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

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?

Windows 7 has been well received both critically and on the street. And while Lifehacker readers love Windows 7, a well-built OS isn’t a perfect OS. Check out these five applications that tweak Windows 7 and customize it to your heart’s content.

A stock Windows 7 installation a fairly pleasant place to work, judging from our readers’ reports. Even so, a little tweaking of its behavior, looks, and other features lets you optimize and personalize that desktop. Check out these five great tools for doing so.

God Mode (Windows, Free)

The “God Mode” in Windows 7 isn’t quite like a video game God Mode—alas, no infinite laptop battery life or unlimited bandwidth—but it is a pretty nifty hack, and doesn’t require any new installations. Create a new folder on your Windows desktop, save it with the name God-Mode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}, though you can substitute whatever name you want for “God-Mode.” The folder will change icons, and when you click on it, you’ll see every configuration option available in the control panel. That’s the real power of the Windows 7 God Mode—it takes all the toggles you have to dig through the control panel menus and sub-menus to get to, and puts them right in one master list. It’s worth trying out God Mode just to see settings you may not have even been aware of.

Regedit (Windows, Free)

The Windows registry is a treasure trove of tweak-friendly variables and values. You shouldn’t muck around in it blindly, but by reading up on specific variables, you can tweak all manner of things that slightly irk you. Stroll through #registry here at Lifehacker to read up on all sorts of neat tricks, like how to speed up the Windows 7 taskbar, customize the login buttons, and tweak Aero peek . While you’re learning about the registry, you’ll want to check out our guide to the registry and registry cleaning. If you’re not comfortable directly editing your Windows registry, we’d advise you to check out some of the other Windows tweaking applications in the Hive Five. Many of the settings they provide are just a neat graphic interface for the variables hidden in the bowels of the registry.

Windows 7 Manager (Windows, $40)

Windows 7 Manager doesn’t do anything that you can’t do with various pieces of freeware or registry tweaks, but it does roll together dozens of functions into a unified, simplified interface. Not only can you tweak the GUI of Windows 7 but you can also tweak your boot routines, find duplicate files, securely erase files, retrieve and backup software keys, and more. Windows 7 Manager comes with a 15 day trial, so you can pit it against the free options in today’s Hive before shelling out your hard-earned cash.

Rainmeter (Windows, Free)

Rainmeter is a skinning application for Windows, but that doesn’t quite do it justice. You can do nearly anything with data using Rainmeter, from embedding the weather into your desktop to massaging the entire way you interact with your OS into something new. The best testament to the versatility and outright coolness of Rainmeter is wandering through the#rainmeter tag here at Lifehacker, and checking out all the unique desktops and tweaks readers have shared with us—also worth a peek is the best desktops of 2009, many of them featuring Rainmeter. If you look at your Windows desktop and go beyond thinking, “I wish the taskbar had different spacing,” and more toward, “I wish my Windows interface looked like something totally new and Star Trek-flavored,” then Rainmeter is for you.

Ultimate Windows Tweaker (Windows, Free)

For those of you that remember and loved the TweakUI utility from Microsoft, Ultimate Windows Tweaker is a freeware tool that takes the concept of the old TweakUI and supercharges it for Windows Vista and 7. You can tweak hundreds of settings and variables—system tray icons, the menu pop-up speed, security settings for the control panel, and a lot of other things you can’t normally get to. It’s a 380 KB, stand-alone portable application, so if you’re curious to see just how many things you can tweak, it’s no hassle at all to take it for a spin.

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

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

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

We’re going to assume that Mary Lou’s bravado-filled “It’s only slightly more difficult than changing a lightbulb” is in reference to working with OLPC. In fact, in Mary Lou Jepsen’s most recent Pixel Qi blog post she makes quick reference of the fact that there will be DIY kits for replacing your own laptop screen (most likely a 10-inch module) with the sunlight-friendly, switchable magic of Pixel Qi, but she spends the rest of the post talking about how in Nigeria some schoolgirls started up a laptop hospital where they’d repair their XOs by swapping out parts or reseating cables. We doubt most of our laptops will be so resilient when it comes to ripping off the bezel and swapping in the Pixel Qi part, but we’re dying to void our warranty and find out.

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

Does the web need yet another how to post on making your own light tent? There are certainly other good options out there for DIY light tents.

But using just paper and binder clips it’s possible to make an even cheaper and even simpler light tent. And if for some reason you get beet juice on it, it can be recycled.

Start with three A3, 11″ by 17″, foolscap, B, tabloid or similar size medium-thickness pieces of paper. Then get 4 binder clips. In a pinch paper clips will work.

Take one of the sheets of paper and fold it in half lengthwise (1). Then make a roughly one inch fold on one of the ends perpendicular to the first fold (2). Cut a roughly 2.5 centimeter slit on the other end of first folded edge (3). Finally fold a T-shape with the slitted end (4). This is the first side of your light tent.

