First of all, what if your name was Daniel Mannheim? Could they sue you for using your own name? Also, the Twitter account is not abused, or used in any way to undermine the city, and even if it were, we have freedom of speech, so still!

Second of all, if they actually win this, imagine the barrage of lawsuits against people who have legally and properly registered a cool name. Could my brother (Martin) sue the founder of this blog if he used “Martin” as a username on Twitter? Would there be a lawsuit with 20,000 people in a deathmatch, everyone against everyone? I’m sure the lawyers would have fun.In addition, this would spread to Facebook, Google accounts, Yahoo accounts, and the rest of the world, taking down more than a few genuinely great twitterers and bloggers.

Personally, I think the city just wants the name, and tried a threat in the hope that it will work. I don’t think they stand any chance of winning this, so they will probably back down if Mark Zondler refuses to let go of his name. What do you guys think, who is right here, will there be a lawsuit, and if so, who stands to win and why? Get your legal hats and start commenting!

If you take a look, you can’t argue that it has a superb no-frills interface, and you can shoot out and manage tasks very easily. It supports inline tagging (use @tag to quick tag a task) and priorities (use !p1 or !p2 or !p3 to quickly add a priority), notifications, task indentation for hierarchy, and a handy search box, which you can use to search based on any word, or task data.

So far this is not unheard of for task managers, I just simply connect with this one better than others. However, where I feel Todoist excels is that it offers a wide range of ways to add tasks, best of all, complete Launchy integration.

If you log in, and go to Todoist Help (if you have no tasks yet, you should see this page displayed anyway), you can see a section named plugins. Apart from finding Netvibes and iGoogle and a Mac dashboard widger (all excellent), you can find instructions on how to use Launchy to add tasks without even opening your browser. I usually find that ideas come in the stupidest situations, where I don’t want to be distracted from my work, so pressing alt+space and quickly typing a task is much easier than going to the site.

Another way you can use laucnhy is from your iPhone, using the application named Doings. I have not tried this personally, I will purchase it in the next few days, so if any of you have first hand experience, share your thoughts in the comments please! It looks as simple as the online counterpart, and supports offline mode too, so you can be sure your tasks will all be there wherever you are. Apart from the name sounding like something you do on the toilet, this seems like a perfectly usable application.

If you really love Todoist, you can also opt for a paid version. The developer stylishly chose to include features in the paid versions which only the most avid users need, so the free one is extremely useful on its own. The paid version gets you Email, Phone, or Twitter reminders, an improved label system and SSL security. At $3 a month, if you really need these, I think they are at an affordable rate.

Among other things, it allows you to add category lists, show comment ID-s, show comment authors, display next image links, add a dropdown box of categories anywhere, useful, and basically “drag and drop”. There is however another great WordPress reference which is a bit more obscure, but also contains a huge load of functions for some other tasks you might have around your site. The WordPress Function Reference section of the codex lists at least 250-300 functions for pages, authors, plugin usage, comments, users, etc, in short, encompassing the whole blog platform, as opposed to more blog post oriented functions in the Template Tags section.

The page is chock full of things like “in_category()”, which if passed a post ID and a category, will tell you if that post is in the category or not. Great if you want to display category specific content on your main page for example. It also gives you real power, with functions like “wp_insert_post()”, which you can use to insert posts “manually”, by passing an array of info to the function. Similarly you can use wp_insert_user() to add a user, with the parameters you want. Very useful for creating some custom sign up forms, custom permissions and so on.

What I’ve come to appreciate while using these functions is how very well WordPress is thought out. I sort of knew this 3 years ago when I started, but when I began to use these functions I realized why. For example, wp_insert_user() will insert a new user, and will return the new user’s ID. It returns 0 if there is an error, but more importantly, if you pass an existing user’s ID, it will update that user, instead of creating a new one. There is a separate wp_update_user() function, but the action they perform is so close, it’s very handy that inserting a user is so flexible.

If you’re just jumping into these functions you’ll find them quite easy to use, while giving you a lot of control. If you’re an experienced PHP programmer you’ll find you’ll program less, and you’ll also appreciate the work going into WordPress a lot more!

