You're almost out the door on a no-shower, rush-rush morning when you spot your reflection—and you totally look like you haven't showered. The quick fix? Take about a teaspoon of baby powder, rub it into your hands or onto a trusted comb, and run it through your hair. This is one of those life hacks I don't love admitting to thoroughly testing, but it's saved my hair from looking like I woke up at a frat house on a number of frantic mornings. Good stuff to have around, too, as it can also quiet squeaky floors and shoes and even control ants. Got any other triage tips for no-shower hair? Post 'em up in the comments. Photo by Abulic Monkey.

It's summer, it's hot, and your big chore for the weekend is getting rid of the stump in your backyard? Instead of digging it out, give the stump a second life as an all-natural stump cooler. Design web site Apartment Therapy walks through the process, which only involves three simple steps: 1) Slice out chunks from the middle of the stump, 2) Add a garbage bag, ice, and your favorite brews, and 3) Enjoy. The bigger the stump the better.

• GrabUp Makes Screenshot Sharing Effortless (Mac)
  "Freeware application GrabUp automatically uploads screenshots to the internet and pastes the URL in your clipboard for quick and easy sharing."
• Dock Spaces Creates Context-Specific Docks (Mac)
  "Free utility Dock Spaces creates and swaps between up to five customizable Docks in Leopard."
• TuneUp Automatically Updates and Fixes Your iTunes Metadata (Windows)
  "Music application TuneUp scans your iTunes library to fill in and clean up your music's metadata, including album art."
• Bug Shooting Does Advanced Screen Capture and Annotation (Windows)
  "Free application Bug Shooting is a simple but powerful screenshot application designed to make sharing screenshots via email or with bug tracking applications a cinch."
• AirRadar Offers Better Wi-Fi Network Management (Mac)
  "Leopard's built-in Airport utility doesn't do much except show you what Wi-Fi networks are nearby, and which require a password—but free utility AirRadar does much more."
• PC Wizard Analyzes and Benchmarks Your PC (Windows)
  "Free application PC Wizard is a portable tool that analyzes and benchmarks your PC."
• Urbanspoon Picks a Restaurant for You (iPhone)
  "Free application Urbanspoon finds you a place to eat nearby at the shake of your iPhone or iPod touch."
• Darik's Boot and Nuke Securely Wipes Your System in an Emergency
  "Free, open-source boot disk utility Darik's Boot and Nuke (DBAN) automatically and completely deletes the content of every hard disk it can find on your computer when you run it."
• AccelMan File Manager Replaces Explorer with Robust Features (Windows)
  "Free application AccelMan is a dual-pane Windows Explorer replacement with a powerful feature set."

We love bringing you good video clips that show off hacks or give clever advice or different perspectives; Check out our weekend watching tag for a few we've posted so far. But what are your favorite sources of Lifehacker-relevant video out there? I've been keeping tabs on Authors@Google, Boing Boing TV, TED Talks, and O'Reilly video. Any others worth adding to our subscription list? Shout out your favorite internet video feeds in the comments.

If you've been checking out the newest VirtualBox beta for Mac OS X, or you're intrigued by Linux but not ready to deal with virtualizing it, the Sun xVM VirtualBox VDI Index—or, as it's skeevily nicknamed, veeDee-Eyes—has a host of pre-compiled, pre-configured images for you. No need to set up space, "boot" from a live CD and mess around with hardware config, as copies of Fedora, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE and others are ready to run. Not all of them are free, with a few of the multi-GB distros asking for a buck or two to cover server costs, but a good number of interesting variants and betas are there for the taking. VirtualBox runs on Windows, Mac, or Linux, and is a free download.

Reader Chimera says that you can use the iPhone 2.0 software's built-in screenshot-taking ability to save images of Google Maps to your device before you leave the house (and the fast Wi-Fi connection) for directions at-the-ready. This technique is especially handy for iPod touch owners, and would work with any handheld device with maps and and screengrab capabilities.