Attach a binder clip to the folded side near the T-fold side to clip together the edges of the paper that were formed with the very first fold.

Take a second piece of paper and fold it in half lengthwise (5). Then make a roughly 2.5 centimeter fold on one of the edges perpendicular to the first fold (6). Note that folds 2 and 6 mirror each other. That is fold 2 above is to the right while fold 6 is to the left. This step isn’t critical but will result in sides that are mirror images. Once again make a roughly 1 inch slit (7) and T-shaped fold (8).

Attach a binder clip to the second side in the corresponding position as was used for the first binder clip.

Almost done. Take the third piece of paper and make a fold on one of the short ends of the page. This page will be the back and bottom of the light cube. The fold will be used to attach the paper to the sides and should be about thumb wide.

Take the two sides and position them in front of you with the T-folds away from you. The sides should be about a page width apart. The mirroring of folds 2 and 6 should be evident and in this case they fold out from the center of the light tent.

Use the last two binder clips to attach to the folded edge of the back/bottom page to the T-folds of the two sides. The folded edge of the back/bottom should sit on top of the slitted edge of the inner T-folds of the sides.

That’s it.

There are plenty of variations. More binder clips can be used to add stability. Double folds can be used if the paper is thinner. Different colored paper can be used for different colored light tents. A fourth folded page can be added as a top. I typically shoot with indirect office lighting or reflected daylight so the four sided cube is adequate.

This light tent can also be scaled up and down. How else to take photos of your new light tent but inside of a larger light tent? Cheap railboard is great for larger versions. In the intrest of brevity, instructions for matryoshka light tents will not be covered in this post. Given the wide availability of paper and paper clips it’s also quite handy to be able to construct a light tent as needed, especially when traveling, in a co-worker’s cube or on the beach. It takes me about a minute to make one from scratch. The binder clips can be removed for lay-flat storage of the light tent. The resulting images, for example the composition below, are sufficient for many uses, even blogging.

And remeber if you get beet juice on your light tent it can easily be recycled.

Ugly cords are the obvious villain in your gadget-charging clutter, but even if you put together a nice charging station, you’ve still got to sacrifice some counterspace to your charging station’s footprint. This clean, wall-mounted charging station tackles both problems.

Pam from home blog Bibbidi Bobbidi Beautiful details how she put together an attractive, cordless, clutter-free charging station with a simple ledge shelf and some picture hanging strips.

She mounted the shelf on top of her outlet (depending on how concerned you are with fire hazards, you may want to reconsider that aspect) with the help of the hanging strips, effectively hiding both the outlet and the chargers from view. The cords also remain hidden by the shelf, and all that’s left is small dongles sticking out the top for you to get your charge on. It’s simple but effective, just hows we likes it.

Based in Germany, K_M_Architektur is a company with a interesting portfolio and an experience that allows them to conduct complex projects. Today’s choice- “Wood Box With View”, a residence located next to Lindau, in the village called village Hochbuch, Germany.

Read entire post at freshome.com

Most of us remember Windows System Restore as a lame-duck feature from Windows XP; when it seemed we might benefit from using it, it never quite worked how we expected. That’s no longer the case.

Windows System Restore is an awesome system recovery tool, and it’s included with Windows for free. It’s the ideal solution for rolling back bad drivers, fixing when buggy software breaks your PC, or simply rolling you back to a previous point in time. If you’ve still got a bad taste in your mouth from the lackluster XP version of System Restore, it’s time to take a look at it again if you’ve upgraded to Windows 7 or Vista.

System Restore in Windows 7 Is Better than XP

If you’ve ever tried the XP variety of System Restore, the uselessness of it probably left a bad taste in your mouth. Setting a system restore point was often agonizingly slow, and when it came time to actually attempt a system restore, it rarely did what you wanted it to do. But if you’ve upgraded to Vista or Windows 7, you should really give System Restore another chance.

Back in the XP days, system restore simply used a file filter and copied files around, but since Vista, it uses the Shadow Copy features built into Windows—essentially, Windows can create a snapshot of your drive as of a certain point in time, which can then be used later to restore your PC should anything go wrong.

Read entire article at lifehacker.com …

The How-To Geek deleted his system32\drivers folder for fun, and used System Restore to easily get the PC running again. His geeky articles can be found daily here on Lifehacker,How-To Geek, and Twitter.

A69 is an architecture company from the Czech Republic. Contrary to a general belief, this house was not projected like this willingly. The site had many particular elements (a garden that needed to be preserved, an old building that was used as an adjacent support for the contemporary one) which made the development of the architecture plans rather tricky.  However, the final results are stunning: a circular home built around a garden, which is also a space for relaxation. A roof garden is a particular feature of this house, which comes to increase its aesthetic value. Large windows are present all around, as an inner circular wall, separating the residence from the green area in the center. The interior was designed with minimalist furniture, but not leaving aside the contemporary feel.