We were eager to know what's happening with Firefox. Mike Beltzner, the open-source browser's director, was glad to tell us. Here's what he had to say about future features, competition with Chrome, and keeping all of Firefox contributors in sync.
When Beltzner was graduating from Queen's University in Toronto with Bachelor of Education degrees in computers and math, preceded by a B.S. in cognitive science, Firefox was still three years off, a future outgrowth of dissatisfaction with the Mozilla Suite's feature bloat. He quickly discovered he "didn't have the patience for high school students, or unions," but a recruiter thought his studies, along with his tenure as a freelance web site builder and layout director for the weekly paper Golden Words, made him a perfect fit for IBM's user experience design team.
Work at Big Blue involved, in part, watching workers use business-to-business software from behind one-way glass, but also gave Beltzner a taste for open source development in the Eclipse project. After landing at Mozilla and working as a user experience lead for three years, he took up the director's chair in July 2008. These days, almost all of Beltzner's work, decisions, and inter-team conversation is done entirely in the open, discussed, and analyzed endlessly in technology circles—a kind of two-way glass, with magnification for both sides.
Beltzner talked with us on the phone last week about working as a Firefox manager, how Firefox can grow to help users get more things done in smarter ways, and how and where the Firefox team competes with the increasingly crowded browser market.
Lifehacker: What's a typical day like as a director of Firefox? How would you chart your time use throughout the day?
Mike Beltzner: It depends, although I don't want to give a "depends" answer. I'd say that 50 percent of my day is communication. As director of Firefox, my job involves coordinating the activities of a cast of thousands contributing to the software we produce. I help people understand the most important thing they could be working on today. We're working on 3.5.2 today for instance, so problems with builds will come up, and I'm coordinating the release team, and engineering team, and a lot depends on clear communication. ... (With) Mozilla's weekly planning calls, I'm helping at moderating them and making sure everyone understands where to expend their efforts to get most value.
Another 25 percent of my day is spent gathering feedback about the product, and from that, figuring out what's important, and figuring where to go. It's asking ourselves, what are the most important things to be (scheduling) out for next version, so maybe I'd say "future planning" is really that 25 percent of my day.
The other 25 percent could be considered management, the traditional kind. The Firefox management team makes sure developers don't have to worry about expenses, and helping those having troubles getting access to certain systems. All that doesn't even count the little extra things I do. I'm a software designer at heart, so I still spend some time working on designs with the user team.
Lifehacker: What tools, software or otherwise, do you use to get things done and keep everything together?
Mike Beltzner: I live my life by Zimbra calendar. I get a lot of meeting requests, and to make sure I'm not late to calls like this one, I have all my appointments on my (shared) calendar, so people know when they can get a hold of me. I'm using Things on OS X for tasks, in large part because I'm using an iPhone, and I try to convince myself the iPhone email client is good enough (laughs).
What I need most is that when I jot down a task, I don't lose track of it. I use a lot of wikis and web-based tools, and even pastebin an awful lot. Wiki.mozilla.org is really perfect for my work because I find that a lot of time, I'll be in a meeting (where) folks will share great ideas, but when I get around to asking them to act on them, they've forgotten what they've talked about. So even if it's just quickly jotted words, I try to bring a scratchpad to every meeting I've ever had, and find (those notes) more useful on a wiki. When I decide I can't take action on something myself, I can just send someone to that wiki with the notes ready for them.
My job, more than most others, is to be available to help make people more able to get work done. So I've got instant messenger and IRC up all the time, and I keep tabs on Twitter ... I get a sense of the zeitgeist in tech, I keep a few saved searches, and I follow everyone I work with. More than most, Mozilla developers tweet a lot about what's going on in the web and software worlds, so that's really helpful.
Lifehacker: Firefox is a kind of rare open source success. There are more people from outside the core contributing code than inside—something like 1,000 coders contributed to Firefox 3.5, while less than 200 work at Mozilla. Does managing the work of all those coders come with a lot of responsibilities and headaches? Every coder, I'm sure, has a worldview of the right, the efficient way to do something ...
Mike Beltzner: I should start by saying, for one thing, I think compared to a lot of other open source software companies, we see ourselves a little differently. Mozilla began as 6-8 people, and there wasn't a ton of interest in working on it at first. People like to say how it was spun out of Netscape, sure, but at the point Mozilla started up, Netscape had lost the browser wars, the people interested in browser development were few and far between, and there was not a lot of money to work on it.