Peek over walls and look around corners with a periscope—a long tool that uses two mirrors to show you hard-to-reach places. Over at how-to site Instructables, they've got the step by step for putting together a periscope using a thin mints box, duct tape, two small mirrors, and an X-Acto knife. The kids will love this one.

My pal Susie decided not to replace her totaled car and happily opted to rent by the hour with Zipcar instead (possibly NSFW link there). With rising gas and insurance prices, her choice is more common and beneficial than ever. Think Zipcar and its ilk is a viable alternative to actual car ownership? Let us know in the comments.

Wired's How-To Wiki demonstrates how to exploit the iPhone's unusual shutter to take distorted photographs. The trick? Just twist your camera as you're taking a picture.

The reason? The iPhone uses a CMOS sensor, which more or less "wipes" the shutter across the sensor like a scanner rather than the circular aperture of a traditional camera. The iPhone's CMOS scanner seems to be a bit slower than, say, the CMOS sensor on your Canon camera. Therefore, as the camera is recording the image, any changes over that small but significant amount of time are recorded.

Taking a psychedelic photo is actually just as easy as it sounds (works better in bright sunlight), but read on for a quick video demonstration.

With a projector, DVD player, a bed sheet, and an extension cord, Wired's How-To Wiki runs down how to make a movie theater in your backyard this summer.

Find yourself in New York City without an airport ride, but don't want to pony up the disheartening full fare for a cab ride? Hitchsters.com hooks you up with other taxi riders taking the same flight to save money and ensure you arrive on time. The benefit over an airline-sponsored shuttle van is that your fellow passengers are trying to make the same flight, so you won't have to hop on two hours early or risk missing your take-off. The service is currently live for Manhattan and Brooklyn pick-ups, but plans to expand. Thanks, Jason!

Macworld runs down how to get vacation photos that don't look just like everyone else's with some power tips on gear, camera settings, perspective and more.

Job interview master Vj Vijai describes how make the best impression at a technical interview using people skills (versus technical skills). His talk, which happened at O'Reilly's awesome Ignite event, is informative, funny, and short. Vijai also has a web site outlining the principles, linked below. The next Ignite will happen in NYC on 7/29. Thanks, Brady!

Subscribe to our top stories feed to get only our best posts without the extras on a daily basis. This week's most popular posts include:

• One Hundred Push Ups Takes You from Zero to a Hundred in Six Weeks
  "Web site One Hundred Push Ups details a training plan for going from 0 to 100 push-ups in a matter of six weeks."
• Top 10 Computer Annoyances and How to Fix Them
  "Computers are supposed to make our lives easier, but too much of the time they can be frustrating, time-wasting, stubborn machines."
• Set Up Push Email, Contacts, and Calendar on Your iPhone for Free
  "One of the coolest features available in the new iPhone 2.0 software update is the ability to get new email messages, contacts, and calendar events pushed to your device automatically."
• Why You're Better Off Avoiding the iPhone
  "If you're a free software lover who's concerned about your privacy and the limitations of DRM, you don't want an iPhone."
• Are You Living Beyond Your Means?
  "Claiming personal savings rates are the lowest they've been since the Great Depression, Yahoo Finance sets out to identify five signs that you're living beyond your means."
• Twenty Healthy Foods that Cost $1 or Less
  "Grocery shopping hasn't been getting any cheaper lately, and the rising costs of fresh food in particular might lead some frugal buyers to be tempted by processed foods and supposedly "cheap" snacks."
• Boost Your Brainstorming Session with MindMeister
  "Jotting a simple list is a great way to brainstorm, but when you want to visualize, organize, and untangle a deep set of ideas, you want a mind map. Web-based mind mapping tool MindMeister offers a simple interface to create mind maps collaboratively or on the go."
• Five Best Windows Backup Tools
  "Your data is your life, and if you're not backing it up regularly, you're flirting with disaster."

