Tips And Tricks

Business cards have long been the networking tool that kept your business-contact list growing, but in a digital age, they seem a little outdated. Weblog WebWorkerDaily argues that we still need them; we're not so sure. What do you think?

WebWorkerDaily's take:

There are times when even the most web-oriented among us have to meet with people face-to-face. Being able to hand out a business card does more than guarantee that they have your contact information and even goes beyond making it easy to pass it along. It can help establish your professionalism. Depending on the type of work you do, there can be some difficulty in reminding your contacts that you're a professional — after all, you spend most of your day at home or the coffee shop. But little touches like a professional business card can really help remind clients and colleagues that you are a professional, no matter where you're working at.

This editor just begrudgingly re-ordered a fresh batch of dead-tree business cards in preparation for a trip to SXSW, which, frankly, is the only place I ever hand them out. So I'm curious:

Obviously it depends a lot on what kind of work you do and the culture of that work, but let's hear specifics for why you do or don't keep business cards on hand in the comments.

While we love a tech-filled geek cave, an elegant workspace with a great view makes working a pleasure. Today's featured workspace has a beautiful desk, a pleasing environment, and a view of Boston.

Not everyone needs triple monitors or an army of peripherals and being able to work productively with just a laptop goes a long way towards having a clear and airy workspace—cable management is, at it's best after all, camouflaging something that's there to appear as if it isn't.

Lifehacker reader CosmoComet, when he's commuting and working from Boston proper several day a week, finds himself working at this nearly invisible glass and acrylic workspace—he can look right through his desk to see Beacon Street below. Check out a wider view of the workspace in the photos below.

If you have a workspace of your own to show off, throw the pictures on your Flickr account and add it to the Lifehacker Workspace Show and Tell Pool. Include some details about your setup and why it works for you, and you just might see it featured on the front page of Lifehacker.

• Top 10 Android Apps (Android)
  Android's been around for more than a year, and in that time developers have whipped up some great apps. Whether you're a new Android owner or a pro looking for new tools, these 10 great and free apps belong in your arsenal.
• Disk Space Fan Analyzes Hard Drive Space with a Dash of Eye Candy (Windows)
  Free utility Disk Space Fan analyzes your hard drive usage to help you determine what's taking up space on your hard drive, representing it all with fancy visualization eye candy.
• Opera 10.5 Final for Windows Brings the Speed (Windows)
  As expected, Opera made version 10.5 of its browser official this morning, calling it "the fastest browser on Earth" and also touting its Windows 7 integration, HTML5 video support, better private browsing, and more.
• Free Alternatives to the MacHeist nanoBundle 2 (Mac)
  Popular shareware software bundler and discounter MacHeist has released a new bundle, offering up 7 premium apps for $20. If you don't feel like shelling out the dough despite the hefty discount, let's take a look at free alternatives.
• Sonar Power Manager Controls Your Computer with Actual Sonar (Windows)
  Sleeping your computer is a useful way to save energy, but free utility SonarPM takes power management an awesome step further: It puts your computer to sleep automatically when you walk away from your desk—using sonar.
• Rapportive Replaces Gmail Ads with Contact Info, Is Very Cool (Firefox/Chrome)
  Sure it's nice and all that we get Gmail for free, but those ads to the right of open messages aren't really all that helpful. Free browser add-on Rapportive replaces Gmail ads with contact info about the sender.
• Squeeze Saves Hard Drive Space on Your Mac, Is Free Today, Seems Almost Magical (Mac)
  If you're quickly running out of space on your hard drive (or backup drive), free-for-today preference pane Squeeze lowers the footprint of large files by compressing any folder—without requiring anything fancy to read it again.
• How to Add Location Awareness to Your Windows 7 PC (Windows)
  GPS-enabled smartphones make it easy to get directions, weather, and many more location based services since they automatically know where you are. With Geosense, you can bring this functionality to any Windows 7 computer even if it doesn't have a GPS chip.
• Firefox 4.0 Alpha 2 + Chrome-Like Plug-In Isolation = Fewer Browser Crashes (Windows/Mac/Linux)
  Mozilla's second Developer Preview of Firefox 4.0's framework and back-end highlights a feature we'd heard was coming: separate processes for plug-ins. That means if (when) Flash or another plug-in crashes, there's a good chance your browser won't go with it.
• KeeFox Integrates KeePass and Firefox (At Long Last) (Firefox)
  KeeFox brings tight integration between the cross-platform, open-source password manager KeePass and Firefox, providing automatic logins, form filling, and more.

This week we showed you where you can listen to great music online, demystified the Windows Registry, helped you see what Big Brother knows about you, and more.

