Jeremy P's shared items in Google Reader

Email Prioritizer Adds "Pause" Button, Auto-Ranking to Email [Microsoft Outlook 2007]

2008-08-20T12:00:00Z

Windows with Outlook 2007 and an Exchange account only: Email Prioritizer, a new Outlook plug-in from Microsoft labs, gives email receivers the tools to both "pause" their email and have it ranked by priority on a scale of one to three stars. Once you've installed the plug-in, you'll notice a new toolbar with a "Do Not Disturb" option, which can be set from 10 minutes to 4 hours (or, smartly, until a meeting you've planned expires) and delays the delivery of mail to you on the client side. Not exactly an Inbox Zero approach, but it might work for do-or-die deadlines. More innovative is a ranking system that automatically sorts your mail based on how it was sent and who it's from, derived, in part, from Microsoft employees. Let's take a look at some of the options:

Photo by CNET Networks

There are more specific filters available, like "Mail from people I'm meeting with in the next 2 days," "Mail from my manager" and from "above my manager," and "Mail with these words in the subject line." There's also the option to mark emails from specific people as lower priorities—something those of us on certain PR folks' email lists can truly appreciate.

We couldn't test out Email Prioritizer's ranking system on our inboxes, as there's no Exchange server running at Lifehacker HQ, and free Exchange provider Mail2Web has yet to roll out Outlook client compatibility on its free accounts (the kind that get you free "push" mail and contacts on your iPhone.

While you're empowering your Outlook inbox to stand up up to less-important email, check out these other email innovations you want in your inbox, both in concept and in download-right-now form.

Have you tried out the Email Prioritizer? What do you think of adding a "Do Not Disturb" and auto-prioritizer to your inbox? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Email Prioritizer [Office Labs via CNET]

EASEUS Disk Copy Makes a Fast Clone of Your Hard Drive [Featured Windows Download]

2008-08-19T18:00:00Z

~~Windows only~~ All platforms: Free boot CD EASEUS Disk Copy copies any disk or partition sector-by-sector for an exact copy of the original. Disk Copy is a perfect tool for upgrading your operating system to a new, larger hard drive, or just making a quick clone of a drive full of files. With support for virtually any drive type or file system and an easy-to-use interface, this app is a fast, effective tool for quick drive copying. I haven't cloned a full drive with it, but according to reader Jason, it copies files significantly faster than previously mentioned HDClone. On the flip side, if you're looking to hot image your hard drive continuously, check out how to do that with DriveImage XML. Disk Copy is freeware, ~~Windows only~~ works anywhere you can boot from a CD. Thanks Jason!

EASEUS Disk Copy

Email Innovations You Want in Your Inbox [Email Apps]

2008-08-18T16:02:33Z

The basics of how email works hasn't changed much since its invention, but even forty years later, there are still tiny features and enhancements that can make dealing with large volumes of email easier. Your email client already provides message attachments, filtering, HTML email, auto-fill contacts, spell-checking, folders or labels, keyboard shortcuts, search, and an advanced spam filter. What else do you need? Well, as people rely on email as a primary means of communication, and everyday users deal with a mounting level of new messages per day, even more advanced features can help all of us keep our inbox under control. In honor of Mozilla Thunderbird 3's latest alpha release, let's take a look at some email innovations—some concept, some already available in various clients and plug-ins—that you want in your inbox.

Undo Sent Message

(Concept) At one time or another, all of us have hit the Send button and immediately regretted it. While Gmail offers a nice (and unusual) "Undo" option for most email actions—like labeling messages or archiving them—there's no Undo once you've sent a message. What would be super-useful for those facepalm moments after you've sent a regrettable email is the ability to take it back. Say your client queues up outgoing mail for 10 minutes before sending it (unless you explicitly override the delay to send immediately), and you get the chance to recall sent email every time. Update: There is a way to defer sending messages in Outlook now.