Photography enthusiast blog Photojojo details how to mount your point-and-shoot camera on your bicycle for fun and creative shooting. The supplies are cheap (under $10), and putting it all together is a breeze. When you're done, you could use it to snap photos at intervals for a time-lapse or shoot some video like Photojojo did above. If your camera doesn't support time-lapse (or you just want to really soup it up), check out how to turn your point-and-shoot into a super-camera with CHDK.

Windows only: Free, open-source application DropUpload is a lightweight FTP client designed to provide simple drag-and-drop file uploads to any folder on your FTP server. To use it, you set up DropUpload with specific folders you want to upload to, then just drag and drop files into the app to automatically upload them to your server. It's quick, extremely lightweight, and very easy to use once it's set up. DropUpload is free, Windows only. Don't have an FTP server? Here's how you can set one up on your home computer.

iPhone/iPod touch only: Free application QuickSend creates and sends simple emails in a flash through a one-hand-friendly interface. When you fire up the app, you get two scrollable sections: the first with email addresses of your contacts and the second with messages. Line up the two you want and tap the Email It button. QuickSend launches a new email with the necessary fields auto-populated, and all you have to do is hit send. While it's a great app for one-handed emails, it could use some improvements. First, if you've got a lot of contacts, finding the right address in the unsorted list is a pain. Second, this really seems best suited for an SMS-integrated application, since these are the sorts of messages you want to send when someone isn't necessarily at their computer. Either way it's a good start. QuickSend is freeware, requires an iPhone or iPod touch running 2.0 firmware.

If you get things done with a classic Hipster PDA—i.e., simple notecards with a binder clip—but would like to expand your hipster PDA to more complex realms, DIY web site Curbly offers a simple suggestion: label your binder clips. Inspired by these $8 task clips, this obvious DIY alternative uses either a label maker or paint pen to roll your own task clips on the cheap. Not groundbreaking by any means, but a good way to add an extra layer of organization to your notecards.

iPhone owner Jason Kottke offers a handy tip for getting images onto your phone (or iPod touch): On any page in Mobile Safari, tap and hold an image to save it to your device. As Kottke points out, this is very useful for assigning images to your contacts or getting new wallpaper (as useful as the new ability to save email attachments, methinks). Hit up Facebook, for example, to grab photos of your pals to add to your address book. You'll need the updated iPhone 2.0 software to do this. Here's our rundown of all the features it adds.

Windows only: Free application AccelMan is a dual-pane Windows Explorer replacement with a powerful feature set. Previously a shareware application, AccelMan boasts a built-in image viewer, tabbed views, command line integration, a media player, text editor, and even file compression and extraction with support for 15 popular formats (including ZIP and RAR). It also does as-you-type search, reads PDF and Microsoft Office documents, and tons more. We've shown you how to replace Explorer with Xplorer2, but if you're looking for an Explorer alternative and Xplorer2 wasn't you're thing, AccelMan is worth a look. AccelMan is freeware, Windows only.

Admit it—even if your desk could be the cover shot for Organized Worker Monthly, your data is all over the place. Between desktop apps, online networks, and webapp tools, it's easy to lose track of data and duplicate tasks, simply because it's not all accessible, or it takes too much of your time to keep it all synced up and together. Conduit, an in-development program for the Linux desktop, makes it simple to link your web data, desktop files, and other information all together, then synchronize them all with a single click. Follow along as we check out how Conduit works, peek at its potential, and try out a few examples (and solicit your own clever ideas).

Getting started

Conduit's interface is meant to make data-syncing simple, and, for the most part, it does. Simply drag and drop icons that represent your data in the "cloud" (Flickr photos, YouTube Videos, Box.net backups, etc.) or your actual, physical stuff (files, folders, iPods, data apps) into the "canvas," and start making connections. Add the "sources" of your data first, followed by all the points that will receive it. Right-click on any item in your chain to configure it, whether that means pointing to specific folders or logging into your Flickr, Box.net, or Facebook accounts from pop-up windows. Here's a look at all the syncing tools you can play with in Conduit:

Once you've put a few of those items together, right-click on the "group" itself (the gray box surrounding the items) to change the syncing options. You can set up two-way sync between items that support it, a "slow sync" to free up your bandwidth, and a persistent "Always up to date" mode. You can also pre-set ways to deal with files already found, deleted on one side but not the other, and whether it should even bother looking at file creation dates to determine what's "new" (good for those of us who have made a few less-than-successful backup attempts).