By necessity, then, the people who officially worked for Mozilla chose to consider themselves the same as anyone else who worked on this project, but just had the privilege to spend all their time on it ... When we hire a developer, for example, they don't have check-in rights on the code base. They go through the same process as anybody else. Their code gets reviewed, but it might not be someone inside the company—it might be someone on the outside, who's already contributed. So when we talk about dealing with those egos and headaches, there's a system already in place ...
... In Cory Doctorow's Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom, there's "whuffie," basically the idea of a social currency, like "karma" on Slashdot. People who have a track record of making smart and productive decisions actually earn social capital in the project. What's neat is we allow anyone with good ideas to get into the community and have their work implemented ... People are always working for the greater good of the browser. It's not problematic or very opinionated, other than user interface design.
Lifehacker: How do interface discussions get moderated? It's a topic a lot of people can argue over.
Mike Beltzner: It's a lot easier for people to feel emotional, and passionate, about browser design. I can feel very deeply, for instance, about whether we have a bookmark bar. I use mine an awful lot, so I'd miss it ... (But) Firefox takes up more vertical space than any other browser right now, and it's a problem we need to solve. I think the solution will probably annoy a lot of people, but I think ... Firefox has proven the web is the most important thing to have in a browser, it's inspired the design of other browsers, and it's a good discussion to be having.
The way I use my browser is very different from the way my wife uses my browser. I put nothing in the bookmark menu. Everything I need to get to later, to act on, I put in one drop-down list called "The Pile." I've got another folder with bookmarklets like Readability, a small-ifier using is.gd. My wife has nothing in her bookmark bar, but her bookmarks are like the Dewey Decimal System, so rigorously organized. And there a lot of people with bi-modal usage patterns. We spend so much engineering time and effort on making Firefox customizable for that reason—not just API customizable, but so the end user can take it and do everything they want with it. I don't think you can make the perfect browser for everybody, but you can give people the means to make it perfect.
Lifehacker: How do you ration development time between fixing and improving features your browser already has, innovating in new features, and looking into features from other browsers to implement?
Mike Beltzner: We don't do direct rationing, but at certain times, our energies are governed completely by the phase of development we're in. From March through June of this year, for example, we were basically polishing up 3.5 for release. Bug fixes, polish fixes, and, (for some developers), 200 small, glitchy, one-pixel polish issues. We'll spend a lot more of that time to work on new features when we're not heading up to a big release.
... You'll hear (Mozilla developers) talk about this metric of startup time. We know our startup time is an issue, and ours is not as good as other browsers. We're working on that problem, but we want to be sure our problem fixes are solutions, something innovation-based, which a good bit of time goes into.
Lifehacker: The most common issue/"bug" cited by Lifehacker readers about Firefox is memory use over browsing time. Firefox doesn't pull much memory when starting up, but after using it for a while, opening and closing tabs, users find it using big hunks of memory, sometimes forcing a restart to reclaim RAM. Is that something that's a known issue among developers? Is it hard to pin down the root causes of, user to user?
Mike Beltzner (via email): Feedback about memory usage is definitely something we hear frequently from our users, and without wishing to blamecast, most frequently the issue is actually related to poorly coded plug-ins, add-ons, and web pages. We did a great deal of work for the Firefox 3 release to make our memory allocation more efficient, as well as create technology that cleans up after some of the common problems created by plug-ins, add-ons, and web pages, but the truth of the matter is that a lot of webpages create plug-in-rendered elements that leak memory over time. The longer you hold that page open in a tab, the more memory will leak out.
We run a pretty thorough test in which we:
- open 30 tabs, each with a different page from the Alexa 500 - close one tab and open one tab for 300 more tabs, all from Alexa 500 pages - close all but one tab
The resulting graph shows how Firefox allocates and releases memory over time. While I haven't yet published the results in a blog post for Firefox 3.5, they are basically the same as they were for Firefox 3.0, which shows that Firefox not only holds at a steady state of memory while opening/closing the tabs, but releases almost all of that memory once we close down all of our tabs.
... So, that's a long answer, but yes, it's known, and while we continue to work at it, I think in many ways we've amassed a reputation that might at one time have been accurate, but with the latest versions of Firefox, isn't actually the case anymore.
Lifehacker: In the wiki outline for Firefox 3.6, there's an "area of interest" set up for task-based navigation. What does that mean at this point? Should task management be made to fit into a browser?
Mike Beltzner: I think it's identifying a problem that's becoming apparent. The "web browser" metaphor was created when the web was going to be a Tim Berners-LeeHyperCard (kind of) book. ... People aren't just reading on the web anymore, link after link. People are now interacting, creating on Facebook, consuming media, and organizing their lives over the web. I don't think that's going away, so what (task-based navigation) is saying is, if I want to pay bills in Firefox, it should be a little more organized for the task of paying bills. I should be able to say, "I'd like to pay bills now," and it should help me do that.
