Jul 31 2008
A $9.99 iPhone tethering application called NetShare made a brief appearance in the App Store, but now it’s no longer available. The app purportedly let you use your iPhone’s data connection on your laptop by using it as a proxy server. Of course, you can tether your iPhone 2.0 for free by jailbreaking it.
Original post by Gina Trapani
Jul 31 2008
While some of you have been following Zen Habits since its early days (beginning of 2007), many of you are fairly new readers. To help you through the fairly overwhelming archives, I’ve compiled a beginner’s guide. Kind of a Quick Start guide. First, a note: Please don’t try to go through this all at once. There are days and days worth of reading here. I’ve just organized that so that you can go to the stuff you want to learn about first. Take it in small chunks. 
Where do you start when you have a thousand posts to read through? You start with the best, or at least the most popular. So here they are: The All-Time Most Popular Posts on Zen Habits:
But those are just the stars of the All-Star team. Next you’ll want to delve into some of your favorite topics. You can go through the main categories:
Or you can go through a few compiled guides I’ve hand picked for some of the more popular categories:
And if that’s not enough for you, here’s a month-by-month Best of Zen Habits:
By now, you might want to know more about Leo, the guy who writes this blog … well, here’s more than you ever wanted to know:
Whew! That was a lot of reading. Now you just need to subscribe (via RSS or email) to make sure you get the new posts as they come out. Oh, and if you like, you can donate, or buy one of my ebooks: Zen To Done or the Zen Habits Handbook for Life.
Original post by Leo
Jul 31 2008
iPhone 2.0 only: Want to save that string of flirty text messages for posterity (or evidence)? While there’s no super-easy way to get your SMS history off your iPhone, with some elbow grease it’s possible. While this method is incomplete and more proof of concept than anything else, let’s take a look at how you can FTP into your iPhone, transfer your text message database to your computer, and open it up in a spreadsheet application like Excel.
Nerd alert! This method requires a jailbroken iPhone and some FTP and DB skills. The end result does give you a spreadsheet-friendly file that includes your entire history of text messages in it, but no (meaningful) record of WHO sent what message. File this post under “proof of concept” instead of “must actually do this.”
I tested Syphone for Mac as per a recent tipster, but try as I might, I couldn’t get Syphone to see my iPhone (and, it’s Mac-only). If anyone knows of an iPhone application that lets you transfer your text messages to your computer without going through this rigmarole, post it up in the comments and I’ll add it here.
root and password alpine.sms.db. Your text message database is located in /var/mobile/Library/SMS/sms.db. Download that file to your computer.sms.db file is a SQLite database, which you can edit and view using free tools. Download one of those tools—the SQLite Database Browser—and install it on your computer. Open up the sms.db file, and click on the Browse Data tab. Choose the message table and you’ll see your SMS history, and it’ll look like this: 
Now, the big problem with the resulting file is that while it includes the messages themselves, who sent each message is not there. (If any database wizards more hip to Apple’s DB structure know how to get that info there based on ID’s, I’m all ears.) Like I said—proof of concept.
You can also jailbreak your phone and download your voicemail messages this way. Is this living to geek instead of geeking to live? Yes it is. But I don’t judge how people get their kicks, so you shouldn’t either.
Original post by Gina Trapani
Jul 31 2008
CNET blogger Gordon Haff found that purchasing electronics cables online is consistently and significantly cheaper than at brick retail stores, and speculates all the possible reasons why—like the fact that consumers are less likely to comparison shop when they’re dying to hook up the shiny new Thingamabob 5000 they just bought.
Original post by Gina Trapani
Jul 31 2008
Handy do-it-yourselfer computerguru365 turned a network-capable laser printer into a wireless printer by mounting a small Wi-Fi router inside its case. This is a really cool mod: After installing a network card, he found space inside the printer to mount a small router (running the DD-WRT router firmware, no less), wired up and mounted LED lights, and tucked both the power and Ethernet cable hook-ups inside. This project’s not for the timid, and not really necessary, as you can just set the router on top or near the printer—but the result looks really good. (Of course you’ll get better bandwidth by keeping the antenna outside the printer.)
Original post by Gina Trapani
Jul 31 2008
Handy do-it-yourselfer computerguru365 turned a network-capable laser printer into a wireless printer by mounting a small Wi-Fi router inside its case. This is a really cool mod: After installing a network card, he found space inside the printer to mount a small router (running the DD-WRT router firmware, no less), wired up and mounted LED lights, and tucked both the power and Ethernet cable hook-ups inside. This project’s not for the timid, and not really necessary, as you can just set the router on top or near the printer—but the result looks really good. (Of course you’ll get better bandwidth by keeping the antenna outside the printer.)
Original post by Gina Trapani
Jul 31 2008
Popular social bookmarking site del.icio.us is now Delicious.com and it’s sporting a brand new look and a speedier backend. No more URL confusion! Watch a quick video of the transformation.
Original post by Gina Trapani
Jul 31 2008
Outlook users, if you find yourself entering the same things into email messages, you should take a look at the Quick Parts feature, which saves snippets of both text and images for easy reuse. While Gina briefly mentioned this feature in her guide to Tweaking Outlook to empty your inbox faster, let’s take a closer look at how to use it.
Open up a new email and create the “Quick Part” that you want to save for later re-use, then find Quick Parts in the Text section, and choose “Save Selection to Quick Part Gallery”.
Give it a name and a brief description so you can easily find it later.
Now, any time you want to enter that snippet of text, you can simply pick it from the drop-down button menu. Hovering your mouse over it will show you the description that you entered above.
If you want to edit your Quick Parts, you can right-click on any one of them, and choose “Organize and Delete” from the menu.
This will bring up the Building Blocks Organizer window, where you can preview, delete, insert, or get back to the Edit Properties dialog that you were shown when first saving it. Unfortunately you can’t actually edit them from within this dialog.
If you want to edit from Outlook, you’ll have to insert it, make your changes, and then save it with the same name, and you’ll be prompted to “redefine” the building block. Why they couldn’t just say “replace” I don’t know.
For even quicker access, I’d recommend adding Quick Parts to your Quick Access Toolbar, which is very easy to do from the right-click menu we used above.
If you are more of a keyboard junkie you may already be using Lifehacker’s own Texter, but for the mouse-oriented, this feature can be a time saver. What would you use it for?
Original post by The How-To Geek
Jul 31 2008
If you’re constantly logging into a remote server using SSH and you’re sick of typing your password every time, tech site Webmonkey details how to save time without sacrificing security. Using SSH-Agent, a utility that acts as a broker between your local machine and remote machine, you can log in without typing your password every time (but also securing your private key from attackers). Hit up Webmonkey to get the rundown on using SSH-Agent on Linux, Mac, and Windows. This one could have done well on yesterday’s list of top 10 command line tools.
Original post by Gina Trapani
Jul 31 2008
Previously mentioned Photoshop Express offers more web-based image management and editing features, like drag and drop upload (via an Adobe AIR app), tags to organize your photos, and slideshows put to music (in addition to Flickr integration). [via]
Original post by Gina Trapani