Sadly the app is not completely free. I usually only look at headlines because I don’t have a huge amount of time, and for that it is perfect. You can click around in the various sections and read excerpts and titles. You can also read the main page articles and the business articles for free. You will need a subscription though to access the full content on the other pages. There is also a feed reader type “Latest News” section, which you can view freel for all the breaking news.

If you’re already a subscriber the whole app is completely free. If you don’t have a Times subscription yet, you can subscribe for $3.5 a week. I think this is a small price to pay for the NYT, especially if you live anywhere off the US coastline. If you enjoy reading newspapers, but you don’t have the time to grab a copy each day, I think the New York Times reader is a great application.

(via Lifehacker)

I am not a huge fan of mobile computing (as in phones), but Evernote is one app I would use myself. Phones basically suck for surfing. I mean the biggest smartphones still have tiny screens, so, at least for me, mobile surfing is a long way away. However, I do frequently have the urge to jot down a few things, which I currently can’t really do. Evernote is a huge help in this, and now that you can take it with you on your BlackBerry everywhere (or you iPhone), taking notes are as easy as… well, taking notes should be.

The best part of the deal is obviously that you can sync fully with your PC version, and this is the selling point for me. I can write notes on the fly, view some in offline mode, take a pic right into the app, or create a quick voice note. This is an especially big help for me, since I usually drive places, which inhibits my texting capabilities.

Anyway, Evernote is a great note taking app weather you use it on your PC, on you Phone, online or offline, so take a look!

All you need to do, is fire up the application, select your style (Adobe style, or Web 2.0 star style), enter your text, up to four letters, select a background color and click generate. The shading is done extremely well, no matter what color you choose your icon will look good. This really is a great way to create file extension icons, especially if you use a lot like php, css, js and so on, you can get much better stuff the the original system ones.

The only thing I don’t like about the app is how it saves icons, more specifically, the naming. It generates four files with the names of “icon_16.png” for example, where “icon” is NOT the name you entered. This way, if you want to save a new icon, you need to get the old ones out of the way because they will be overwritten. I have no idea why the icons are not named after the name you enter, this would make saving and handling of these files much easier. Otherwise a great little app, give it a go!

A version of ubiquity called taskfox, although slightly toned down, will be built right into Firefox (hopefully soon) and will allow for a lot of the power which Ubiquity gives you. There are some awesome things in there, like searching for and starting a youtube video from the awesomebar, in the awesomebar. The path you need to take from inputting something to finding what you want is greatly reduced as a result, especially since everything can be completely controlled by the keyboard too.

Take a look at the video on the site, it looks interesting, I can’t wait for it to get into the Firefox main build. Until then, if you are restless, take a look at Ubiquity, which offers much the same, and then some.

The model behind Lulu is that you write the book, upload it in a suitable format, select lots of options and then save it as a book. You can create commercial grade hardcover illustrated books, the tech behind it is really flexible, your imagination is the limit. There are no costs involved anywhere. The “catch” is that it will cost you more to print a book than it would if you would take it to a publisher to print 10,000 copies. The reason is purely economic (economies of scale), printing a few copies of a book is relatively more expensive than doing a large amount.

These costs are deducted from the sale of your book, so it’s all good, since you don’t actually see the cost, after one successful sale you still get money. You can set your own price for the book, Lulu will deduct its own costs, and you get the rest. They also offer lots of tutorials on creating the document for the finished version of the book, and for once they really are helpful, even for people who’ve dabbled in this before.

Overall, I love Lulu, I used it to create a book, and I will be sending myself a copy soon. If for nothing else, you can create a really great gift for your friends & family!

You can use this as a jump start for searching, clicking on the result to open it in a new window, but you can easily add it to an email, by selecting “reply with result”. This will paste the whole result you selected into the email. This is a convenient, and pretty fast way of sharing search results. I find that it is fastest if I already know the answer to the question. For research I like big ol’ regular Google, but if I already know what I need I can get it very easily like this.

Another side-feature which is worth noting is that Gmail has a hundred or so more emoticons available in a labs feature called Extra Emoji. I pretty much hate all emoticons, so you won’t see me using this, but if you like the “no-end fun” these bring to your emails you might like to try them out. They have icons for wine, hurricanes, rabbits and whatnot, stuff I mention regularly in all my emails…

1. Enabling bluetooth

The first thing you need to do is enable bluetooth on both devices. You should find bluetooth under connection settings on your phone, or some similar place. I use a Sony w880i, I have it under Settings, Connectivity, Bluetooth. Make sure to set your phone to visible, although this should be the default setting.

