Firefox: If you love the screen coverage full screen mode provides, but you rely on the toolbar too much to have it constantly popping in and out of existence, this simple tweak will keep it in sight.

It seems counter productive to willingly give up some of that screen space you gained by switching to full screen mode, but if you rely on the toolbar or you just like having the address and search boxes visible, all it takes is a single right-click tweak. When you’re in full screen mode, move the mouse up to the top of the screen to bring the address bar and toolbar down, right-click and uncheck “Hide Toolbars”. From then on, you’ll still get the expanded view in full screen mode but you’ll also enjoy a compacted address and toolbar interface.

In a nutshell, you’ll use iPhone Explorer to copy over the Android files, then turn your Mac or PC into an Ubuntu virtual machine to install the OpeniBoot software. When you’re done, you’ll probably have a dual-booting iPhone that can swap between iPhone OS and an experimental version of Android 1.6 at startup.

read on the entire how-to at androidalot.com

source engadget.com

www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJBw9kHVJKo

iTag is a FREE service to locate and protect your lost or stolen phone. View your cell phone’s location, make it ring from the website, lock the keys, back up your data, delete the information on the phone.

itag.com

Here is something for the skiing fans out there. Nostalgic for those snow covered slopes? no fear – here is something that will keep you “cool” till the winter.

DIY Soft iPhone and iPad Stylus from adam kumpf on Vimeo.

Whether you’ve got an an iPad, a different snazzy tablet, an Android phone, or some other touchscreen device, sometimes your fingertip isn’t the ideal input device. With a few common materials, you can make an effective and inexpensive stylus for your touchscreen.

User adamkumpf at DIY site Instructables explains that if you’ve got a regular old pencil, a sock, and a pair of scissors, you can make a really simple but useful touchscreen stylus for next to nothing. The key is in the socks. You’ll need socks with anti-static material (socks with this material in the foot contain conductive silver thread that conducts well enough to work with touchscreens)—basically you’re wrapping the pencil in this anti-static, conductive material to make it touchscreen friendly.

I happen to be wearing anti-static socks at the moment, and sure enough, the material works nicely when pressed against my phone. We’ve featured other homemade styli in the past, but this soft stylus seems like the best version we’ve seen.

The guide also suggests you’ll need some remedial stitching skills, but if you’re really against pulling out the needle and thread, some tape would probably do just as well.

Like the rest of the world, we’ve been drooling over multi-touch here at Lifehacker, but now DIY web site Instructables has a guide to combining that with our other favorite hobby: building stuff.

This isn’t your typical Lifehacker weekend project; you’ll have to shell out quite a bit for the materials (about $2500, or $1500 if you already have a computer lying around). However, if you have need (or want) of a multi-touch surface in your home, making it yourself will still cost you quite a bit less than buying it. You’ll need quite a bit of tech, such as a projector, computer (any recent one will do), a PS3 Eye Camera, as well as some acrylic sheets for the surface itself. You’ll also need some software for this project, but it’s our favorite kind of software—free. The project is pretty involved, but you can’t argue with the final product—it’ll certainly be the coolest piece of furniture in your house. Hit the link for the full how to, and if you’ve ever pulled something like this off, tell us about it (and show it off) in the comments!

Let’s face it, the Toyota Tacoma has a long way to go before being considered glamorous, or even remotely cool, but jacking an iPad into its console might be a good start. That’s what the good people of SoundMan Car Audio over in California have done with a little bit of elbow grease and knowhow, and we’ve got video of how it all came together after the break. They’ve yet to wire it up to the Audison Bit One sound processor and McIntosh MMC406M 6-channel amp that are intended to receive the iPad’s audio goodies, but the important stuff of fitting and molding the dash to its new 9.7-inch centerpiece is all done. Alright, so the glossy black screen and the demure grey plastic don’t exactly sing in harmony, but surely the funky aesthetics can be forgiven for the sake of accessing all your media on the move. Right, dawg?

Those you you who’ve been following the CrunchPad project since we first announced it in the summer of 2008 weren’t too happy to hear about the recent…hiccups…that we continue to fight through.

But never fear, while we continue to clean up the mess that our Asian contractor left behind we’ve been hard at work on a new project that lets anyone create an iPad like device from any laptop screen. It’s called the CrunchPad Kit and it goes on sale now. Best of all, we’re selling this for just $49 as an introductory price. Once 800 have sold, or about $44,000 in revenue, we’ll be moving to a higher price.