Snooze This Message

(Concept)
Sometimes you just don't need to deal with an email message this very second, but you don't want it cluttering up your inbox or lost in a folder somewhere. Adding a "Snooze button" to your inbox could solve the problem: You hit "Snooze" on a message and it disappears from view—until a day later, when it reappears again, unread and in your inbox, ready for processing.

Reply to Selected Text

(Available in Apple Mail, Eudora and coming in Thunderbird 3)
This one's less an innovation and more a dead simple feature every client should already have. When someone sends you an email with a question or a comment buried in the body, "Reply to Selected Quote" is the feature you want. Just select the quote you want to respond to and hit "Reply to Selected Quote," and your email client clips that text and quotes it, and only it, in your reply.

Smart Reply Templates

(Available in QuickText extension for Thunderbird)
The concept of email templates is as old as the hills, but most implementations are still dumb (or non-existent, especially in web-based mail like Gmail). Smart email templates offer variables that refer to the elements of a message you've already received—like the sender's first and last names, for example. See how the QuickText extension for Thunderbird handles smart reply email templates better.

Attachment Reminders

(Available as an Outlook macro or Greasemonkey script for the old version of Gmail)
So you just wrote this long, explanatory message about the file attached to your email and you send it—without the attachment. Detecting the words "attached" or "attachment" in the body of your email isn't difficult, and it would be nice for an email client to pop up a prompt that says—"Hey, looks like you meant to attach a file to this message" when there's no attachment but the words appear.

Language-Based Filtering

(Sort of—but not quite—available in Gmail)
When you only speak certain languages but you receive messages in many others, chances are those messages are spam (or at least messages you don't want to see). Right now, filtering foreign language spam involves searching on specific characters in various languages. But the evolved email client could detect what language a message is in and filter based on that criteria. (For example, in Gmail, to filter all non-English messages you could use -lang:english, though currently this does not work reliably.)

Usage Trending

(Available in the Mail Trends script for Gmail and built into Eudora)
What time of the day do you get the most email? What sender fills up your inbox the most? Who do you send the most messages to? While spam filtering has gotten super-smart over the years, regular usage trending is still not available in most email clients. Since you spend most of your workday in an email client, getting data about what you're putting in and getting out of it can help you use email smarter and more efficiently. See what kinds of trend information Mail Trends for Gmail gave me on my usage.

Faceted Search/Related Messages

(Available in the Seek extension for Thunderbird, RelatedMail add-on for Mail.app, Xobni for Outlook)
Your email inbox and sent mail archive is basically a huge personal database of communication over time, and smart search can help you slice and dice it by topic and sender. While Gmail is ace at helping you pinpoint that one message you're looking for, a few other add-ons offer "faceted search", a related message view, and statistics about your email relationships. The free Xobni add-on for Outlook is probably the most developed and feature-rich of the current crop of advanced email search products; see how it works here.

Now that you've seen just a few possibilities of the evolved email client, tell us which one you want the most (or have and love).

Which email feature do you want the most in your inbox?

What did we miss? If you were designing the latest iteration of Thunderbird, what feature would be highest on your list to build in immediately? Let us know in the comments.

Gina Trapani, the editor of Lifehacker, wants her inbox to be like Kanye—better, faster, stronger. Her weekly feature, Geek to Live, appears every Monday on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Geek to Live feed to get new installments in your newsreader.

Choose a Safe, Reusable Water Bottle [Health]

2008-08-17T20:00:46Z

Americans consume 28 billion single use bottles of water per year and roughly 80 percent of those end up in a landfill. Even if you don't fancy yourself an eco-crusader, the impact of that amount of trash is significant, not to mention Bisphenol A—a chemical found in most water bottles—has been linked to a host of ailments including increased risk of cancer, obesity, early onset puberty, and diabetes. Companies are slowly phasing out the use of Bispehnol A, but why wait until they discover that another chemical in the plastic is harmful? The Good Human environmental awareness blog has a guide which ranks bottle choices from worst to best. Turns out the best water bottle is made of a chemically inert substance, and you just can't beat stainless steel. Photo by shrff14.

