Lifehacker

When there's too much Lifehacker and too little time, switch to our trimmed-down top stories feed to skip the extras and get right to the good stuff. Don't care about Windows-only downloads or the iPhone? Customize our URLs to see only the posts you want. This week's most popular posts include:

• Customize Your Own Killer "Enigma" Desktop
  "Windows desktop tweaker extraordinaire and Lifehacker reader Kaelri?who brought us the gorgeous Lightning at Sunset desktop and then showed us how to do it ourselves?is back, this time with a fresh new desktop he calls "Enigma.""
• Gmail Updates Its Look, Adds Themes
  "Google's beloved web-based email client has always been ripe for third-party design customization (we've always been partial to the Gmail Redesigned skin in Better Gmail, for example), but now Gmail is officially riding the interface customization train by offering 30-some new themes to spice up your inbox."
• Thirty Cliches You Should Avoid (Going Forward)
  "Using a data analysis tool that monitors new books, research papers, broadcast transcripts and news sources, Oxford University came up with a list of the top 10 most irritating phrases."
• Top 10 Ways to Speed Up Your Web Browsing
  "Even in a world where high-speed internet is just a tall house blend away, anyone can get stuck with a slow or uncertain connection at home, in the office, or at the worst possible time while traveling."
• Five Best Video Chat Applications
  "When you really want to stay in touch over a long distance, a simple phone call or voice chat pales in comparison to a face-to-face video chat."
• Liberate Yourself from Old Email Addresses
  "If you've been on the internet for any substantial amount of time you've likely accumulated your fair share of email addresses..."

Four Googlers show off their artistic skills as well as Google Docs' collaboration capabilities in the time-lapse video above of a spreadsheet holiday art project. Hit the play button to watch them fill in an 100 row by 186 column spreadsheet with 18 colors to make a detailed holiday snowflake pattern. (The eagle-eyed will notice that at least one of the authors was not using Google's own browser, Chrome—it looks like Firefox on the Mac.) Hit the link below to grab the template and make your own. Spreadsheet Art Template [Google Docs]

New peer-to-peer file sharing web service LittleShoot finds and downloads files right inside your web browser. LittleShoot founder (and former LimeWire engineer) Adam Fisk says he created LittleShoot to overcome LimeWire's shortcomings. To get started, you can search for a keyword at the LittleShoot web site without installing a thing and you'll get dozens of results from YouTube, Flickr, Yahoo, and LittleShoot users. (See the results for a search on "Twilight" above.) To play or download a file, you will have to download and install a small LittleShoot add-on. To publish a file on LittleShoot, hit the Publish tab and add a file on your local computer. The Mashable web site reports that LittleShoot is optimized to find nearby computers that host the file you need as well as defaulting to computers on the same ISP to increase download speeds and responsiveness. All in all, LittleShoot is looking very promising for P2P-ers who don't want to run full-fledged BitTorrent or other clients. What's your favorite way to P2P? Let us know in the comments. Thanks, Sangraal!

At our brother site Gizmodo, Jesus Diaz posts a ripping rant against what he calls "beta culture," and consumers' tolerance for half-baked software and hardware that breaks more often than it should. Diaz writes:
We have surrendered in the name of progress and marketing and product cycles and consumerism. Maybe those are good reasons, I don't know, but looking at the past, it feels like we are being conned. Deceived because the manufacturers of electronic products have taken our desire to progress faster and even embrace the web beta culture as an excuse to rush things to market, to blatantly admit bugs and the rushed features sets and sell the patches as upgrades.

