. Using the same concept, you can use this trick to discover new music or movies. For example, " reminds me of _someband_" or "sounds like _someband_" will pull up artists people have thought sounded similar to the one you typed in. This is also a great way to find good, no-name musicians you'd probably never know of otherwise.

Examples:

Results 1 - 88 of 88 English pages for " reminds me of Metallica".

Results 1 - 36 of 36 English pages for " similar to Garden State".

Results 1 - 66 of 66 English pages for " sounds like The Shins".

Just get creative and you'll, without a doubt, find cool new stuff you probably never knew existed.

6. Use Google as a free proxy

What, your company blocks that hip new web site just because it drops the F bomb occasionally? Use Google's cache to take a peek even when the originating site's being blocked, with cache:example.com.

5. Remove affiliate links from product searches

When you're sick of seeing duplicate product search results from the likes of eBay, Bizrate, Pricerunner, and Shopping.com, clear 'em out by stacking up the -site:ebay.com -site:bizrate.com -site:shopping.com operator. Alternately, check out Give Me Back My Google (original post), a service that does all that known reseller cleaning up for you when you search for products. Compare this GMBMG search for a Cruzer 1GB flash drive to the regular Google results.

4. Find related terms and documents

Ok, this one's direct from any straight-up advanced search operator cheat sheet, but it's still one of the lesser-used tricks in the book. Adding a tilde (~) to a search term will return related terms. For example, Googling ~nutrition returns results with the words nutrition, food, and health in them.

3. Find music and comic books

Using a combination of advanced search operators that specify music files available in an Apache directory listing, you can turn Google into your personal Napster. Go ahead, try this search for Nirvana tracks: -inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:"index of" +"last modified" +"parent directory" +description +size +(wma|mp3) "Nirvana". (Sub out Nirvana for the band you're interested in; use this one in conjunction with number 7 to find new music, too.) The same type of search recipe can find comic books as well.

2. ID people, objects, and foreign language words and phrases with Google Image Search

Google Image search results show you instead of tell you about a word. Don't know what jicama looks like? Not sure if the person named "Priti" who you're emailing with is a woman or a man? Spanish rusty and you forgot what "corazon" is? Pop your term into Google Image Search (or type image jicama into the regular search box) to see what your term's about.

1. Make Google recognize faces

If you're doing an image search for Paris Hilton and don't want any of the French city, a special URL parameter in Google's Image search will do the trick. Add &imgtype=face to the end of your image search to just get images of faces, without any inanimate objects. Try it out with a search for rose (which returns many photos of flowers) versus rose with the face parameter.

What's your favorite ninja Google search technique? Tell us about it in the comments.

Year in Review: The 70 Best Lifehacks of 2007

Dustin Wax — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 08:30:20 -0500

2007 was a great year for personal productivity at lifehack.org! We’ve added more than a dozen new writers, who have brought new perspectives, new topics, and most importantly new hacks and tips to our virtual pages.

If you want to be more productive in the New Year, take a look at these 70 best lifehacks of 2007 now, and subscribe to our feed so you don’t miss any of the great advice and information to come in the year ahead. These were the most popular posts of the last year, based on their popularity, your comments, and links from other sites. As 2007 winds down, invest some of your time and read them all. Or bookmark this page and make reading them one of your New Year resolutions.

Networking and Communication

Writing and Studying

Productivity, Creativity, and Motivation

Leadership, Work, and Money

Body and Mind

Software and Technology

Family, Home, and Life

Success

Were there any other posts that you enjoyed which haven’t mentioned here? Was there anything you learned here that changed your approach to work, family, or life in general? Let us know in the comments!

Finally, let’s take a moment to recognize all the contributors whose incredible work in 2007 made lifehack.org a must-read resource for personal development:

Lifehack.org Staff: Leon Ho, Scott Young, Craig Childs, and Dustin Wax
Contributors: Reginald Adkins, Marco Adragna, Brian Armstrong, Leo Babauta, Chris Brogan, Lawrence Cheok, Tony Clark, Rob Crawford, Raj Dash, Jonathan Fields, Lisa Gates, Brett Kelly, Donald Latumahina, Michael Leddy, Shane Magee, Rowan Manahan, Rory Marinich, Lorie Marrero, Tatsuya Nakagawa, Tom O’Leary, Tejvan Pettinger, Kyle Pott, Vishal Rao, Gleb Reys, Kim Roach, Susan Sabo, Adrian Savage, Rosa Say, Nick Senzee, Alex Shalman, Pamela Skillings, Mike St. Pierre , K. Stone, George Tee, Bob Walsh, and Rob Witham

Thanks to all of them, and to all the lifehack.org readers who have made lifehack.org successful. We wish you all a happy, healthy, and productive 2008!

Dustin M. Wax is a contributing editor and project manager at lifehack.org. He is also an anthropology and women's studies professor in Las Vegas, NV where he lives with his partner and three children. His personal site can be found at dwax.org.

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Lifehack Digest for December 30

Lifehack Editors — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 03:00:00 -0500

Become a Knowledge Management Ninja with Google Reader
Micro Persuasion offers an unorthodox take on Google Reader, with instructions to set up, use, and mine Reader like a giant database. With tagging and Google’s search capabilities at your disposal, Reader puts vast amounts of data within easy reach.
Tags: productivity googlereader research information

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