A guy by the name of Professor Solomon wrote a partially tongue-in-cheek book called How to Find Lost Objects. You can download it for free here (5MB PDF).
It’s entertaining in parts, and the instructions to make your own thinking cap are amusing enough. The 67 pages have quite a bit of fluff. [...]

Online storage is the ideal solution for off-site backups. I’ll be writing an in-depth article about how to set up an automated home backup solution in a future post, but this post is to let you know about a storage site called ADrive that gives you 50GB (!) of free storage space online.
Here are [...]

Patrick Winston, Professor of Artificial Intelligence at MIT, gave a lecture at Harvard on how to give lectures. The lecture was broken up into a set of bite-size videos.
He shows ways to improve your delivery and style. He also talks about how to use the blackboard, overheads and props. There’s enough meat [...]

These tips can help you bypass the automated answering systems when calling customer service.
1. Interrupt
It’s not rude to interrupt the computer, so feel free to talk over the voice.
2. Talk
Sometimes saying what you want can get you just that. Try “get human” and if that doesn’t work, get angry. Some systems can detect [...]

Drop.io is handy site for sharing files with others. You create a drop by uploading the files you want to store or send, then you can set an optional password. Once the drop is created, you can email the link to the recipient and they can download the files.
You don’t have to go [...]

Many people like to track their incoming shipments, but it’s a hassle to check each different shipping site. With TrackMyShipments.com, you don’t have to.
Just forward your shipment notification email to them to track all your shipments in one place.
Here are some screenshots of what you’ll see. I especially like the integration with Google [...]

Here are 25 sites TIME magazine can’t live without. There are the standard ones you’d expect like Google, Amazon, Wikipedia, Yahoo and Ebay, then there are several more that I use on a regular basis but aren’t necessarily mainstream. There were only three I hadn’t heard of before: usa.gov, tmz.com, and televisionwithoutpity.com. [...]

A recent tips of the trade trick about e-mail had some great advice. I already do half of it, and plan to begin doing the other half.
The first part is to attach whatever you’re going to attach before you write the e-mail to avoid sending out the second e-mail explaining that you forgot to [...]

Expert Village is a great idea. They’ve found experts in all sorts of areas such as auto mechanics, health and fitness, music, parenting, hobbies and sports to record a series of instructional videos. The experts might be lacking in some areas, but of the videos I’ve watched they’re helpful if you’re just [...]

When I first ate at In-N-Out I ordered a cheeseburger, as advertised on their menu. In-N-Out has the sparsest menu of all the burger places I know of. I never expected there to be a hidden one because they have plenty of room to fit other items. When I bit into my [...]

I’ve had my Netgear router for over two years and it continues to work well, with one exception. It times out idle connections after 15 minutes. This is how it was designed, so it’s not a flaw in the product, but it’s frustrating because I often have terminals open to other machines, and [...]

This is truly a heartwarming story.
A laptop stopped working a mere 2 weeks after the 1-year warranty had expired. Compaq wasn’t willing to budge on the 1 year mark, but since the laptop had been purchased on an American Express card, which has extended warranty protection, they would take care of it. The customer [...]

Sites like techcrunch (among many others) have introduced an annoyance that I find exceedingly . . . annoying.
Fortunately for me (and anyone else who is similarly annoyed), you have but to click this magical link. It will set a cookie to disable snap preview on every web site that uses it.
(via Paul Bausch via [...]

Leon Ho, creator of LifeHack.org and internationalization manager at RedHat Linux, linked to Listible in the Showcase area of his blog. At first I assumed he created it, because there are only three links in the showcase area, one to lifehack and the other to his job. The whois domain information is private [...]

I learned this from investigating an e-mail forward I received during the Christmas holidays, but it’s a useful tip that others might like to hear.
When you’re giving a presentation, the last thing you need is more work, and I have seen numerous presenters struggle with the foreign laptop they’re on or try to get something [...]

Are you tired of getting calls from telemarketers and salespeople? Would you like a phone number that lets you deal with phone calls when you want to, instead of the moment the call is made? You can get a free local telephone number to use online from NetZero, the company that provided free [...]