Taskfox and Ubiquity are definitely part of that ... Something along the lines of keyword searches is what's being looked at. We've seen a bunch of really cool add-ons in this area, actually, some coming out of accessibility needs. Chickenfoot, done at MIT, is heading toward natural language scripting for the web. Banking always requires me to find the bank site, log in, and get to the exact page for what I want to do. Why can't Firefox know that my bank is Scotiabank, then remember the chain of events I go through to pay a certain bill or check a balance? Our intent is to find out what the intent behind those patterns are, and figure out better ways to get there.
Lifehacker: Google Chrome gets a lot of press for every new feature, for its speed, and just in general. How often does Chrome and its features factor into the discussions by developers?
Mike Beltzner: Google is sexy. It's the verb that ate Hollywood. The first time I heard Google as a verb on a show, I thought, "Wow, the world just got a little nerdier, and that's cool."
More people have touched Google, and understand what it does. Far fewer people can put a finger on Firefox and what it is, exactly. That said, it's extraordinarily exciting to have people working on a browser that are extraordinarily well-aligned with what we're doing. We watch their development list, and they watch ours. It's nice to have other people thinking about end user features people will want. But Chrome also benefits from the advantage of, when you're building something from scratch, it's easy to throw everything away and not worry about the consequences.
All of us try to use a bunch of different browsers, and Chrome comes up more in discussions, tools and technology building (than other browsers). It's good for checking our own assumptions about what can or can't be included in a browser. And it's rewarding to see Firefox's emphasis on just presenting a standardized web, and getting out of the way, echoed in another project.
Lifehacker: When Chrome or any new browser release comes out, speed ends up being a big part of the discussion these days. We do speed tests, other sites do them, and each firm rolls out its own favorable tests. How important are speed and benchmarks in a modern browser?
Mike Beltzner: Speed is important. It's not just from the perspective of having to wait for a browser to load something, it's important from an app development perspective. The speed of modern JavaScript engines is entirely different than what you could build before. My calendaring and mail applications, using original speed JavaScript compilers, would be just unbearable ... We're now using engines 10 times as fast the first Java engines, so haggling over 100 milliseconds here and there is just a matter of engineering excellence. The ability to push that envelope, the way that JavaScript gets reported back to a testing engine, that doesn't matter.
Lifehacker: So, you're suggesting that testing suites written and tweaked by JavaScript engine makers to test best on their own engines?
Mike Beltzner: I'm absolutely positive that's the case. SunSpider was built by Apple engineers, and while it's great, and we use it and talk about it, it gives our engines systematic disadvantages. That's fine, in some ways, and we can optimize for that just as well as anybody else.
What's a problem is when you prioritize that work in relation to everything else. If it becomes a choice of making sure we have the best JavaScript for SunSpider, or making sure we've got the best JavaScript for users, it's an obvious choice. ... SunSpider, and other JavaScript tests, are somewhat like a horsepower test. In some ways, it shows how your engine is doing, but it doesn't tell the whole story about your car's performance.
One of the things giving (Firefox) a perception of being slower than other browsers is our cold start-up time. If you grab Firefox from the (latest build) trunk, start-up time is already better than 3.5. That matters because once you click to start up the browser, if you're used to waiting on it to load, you'll go do something else in the meantime. However long it takes you to come back and get back to that browser, that's your perception of how long it takes.
Apple just rolled out OS X 10.5.8, their final minor point release before the big jump to Snow Leopard this September.
As Gizmodo points out, it's primarily a maintenance update, most notably improving iCal's relationship with CalDav, adding RAW support for more cameras, and improving reliability for Wi-Fi and BlueTooth. Hit up the changelog for more specifics, or just fire up the Software Updates preference pane and get your update on.
Zune HD gets a rave review, the iPhone and Wii remote engage in an unholy marriage, HTML 5 demos blow your mind, and we wonder what this mysterious Apple iProd is all about (if not a typo).
TomTom iPhone pricing leaked The long-awaited iPhone app from popular GPS maker, TomTom, is rumored to cost roughly $194. [Daniweb]
MyFi Plus iPod Touch (Almost) Equals iPhone If you'd like the calling and always-connected aspect of the iPhone but don't want to marry AT&T, the MiFi + iPod touch route might be something worth looking into. [Wired]
Innovation in video on the web Google buys a video compression company, with, we'd assume, an eye on improving YouTube. [Official Google Blog]
Ninjawords: iPhone Dictionary, Censored by Apple While we're talking about bad Apple business, take a look at Ninjawords, the *dictionary* that's been censored over and over again by Apple. [Daring Fireball]
To build one, all you'll need is a Gatorade cap, around two to four magnets, some Velcro, a glue gun, and a plastic ring. The hack is an economically welcoming alternative to more costly commercial cleaning systems—and both your fish and pocket book will be grateful for the effort.