Stainless steel, which does not leach, is difficult to break or crack, and does not easily stain or interact with whatever product you are consuming. The water always tastes good out of it (at least ours does, and it is Los Angeles tap water!) and it keeps it reasonably cold for a little while when we go hiking or out in the sun.

Check out their reviews for more information on styles and brands of bottles. After installing a water filter at my house, I've opted to start using a metal bottle. Sound off in the comments on how you carry your liquid refreshment around with you.

How To Choose A Safe Reusable Water Bottle [The Good Human]

pptPlex Puts PowerPoint Slides on an Interactive Canvas [Featured Windows Download]

2008-08-18T12:35:00Z

Windows with Office 2007 only: pptPlex, a free Office add-on, makes PowerPoint presentations less of a one-way street and more of a neighborhood exploration. After installing the add-on, you'll be able to put slides together in groups, slide around the canvas during a presentation, easily zoom in on charts or stats you want to highlight, and generally make the presentation more open to give-and-take and audience questions. Check out the video above for an overview. pptPlex is a free download for Windows systems with Microsoft Office 2007.

pptPlex [Microsoft Office Labs via Office Tweaks]

Setting up your Wii for Homebrew

2008-08-15T18:40:08Z

The Twilight Hack works by employing a lengthy character name for the horse in the game ('Epona') in order to facilitate a stack smash. This gets triggered when talking to the man next to you when you start the savegame as he loads the name to use it in his dialog or upon attempting to enter the next zone, before the man talks to you and reminds yo

Google Turns On AdSense For Feeds

2008-08-15T14:20:07Z

After more than two months of testing, Google has finally turned on AdSense for Feeds. Formerly, these were FeedBurner ads. The acquired company has moved its advertising program over to Google’s system, and now any AdSense advertiser can tap into the Feedburner network.

The ads are contextual and come in different sizes and formats. Google Operating System, which noticed that the service is now turned on, reports:

The new AdSense for Feeds option lets you create a new ad unit that has a format automatically selected from 468×60 and 300×250. . . . You can choose if you want image ads, the ad frequency, the position (top or bottom of the post), the colors and a channel that tracks the ad performance.

Hopefully, this will turbocharge ads in feeds, which have not been a stellar performer so far. Does anybody click on those ads? Maybe they should be seen more as branding opportunity, because you certainly see them when you are scrolling through your blog and news feeds.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

[October 8, 2008 / 7:00pm] Graveyard Book US Tour: Minneapolis, MN

2008-08-15T15:50:47Z

Saint Paul's United Church of Christ
900 Summit Avenue
St Paul, MN 55105

Phone: 651-224-8320

Hosted by Red Balloon.

"So, what do you do?" "Me? I'm a web designer" ....

2008-08-15T09:03:44Z

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Five Best Desktop Search Applications [Hive Five]

2008-08-14T16:00:00Z

As hard drives grow ever cheaper and capacious, keeping track of every file single file is a job suited to no one. Luckily desktop search applications have improved in leaps and bounds beyond the useless Windows file search dialog of yesteryear, leaving users with a wealth of free and diverse desktop search tools at their fingertips. On Tuesday we asked you about your favorite desktop search application, and today we're back with the five most popular answers. Keep reading for a detailed look at the five best desktop search applications, then vote for the app you like best.

Google Desktop (Windows/Mac/Linux)

Google Desktop is the only completely cross-platform desktop search application on our list. Coming from a company who's built an empire out of search, Google Desktop indexes and searches your hard drive, email (including Gmail or Outlook), web history, and more. You can start a Google Desktop search at any time by invoking Google Desktop's floating search box by double-tapping Ctrl (or Cmd on Macs), and GDesktop displays extended results in your default web browser. The bundled sidebar is one point of contention with users since it displays widgets (or gadgets, as Google calls them) that have little to do with desktop search. If you're a Google Desktop die-hard, check out how to get more from Google Desktop.