With virtual hosting, a single IP address can host dozens of domains, and it can be interesting to find out what other domains are being hosted on the same server. Windows live search lets you use the ip: prefix to search for all the domains on a given IP address.
For example, yahoo.com resolves to [...]

I was planning to do something that took about 45 seconds and I wanted to know how long it would take if I did it 15 times. In the past, I’ve also wanted to calculate other things that were time-related and found that a regular calculator wasn’t all that useful. So, I’ve created [...]

I signed up for Amazon’s affiliate program way back in March 2002 and at the end of October 2006 my total finally broke the $100 mark. I’m still awaiting the check (I think they sent it to my old address, even though I updated my address before the end of October. [...]

A friend recommended a book called “Captain Blood,” so I looked it up on wikipedia to find out more about it. On the wikipedia page there were links to free text and PDA versions at Project Gutenberg as well as a free audio version at Babblebooks.
I hadn’t heard of BabbleBooks before, but it sounded [...]

Neighboroo is a simple, but very cool, idea. They’ve gathered data about cities all over the US on lifestyle, politics, crime, education, air quality, home prices, rent, cost of living, commute time, household income, tax rates, population density and others, and display a heat map of the US.

Here’s an example of housing prices.
(via dumb [...]

I have two monitors at work and only one monitor at home, so when I work from home, all the applications on the second monitor aren’t visible. This was a problem that I had a hard time solving because none of the typical windows commands were made to switch an application’s desktop.
My solution is [...]

I’m the last person you’d want to decorate your home. I don’t know what to put where to make a room look pleasing and inviting. However, I consider myself a decent judge of aesthetics, so even though I don’t know how to do it, I can tell between my decorating job and that [...]

I recently converted my 500+ CD collection to MP3s. Here’s how I did it.
I used Exact Audio Copy to rip the CDs. It was really slow in secure mode so I switched to burst mode and used copy and test which does CRC comparisons to make sure you got the same audio in [...]

Every once in a while the tooltips start showing up behind the taskbar so they can’t be seen. This is very annoying.
I found a fix that worked, but I’m surprised and a little dismayed that it fixes the problem. It’s like telling someone with a headache to jump around clucking like a chicken, [...]

IRC isn’t as popular nowadays, but every once in a while I have a reason to use it. I’ve used xChat on Linux but on Windows I didn’t know of a free IRC client. I Googled around but found only commercial applications.
Then I found one right under my nose. Literally.
I was [...]

I started a weekly Tuesday Trivia on my coin collecting site, but it took me a while to find a good solution for displaying the questions and answers. I had the following requirements:
1. Easy to enter, since I have to do it every week.
2. Easy for the reader to get the answers, but not [...]

I wanted to make a diagram of my home network so I could keep track of everything and how they’re connected. I could have used Dia or Visio, but I created it online instead. The site I used is called Gliffy, and its interface is extremely advanced for a web application. They’re [...]

I was reading a PDF that had a few diagrams that I wanted to print, but I wasn’t aware of how to print just the diagram instead of the whole document. The PDF was over 1500 pages, so printing the entire document was not an option. I knew about the select tool to [...]

Do you ever forget to do something and wish you had gotten a reminder about it? It’s quite common to become so involved that you forget about other tasks you were supposed to complete.
You’re not the only one, and you have a few options if you want to improve in that area. Here [...]

I read a recent lifehacker post with amusement when people were explaining how they heat up their ice cream scoops before using them, or pop their ice cream into the microwave for a few minutes. The reason I’m amused is because I remember trying similar tactics rather unsuccessfully. I would usually either bend [...]

There’s an Ask Metafilter question about how to write friendlier emails and the answers are quite good. It’s hard sometimes to convey sarcasm or humor via e-mail because the other person doesn’t have the benefit of your tone of voice or facial expression. This leads to misinterpretation.
Here’s some great advice for writing business [...]