Check out the above video to see the completed tank cleaner in action, then hit up the full post for the step-by-step.
According to Runner's World, the above constitute the three basic foot types, and each has its corresponding shoe. The wet test should help you determine which you are. (The instructions in the video are good, but they do seem a little silly considering how many times you've likely done this on cement after dipping your feet in a swimming pool or something along those lines.)
If you're a flat type, for example, Runner's World says you'll do best with dual-density midsoles and supportive "posts" as well as shoes that offer firmer support. If, on the other hand, you have a high arch—meaning you only see your heel in the test, the ball of your foot, and a thin line on the outside of your foot—you're "best suited to neutral-cushioned shoes because they need a softer midsole to encourage pronation." Those with normal arches have the most leeway and can wear almost any shoe, though Runner's World suggests that "lightweight runners with normal arches may prefer neutral-cushioned shoes without any added support, or even a performance-training shoe that offers some support but less heft, for a faster feel."
Windows/Mac OS X: TidySongs is an Adobe AIR application that analyzes your iTunes library to find duplicates, clean up tracks, and better organize your genres (something that's always been the black hole of metadata with my music).
We've seen lots of automated metadata cleaners in the past, perhaps most notably in the form of the recent, previously mentioned TuneUp, but TidySongs throws a new hat into the ring. The catch: Unless you want to buy TidySongs (for a pretty hefty $30), you only get one feature: Genre renaming.
Normally we'd pass on covering something so limited for free use, but TidySongs is one of the only such tools I've seen that makes genre management so easy for your metadata, and as someone who rarely if ever pays attention to genre because it is always so inconsistent, it's not a bad little tool to have—if only for that feature.
If you feel like ponying up the whopping $30 for cleaner MP3s and the duplicate finder, they look like they're pretty solid tools—but then again, you're probably better off just aiming for one of these (mostly free) best MP3 tagging tools.
Reader Chaebi69's desktop completely customizes the Vista desktop with resource hacks, turning into a dark, stylish custom theme without a lot of extra software.
Once you've created your own beautifully tweaked (and hopefully productive) desktop, post it over in the Lifehacker Desktop Show and Tell Flickr Group complete with a description of the programs and tweaks you used (and preferably links as well!), and we just might feature it here.
Our readers show us how they budget on-the-go, how to save paper with a cellphone, and how to export your Facebook friend's phone numbers into your Google Contacts.
Don't like the gallery layout? Click here to view everything on one page.
Budgeting on the Go with Google Docs
Igor and his wife needed a way to keep real-time track of their budget while on the go. Here's what they came up with:
My wife and I set up a weekly budget, but had a hard time sticking to it because we never knew what the other one spent while on the go. Finally we figured out a solution: I set up a Google Docs spreadsheet with a debit column, credit column and a total. Google Docs have limited support for the iPhone, which we both have and it works great for us. Whenever I am buying something, I simply add a new entry (just the amount) and both of us can see the purchase right away.
Show Me the FiOS Deals
Markus sent in a link to an easy-to-read Verizon FiOS deal chart, which breaks down every service detail, how much you can save, and even gives you the "best deals" that are offered:
Jon and his wife save paper by using this little tip:
To save paper, my wife writes a list of shopping items on the whiteboard on our fridge. Instead of then writing them all down on another piece of paper, I snapped an image with my cell phone and shopped from there. When I'm done, I simply delete the pic.
Export Facebook Phone Numbers into Google Contacts
You never know when you may need to get in touch with one of your Facebook friends (yes, actual live contact) so Michael pointed us to a Greasemonkey script that will export your Facebook phonebook into your Google contacts:
Here's a blog post describing a Greasemonkey script and a web-based tool which will automagically export your Facebook phone numbers (just phone numbers right now, apparently) to your Google Contacts, merging contacts as necessary. There's not even an interim step, you log in to Google and it goes straight through.
I just did this and it worked wonderfully. It even let me preview all the changes it was going to make before accepting the action. It properly merged all the contacts (as long as the names were the same) and created new contacts for people I didn't already have in Google. It also created a group called "Facebook" and added all new and modified contacts to it so I could easily see the newly added info and change anything that didn't go correctly (mostly just editing contacts whose Facebook names didn't match my entires for them in my Google Contacts).
It's not "synchronization," you need to run it each time you want to synchronize the two systems, but it's better than nothing!