• Five Best Music Streaming Services
  The internet has revolutionized nearly every form of media, and music is no exception. This week we look at the five most popular music streaming services to see how people are getting their music fix.
• What's the Registry, Should I Clean It, and What's the Point?
  There's nothing more mysterious on a Windows PC than the Registry, and today we'll explain exactly what it is, how it works, and whether you should bother cleaning it.
• The Day Trader's Paradise
  What do you get when you have space for a custom office setup, a good amount of cash, and the vision to make it all happen? Dozens of monitors and the need for your own personal power plant.
• Run a Total Background Check on Yourself with Free Online Tools
  Consumer-advocate blog Consumerist is always looking to help you keep tabs on Big Brother and any of your personal information He's tracking. Toward that end, their comprehensive list of online background-checking tools is worth a look.
• Top 10 Android Apps
  Android's been around for more than a year, and in that time developers have whipped up some great apps. Whether you're a new Android owner or a pro looking for new tools, these 10 great and free apps belong in your arsenal.
• The Easy, Any-Browser, Any-OS Password Solution
  Whenever we talk passwords, we always preach the same thing: Use strong, difficult-to-remember passwords, and different passwords for every site. Easy to say, extremely difficult to do through sheer willpower.
• The Best Things to Buy in March
  You've been diligently checking back on our guide to the best times to buy anything, all year round at the start of every month, right? No? Well, let's go ahead and refresh your memory on what's discounted and off-season in March.
• Exercise or Not, Sitting at a Desk All Day Is Bad for You
  We've been proponents of standing desks and treadputers for some time, but we've also met with plenty of reader skepticism on the subject. The New York Times examines why sitting all day is so bad for you, whether or not you exercise.
• Speed Up Your Shirt-Hanging Routine with a Simple Trick
  We love the two-second t-shirt folding technique we featured a few years back, but if you're more of a hanger than a folder, home blog Apartment Therapy's got a few pointers to help you speed up getting your shirts on hangers.
• 750 Words Clears Your Mind, Gets Ideas Flowing
  In his web-site-turned-book Things I Have Learned in My Life So Far, Stefan Sagmeister says keeping a diary supports personal development. I couldn't agree more.

MetaFilter founder and blogger Matt Haughey spent some time recently watching Pawn Stars (the History channel's "blue collar version of Antiques Roadshow"), and after a few episodes learned some solid negotiation lessons from the folks at the pawn shop.

The video above offers a few pointers for how to approach a pawn shop when you're looking to sell things, but Haughey also extracts a pattern for the negotiations that take place in Pawn Stars that seem applicable to nearly any negotiation.

The best part is the negotiation stage. I'm a terrible negotiator and in the past I've only done bargaining for new cars over email, since I completely fail trying to persuade lower prices from someone standing in front of me. I'm fascinated at how consistently Rick pulls a fairly low price for items and there is a general pattern to the procedure worth knowing.

Hit up his post for the breakdown, especially if you, like Haughey (and this editor), aren't generally skilled at negotiation. While you're getting your haggle on, don't forget the golden rule of negotiation.

What do you get when you have space for a custom office setup, a good amount of cash, and the vision to make it all happen? Dozens of monitors and the need for your own personal power plant.

We've been watching Steve's office since he first posted the construction pictures into the Lifehacker Workspace pool. Slowly we've watched his office take shape from a spackled room with naked monitor mounts into the jaw dropping display of computing power you see above.

Steve just finished the project and posted some pictures to update us, writing:

Originally there was to be 60 monitors, a mix of 19s and 24s however it changed a bit and there is now 40 24" monitors and another 20 monitors offsite for development.

There is six computers running all the monitors, eac computer has a core i7 975, 24 gb of DDR 3 memory, two SLC SSDs in raid 0 and a large amount of nvidia NVS 420s as well as Nvidia 9800 GTs.

This office is used for intraday trading and development.

And by "intraday trading and development" he means displaying the world's largest line chart screensaver when he isn't using it to build a better bomb and issue demands of monetary compesation to world governments—or something like that we'd imagine. Check out more pictures of his awesome setup below:

You can check out more pictures of Steve's office by visiting the various photo sets he shared during construction: Office construction, Office, and New Office Done.

If you have a workspace of your own to show off, throw the pictures on your Flickr account and add it to the Lifehacker Workspace Show and Tell Pool. Include some details about your setup and why it works for you, and you just might see it featured on the front page of Lifehacker.

If you're ever on the lookout for ways to reuse and recycle—or perhaps just to drink a lot of wine—this wine-bottle garden border is a clever and attractive repurposing project.

Annie and Alexis Thomas were looking for a green way to edge their gardens in an interesting and novel way. They edged their sizeable garden with 489 bottles—most collected from local restaurants and wine stores—partially buried, as the demarcation between the gardens and the foot paths that wind through them. Wine bottles are sturdy, especially the bottoms, and will last as long as they want to keep them in the garden before shipping them off to be recycled. Check out the link below—scroll down past their cool solar shower to get to the wine bottle project—for more information, or visit the via link to see more examples of wine and beer bottles being used to edge gardens.

Have a recycling trick up your sleeve? Let's hear about it in the comments.

Rampant DIYing aside, this week we rounded up five of the best start pages for your browsing convenience, detailed how to set up a fully automated media center, and reminded you to always, always write it down.