The CrunchPad team has been working around the clock here at our Palo Alto headquarters to get the kit ready for full production in time for the delivery of the iPad on April 3.

We know you want an iPad, but you aren’t as excited about that $499+ price tag. With the CrunchPad Kit, you can turn any laptop screen into a device that’s just as good, for a fraction of the price.

Introducing The CrunchPad Kit

The kit contains everything you need to convert any laptop screen into a fully functional touch screen device. The key piece of technology is a transparent resizable modular touch screen overlap material that you add to the screen after removing it from the rest of the laptop. You then install the remaining electronics, as well as a power supply, and the device is ready to go. Also included in each kit is a 4G module that you can optionally activate and add to the device for always-on connectivity.

There’s real technology here, particularly in the touch module, that we’ve developed with our new partner. A number of patents have been filed around this new research, which we’re calling the F.U.J.J. With the F.U.J.J. you can convert any laptop screen of any size, up to 17 inches, into a CrunchPad.

There’s more information in the video above, including a complete walk through of the five minute installation process. Order your CrunchPad Kit now, we expect to be completely sold out within 48 hours.

Here’s one last picture of the Asian team we hired to help us build this product working on the F.U.J.J. from our office in Palo Alto after we sponsored their immigration visas to get them over here.

Windows: Windows desktop customization tool Omnimo takes the look and feel of the upcoming Windows Phone 7 user interface and brings it to any Windows desktop in an attractive and functional form that’s fresh, useful, and full of eye candy.

(Click most of the images in this post for a closer look.)

When you’re done setting it up, the Omnimo customization will add Windows Phone 7-style widgets to your desktop that’ll give you quick access to weather, calendars, your favorite programs, your unread email, notes, system monitoring (like CPU, hard drive, and RAM use), Wi-Fi signal strength, and oh-so-much-more. Best of all, everything’s easily customizable via drag and drop once you make it through the setup, so you can make it look however you want. Here’s a quick sampling of various setups straight from the Omnimo homepage:

Note: Omnimo should work on any Windows system, XP through Windows 7.

read on the rest of the article at lifehacker.com

On which netbooks you can install Mac’s OS X – read on..

When it came to OS X on netbooks the only chart I knew about was the Boing Boing OS X compability chart. It hasn’t been updated in ages though and the list of netbooks are old-ish and small in number.

Now there’s a new OS X compatibility chart on the block over at mymacnetbook.com.  Well actually apart from the ASUS Eee PC 1201 (which doesn’t support Wi-Fi and LAN with OS X it seems) all the other netbooks are old-ish.

The new blog seems like it’ll be a good place to keep up with the latest OS X happenings on netbooks, outside of forums.

Source: Liliputing

I like the iPad somehow. Somehow means I like the shape, the way it performs but I don’t like the limitations imposed by Apple so I’m pretty sure I won’t buy one anytime soon (or preorder it). There are a lot of people out there like me, so there’s always the solution of building yourself your own iPad from better and more capable hardware. That’s what a guy at InsanelyWind, a forum for MSI Wind netbooks has done, turning his own device in something that resembles the iPad.
What he did is pretty simple: he removed the screen and keyboard, attached the former to the bottom part, did some rewiring, installed a hacked Mac OS X version with a theme that makes it look almost just like the iPad interface and that’s it. Sounds simple, I know but it’s clear to me that you need some skills to perform this ’surgery’ on your own. Maybe he’ll make a business from this in the future (except the Mac OS X install part as we all know what happened to Psystar).

original source – engadget.com By Joshua Topolsky

IE6 – Oh IE6… Why Must We Live With You?

Well we all know IE6 is poo, that’s just a given. So we wont get into any sort of rants about ‘don’t we have enough browsers to test on?‘, ‘it’s not even supported anymore‘ or discuss such things as phasing out, browsers comparisons, percentages etc etc. It has been done to death… Although saying that, for those of you viewing this site in IE6, Cough… Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera or, to be fair even this would probably work better.

I have no doubt in my mind that what the digital revolution is doing for television, one day common sense will do for internet browsing and we will be rid of it forever, but until that day comes, we must live with IE6. So with that painful recognition, I thought I would put together and share a few common IE6 bugs, along with some helpful hints and tips to combat this crummy browser!