Locate32 (Windows)

Locate32 takes a completely different take on desktop search than the four other apps in this Hive Five. Rather than index the contents of your files like the others, Locate32 only indexes your files by name and location (you can search inside files from the Advanced tab if you need to). That means most of your searches are limited to tweaking variables like name and location or size and date. Why is Locate32 still popular, you ask? Because not only does it perform searches extremely fast; it also has a tiny memory footprint. Where many of the other desktop search apps require a lot of horsepower to index your desktop and search that index, Locate32 hovers between 2MB and 5MB. While Locate32 is probably not the best option if you need to perform deep searches inside files, it's perfect if you have a good idea of the name of the file you're looking for. As an added bonus, Locate32 can run as a portable app on your thumb drive. (Original post)

Copernic Desktop Search (Windows)

Copernic Desktop Search indexes and searches your desktop—including email and pretty much anything else that lives on your hard drive. Copernic has been around for years, and despite lacking a strong backer like Microsoft or Google, it's still a must-have desktop search application for many faithful users. One very cool feature of Copernic is its preview panel, which provides a peek into files to see what matched your search. Copernic is free for non-commercial home use, costs $60 for the Corporate edition.

Windows Search 4 (Windows Vista/XP)

Where file search was once the most useless "feature" built into a Windows XP PC, the new and improved Windows Search 4.0 is a fast, extensive desktop search tool from Microsoft. Windows Search comes baked into the Vista Start menu with Instant Search, but you can also install Windows Search on XP. Windows Search indexes files on your hard drive or remote file share along with emails and attachments. One little known feature that sets Windows Search apart: Support for natural language queries like "Email from Bill Gates sent yesterday." Trick is, you've got to know how to enable it.

Spotlight (Mac OS X)

Spotlight was first introduced to Macs with OS X 10.4 back in 2005, and today it's a favorite tool for most Mac users looking to search and access their files, email, web history, applications, and even system preferences. Spotlight even has a few useful but not immediately obvious surprises up its sleeve, like dictionary integration and the ability to perform quick calculations. Its search engine also powers Finder's built-in search tool, so whether you're using the default Cmd-Space or Cmd-F shortcut in Finder, it's always at your fingertips.

Now that you've seen the best, it's time to fire up your voting finger.

Which Is the Best Desktop Search Application?
( surveys)

Honorable mentions go out to X1 (Windows) and Tracker (Linux). If you've got more to say about your app-of-choice, let's hear all about it in the comments.

Watching DVDs on your Wii

2008-08-14T16:15:00Z

Filed under: wii hacks

Nintendo Wii Fanboy explains how to watch DVDs on your Wii using the new MPlayer application. Although the reviews are mixed, some claim it works and others claim it doesn't, most are excited about this new feature which has been missing since the Wii's launch. To get this working, you need to run the Twilight Hack and get the Homebrew Channel. Then you download the MPlayer software onto your SD card and install that using the Homebrew Channel. From there, you can launch the application and play your DVDs with ease using the minimalistic DVD player interface.

Although this seems like a lot of work just to watch a DVD, especially considering this might not work for you, it is interesting to see people trying to push for media center software on the Wii. Now they only need to find ways to get past the Nintendo's attempts to stop this Homebrew movement.

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The Web Entrepreneur's Customer Service Toolbox: 100 Hacks and Resources

2008-08-14T16:57:23Z

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Editra Brings Code-Friendly Editing to All Platforms [Featured Download]

2008-08-13T15:10:00Z

Windows/Mac/Linux (All platforms): Editra, a free, cross-platform text editor, is a great lightweight solution for anyone who does coding, HTML work, or just a good amount of plain text editing. Similar to Notepad++, but with a whole lot of extras, the editor features tabbed files, context and code highlighting, theme-able icons and look, session saving, transparency support, auto-completion, and lots of indent and context tools that will make coders feel right at home. Even if you're not code-savvy, the editor packs a lot of features in without feeling overly crowded. Editra is a free download for Windows, Mac, or Linux systems.

