Benton Pena @ technology + culture + life and everything in between

The Pirate Bay has lost some weight, the Kinect may be more than a toy, and Evernote Hello gets its first update.

• Download a Copy of The Pirate Bay, It’s Only 90 MB: The switch from torrent files to magnet links means the entire site now fits in a 90MB compressed file, available as a torrent where else but The Pirate Bay. [TorrentFreak]
• Microsoft Will Launch Kinect for Workplace Next Month: The device is being offered as a handsfree alternative for data entry in environments where stopping to remove gloves or approach a register interrupts workflow. [Read Write Web]
• Evernote Hello Gets a Big Update: The visual, contextual address book for iPhone got its first update today, with a focus on “faster, easier, and more natural” interactions. Some new features include contact integration and search for all data fields. [Evernote Blog]
• File Sharing in the Post MegaUpload Era: Analysis shows file sharing traffic only slightly decreased in the wake of MegaUpload’s seizure, though more of North America’s traffic crosses the Atlantic from Europe. [DeepField Networks Blog]
• Apple to Announce iPad 3 First Week in March: Citing unspecified sources, All Things D predicts and analysts agree we’ll see an early March event in San Francisco. Apple has no comment. [All Things D]
• LinkedIn Will Introduce Ads to Mobile Apps: The CEO said in a call with analysts today that the infrastructure is in place and ads will be rolling out. [TechCrunch]

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Article source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/UltPqvLKFe8/remains-of-the-day-download-a-copy-of-the-pirate-bay

The Pirate Bay has lost some weight, the Kinect may be more than a toy, and Evernote Hello gets its first update.

• Download a Copy of The Pirate Bay, It’s Only 90 MB: The switch from torrent files to magnet links means the entire site now fits in a 90MB compressed file, available as a torrent where else but The Pirate Bay. [TorrentFreak]
• Microsoft Will Launch Kinect for Workplace Next Month: The device is being offered as a handsfree alternative for data entry in environments where stopping to remove gloves or approach a register interrupts workflow. [Read Write Web]
• Evernote Hello Gets a Big Update: The visual, contextual address book for iPhone got its first update today, with a focus on “faster, easier, and more natural” interactions. Some new features include contact integration and search for all data fields. [Evernote Blog]
• File Sharing in the Post MegaUpload Era: Analysis shows file sharing traffic only slightly decreased in the wake of MegaUpload’s seizure, though more of North America’s traffic crosses the Atlantic from Europe. [DeepField Networks Blog]
• Apple to Announce iPad 3 First Week in March: Citing unspecified sources, All Things D predicts and analysts agree we’ll see an early March event in San Francisco. Apple has no comment. [All Things D]
• LinkedIn Will Introduce Ads to Mobile Apps: The CEO said in a call with analysts today that the infrastructure is in place and ads will be rolling out. [TechCrunch]

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Article source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/UltPqvLKFe8/remains-of-the-day-download-a-copy-of-the-pirate-bay

Valentine’s Day is next week, and whether you’re forever alone or you’re looking for the perfect film to take someone special to see, this week we want to know where you turn for movie suggestions and reviews to help you decide what’s worth seeing on the big screen, where you can find indie theaters playing documentaries and special releases, and what you may as well wait for to appear on Netflix and save your money.

You don’t have to be planning a night out to look for movie reviews, although movie recommendation services are particularly useful if you’re not a movie buff and you’re looking for something that everyone will find interesting to watch. So which site or service do you turn to when you want to know what’s worth checking out in the theaters? Let us know in the comments below.

Hive Five nominations take place in the comments, where you post your favorite tool for the job. We get hundreds of comments, so to make your nomination clear, please include it at the top of your comment like so: VOTE: BEST LIVE TV STREAMING METHOD. Please don’t include your vote in a reply to another commenter. Instead, make your vote and reply separate comments. If you don’t follow this format, we may not count your vote. To prevent tampering with the results, votes from first-time commenters may not be counted. After you’ve made your nomination, let us know what makes it stand out from the competition.

About the Hive Five: The Hive Five feature series asks readers to answer the most frequently asked question we get: “Which tool is the best?” Once a week we’ll put out a call for contenders looking for the best solution to a certain problem, then YOU tell us your favorite tools to get the job done. Every weekend, we’ll report back with the top five recommendations and give you a chance to vote on which is best. For an example, check out last week’s five best ways to stream live TV.

Photo by gailf548.