Not every point on your data chain is fully two-way, unfortunately. I would've really liked to have created a Mega-Omni-RSS Feed for all my social networking updates; for now, I'll have to stick with Gina's Yahoo Pipes method. There are three basic data types in Conduit, distinguished by the little blue arrows on their icons:

• One-way sources: You can only pull data from these items. Includes RSS feeds and music/playlist data from the Rhythmbox and Banshee music managers.
• One-way syncs: You can drop data into these places. Backpack Notes, Facebook, and (disappointingly) Google Documents included.
• Two-way items: The good stuff. Most web apps (Google Calendar & Contacts, Flickr, Box.net) support this, and if you're an Evolution user, your office gets a lot bigger.

conduit-client -h

Great uses for Conduit

LSync Calendars, Contacts, and Notes with iPod/PDA
If a Linux system can detect and mount your iPod, Palm, or other data organizer, Conduit can sync up your calendars, contacts, and notes with it, wherever you have them stored—Google, Evolution, your Backpack notes, or even downloaded files. Simply plug in your device and hook up its separate calendar/contact/note items with your data.

Share once, publish across sites
Conduit works exceedingly smoothly with online photo sites, and its "Always up to date" feature means you can create a "Magic Folder"—drop a photo in it, and it gets picked up and sent out to all the sites you'd normally publish to.

YouTube/Podcast subscriptions made easy
Whatever you listen to your podcasts or watch videos with, Conduit can automatically grab the newest additions to a YouTube channel or podcast stream and drop them in a folder (or your Box.net space, your USB drive, iPod—you get the idea).

Simple folder sync/backup
The hardcore backup addicts will swear by using rsync to mirror files on any system, but Conduit makes what you're doing understandable and simple. Create a two-way sync to have any files on a USB drive auto-magically synced to a folder when plugged in. Back up and restore your files to a Box.net space, a web or FTP server, external hard drive, or anywhere else you can normally connect from your Linux system.

Your ideas
There's a lot of tools sitting in Conduit's left-hand pane, just waiting for you and your clever ideas to tweak into seriously cool uses. With the prevalence of RSS feeds generated from web apps, there are bound to be at least a few great work-arounds, useful filters, and other connections to be made.

So, let's hear it—What syncing ideas can you put into action with Conduit? What feature would you need to see installed for Total Data Awareness? Share it all in the comments—I'll update the post with some of the best sync chains as they roll in.

Kevin Purdy, associate editor at Lifehacker, sleeps easier when his data is neatly ordered and backed up. His weekly feature, Open Sourcery, appears Fridays on Lifehacker.

Editor: Being digital vagabonds without an Exchange server, we Lifehacker writers use online apps like Gmail and Google Calendar to get things done. But can an Outlook user make the switch without losing out? Guest contributor Jared Goralnick's here today to take a look.
Gmail launched in 2004 and has matured each year, but Microsoft Outlook (with Exchange) is still the most popular tool for accessing email. Comparing the two side by side, is it time to jump ship from either platform? Let's find out.

This comparison below is based on Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 with Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 and Google Apps for your Domain's free version of Gmail.

There are many differences between the two products in terms of how they can be configured and the type of workflow that they support. I'll go through each area of difference below, comparing and contrasting. At the end, you'll find an overall comparison and some recommendations.

Search

But Gmail is still much faster. And as an added hassle, if Outlook ever returns incorrect or incomplete search results you have to dig into the settings to tweak or rebuild your search index, hoping that you can fix the problem.