First, some advice

We can of course before we get into any bugs and fixes, help ourselves along by making sure all our code is built using semantic markup which validates and works in modern browsers. Never build your site for the older browsers first, always build for the newer ones then apply fixes for the older ones. This means you are future proofing your site. Also make sure a valid doctype is declared. If you do these things then you may not experience any bugs or issues. If you do come across a bug, fix it when you discover it as it is much easier to handle than trying to fix a boat load at the end of a project.

A handy CSS tip!

One trick I use regularly is the ‘* html‘ rule. This rule is ignored by all browsers other than IE6, allowing us to apply specific rules and styles for IE6 problem areas. This code in use could look something like:
p{
font-size:14px;
color:#fff;
}
* html p{
font-size:12px;
color:#000;
}

Using the above example, the font would be 14px and white in all modern browsers, but in IE6 it would display at 12px and be black. I sometimes use this rule to overcome some of the specific bugs highlighted below, also as a light weight alternative to replace pngs with gifs in IE6 instead of using the iepngfix.htc PNG fix which we will cover shortly.

The Double Margin Bug

Lets say we have an element on our page, a div for example. We need this div to be 500px wide and want to float it right with a margin-right of 10px. The CSS for this would look like:
div {
width: 500px;
float: right;
margin-right: 10px;
}

IE6, due to it being a genius browser will double the margin, so instead of 10px it makes it 20px. Marvelous!

Solutions:

1. You can set the element to have the property ‘display: inline;‘ which immediately remedies the issue, but this causes an element which does not have a float property attached to lose its static width. So this is not always a viable option.
2. Do not add margin-right to your element, but instead add padding-right. Again not always suitable as you may have a border or different background colour applied to your element.
3. Remove padding and margin all together from the element, and instead add a padding to the elements parent.
4. The * html fix mentioned above!

None ideal, but no bug fix is!

The Box Model

The Box Model is quite an annoying and very common IE6 bug and it involves a miscalculation of any element with a declared width. Your code could look something like:
div {
width: 500px;
padding: 20px;
}

IE6 calculates the width of the div to be 500px, whereas modern browsers will calculate the width of the div as 540px incorporating the 40px padding.

The solution:

The answer to this problem is to not add padding to the outer element, but instead embed an element, perhaps a ‘p’ tag or another div inside the parent div, and add your padding to this element instead. Creating:
div {
width: 500px;
}
div div {
padding: 20px;
}


The Stepdown Bug

This is an issue commonly found when creating elements like horizontal menus. It is caused by IE6 adding a line break after the floated element, which in turn knocks the next floated element down a line and so on.

The solution

There are two ways around this problem.
1. Set the elements that are floated, lets say the ‘li’ in a list to be ‘display:inline’, then display the embedded element as ‘display:block;’ An example of this would be:
ul li{
display:inline;
}
ul li a{
display:block;
}

This allows us to remove the float property from the parent element, in turn removing the bug.
2. You can set the parent elements line-height to 0 causing the break to attain 0 height.

None Collapsable Elements

This is quite an annoying little bug, if you are trying to set an element with a 1px or 2px height property, IE6 ignores this and will not collapse the element down further than the height of the base font-size.

The solution

Simple solution to this one, we just need to add ‘overflow: hidden;‘ onto the element in question. This then ignores the height of the font in IE6 and sets the height of the element accordingly. Example:
div {
width: 400px;
height: 1px;
overflow: hidden;
}


No Hover States

In modern web design, we like interaction, meaning we try to add hover states to more things than just links. Most modern browsers support hover states on elements such as ‘li‘ ‘inputs‘ etc, but not IE6.
You can only have a hover state on an ‘a‘ element and it must include an ‘href‘.

The solution

Unfortunately the only solution to this problem is using a JavaScript fix, something similar to this, or you will just have to live with your users experiencing less interaction on IE6.

Alpha Transparency PNG

IE6 does not support transparent images, and it was only until IE7 was introduced did Microsoft decide to say, OK we will allow people to have pretty websites! Not a quote! Yes if you try to include a nice transparent png image on your website, IE6 will throw in a lovely Grey coloured background for you.

The solution

There are again a few workarounds to this issue.
1. Use the * html fix I highlighted above to specifically add a gif instead of a png image to your site. This does mean creating 2 images every time you want to use a png but it is very flexible and allows you to keep your code clean. something like the following would work:
div{
background-image: url('images/BG-image.png');
}
* html div{
background-image: url('images/BG-image.gif');
}

2. You can use a iepngfix.htc. This works by cleverly replacing the background with a blank 1px x 1px gif image. There are many different versions of this file, some only work with inline images, some can handle background images. The one I turn to can be downloaded here. It is simple to implement and contains instructions on use.