Article source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/BRqoU9brxZM/best-movie-recommendation-service

Valentine’s Day is next week, and whether you’re forever alone or you’re looking for the perfect film to take someone special to see, this week we want to know where you turn for movie suggestions and reviews to help you decide what’s worth seeing on the big screen, where you can find indie theaters playing documentaries and special releases, and what you may as well wait for to appear on Netflix and save your money.

You don’t have to be planning a night out to look for movie reviews, although movie recommendation services are particularly useful if you’re not a movie buff and you’re looking for something that everyone will find interesting to watch. So which site or service do you turn to when you want to know what’s worth checking out in the theaters? Let us know in the comments below.

Hive Five nominations take place in the comments, where you post your favorite tool for the job. We get hundreds of comments, so to make your nomination clear, please include it at the top of your comment like so: VOTE: BEST LIVE TV STREAMING METHOD. Please don’t include your vote in a reply to another commenter. Instead, make your vote and reply separate comments. If you don’t follow this format, we may not count your vote. To prevent tampering with the results, votes from first-time commenters may not be counted. After you’ve made your nomination, let us know what makes it stand out from the competition.

About the Hive Five: The Hive Five feature series asks readers to answer the most frequently asked question we get: “Which tool is the best?” Once a week we’ll put out a call for contenders looking for the best solution to a certain problem, then YOU tell us your favorite tools to get the job done. Every weekend, we’ll report back with the top five recommendations and give you a chance to vote on which is best. For an example, check out last week’s five best ways to stream live TV.

Photo by gailf548.

Article source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/BRqoU9brxZM/best-movie-recommendation-service

Filling up a bucket of water is awkward and frustrating when it doesn’t fit in your sink. Redditor mrfitzy shows us a genius way to fill it up hassle-free. All you need is a dustpan.

Just put the dustpan in the sink, handle facing outwards, and let the water flow into the handle (like a funnel) and out of the sink, into your bucket. This will work a bit differently for everyone depending on the size of your sink and dustpan, but with a few modifications, we were able to make it work using Dachis’ abnormally large sink (and tiny dustpan). If you’re really lucky, you’ll get something like the image to the right—where the dustpan fits perfectly in the sink and you can let it sit while it fills up. If not, though, you can do what we do in the above video, and hold it while the bucket fills to the brim. Hit the link to read more.

Update: Looks like we posted this a few weeks back—but it’s just so clever that we don’t care. Plus we’ve added a video, complete with me flinging water on the camera and making a funny face. Sorry if this is old news to some of you!

LPT: Use a (clean) dustpan to fill a container that doesn’t fit in the sink | Reddit

Article source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/bV9AuhAZZDc/fill-up-large-buckets-with-water-using-a-dust-pan

Filling up a bucket of water is awkward and frustrating when it doesn’t fit in your sink. Redditor mrfitzy shows us a genius way to fill it up hassle-free. All you need is a dustpan.

Just put the dustpan in the sink, handle facing outwards, and let the water flow into the handle (like a funnel) and out of the sink, into your bucket. This will work a bit differently for everyone depending on the size of your sink and dustpan, but with a few modifications, we were able to make it work using Dachis’ abnormally large sink (and tiny dustpan). If you’re really lucky, you’ll get something like the image to the right—where the dustpan fits perfectly in the sink and you can let it sit while it fills up. If not, though, you can do what we do in the above video, and hold it while the bucket fills to the brim. Hit the link to read more.

Update: Looks like we posted this a few weeks back—but it’s just so clever that we don’t care. Plus we’ve added a video, complete with me flinging water on the camera and making a funny face. Sorry if this is old news to some of you!

LPT: Use a (clean) dustpan to fill a container that doesn’t fit in the sink | Reddit

Article source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/bV9AuhAZZDc/fill-up-large-buckets-with-water-using-a-dust-pan

You may have heard of Windows 7′s Homegroup feature before, but never really understood what it did. It’s actually the simplest way to share files between two Windows machines, and it takes seconds to set up. If you have more than one computer in your home (or a friend who comes over and likes to borrow your music), here’s how to set it up.

Sharing files in Windows used to be a painful process, and while that system still exists, homegroup is dead simple to use. All you need is a copy of Windows 7 Home Premium or above (which most people should have) to start the homegroup. Any computer running Windows 7 can join the homegroup. To set it up:

1. Open up the Control Panel, go to Network and Internet, and click on HomeGroup. You can also type “homegroup” in the Start menu’s search box.
2. Click Create a Homegroup if one isn’t already set up. When you first join your home network, it may have already created one for you, in which case you should already see most of the following options on the main Control Panel page—no need to go through the wizard.
3. First, the wizard will ask you what you want to share with the other computers in your house. You can share your Pictures library, your Music library, your Videos library, your Documents library, and any printers hooked up to your machine. You can’t choose specific folders on your machine to share with Homegroup, but you can add them to one of those libraries to get it sharing.
4. Next, it will give you a password to write down. For now, you can ignore this, since we’re going to set the password ourselves. Click Finish.
   