The one bug-ish thing I ran into is that you have to visit http://www.facebook.com/friends directly and then launch the Greasemonkey script; you can't just click "Friends" because the Greasemonkey script doesn't recognize that URL as "correct".
Arno sent in a tip to keep bathroom cabinets clear of dusty, sticky dirt (while forcing the product junkies among us to keep on top of their unused stuff):
The main problem is dust in the air mixed up with bathroom humidity and sticky chemicals, e.g. from hairspray. By the time this leaves, a tough dirt-layer is on nearly everything in the bath. If you leave your cabinet doors open wide while using the cosmetics you will soon procrastinate cleaning the insides, just as my friends and I do. But if you keep your doors closed as long as possible the dirt-accumulation will be reduced dramatically!
I tried it myself by using boxes to bundle cosmetics by their use, e.g. one for the morning routine, one to be used after sports or another one for shaving and so on. This allows me to get to my cosmetics within just a few seconds with an open cabinet door. You can easily pour out the boxes and wipe them out or even put them in the dishwasher.
A nice side effect is the reducing of "cabinet corpses" (bought, but never really used cosmetics), because you always pull out the whole box and are forced to review its content.
This could be used in the kitchen as well, where the shelves get fatty after a time!
Windows/Mac OS X: Enlarging images, especially from lower resolution source images, can be dicey business. Want to enlarge an image and you don't want it to look like an 8-bit video game sprite? SmillaEnlarger can keep things smooth and artifact free.
SmillaEnlarger is an open-source and portable application designed to help you intensively massage an image enlargement to keep it from looking jagged and filled with artifacts. You can select the level of zoom using the zoom slider and the location of the zoom via the selection box.
Once you have the selection you're after, you can begin tinkering with the sharpness, flatness, dithering, noise levels, and more. The preview function is quite speedy so don't hesitate to preview often to check how the various settings effect the outcome of your image.
When your enlargement is satisfactory, hit the Calculate button to render it—a process only slightly longer than the preview. From our testing, the results achieved with SmillaEnlarger are on par with other—usually pricier—methods.
If you know of any other tools—freeware, web-based, or otherwise—for easy photo enlargements, let's hear about it in the comments. SmillaEnlarger is portable freeware, Windows only.
It's hard to look for silver linings during a recession, but they do exist. One of the biggest advantages to consumers in this recession is the drop in prices.
For some items, it's like one big sale out there. No matter where you look, from buying a home to purchasing school clothes for the kids, it is possible to take advantage of discounts. Consumer Reports offers a look at some of the best recession bargains available right now:
Television. TVs are being offered with deep discounts. Other consumer electronics can also be bought at discount rates. Computers and laptops are especially inexpensive right now. Use a site like BizRate or PriceGrabber to easily compare prices on a number of items.
Cars. Between the new car tax credit passed earlier this year and the recently instituted Cash for Clunkers program, there are a number of government incentives to buy a car. Even with the law's future in limbo, some dealers are accepting deposits for discounted wheels. Also, dealerships are offering great bargains, low prices and special financing.
Furniture. Furniture stores are hard-hit right now, and have dramatically reduced their mark-ups. You can buy new furniture for rock-bottom prices. Look for closeouts to see even better deals. You might even get free delivery.
These deals work best if you already plan to make purchases within a year. Buying just to buy isn't the best strategy. But if you know you will acquire something in the next 12 to 18 months, you might consider getting it while it's on sale.
Those "Sponsored Ads" in e-mails are an annoyance to both sender and recipient and they seem to escape blocking. Until now. These two (so far) fail-proof sentences at the end of an email will let you enjoy e-mailed rants, ad-free.
(Click the images above and below for a closer look at the before and after effect.)
In his personal blog, Joe McKay writes about his experience in blocking Gmail's sponsored ads using words referencing tragic or catastrophic events (which Google bans from their ads) as well as words from George Carlin's infamous list of seven words you can't say on TV.
That's great news, but how on Earth do you send an email to your boss that's littered with f-bombs and talk of murder? After finding a few victims and experimenting with various potential ad-blocking words, here's the relatively kindly signature we came up with:
I enjoy the massacre of ads. This sentence will slaughter ads without a messy bloodbath.
Result:
Those two simple (and innocent) sentences at the end of an e-mail appear to consistently block Gmail's sponsored ads for us. We've tested e-mails of varying lengths because Joe remarked that he found that there needs to be a ratio of one ad-blocking word for every 167 normal words, but so far, we haven't seen those sentences fail.