Editra [via PhoroLinux]

What do McCain and Obama's blogs have in common? [Pic]

2008-08-12T22:39:28Z

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New in the Maker Shed - USB7 6-digit LED display kit

2008-08-12T13:00:00Z

An easy-to-use 6 digit display kit updated via your computer over serial/USB connection -

The USB7 expands most computers with a USB connected 6-digit seven-segment display. Supporting letters, numbers, and a range of punctuation, the USB7 benefits any project requiring highly visible information.
Using common a USB cable for both communication and power, the USB7 requires no special or bulky cables and with a simple virtual-serial port protocol, sending regular ASCII characters is all that's required to control the USB7s full output capacity.
Based on the AVR-CDC project, the USB7 is supported by Windows XP, Windows 2000, OS X, and many Linux variants.

Simple to use

The USB interface provides all of the communications and power to the display.

Simple ASCII data over the virtual serial port controls all of the displays functions.

Easy to assemble

All through hole parts.

An easy kit contains all of the required parts, including a pre-programmed microcontroller.

Standard 0.56" common-anode display format allows versatility in display selection.

Comes in standard green readout.

Useful for displaying email/IM notifications, time/date, weather/temperature, countdown timer, word-of-the-day notifier, spouse's shoe size - any text which simply must-be-seen in glowing green! - USB7 6 Digit LED Display Kit

Tales of an absentee manager.

2008-08-11T14:08:19Z

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Rick Astley replacing Daniel Craig as James Bond in new film

2008-08-11T07:19:32Z

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TweetDeck Offers Features Twitter Lacks [Featured Download]

2008-08-09T22:00:00Z

All platforms with Adobe AIR: When you follow enough chatty people on Twitter, some days the noise can overwhelm the signal—that's when you want TweetDeck, a full-featured desktop Twitter client that groups, filters, and searches incoming tweets for you. TweetDeck's killer feature is its ability to separate the people you follow on Twitter into groups—like "Don't Miss," "Co-workers," and "Chatty types." That way while tweets by the prolific folks fly by in one pane, infrequent tweets from people you don't want to miss stay bookmarked on top in another. You can add or remove modules from TweetDeck's multi-paned interface to show you all tweets, tweets from groups you configure, replies to your tweets, direct messages, search results for a keyword, and more.

The second most useful feature TweetDeck offers is its excellent replies capability. Unlike the Twitter web site, TweetDeck doesn't only show you replies that start with @yourusername—it shows you any tweet that contains @yourusername anywhere in the body. Similarly, it can show you a constantly updating search for a particular term, like a search for "Lifehacker." The more modules you add to TweetDeck, the wider it gets. Here's a screenshot. (Click on the image to pop up a full-size version.)

Of course, you can resize TweetDeck to whatever width you want—a single column, if you'd like.

TweetDeck can also display all the tweets from the last 48 hours, often more than the Twitter web interface can (when the "Older" button's disabled, anyway). TweetDeck also has TwitScoop built in, which shows you the most popular keywords appearing on Twitter at the moment, a Twitter status indicator for when the service is down (which is often), and a URL shortener available right below the new tweet entry box. TweetDeck is a free download for all platforms running Adobe AIR.

TweetDeck

'Star Trek' Online Game Ready To Engage

2008-08-09T18:30:03Z

After years in development limbo, the "Trek"-themed massively multiplayer online game will engage.

Eneloop batteries get C and D-sized, still not bigger than yo mama

2008-08-08T11:12:00Z

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Ever seen a toy robot low on batteries? It's sad, sadder than the shredded flesh and bone caked between its servos. Unfortunately, modern gear chews through disposable batteries faster than the time it takes to make a hippie cry. Enter Sanyo, which today finally announces its new rechargeable C and D-sized Eneloop batteries. This ain't the same, sad Ni-MH rechargeable tech found in yo mama's pager battery -- you know, the one that beeps and makes people think she's backing up... Oh! Eneloops come pre-charged, maintain that charge in the drawer, and can be recharged a thousand times without any of that lame memory effect. Available initially on September 12th in Japan before breaking out for global distribution.

[Via I4U]

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