One advantage of Outlook search is that it searches within attachments. Google Desktop Search would accomplish this if you used a separate email program (even Outlook!), but the Gmail web interface does not. Still, the inability to search within attachments is a small price to pay for the superior speed and accuracy of Gmail's search.

Search Verdict: Gmail wins for a faster and more reliable search. Outlook is just a step behind with full attachment search.

Folders vs. Labels: How To File Messages

Outlook has always had categories, which behave similarly. In version 2007, Outlook created a faster system that used color-coded/named categories and Search Folders to perform nearly the same functionality as Gmail. Most people are not aware of this feature because it's less noticeable than the Outlook folder tree and would require setting up search folders for each category to function like Gmail labels. However, since categories have no relationship to the folder location of an item they're not a complete replacement for the folder tree.

On the surface, labels seem superior to a folder tree—after all, tags are the preferred method of identifying data on many new web sites. There are a few problems with labels, though:

• There's no such thing as "sub-labels." As such, if you decide to use Google like a folder tree, you'll quickly discover that the hierarchy is only one-level.
• There is no drag and drop functionality in the Gmail web interface (most likely since applying a label isn't necessarily moving it from one label to another).
• Gmail's labels are not 100% compatible with IMAP support. They're mostly compatible, but some people (like me) may run into synchronization issues.

In Outlook, a label-like feature is available but harder to access. It has additional filtering and organizational capabilities, but most users might not dig that deeply into the software to find them, especially since in Outlook one still has to work with the folder tree to move items out of the Inbox.

Folders vs. Labels Verdict: Gmail wins for a simpler, generally more flexible approach.

Rules vs. Filters: How To Automatically Process Mail

While it appears there are more options available within Outlook, Google has done a better job of helping people get to the most relevant options right away. Gmail also allows you to test exactly how the filter would behave before you save it:

Outlook has taken a step in the right direction by providing a right-click option called "Create Rule...." It does a better job of exposing the most relevant information, but it's still not as easy to configure or test as with Gmail.

Note that Microsoft Exchange users may benefit more from rules than standalone Microsoft Outlook users. Gmail is a server-side tool, so its filters will affect Gmail mail, regardless of where you access it. Microsoft Exchange users will also have this benefit. However, if you do not have Microsoft Exchange and your Microsoft Outlook is not running, the rules will not be processed. This can be frustrating when checking mail remotely.

Once again we have a similar divide—most people will be better off with the faster to configure and easier to test Gmail results, but Outlook has more features.

In my experience with clients and colleagues, people don't use as many Outlook rules as they do Gmail filters, even though filtering is a huge help with the volume of email many of us receive. This leads me to believe that Outlook's rules are more intimidating.

Rules vs. Filters Verdict: Google wins for a simpler, more approachable interface.

Contacts

If you don't keep an address book and don't plan to, Gmail's Contacts feature is a sufficient Band-Aid in that you never to have to visit Contacts to get some benefits. That is, it remembers email information long after a correspondence.

Outlook also remembers the email addresses of people you've corresponded with, but it stores the addresses in a hard to find text file (called an NK2 file) that people often forget to back up. As such, when people get a new workstation or reinstall Windows they often lose the email information that they thought they had "stored."

If most of your contact activities are about email correspondence, then Gmail and Outlook are roughly comparable since they both hold onto the core data.

But depending on your needs, the products differ greatly beyond that:

• If you use a lot of shiny new web applications, they can often import your contacts directly from Gmail (much faster than your Outlook contacts).
• If you want to track customer correspondence, Gmail's "Recent Conversations" view makes this a snap. Outlook still hasn't figured this out—its "Activities" area should be the answer, but it's painfully slow and inaccurate at best. (Instead Microsoft recommends either Outlook Business Contact Manager or Microsoft CRM, two tools that are no walk in the park to implement but are darn cool if you can swing it).
• If you regularly mail merge in Word or do anything that involves contact data in Windows, Outlook contacts are your best option (yes, anything is possible, but it's fewer steps with Outlook contacts).
• If you synchronize with a mobile device, Outlook is your best option since it works with nearly every PDA device (BlackBerry, PalmOne, Windows Mobile, the iPhone, iPods, etc.) whether the synchronization is USB or over the internet.
• If you work in an office with Microsoft Exchange, contacts can be shared and synchronized, which is very helpful.
• If you have lots of contacts, then Outlook offers dozens of ways to organize and view them, from separate folders to flags to categories to "recently added," and it also offers privacy settings for sharing only some of them.

Contacts Verdict: No winner. If you're in a business environment, Outlook likely wins. Otherwise, there's no clear choice.

Spam Filtering

My two issues with Gmail's spam filtering are:

• It doesn't completely eliminate the stuff that's obvious as spam (you still have to wade through it). With Google's purchase of Postini we'll hopefully see some improvements in this area, but I find it difficult to skim through 500 spam messages per day, and inevitably don't bother.
• There are still occasional false positives (non-spam that gets sent to the Spam folder), which is unfortunate when a lot of people never read through the Spam folder.

Gmail wins on spam, since there's no installation necessary. For businesses, or people who subscribe to a Hosted Exchange service, a commercial anti-spam service will likely perform better than either product out-of-the-box. (However, most commercial anti-spam solutions can be used with Google Apps for Your Domain as easily as they can be used with Exchange.) Note: the spam count in the image above is a joke.

Spam Filtering Verdict: Gmail wins for doing a decent job without any installation.

Storage Space

Gmail users have 6.76 GB for no charge (or 25 GB for $50/year). The storage they provide regularly increases.

Businesses might feel they are offering reasonable limits to their users, except that many people still attach big files to emails rather than linking to them. Thus there are often many people who have to clean up or archive their email every few weeks. While there are reasons for this (due to the cost of storage), it's a complaint I encounter frequently with clients.

People who use Outlook without an Exchange connection have nothing to worry about with regard to storage space, but they should be careful to back up and split their PST (Personal Storage files) regularly after they hit a couple GB.

Another caveat is that storing your email in the Google cloud is a tough pill to swallow for some people and many businesses. As such, that factor alone may be a deal-breaker, regardless of the convenience.

Both Outlook and Gmail offer plenty of options for file storage, but I, for one, am sick of all the work I have to do to keep my Exchange store size trimmed. Until Exchange storage gets less expensive or businesses suck up more of the costs (sorry!), I'm handing this category to Google.

Storage Space Verdict: Gmail wins for generally offering more space for less (or no!) money, but this depends on a whole host of factors.

User Experience

• Gmail's Threaded view is much simpler than Outlook's Arrange By Conversation (and better yet, it always takes up less screen space to display threads, whereas Outlook's often takes more).
• Search is what you live for in Gmail, and it's near the core of the user experience, in a good way.
• Outlook allows you to drag-and-drop messages for filing (or creating tasks).
• Outlook has a sort feature. I partially understand why Gmail views don't sort, but I still have trouble getting past this conspicuous shortcoming.
• Both programs have keyboard shortcuts (see Gmail's), but Outlook's are easier to discover (since they're displayed).
• Gmail shows the first few words of an email in the one-line view; Outlook offers a reading pane that makes it easier to get the whole story fast (similar to Google Reader).

User Experience Verdict: No winner. This is even more a matter of opinion than my other verdicts!

Workflow

Certain activities fit nicely within Gmail's confines and others benefit from Outlook's larger feature-set. You can read more about how I've resolved which scenarios fit which tool, and why I use both.

For the business user with many responsibilities, Outlook's expanded feature-set (tasks, task sharing, message flagging, shared contact list, etc.) is a huge reason why the product is dominant in the workforce.