Got your own methods of avoiding the extra ads in Gmail? Maybe you've put together a better ad-blocking signature sentence? (Remember, we're aiming for something workplace safe.) Let's hear about it in the comments.
Google has released a new beta for Chrome, featuring changes to the new tab page including the ability to pin web site thumbnails, hide pages, and other improvements.
You can now use "the new New Tab page" to pin web site thumbnails to a designated spot to keep better track of them. Another addition is the ability to use the layout buttons to hide parts of the page. Additionally, the Omnibox now shows icons next to each site in the drop down menu. Google has also started to implement HTML5 capabilities like video tagging into this release. And yes, the new release promises even more speed in the form of JavaScript improvements and optimizations in how Chrome fetches pages.
All these new features are available for testing on the beta channel. While you're updating, make sure to take a look at Chrome's new theme gallery.
If you read over our review of the Snooth, the social network for wine lovers, and thought "What about tea?" then you're in luck. Steepster is a virtual tea house of sorts with tea reviews, information, and even tea blogs.
Without a Steepster account you can browse teas, read reviews of teas, and learn more information about various types of tea including caffeine content and optimum steeping temperature and times. If you create an account you can participate in discussions, leave comments, review tea, and maintain a shopping/wish list to keep track of all the new teas you find via Steepster for future brewing pleasure.
Know of a similar service for other coffee, beer, or other liquid delights? Sound off in the comments.
You already pay your bills online and get electronic statements, but there are even more ways you can stop killing innocent trees and wasting time and money dealing with paper. It's time we went paperless.
Reduce Unnecessary Postal Mail
Junk mail and catalogs are two of the biggest sources of annoying and unwanted paper. Instead of contacting every company who sends you a catalog or piece of mail and asking to be removed from their mailing list, there are services who help you opt out en masse.
Credit card offers and direct marketing mail At Optoutprescreen.com, you can request to be permanently or temporarily removed from credit and insurance offer mailing lists. At DMAchoice you can register to opt out of direct marketing mail you don't want as well. The Federal Trade Commission's Consumer Alert also includes information on how to stop receiving unsolicited mail and telemarketer calls.
Instead of printing documents onto paper and filing them away, "print" them to PDF files. Mac users already have a "Save as PDF" option built into every Print dialog by default. Windows users need a little extra software.
I use the free CutePDF Writer, which adds a PDF "printer" to your options. Choose it and you'll save the document to PDF (instead of printing it on paper). Adam likes doPDF, which serves the same purpose.
Most desktop search software, like Google Desktop or Mac OS X's Spotlight can search inside the contents of PDF files, so you don't need any extra software to find PDF's you've saved. See also Lifehacker readers' picks of best PDF readers.
If you've already got an important bit of paperwork in your hand but you want to digitize it, you need a good document scanner. I'm still loving my Fujitsu ScanSnap, a portable document scanner that I bust out for contracts, legal agreements, and other already-in-paper-form documents.
A Word on Backing Up Your Data Of course, once you start digitizing important paperwork, you've got to have a good backup system in case your hard drive fails or computer crashes. While fires, flood, and coffee spills can just as easily happen to paper, computer disasters are always possible. Be sure you've got automatic local and remote backup for your data just in case.
Digitize Your Signature and Email Instead of Fax
The biggest source of paper in my work life is contracts and client agreements that need to be signed and returned. While people generally say "sign this and fax it back to us," you can do it without getting paper involved. First, create a digital version of your signaturewith a transparent background. Then, get the documents via email, and email (or eFax) them back with your signature added to them. (While there are lots of different kinds of electronic and digital signatures, this type will work for common consumer scenarios. It won't work if you need something notarized or to appear with an original signature.)
Bypass Paper Entirely and Capture Information Electronically
In addition to the paper-reducing techniques mentioned above, folks on Twitter had more ideas for how to reduce paper:
fitzwilliesays, "evites. Video holiday cards." rossmsays, "print on both sides of paper, refuse paper (and plastic) bags when shopping, print to pdf whenever possible" NoahGKsays, "for mail-in rebates, I scan to PDF (for my records) and mail the originals (if there's no online option)." danielzevsays, "I never ask for a receipt when using my debit card" thompsonpaulsays, "Put a No Junk Mail block on mailbox - get online versions of grocery, electronics, hardware flyers instead." norageddonsays, "Mint.com for bank/credit/loan management, online bank statements, shoeboxed.com for receipt management" deadparrot101says, "I've switched two Magazine subscriptions to PDF file transfers!" rickhuizingasays, "Reduce paper? Fujitsu SnapScan and Evernote. All paper documents are scanned to PDF w/OCR, saved to Evernote, and shredded." Dave_RIsays, "re: Paperless-online shopping (not catalogs), Kindle (no books), News sites (no newspapers/fewer magazines), Email (less mail)" jesseGlackensays, "How I use less paper: News, bank statements & bills via web. eBooks. Cloth napkins & dishtowels vs paper. Canvas grocery bags." khstappsays, " Have the post office hold your mail for a few weeks. They stop dumping circulars and junk mail in your mail after a while."