5. Under “Other homegroup actions” on the Control Panel page, click “Change the password”. Now you can just enter any password you want.
6. Now, on your other computers, head to the same Homegroup window in the Control Panel. It should tell you that it’s detected a homegroup on your network. Click “Join Now”, select the files you want that computer to share, and type in the password you just set.
7. You should see Homegroup pop up in Explorer’s sidebar, from which you can access all the shared libraries from other Windows 7 computers in the homegroup. That’s it!

After typing in that password on all your Windows 7 machines, you’ll be able to access any files on those machines right from Windows Explorer. If you have a friend that comes over and wants a file, you can just give them the password to your homegroup (though they’ll need to mark your Wi-Fi network as a “Home” network, which is fine).

To print a document on a shared printer—that is, a printer connected to one of the other homegroup computers—all you need to do is go to the print dialog as normal. You should see that the shared printer pops up under the “Select Printer” list (in fact, if you don’t have a printer hooked up, it’ll already be set to the default). Just hit Print and it’ll send it to that shared printer without so much as a blink.

You can also turn on Media Streaming from the main Control Panel page, which lets you send your music, pictures, and videos to other devices via Windows Media Player. I’ve never found a need for this feature since I can access the videos just fine via Windows Explorer and open them up with PotPlayer, our favorite video player for Windows.

The only real downside is that it only works on Windows 7. If you have Mac or Linux computers in the house, you can’t join the homegroup, per se, but you can still access shared homegroup files using this method. In an all-Windows household, though, it doesn’t get any easier than this.

Emailable Tech Support is a series of easy-to-share guides for the less tech savvy people in your life. Got a beginner tech support question you constantly answer? Let us know at tips@lifehacker.com. Remember, when you’re just starting out computing, there’s very little that’s too basic to learn.

Article source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/WtMNrgTiXnY/how-to-set-up-windows-7-homegroups-for-seamless-instant-sharing-between-pcs-in-your-home

iOS: Tweetbot, our pick for the best Twitter client for the iPhone just rolled out a new update that adds in-line image viewing, single-tap-to-launch links, an overhauled UI, and easy access to people who have retweeted you. Tweetbot has also finally landed on the iPad, with an interface that makes use of the tablet’s larger display, multiple-account support, push notifications, and support for third party apps like Instagram, Readability, and Instapaper.

The iPad app also allows you to tweak and customize your quick-access tabs to display the way you like, and like the iPhone version, also allows you to mute chatty Twitter users or played out hashtags, supports smart gestures to reply, retweet, and share, and adds a customizable display font size.

Tapbots, the company behind Tweetbot, decided against making Tweetbot universal, so if you have the app on your iPhone and want it for your iPad, you’ll have to buy it for $2.99 in the iTunes App Store. The update to the iPhone app is free, of course, but if you’re new to the iPhone version, it’ll set you back $2.99 as well. Do you use Tweetbot, or is $3 too much to spend when there are free Twitter clients aplenty? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Tweetbot for iPhone | iTunes App Store via Tweetbot for iPhone – Tapbots

Tweetbot for iPad | iTunes App Store via Tweetbot for iPad – Tapbots

Article source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/Lr-gsS_efs0/tweetbot-updates-with-a-new-ui-for-the-iphone-and-a-new-ipad-version

Flickr user Tim Garbarino reminds us that for those of us in the northern hemisphere, winter isn’t quite over yet with this gorgeous, serene setting sun behind a lonely snowball. The setup is functional too—Tim has his favorite feeds on the right, upcoming appointments at the top, and a spring-loaded dock on the left.

If you want the same look for your Windows desktop, here’s what you’ll need.

