Last year I told you about Flashhacker, which allowed you to watch videos in full screen on your secondary monitor whilst using the other one. Its always been one of those bits of functionality people feel should be included in the stock build of Flash and guess what… now it is!

You may not have noticed (I certainly hadn’t!) but Adobe has finally added proper dual screen support to its latest release of Flash (10.2), as usual downloadable for free from their website. As great as Flashhacker is it’s always better to have this kind of thing built properly into the program, I’ve been playing with it (whilst writing this post in fact) and it seems to work very well.

Needless to say if you have a secondary monitor you should definitely check this out (even if you don’t you should make sure you’re up to date as the new version comes wit the usual bug fixes and speed enhancements), you’ll never be as productive again… sorry about that!

How often do you receive an email only to tell yourself that you’ll deal with it later? In my case it’s all of the time, I’ve become quite the master at sending apologetic replies to week old emails, but convincing someone that your dog walked over the keyboard, accidentally launching your emails and hitting the correct series of keys to mark all your emails as read is becoming more and more of a hard sell. I mean really, there isn’t any trust in today’s society…

My technique (before today at least), used to be to set any email I planned on answering later to unread, foolproof! As you might have guessed, not so much. When you receive as many emails as I do on a daily basis you get into the habit of skim reading subject lines, reading the important looking stuff and then hitting the magic “Mark all as read” button – bye bye carefully marked emails… The other option of course is to star your emails, for some reason I’ve never really been able to get into the habit of checking them, I’m evidently lazy at heart.

Enter the Snooze Your Email extension for Google Chrome. Currently it only works for “us cool kids” that use Gmail but support for other email services is said to be in the pipeline. Installing creates a snooze option within Gmail, giving you the option to snooze an email from a matter of minutes to days. Once the time’s up a notification will appear on your desktop (along with a alarm clock snooze-esque sound effect) and your email will revert to unread, fantastic!

In my opinion this option really should be baked into Gmail itself instead of needing a separate extension, fingers crossed it will be implemented in the future, but for the meantime I think this is a great alternative. Now all we need is an extension which responds to all of your emails for you, should be pretty easy….
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You can install Snooze Your Email here.
Source – Addictive Tips

I’ve just been reminded by Chris Pirillo about a cool Facebook Easter egg which allows you to change the language to pirate. Simply scroll to the bottom of any Facebook page and click on the link marked English (or whatever language you have it set to!), then click on the English drop down and select English (pirate). The language should now have changed to piratey English, some of the sayings are fantastic. I’ve had mine changed all day and I’m still finding new ones, go check it out – Facebook… ‘arrr (had to be done)

My Dad is a photography enthusiast. When I was younger I would develop photos I had taken in the dark-room under a red light, work with real negatives taken from the camera spool and dunk my photos in fixer to produce timeless glossy prints, kept to this day in my parent’s photo collection under the stairs. How times have changed.

Compare the the aforementioned method with the following: You take a picture using any standard digital camera, and the photograph is wirelessly transmitted to either your home wireless network or your smartphone in your pocket.

Now the concept of wireless back-ups is nothing new, but the recent development from “Eye-Fi” of being able to effectively create a Wi-Fi hotspot within your camera enabling your smartphone to access your pictures while on the move certainly is. Of course the trick being that once your information is submitted to your phone, the mobile network can be deployed, spelling the end of “what happens on tour – stays on tour”. Don’t have a smartphone? Just stroll up to any public Wi-Fi hotspot and your pictures can be uploaded to your home network from almost anywhere. “Eye-Fi” sell a bog standard 4/8 gig memory card spliced with Wi-Fi capabilities to bring you these functionalities.

Of course all this black magic doesn’t come cheap, with the top end “Eye-Fi” cards costing over £100, though at the expense of some of the flashier smartphone related features cheaper models are available. In my opinion the “Eye-Fi” offers a great extension to wireless storage, relieving more pressure from a primary data storage device, which of course is subject to a variety of dangers (a few examples being – nuclear explosions, being dropped in acid and disappearing into the back of the sofa) . Swing by their website and take a look for more information and let us know what you think. I know you’re all comment crazy but we love them anyway.
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Buy Here

How often do you go to a site like Facebook in a day? If you’re not in the most productive mood I wouldn’t mind betting that at some point you’ve been back so quickly nothing’s changed at all.

It’s very easy to start mindlessly checking websites over and over again, I’m not so bad with Facebook but there’s a loop of tech sites I can get myself stuck in, checking them again and again without really thinking. Fortunately there’s a web app out there called KeepMeOut! which can help to break your web surfing addiction.

It’s extremely easy to use, simply visit KeepMeOut! and write in the address for the site you wish to reduce your visits to, along with a return time you think is sensible. Then hit submit (not literally unless you’re looking for an excuse to replace your monitor) and bookmark the generated link, renaming it however you wish. That’s it, simply use the new bookmark instead of your old one and if you click it too often you’ll get the friendly warning shown above, it even shows you a nice graph of your recent visits just to make you feel that little bit more guilty!

Now it’s not going to present anyone with any initiative at all a problem if they want to visit the site in question (simply writing the URL into the address bar will get you there), but it can certainly help by giving you a bit of a wakeup call if you’re just mindlessly clicking through your favourite sites. The only problem I can think of is that if you’re in the habit of leaving the site open in a tab it’s not going to help you, apart form that I think it’s a great little solution.
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You can check out KeepMeOut here.

What do you think/hope will be happening in your life one or two years into the future? Maybe you’ve got plans to change jobs, take up a hobby or simply wonder how your views on life will change. FutureMe.org lets you send yourself an email your future self, it’s kind of like a high tech time capsule (without the need for a spade and rust proof container).

I think it’s an interesting idea, I hadn’t come across it until recently (although the site was first set up in 2002, yeah I know I took my time finding this), but this kind of thing can’t really go out of date. I’ve used it to send myself a list of goals which I hope to achieve over the next couple of years (I tried to keep them sensible, competing in the Olympics and learning to speak Chinese seemed like a bit of a pipe dream), so on the 22/01/2013 I’ll get a sarcastic email from yours truly, berating myself for not getting round to the things I wanted to do… at least I know my goal to be a professional tennis player will have come to fruition by then, so I suppose I can also tick off being a millionaire as well, all in all it looks like 2013 is a year to look forward to!

Needless to say I thought some of you might find it an interesting exercise, it will only take you a couple of minutes and it’ll certainly catch you by surprise in a couple of years. So what are you going to tell yourself?
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In case you missed the link to FutureMe in the article here’s another one. Isn’t that nice of me!