• Five Best Start Pages
  Your start page is the first thing you see when you open your browser or load a new tab-your gateway to the rest of the web. Get the most from your start page with one of these five favorites.
• How Can I Ditch Cable and Watch My TV Shows and Movies Online?
  Dear Lifehacker, I'd love to get rid of cable and stream all my favorite TV shows right from the internet. What do I need to know before I take the plunge?
• Set Up a Fully Automated Media Center
  We love a good media center almost as much as we love automation, so self-confessed media geek Alex Ward's fully automated media center caught our eye.
• When It Doesn't Pay to Be Google's Guinea Pig
  Besides a killer algorithm and brand-name recognition, Google's greatest strength is its speed at releasing new products. We get to play with new, cool, and ever-improving tools for free.
• A Celebration of Duct Tape: Our Favorite Duct Tape DIYs
  If the DIY community had a universal symbol, it most certainly would be a roll of duct tape. Inexpensive, abundant, strong, and ready to stick to nearly anything, this versatile DIY companion is a must in your DIY toolkit.
• Top 10 Windows Media Center Plug-Ins and Boosters
  Microsoft's powerful home theater centerpiece, Windows Media Center, is easily one of the best applications that ships for free with Windows. But you can still make it better-and take it into new realms-with these plug-ins, helper apps, and tweaks.
• Flavors.me Is a Simple and Elegant Personal Portal
  If you're looking to set up an elegant portal for your online identity that brings together social networks and other aspects of your online presence, Flavors.me is as simple and easy to use as it gets.
• Convert Your Old Laptop into a Digital Projector
  Some people have an extra $1,000 just lying around to buy a digital projector. Unfortunately, most of the people that I know, myself included, do not.
• How to Cook Something in the Dishwasher
  Authors Gever Tulley and Julie Spiegler's Fifty Dangerous Things (you should let your children do) builds on the premise that "dangerous" things we avoid are often eye-opening and educational.
• "It Didn't Happen If You Didn't Write It Down"
  Borrowing an idea from a Tom Clancy novel, software developer and blogger Christopher Schanck explains why he writes everything down, then suggests a handful of worthy tools for the job.

Gmail stutters, a phony version of Microsoft Security Esssentials makes the rounds, Opera 10.5 beta comes to Macs, and video codecs Ogg Theora and H.264 go head to head.

(Click the image above for a closer look.)

• Why Can't PCs Work More Like iPhones?
  NYT's Nick Bilton wishes that PCs could adopt a few of the better things about iPhones and other user-friendly mobile operating systems—just not the awful walled garden part. [NYT]
• Quicken for the Mac: Finally!
  The popular personal finance desktop application makes its way to the Mac desktop. [CNET]
• Gmail Acting Up? It's Not Just You
  Earlier today, several people experienced Gmail errors, acknowledged by their Apps Status Dashboard, so if you had Gmail bugginess this morning, you weren't alone. [TechCrunch]
• Security Essentials 2010 Is Not Microsoft Security Essentials
  There's a fake antivirus application making the rounds on the internet called Security Essentials 2010—not to be confused with Microsoft Security Essentials, the antivirus app we like so much. [Softpedia]
• Ogg Theora vs. H.264: head to head comparisons
  A side-by-side comparison of two competitors for the throne of de facto web video standard reveals, unfortunately, that the free solution (Ogg) doesn't appear to stack up. [Ars Technica]
• Opera 10.50 Beta for Mac!
  Opera 10.5 Beta is now available for Macs, and it's gooood. [Opera Blog]

Google Reader goes real-time, the Criterion Collection comes to Hulu, and some PowerPoint mistakes never change.

• AT&T Roars Back in PCWorld's Second 3G Wireless Performance Test
  PC World's annual 3G performance test puts AT&T's 3G network on top of download and upload speeds, followed by Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint. [PC World]
• Google Reader goes realtime with PubSubHubBub support
  We've talked about the real-time web and pushbutton web in Google Reader before, and now it looks like Reader's picked up real-time updating for sites that support the PubSubHubBub protocol. [Download Squad]
• iTunes Will Sell 10 Billionth Song Today
  I guess that's a lot of songs. [Gizmodo]
• Enough with the "expert" guilt
  "Sergey and Larry weren't advertising experts before they started Google." [A Smart Bear]
• Truth: Common Power Point mistakes never change
  An old video of a commedian's take on common PowerPoint mistakes demonstrates that not much has changed in the PowerPoint no-nos department. [Boing Boing]
• The Claim: To Cut Calories, Eat Slowly
  Another confirmation of an old favorite. [NYT]
• Ohhh Baby: The Criterion Collection Comes to Hulu
  And quality entertainment continues to make its way to the web. No complaints here. [Gizmodo]
• Office, Bing, and Windows Live on the iPad? Naturally
  "...there's good reason to think that Microsoft apps will be coming to the iPad." [Ars Technica]