• The Snowball and the Sunset wallpaper from Quality Wallpapers (Tim says he got it from Wallbase, but we couldn’t find it there.)
• The Rainmeter system monitor and configuration tool for Windows
• The Elegance 2 skin for Rainmeter for the clock, date, mail, and weather
• The mii System Skin 2 for Rainmeter for system monitoring like CPU temp and GPU temp and load (tweaked to fit in with Elegance 2)
• Simplesentencethree for Rainmeter for the currently playing music display in the lower-right corner
• Googlebar for Rainmeter for quick web searches
• The RocketDock launcher for the left side of the screen, complete with the Stacks docklet for spring-loaded application and folder menus
• aablab’s Icon Pack 2 and the Game Icons Pack by Wolfangraul to complete the dock layout

This one requires a lot of components, but they all fit together nicely and you really only need Rainmeter and RocketDock as your primary applications to make all of this happen. If you’re not sure how to make it all work, take a look at our guide to setting up an attractive HUD with Rainmeter for tips, or drop by Tim’s Flickr page to let him know how much you dig his desktop.

Do you have a great, beautifully productive desktop of your own that you’d like to share? Go ahead and post it to the Lifehacker Desktop Show and Tell Flickr Group with a description of how you made it and it may be the next featured desktop!

Snowball Sunset2 | Flickr

Article source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/aJXn5kLr8hM/the-snowball-sunset-desktop

No one ever said that single-serving coffee machines and the coffee cups and brewing pods you need to operate them were cheaper than buying and brewing your own coffee at home, but they’re certainly more convenient. Each of us has to decide how much we’re willing to pay for convenience, but the price of that convenience can be as high as $51/lb, according to a new study that compared the costs of buying by the pound and brewing your own versus single-serving makers.

We frequently discuss how to brew better coffee here at Lifehacker, and even discussed how much you’ll save by brewing your own instead of buying out. The New York Times ran the numbers on single-serving machines, and here’s what they came up with:

For example, the Nespresso Arpeggio costs $5.70 for 10 espresso capsules, while the Folgers Black Silk blend for a K-Cup brewed-coffee machine is $10.69 for 12 pods. But that Nespresso capsule contains 5 grams of coffee, so it costs about $51 a pound. And the Folgers, with 8 grams per capsule, works out to more than $50 a pound.

That’s even more expensive than all but the priciest coffees sold by artisanal roasters, the stuff of coffee snobs.

The article then goes on to point out that even high-end fancy coffees at your local coffee shop or grocery store are well south of $20/lb, so the cost of convenience is pretty steep indeed. There are important caveats not mentioned in the NYT piece though—for one, some single-serving machines allow you to fill reusable cups with your own coffee, and if you only drink a cup or two per day, the cost per pound per day may even out as opposed to how much coffee you may waste brewing a whole pot and then pouring the coffee you don’t drink down the drain. Ultimately, their study is more of an eye-opening way to make an educated decision for yourself than a condemnation of the single-serving industry.

The Times points to generational differences in perception as the root of the issue, with younger people thinking in terms of how much a cup of coffee costs where older folks thought about their coffee costs in terms of pounds. What do you think? Much ado about nothing, or even more reason why you’d never buy one of those machines anyway? Let’s hear it in the comments below.

Photo by Michael Dorausch.

With Coffee, the Price of Individualism Can Be High | The New York Times via The Consumerist

Article source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/58gOHovivLQ/skip-the-single+serving-container-coffee-and-brew-your-own-to-save-serious-cash

iOS (Jailbroken): One of the quirks of the iPhone is that apps can access your personal information, including your contacts, without you knowing about it. If this bothers you, ContactPrivacy is a tweak that sends an alert when apps start digging through your address book.

ContactPrivacy sits quietly in the background until an app attempts to access your address book. If an app does, ContactPrivacy pushes out an alert that gives you the chance to block access. However, blocking access to your address book will cause some apps not to launch at all, so be careful with what you choose because there’s no way to restore access without uninstalling ContactPrivacy. You can find it by searching for Contact Privacy in the Big Boss Repository.

ContactPrivacy | via Cult of Mac

Article source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/hZvTF49y6rs/contactprivacy-alerts-you-when-apps-access-contact-information

iPhone: Waze, our favorite turn-by-turn navigation app for iPhone (and Android) just added a great new feature: hands-free operation. Now you can control Waze with a wave of your hand and the power of your voice.

The video above will give you an idea of how it works, but here’s the gist. You can enable Waze to respond to either a three finger tap or just a wave of your hand over the screen. When you perform one of these actions, Waze will then load its voice control functionality and prompt you for input. You can report traffic conditions, ask for directions, notify others that you’re running late, and more. It’s pretty awesome and is, as always, another free feature in the already great free app.

The latest version of Waze is rolling out in the iTunes App Store today. Android users can expect this functionality in the coming months. For more info, check out the Waze blog.

Waze (Free) | iTunes App Store

Article source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/xXUMUcssREo/waze-for-iphone-offers-voice-control-for-hands+free-operation-while-driving