On your computer you should have a bluetooth icon in the tray. If you do, right click it, and select “show devices”. If you don’t see the icon there, go into your control panel and double click on “Bluetooth Devices”. This should take you to the same screen. If you don’t see bluetooth settings here, you might not have bluetooth capability, or you might need to install drivers.

2. Adding your device

On the Bluetooth Devices screen you might already see your phone, or you will need to click on “Add Wireless Devices” in the top menu. All devices which can be discovered should be listed after a few moments of searching, if you wait a few more moments, their names, brands, or types should also be visible.

Double click on the device you want to add, and you will be taken through a very simple procedure to add the device to your list. You will need to enter a code into a dialog on your computer, the code for it will be shown on the phone. Once done, your device will be listed on the Bluetooth Devices page.

3. Importing contacts

Double click on your newly listed device and you should see a screen similar to the one below. Select “Backup Contacts and Calendar Information from your Phone”. This will quickly copy all your contacts to the contacts folder in your user directory. You can now sync your contacts between your computer and phone. If supported you might be able to do the same with calendar items, emails and notes.

4. Using your computer as a phone

On the same page, you can see that at the top, you can enter a phone number and call the number. Doing this will work, but it will all be initiated only on the phone. Simply click connect next to the headset option “Use this computer as a headset or speakerphone for calls on your phone”. This will make your computer act like any other wireless headset, so any calls your receive or initiate can be conducted by just talking at your computer. I have a good speaker and a built in mic, so I don’t even have to stop working to talk to people.

The great thing is that you can also initiate a call by right clicking a contact, going to “actions” and clicking on “call this contact”. The call will be initiated from your phone, but since your laptop is your headset, there will be no need to touch your phone, or for it to be anywhere near you.

Youtube Preview

This really cool feature puts Youtube videos right inside your email. If you receive any link pointing to a Youtube video the actual video’s thumbnail will be shown in the email (words for multiple links), and clicking the thumbnail will enlarge the player so you can view the video right there. I am always looking for ways to streamline my work (and my fun), and this is a real time saver.

Image Previews

The same system above is implemented for Picasa, and Flickr images, again, making image sharing much less painful. If you receive a wad of links you don’t need to click through each one (especially since many filenames are like dsc11902.jpg), this way you get a small preview right away.

Show everyone where you are

If you have a signature enabled, you can add your map location to the bottom of all your emails. Very handy if you have your own company, or if you want everyone to get to your party on time.

There are a number of other labs features you can try out, let us know which one you use, and which one you like most, I think in terms of usefulness the Youtube one wins my award.

The new game brings a huge change, instead of going for realism, they went for a cartoon look, which looks pretty stunning I think. Many will be deterred by this, I suspect especially hardcore gamers, but if I want realism I’ll jump down to a war zone and take a look myself. I think it’s quite unique and it makes the game more accessible to other ages and our friends of the female persuasion (I might be able to get my girlfriend to play a round with me!).

I haven’t played a lot with this series, I spent an hour or two with a newer one, and from what I can tell, the experience is much the same, but obviously very different due to the environment. I’m actually still waiting for my beta key, but to me the screenshots radiate much more of a fun factor than I’ve seen in games for a while.

Let us know if you’ve tried the game, I’ll add a comment as an update as soon as I give it a go, I can’t wait to shoot every one’s cartoon bum out of the sky, woohoo!

With no install needed, just run it, select a drive and watch as the table structure fills up with folders and sub-folders. You can double click on any folder to bring it into main view (cool animation here), so you can see more detail. If you’ve zoomed in on a folder you can click the name again to zoom back out, or you can use the forward and back buttons like on a browser.

There are options to show unknown space, free space, but apart from that this app is a simple hard drive space analyzer, but a really very well made one. It is beautiful, it is elegant and it gives you the information you need in a form very easily digested by the human mind. I simply love this app, if you can and you like it too, please consider donating to them.