The folks over at 43 folders have compiled a few tricks for remembering names. I used to use some of these, but I’ve gotten out of the habit. Now that we’re in a new area, I’m meeting a lot of new people and I would like to remember names.
It’s just that using some [...]

I’ve been listening to books on CD on my commute and I recently listened to a book called Improve Your Memory by Gary Small.
I wasn’t all that impressed by the book, especially since I had to search the web to find the title and author. You’d think after having just read a book on [...]

I have it on good authority that the site optoutprescreen.com is a legitimate and fairly successful way to opt out of all sorts of junk mail.
First, the site is mentioned on the FTC’s site as a way to reduce the amount of unsolicited credit and insurance offers.
Second, Ed Foster researched the site and found that [...]

Google has released Picasa for Linux. This is great news for me because Picasa is a great application but I haven’t used it much because it only ran on Windows. I’ve already downloaded it and it worked great. Three cheers for Google.

I was researching a few online brokerage sites and one of them mentioned that they had ranked in the top 5 in a Keynote Ranking study. I’d never heard of Keynote before so I looked at their web site and was surprised to find all sorts of rankings on the utility, ease of use, [...]

My home theater is not what you’d call impressive or up-to-date. In fact, the TV is more than 20 years old, I bought the stereo 10 years ago and the CD reading laser has long since burnt out (but the speakers still work) and the DVD player is made by Daewoo (you know, the [...]

I’m not an expert mechanic, but I know enough about cars to get myself in trouble. I found this list of 10 automotive secrets interesting, but I wouldn’t consider many of them secrets, just handy tips and things to be aware of. In fact, I don’t think any of them are all that [...]

I just heard about Protopage, which is a customizable desktop of sticky notes.
You can move, resize and add links or text to the notes and then save it and come back later. They’re promoting it as a start page, and it’s actually not a bad idea. It has the date and a little [...]

A few days ago I wanted to convert British pounds to dollars and I thought Google’s calculator could do it, but I couldn’t get it to work so I ended up using a currency conversion site.
Today I found out why I couldn’t get convert currency with the Google calculator: they just added support for converting [...]

I’m always interested in good ways to manage my finances, and I found this list of 50 smart things to do with your money from Money magazine rather interesting.
(via kottke)

If you use Bugzilla as a bug tracking database, or use any bug tracking database for that matter, this may be a handy tip. I often have a bug ID that I want to look up and it’s kind of a pain to have to go to the main bugzilla page, click in the [...]

Have you ever been lying in bed with the feeling that your legs wanted to do something other than relax?
Every once in a while my legs decide they’re not interested in snoozing with the rest of me, making it hard to get to sleep. I didn’t know there was a formal name for this [...]

I was captivated by an infomercial several years ago about a product called Le Presse. The demonstrations made chopping things up so easy and quick, I came close to buying one. Then I learned that it was $75 ($59 plus $14.95 shipping) and decided it wasn’t worth that much.
Recently I was thinking about [...]

I remember getting a letter in the mail telling me I could get a loan for up to $10,000 at 3% interest. I began filling out the request form but then a little warning bell went off in my head. The form was unlike any normal credit application I had seen, I didn’t [...]

I was helping someone with some computer problems recently and suggested they could benefit from an increase in RAM. Having not dealt with that computer before, I didn’t know what kind of RAM it needed and I didn’t want to have to open up the case to find out. In order to save [...]

When I first heard about vi and ran it, I grew confused and frustrated. I couldn’t do anything when I ran it, and I couldn’t even exit. I tried typing help but it displayed an error (No File). Then I tried typing quit, and it said something about recording and then insert, [...]

The New Scientist has a list of 11 steps to a better brain. None of them are revolutionary. In fact, I would venture to say that most college students already use several of the techniques to do better on exams.
I disagree with the first one because I’m not keen on the idea of [...]

I read with interest the Forbes’ list of 10 ways to live longer. Some items are easier to do than others, but based on the list, I think I can expect to live a pretty long life. According to the what age will you die quiz, I will be 88 when I shuffle [...]