To Conclude

These are just some of the bugs we as web designers need to face when dealing with IE6, and these are some of the ways I deal with them. Not all are the best way, but they seem to work! If anyone has any preferred and tested methods covering some of the issues above, please feel free to post them below.

for more interesting posts on the above subject pls visit branded07.com/

The ASUS Eee PC 701 is back yet again with yet another slate tablet mod purposely made for those occasions where the modder wanted to verify actor roles at IMBD in front of the TV. He bought a used Eee PC 701 and touchscreen kit off of Ebay and proceeded to hack the innards with details that go over my head. He is going the Linux route and I’d be pretty interested to see that how goes with a touch screen.

Just a couple of pictures for now but I’m hoping he’ll add some more stuff to see.

Source: Eee User Forums and MikeJose

If you’d like a clever and cheap way to keep windows, goggles, and other glass and plastic surfaces from fogging up, you can use a potato to keep the vision-blocking condensation at bay.

Photo by jimmihomeschoolmom.

We’re almost out of the so-cold-your-breath-fogs-the-windshield weather in most of the US but this trick works for everything from windshields to swim goggles. Over at the how-to site wikiHow they’ve shared a guide to using a cut potato to keep your windows fog-free.

1. Cut a raw potato in half. Be sure to use a clean potato, so wash it first if it is coated in soil. This is a good opportunity to use up an old potato that has started to sprout and is past its best.
2. Rub the cut part of one half potato on the window. This will clean it and leave a layer that will prevent fog from forming on the window.
3. Use the other half if needed. You can also cut off dirtied slices and keep using the existing half if wished.
4. Leave to dry without touching.

We thought it sounded too cheap and easy to actually work so we grabbed a potato and went and rubbed a raw slice on the shower door, window, and mirror in the bathroom. After a few minutes of steamy hot water the surfaces did in fact remain fog free. How well it lasts over time and how it compares to a $7 bottle of anti-fog spray from your local sporting goods store is open for debate.

Toyota has been dealing with negative backlash from the massive safety recalls of its vehicles; and is even suffering in terms of sales. So what does the company do to repair its image? Turn to Twitter, of course! The Japanese auto giant has launched a branded channel on TweetMeme, in partnership with Federated Media, which aggregates and organize Twitter conversations regarding Toyota.

Called Toyota Conversations, the site brings together the top stories being Tweeted about Toyota, from news articles to press releases. The site also shows visitors the most popular videos and images being shared about Toyota on Twitter. And the channel includes a Featured Tweets from Toyota’s Twitter account and press room as well as AdTweets, which are Tweetmeme’s retweetable ads for Toyota.

You may notice after taking a look at all of the top stories that are being aggregated on the site, that most of the news is positive. That doesn’t seem to match the general tone of the media writing about Toyota, which has been quick to criticize the car company for its manufacturing mistakes. If you take a look at Twitter sentiment app Tweetfeel, the sentiment of Tweets mentioning Toyota lean more negative. Tweetmeme channels can be set up to pick up only certain news sources. It looks like Toyota picked the friendlier ones.

That being said, it’s definitely interesting to see such a high-profile company taking to Twitter to try to reform its image by engaging directly in a dialogue with consumers. As we’ve seen with the recent Southwest/Kevin Smith incident, Twitter is influencing public relations in unprecedented ways. Now more than ever, brands are flocking to Twitter to not only monitor and track what’s being said about their company on Twitter but to influence and participate in the conversation.

Photo Credit/Flickr/JoelZimmer

Bottle Hanger

Cuckoo Wrist Clock

Plastic Bag Lamp

Bike Valve Key Rack

Bird Shape Scissors

E-ntancle

Sofa Bunk Bed

Rug Cum Hut

Hanger Tea

Glass Pool Table

Finger Bookmark

Oops Cabinet

iTable

Sicko Tissues

Runny Nose Tissue Box

Underfull Table Cloth

Blood Puddle Pillow

Remember that polarizing Windows 7 Activation Technologies Update we told you about? You know, the one that helps you to “verify that the copy of Windows 7 that is running on your computer is activated correctly and is genuine?” It’s available for download now through Windows Update, and it’s not particularly easy to spot. The main label simply says “Update for Windows 7,” though we’d be sure to avoid KB971033 if you weren’t up for having this thing looking into your business. Your call, though.

[Thanks, Elijah and bighap]