While I see where he's coming from—especially in regards to hardware you spend your hard-earned cash on—we're fans of testing beta software (the key word being "testing") because it's often where the best new features are. What about you?
Is "beta culture" a good or bad thing? ( polls) Tell us more in the comments. Bad Technology: A Call for Revolution Against Beta Culture [Gizmodo]

Firefox only: If you like to copy and paste snippets of web pages—but want to include the source URL and date and time in one shot—the QuoteURLText add-on's for you. Once installed, just select the relevant quote from a web page and press Ctrl+Shift+C (Win) or Command+Shift+C (Mac) and the selection will be copied along with the URL of the source page. Additional options allow you to include the time browsed and title of the page, as well. Advanced options let you refine the metadata added to the selection in the clipboard further. QuoteURLText is a free add-on download for Firefox browsers. QuoteURLText [via gHacks]

We spend all day typing at you, so now it's your turn to type back at us. This comment thread is officially open: post your cries for tech help, reader surveys, questions about the meaning of life, favorite screenshots, video clips, site feedback, rants, and raves below. Don't forget to respond to a specific comment by a fellow reader by hitting the arrow on the bottom right hand side of it. Anything goes here (within reason, of course—play nice, my kittens), so let's start cocktail hour early and chat it up. We'll round up the best threads that appear here over the weekend so they don't fall off the page into oblivion before the night is done. Have fun! Photo by Soffia S.

Researchers at the University of Maryland found the one activity unhappy people do more than happy people is watch TV. The New York Times reports:
"We looked at 8 to 10 activities that happy people engage in, and for each one, the people who did the activities more ? visiting others, going to church, all those things ? were more happy,? Dr. [John] Robinson said. ?TV was the one activity that showed a negative relationship. Unhappy people did it more, and happy people did it less.?

The study doesn't indicate whether TV-watching is a symptom or a cause of unhappiness, so turning off the TV won't necessarily make you happier. Have unhappier times in your life involved more TV-watching, less, or the same as happy times? Let us know in the comments. What Happy People Don't Do [NYTimes.com]

Windows XP only: When you right-click on your desktop or on a file, do you have to go through two dozen useless menu items before you hit the one you want? Free utility Mmm offers an easy interface for hiding and organizing context menu items—into a "Rarely used" subfolder, for example. With Mmm running, hit the colored button it adds to the top left of the menu to see the configuration area, shown here. Check out the before and after photos of my context menu using Mmm.

Before:

After:

Recently, the How-To Geek explained how to clean up your right-click menu by editing the Windows registry—a fine option for super-savvy users who don't want to run yet another utility to achieve the same end. If messing with your registry isn't your bag, previously mentioned FileMenu Tools and ShellExView also get the job done. Mmm Free is a free download for Windows XP only; Mmm+ offers more options for $9.99. Thanks, gravi_t!

We just pushed an update to Lifehacker's mobile-friendly site version, located at m.lifehacker.com. Mobile users on the Blackberry, iPhone, and other handsets who visit Lifehacker will be automatically redirected there; click the "classic Lifehacker" link to see the full-on browser version on your phone. Suggestions, thoughts, feedback? Post it in the comments here.

Mac OS X only: The latest version of the free Plex Media Center for Mac now includes iTunes and iPhoto support, iTunes visualizations, TV theme music, and the ability to play songs you've purchased from the iTunes Store. This tight iTunes/iPhoto integration comes in part from the Plex Media Server, which makes your songs and photos show up inside Plex while running in parallel. The Plex developer explains:
The Plex Media Server is a standalone program that runs alongside Plex (or alone on any machine, it?s a Universal Binary). It serves up media from your iLife applications (iTunes and iPhoto today, Aperture and Lightroom shortly). Plex communicates with the Plex Media Server on the local machine, on your local network, or even across the world over the Internet. This means that you can play your friends? iTunes playlists or browse their podcasts or photo albums.

The Plex Media Center is a fork of the XBMC project, which also offers a Mac version. In fact, XBMC Atlantis' Mac version also includes iTunes and iPhoto support; compare our Plex screenshot tour to the Atlantis tour to see the differences between the two projects, which share the same code base. Plex is a free download for Intel Macs running Leopard only. Plex

Along with the release of the iPhone 2.2 software, Apple also drops a new iTunes update to version 8.0.2, which includes bug fixes and integration with VoiceOver (Mac) and Window-Eyes (Windows), screen reader utilities for increased accessibility. Hit Check for Updates from the iTunes menu to download it.