Melanie’s Review:

How to Reduce Disk Usage in Windows 7 with SpaceSniffer

After using your PC for awhile, you might begin to notice that available space on the hard drive is persistently decreasing. For the advanced user, this is not a problem and it is an easy fix. For the beginner, this can be confusing and it raises a question: Why is my disk space disappearing and how can I get it back? The beginning user may not understand what has happened. This article is for those users who do not know why this happens or what to do about it. Fear not, dear beginners! The disk space can be easily reclaimed.

Though there are several ways to cleanup old files and old programs that have not been used for a long time, we will look at a simple, free utility called SpaceSniffer. There is no need to install it, as it is run from an .exe file in the .zip archive. This utility will assist the new user in identifying the files and programs, etc. that is occupying hard disk space and then help them to clean it up.

You will want to download the latest version, which you will find at the top of the download page at the website. Look for version 1.1.3.1 and click to download. Beginner advice: Always open the containing folder for the program file before opening a program from the internet. Right-click on the file and select “Scan with ” and if the scan comes up clean, then you may open the file.

Since this is a .zip file, you will see 5 different files listed. Double-click the Application Type file pictured at the bottom in the screenshot above. There are two PDF files in the .zip archive as well. The user manual is full of great tips to help you get the most out of the utility.

In the “Choose drives or type paths” menu, choose the drive that you want to clear space on. In most cases, this will be drive (C:) which is the main hard drive for the operating system. If the drive is partitioned, you will need to clean those partitions separately but you will find them on the menu.

Once you click on the drive icon, SpaceSnifferr will run a scan and show how the disk is populated by particular files and programs. One area that is important to clean is temporary files. Type the pathway in the Filter box and then click Filter.

You will then be able to see the temporary files and how much disk space these occupy. Many of them can be removed and this will clear a significant amount of space on your hard drive.

You may also search by time period. For example, type >1year in the Filter box and then click Filter.

Areas that have not been used in greater than one year will be highlighted blue. In the following example, the major areas that could be cleaned are pagefile.sys and hiberfil.sys. These occupy almost 6GB of drive space.

This is where the user manual comes in handy. You will have to read through a few pages, but there is a content sidebar that shows the different subjects. Use the information in the manual to help you clear unnecessarily occupied space on the hard drive. Once you get the hang of it, it is very easy to use.

Now, the Fon 2.0 router is out, which allows you to download to a pendrive, external hard drive, upload to Youtube, all that fun stuff, but without having your PC or laptop turned on! Just set up a Youtube upload, add some torrent files, switch off your laptop, and the download/upload goes on. There are tons of cool apps built into the firmware, as the screencast about it says, it’s like a mini linux in there.

The price is EUR 50, which is roughly $65 now. Compared to the price of the old Fon this is pricey, but not compared to other top of the line routers which can’t do half as much. I purchased three routers pooling with my friends for about $10 each, and I have been using it since, it really is a great pieve of hardware, so I can’t wait to get my hands on the new one. Even if you don’t need these functions check it out, you will be helping out a great cause. I don’t travel as much, but one of my friends spends all his time doing so and he finds Fon routers everywhere in the World!

The first thing to do is to install Launchy. This will give you awesome application launching skills. Just press alt + space and start typing the app you want to launchy. It remembers stuff, so I can now launch Firefox by just pressing “f” and then enter. You will then have to install the script from Lifehacker which is a bit more complicated than extracting an archive, but nothing you can’t handle, take a look at the site for the instructions.

Once done, you can add items to a list easily, by just typing “rtm”, pressing tab, entering the task name and then enter. This will add that task to your inbox. If you want a bit more control you can add a due date, the list name, priority, tags and notes, in that order, by pressing tab after each one, and enter at the end.

This method is� so great, because it is really quick, and it also enables you to add tasks without having to go to the site. You can just add tasks all day, and maybe take 15 minutes at the end of each day to manage your tasks.

Personally I like sidebars, but for some reason I don’t use them. I have a pretty wide screen and a system which has plenty of memory to eat, but to me the cleaner my screen, the less stuff I have to focus on, the better. I never really liked the Vista sidebar, it’s just too “big”, it looks a bit clunky sometimes, but there are some good widgets you can put in there, so it’s not all bad.