How do you reduce the amount of paper in your life? Give up your tips in the comments.
Gina Trapani, Lifehacker's founding editor, never wants another piece of unnecessary paper in her life. Her weekly feature, Smarterware, appears every Wednesday on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Smarterware tag feed to get new installments in your newsreader.
We try to provide you with enough keyboard shortcut knowledge that your hand rarely moves over to your mouse, but let's face it—the right mouse can be a great thing. What do you use when it's drag-and-drop time?
It's time for another Show and Tell, in which we enjoy the image upload capabilities of our new-ish comment system by asking you to show off the way you work in the comments. Today, we want to see your computer mouse, so snap a pic and upload it to the comments. Along with the pic, let us know what you love or hate about it, where you got it, and whether you'd recommend it.
As a heads up, our image upload tool crops images to fit nicely in the comments, but you can click on the cropped image for a full-sized view if said crop is cutting off the full pic. Happy uploading!
The latest Gmail Labs offering does something that Greasemonkey hackers (and our own Better Gmail extension) have long found useful—hide label tags from the inbox, freeing up more screen space for subject lines and message previews—especially useful for netbooks.
Head to the Labs section of Gmail's settings and enable "Remove Labels from Subjects" to clear out label tags on messages. They'll still show up on the actual message page/permalink, but for those with smaller screens like netbooks or tablets, or anyone who just wants more space for skimming the first bit of text from each message, it's a nice option to toggle.
Audiophiles love FLAC files for their lossless fidelity, while Ogg and WMA files aren't widely supported. With free plug-ins, all three of those formats can be played and managed in iTunes.
MacWorld links to and explains a number of free iTunes plug-ins, both official (Windows Media for QuickTime) and third-party, that make Windows Media Audio, freely-licensed Ogg, and FLAC files compatible with iTunes libraries on Windows or Mac. In the case of FLAC files, you'll actually have to convert the file types from .flac to .mov, but the article explains the easy way to do that with Mac's Automator. On Windows systems, we'd suggest the previously mentioned Bulk Rename Utility. Found another way to make Apple's generally walled-off media manager play nice with non-native formats? Tell us how in the comments.
Bulk cooking and freezing is a great way to bank meals for later and cut down on time spent cooking. The five-day freeze technique makes bulk cooking feasible for those who don't have a whole weekend to set aside.
Linsery Kerl is a busy mom and writer for the frugality blog WiseBread. She'd tried bulk cooking before but found that with four children and a busy schedule the idea of devoting a weekend to stock-piling meals just wasn't going to happen. She advocates taking an approach that spreads the labor out in a more manageable fashion:
What I'm aiming to discuss, however, is how to achieve the same level "cook now, eat later" zen, without the horrid hangover that occurs when you shop for an entire month's worth of food, cook for 12 hours straight, and then collapse in a pile of sweat and tears before realizing you lost two days of your life for some frozen lasagna trays. Some people have mastered the batch-cooking technique without all the drama, but let's be realistic: I'm a work-at-home, home-educating, mom of 4 little ones. I can rarely find time to sweep and scrub, much less create 30 days' worth of frozen meals on my days off. Here is how I've achieved basically the same results (easy meal prep on a budget) with the spare 30-minutes to an hour I have each day.
The secret to bulk cooking without turning into a food-making robot for one weekend out of every month? Make your regular entrees and cooking endeavors throughout the week ones that freeze well and can be used in multiple ways.
They give the example of hamburger being on sale. Buy extra—a lot extra—and on top of the meal you're making for the evening you can make meatballs to freeze, seasoned beef for taco night down the road, pre-brown and freeze for other recipes, and so on. By incorporating a future meal into your nightly cooking session you can begin to stockpile meals and meal components without having to dedicate entire days or weekends to stuffing your freezer.
Check out the full article for more ideas on maximizing your cooking sessions and if you have your own experience with bulk cooking and advanced meal planning we'd love to hear about it in the comments.
Listia isn't quite Freecycle, eBay, or Craigslist, but it's working the same kind of premise. It sets up auctions for free items that users bid their (normally free) credits on, with possibilities for charitable proceeds as well.