Windows and Linux only: A new release of the open-source, all-in-one email, calendar, and task manager Spicebird is now available for download. Kevin took you on a tour of Spicebird 0.4 back in January, but the new version 0.7 adds features and fixes. Notably, 0.7 got support for Google gadgets on the home screen, revamped instant messaging capabilities, Google Calendar support, and experimental blogging capabilities—see the full release notes for details. The Spicebird 0.7 release is a free download for Windows and Linux. Thanks, Asian Angel! Spicebird 0.7 Released

Prague-based virtual panorama company 360 Cities is offering its entire collection of nearly 10,000 spherical images on Google Earth. Head to the "Featured Preview" layer in the 3D tool to enable 360 Cities, then just click to scan around and gawk. [via]

The long-awaited 2.2 firmware updates for iPhones and iPod touch models hit iTunes at midnight last night, pushing a good deal of new features and long-awaited fixes to the mobile devices. We've already detailed some of the major new features already: Street View with walking/transit directions in Google Maps (iPhones only, unfortunately) and "emoji" face emoticons, over-the-air podcast downloading, and, while not really a feature, it's expected that 2.2 will be jailbroken before you know it. There's a good number of interface and usability improvements too, like improved HTML email formatting and location sharing, stability and menu bar tweaks to Safari, and a few other punch-list items. I'm downloading my 240MB-ish iPod update just fine this morning; tell us your impressions of 2.2 in the comments. iPhone 2.2 Update Available Now [Gizmodo]

Windows only: Free file browser Q-Dir makes for a good USB drive app or installed replacement for Windows Explorer for those who do a serious amount of file swapping, or just like to be able to keep multiple folder views open at once. The app—which installs by default, but can run by itself after renaming it "Q-Dir.exe"—offers a customizable number of panes, though the default four-square is a pretty good starting point. You can save any view you like to a favorite button, along with adding shortcuts to frequently-accessed folders. There's also a quick-filter box in the lower-right for easy sorting and finding, and if you use Q-Dir regularly, you'll be glad it keeps your right-click shell extensions and offers its own "*Q-Dir" launch option on right-clicking a folder. Q-Dir is a free download for Windows systems only. Only need two panes? We're also big fans of replacing Explorer with Xplorer2. Q-Dir [via FreewareGenius.com]

Publisher Ziff Davis has printed the last edition of PC Magazine and announced it would go online-only, but fans can get a free one-year "subscription" emailed to them every month at GoReadGreen.com, along with a few other mag titles. [via]

iPhone/iPod touch only: Streaming media server Orb has released free and $9.99 versions of an app that lets you watch videos, listen to music, check documents and even stream live or recorded TV to your iPhone or iPod touch. Like other combinations that use Orb's Windows-only (for now) software at their core, connection speeds and lag vary depending on the two sides of the connection, but streaming video to my iPod touch was decent enough, if a tiny bit out of sync. The main difference between the free and paid versions is a big one—the free version picks three items from each category to stream, while the paid app gives you full access to anything you want to grab. That's just about all there is to it, though you'll want to head to the app's settings to optimize streaming for EDGE, 3G, or Wi-Fi connections. The OrbLive applications are free and $9.99, and both require an iPhone or iPod touch running at least the 2.0 firmware. Check out our screenshot tour and Wii media center guide for a closer look at the Orb software itself. OrbLive Free and OrbLive [iTunes App Store via Gizmodo]

Some logged-in Google users are seeing an interesting new feature enabled on their results pages this morning. SearchWiki adds two buttons to the right of each result that let users move their favorite or most relevant results to the top spot or kill out a result entirely for their page only, as well as add notes for yourself on certain results and add entirely new results to that crucial first page. You (and other users) will be able to see the changes your username has made, along with aggregate numbers for other users' actions (x voted up, x removed). While they're just for your information right now, Google engineers have said they might consider letting group decisions impact global results. I don't have SearchWiki enabled in my account yet, so I can't tell if the "I'm Feeling Lucky" results work with the re-ordering (so cool if so). Check out Google demonstration video below, and tell us what you dig and don't about SearchWiki in the comments. Screenshot from Google Operating System.