I pretty much like Google’s sidebar, and it also has some good widgets, the best feature is probably the integrated hard drive and email search, which really can be a savior sometimes. It also seems that there are better widgets for the Google Sidebar, but that might be just my perception. In my case I don’t really find the widgets so useful that I would need to see them permanently on a sidebar, what’s your take on all this, do you perhaps use another sidebar?

TiddlyWiki is one such wiki, which you can download as a single file to your hard drive, or your can host it online using TiddlySpot. I recommend you visit the site and download a copy for yourself, there are easy to follow instructions, and no real set up is required.

To organize your notes you can use tags, and the whole database is easily searchable from the search box at the top. For example, I usually think up my designs as a single HTML page, without any PHP, just laying out the design. Depending on the general structure of the design I have a few templates at the ready, all in my trusty wiki. To get the one I use for a “content on the left, sidebar on the right” layout I just type “template sidebar right”, and the first note will be the one containing this layout, I can just copy paste the code into my file.

There are a number of other uses you can put your Wiki to of course. If you’re learning to code, you can simply copy the snippets you find and you want to study, and tag them by language, for future reference. You can also store some helpful links, ideas, project plans and so on.

You can use this is a regular notebook too, the real use of a Wiki is that it is very unobtrusive. You can use the same file for your personal notes, your diary and your coding organizer. Since you can use tags and search, you can display only the tiddlers (or notes) you want, so your coding stuff doesn’t have to get in the way of your other notes.

The see the power of a Wiki you really have to take a look yourself, so head on over to TiddlyWiki and grab yourself a copy. Wikis are not everyone’s cup of tea though, so you may not like it as much, but it is a bit different than most systems so give it a chance, try forcing yourself to use if for a week or two, you’ll definitely see the benefits.

If you’d like to get some more tips and tricks for web development and specific languages like HTML, CSS, PHP and the rest, head on down to Scriptastique for yumm coding treats!

Essentially it does what you could do manually, it finds the services and apps running that you don’t really need, and switches them all off with the push of a button. It switched off Launchy for me, the Aero theme for Vista, which apparently eats away at the CPU, some tablet services I didn’t even know I had running, etc., so it does quite a good job.

I actually didn’t notice a huge increase in performance, but the difference is there. I tested on GTA 4 which runs away on my system, but not very well. On minimum spec I can play pretty well, with only a few effects added. In very intense areas I noticed some performace issues were less prominent, like less lag and jittery camera, so it definitely did help. The best thing about this app is that it is so easy to use, no need to go through 20 services and shut them down, but even better, they can be restarted with the same one click action. This is also great for trips to prolong battery life!

You can invoke the tool by pressing the print screen button (you can bind it to anywhere else), and the tool will pop up. It has a great mechanism because you can draw on your desktop before you create the “snip”, so depending on what you draw you might decide you need a bigger area. You can then use a box or a freehand tool to select the area you need and snip it.

Once that is done the snipped image will sort of hover on your desktop in a very cool way, you really have to see it to appreciate it, take a look on the website above or at youtube directly. You can save it to the clipboard, edit it with Paint or your can save it to your hard drive. My only problem was that the edit option opens up Paint and apparently there is nothing you can do about this. Since you can send to clipboard it’s not that bad, you can open it up in Gimp or Photoshop by simply pasting, but since you can choose saving format, timer option and so much, to me the inclusion of this feature would have been obvious. Great looking app though, give it a go!

You can use a simple key to add a quick note, just select any text and press ctr+shift+q. Your note will be instantly created, which you can then edit, add a subject to and save. This is not so new, a lot of apps offer this functionality, but the little things that Quotepad offers add a lot of extra to the program.

Just as an example, clicking the taskbar icon brings up a note list. Clicking it again (or double clicking) brings up the interface to add a new note. Simple, but very effective and efficient use interface. You can mark notes, have the whole window stay on top, change color schemes, change reading order, use filters to narrow your notes, Quotepad can become a great research tool, not just a copy-paste companion!

I find it very useful when I’m thinking about post ideas. Even with tools like Google Reader, it is sometimes hard to keep track of what I want to write about, and a quick copy paste into Quotepad is a big help, firstly because I can paste the intro paragraph from a blog post, or a description from the app main page. Quotepad shows the source of the text, so I can save the url copy-pasting time. I can then narrow by keyword, making all my blogging work much easier and faster.