In other words, if you have an old DVD, a cool but never played board game, or even something like a TV to give away, you list it on Listia. You receive a stash of credits/points when you sign up, and get more when you give things away, but can also re-up your points with cash. The winner of an item "auction" receives the rights to pick it up from you for free (or arrange shipping), and you can decide to donate 60% of any money that user spent on points to get your item to a charity.
Altruism aside, Listia is really a way to give away items without having to manage dozens of Craigslist replies or ship an item cross-country for almost no profit. It is, like so many start-ups, very San Francisco/NYC oriented at the moment, but can grow into more markets as it gains in popularity. Its search functions are helpful for such a service (including a filter for closest give-aways by location), and is worth a try for any item you're trying to get rid of—or items you think might be given away in your neck of the woods. Free to sign up for, additional credits can be bought for cash.
No, we're not talking about moving from politely asking to screaming. But when you keep hitting the same dead end with a customer service complaint, Consumerist suggests a routine for getting your questions further up the chain.
The tips come from an AT&T representative and were spurred from a specific complaint about double charging, but they're a nice reinforcement and specific example of being a better customer to get better service.
Our reps are trained that escalation is part of the process, and they are explicitly instructed to escalate every time it's requested.
Each time you call, make note of the rep's name and the time and date you call. If you ask to be connected to a supervisor and you are not connected, hang up and call back in, THEN IMMEDIATELY ask to speak to a supervisor. We want to know when our protocol isn't followed, and we want to resolve your issue.
Being careful not to sound too too rude is important, as angered employees are likely to leave angry notes. But procedures and elevation requests are good reinforcement to keep in mind when trying to solve a matter over the phone.
CNET's UK site has installed, tested, reviewed, and benchmarked the version of Windows 7 that's being shipped to manufacturers for a late October release. The verdict? An all-around approval, as Seth Rosenblatt declares Windows 7 improved in most every way, but especially in performance and shut-down measurements. The blue note comes from seeing that Windows XP SP3 still runs Office faster than Vista or 7, but for Vista owners, 7 is looking like a pretty sure upgrade bet. [CNET UK]
We were eager to know what's happening with Firefox. Mike Beltzner, the open-source browser's director, was glad to tell us. Here's what he had to say about future features, competition with Chrome, and keeping all of Firefox contributors in sync.
Mike Beltzner: I live my life by 
The way I use my browser is very different from the way my wife uses my browser. I put nothing in the bookmark menu. Everything I need to get to later, to act on, I put in one drop-down list called "The Pile." I've got another folder with bookmarklets like 
The resulting graph shows how Firefox allocates and releases memory over time. While I haven't yet published the results in a blog post for Firefox 3.5, they are basically the same as they were for Firefox 3.0, which shows that Firefox not only holds at a steady state of memory while opening/closing the tabs, but releases almost all of that memory once we close down all of our tabs.
Mike Beltzner: Speed is important. It's not just from the perspective of having to wait for a browser to load something, it's important from an app development perspective. The speed of modern JavaScript engines is entirely different than what you could build before. My calendaring and mail applications, using original speed JavaScript compilers, would be just unbearable ... We're now using engines 10 times as fast the first Java engines, so haggling over 100 milliseconds here and there is just a matter of engineering excellence. The ability to push that envelope, the way that JavaScript gets reported back to a testing engine, that doesn't matter.
Zune HD gets a rave review, the iPhone and Wii remote engage in an unholy marriage, HTML 5 demos blow your mind, and we wonder what this mysterious Apple iProd is all about (if not a typo).
It's hard to look for silver linings during a recession, but they do exist. One of the biggest advantages to consumers in this recession is the drop in prices.
Credit card offers and direct marketing mail
I use the 
The biggest source of paper in my work life is contracts and client agreements that need to be signed and returned. While people generally say "sign this and fax it back to us," you can do it without getting paper involved. First, 
We try to provide you with enough 
The latest Gmail Labs offering does something that Greasemonkey hackers (and our own 
Audiophiles love FLAC files for their lossless fidelity, while Ogg and WMA files aren't widely supported. With free plug-ins, all three of those formats can be played and managed in iTunes.
Bulk cooking and freezing is a great way to bank meals for later and cut down on time spent cooking. The five-day freeze technique makes bulk cooking feasible for those who don't have a whole weekend to set aside.
No, we're not talking about moving from politely asking to screaming. But when you keep hitting the same dead end with a customer service complaint, Consumerist suggests a routine for getting your questions further up the chain.
CNET's UK site has installed, tested, reviewed, and benchmarked the version of Windows 7 that's being shipped to manufacturers for a late October release. The verdict? An all-around approval, as Seth Rosenblatt declares Windows 7 improved in most every way, but especially in 
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