If little or none of your email turns into tasks, Gmail's filtering, labeling, and search make it a good choice. But since for many people, email inevitably leads to deferred responsibilities, and Google Apps does not yet natively support tasks, I'm going to hand the workflow to Outlook. Fortunately Remember the Milk makes tasks possible in Gmail.

Workflow Verdict: Outlook wins, for natively supporting tasks and offering more workflow flexibility.

Mobility

Both Microsoft Exchange and Gmail offer scaled down interfaces that work well via web access on mobile devices. (Gmail's is available by accessing their site from a mobile browser or by visiting m.google.com/a. Microsoft Exchange users can access an often overlooked tool called Outlook Mobile Access—just ask your Exchange administrator for the URL to "OMA" on your server.)

Many people have never seen Microsoft's full mobile experience because they are simply using the desktop version of Outlook and/or are not on a Microsoft Exchange server. But I have to hand this to Microsoft, since Exchange not only synchronizes email but also calendar, contacts, and tasks, making this information fully accessible offline via ActiveSync (or other third-party services like BlackBerrys').

If you don't have access to an Exchange server but prefer Outlook most of the time, your best bet is to use Gmail as your email host and Outlook as an IMAP application—then you'll at least get much better mobile access than what is likely provided by your Internet Service Provider. We'll see if/how MobileMe changes the landscape.

Mobility Verdict: Outlook with Exchange wins. And non-Exchange Outlook users could host their email with Gmail to get its mobile tools anyway.

Support

I happily use both Hosted Exchange and Google Apps for different purposes, but I know that for critical business needs there's a person who I can get on the phone to help with Exchange problems. Google offers support, but they have a very different model and are not providing the "on call support" that many businesses depend on.

If you're a do it yourself-er, you have much less chance of messing things up with Google Apps for your Domain than by setting up Exchange yourself. However, Hosted Exchange providers and a large pool of qualified technicians are a better alternative for the tricky issues that come up when you least expect them.

Note: if you're the "family geek," I highly recommend getting Google Apps for your Domain. I recently switched siblings, parents, and grandparents to this and it's a breath of fresh air. Exchange was a bit too costly and unnecessary an option for family technical support.

Support Verdict: Outlook wins for having a larger support ecosystem.

Findings Table

Conclusions, And What The Future Holds

I personally use Outlook for business correspondence and managing responsibilities, and Gmail for social media and most web activities. Some people combine their activities and choose just one email application, and that's fine, too.

If one thing is clear, it's that Gmail has become an increasingly mature product that can be used for business. With the Postini acquisition, Google is beginning to offer enterprise-level services (like compliance archiving, service level agreements, and more comprehensive spam policies). I foresee the addition of tasks and integration with the Google Search Appliance positioning Google squarely against Microsoft.

At the same time, Microsoft has long been making progress in the Software as a Service space, primarily with their hosted Exchange offering and now with hosted Microsoft CRM. Earlier this month, Microsoft announced that it would begin offering these services directly instead of just through partners, with starting prices well under $10/user per month (as of now with 5 user minimums). This positions them squarely against Google.

Competition here is crucial for our success, as it's a large part of our own productivity as knowledge workers. Regardless of the tool you pick (Thunderbird's pretty awesome, too!), you'll have plenty of company and some welcome changes ahead.

Jared Goralnick is a Productivity Evangelist for AwayFind, a tool that helps you to stop checking email. Check out his time-saving hacks on his blog at Technotheory.com.

Windows Mobile only: The newly released Opera Mobile 9.5 beta offers a host of features for surfing on your handheld device. The browser operates in full-screen mode to maximize the amount of web site you see without cluttering things up with toolbars. Restore access to the toolbars by tapping the small silver arrow in the lower corner of the screen. Opera Mobile also has support for full-screen browsing similar to Microsoft's experimental browser Deepfish. You can look at the entire page at one time and choose which area you want to zoom in on for closer examination. The full-page browsing is handy for maneuvering around web sites that aren't mobile phone-optimized, instead of playing the scrolling game to figure out if you can find what you're looking for. Opera Mobile 9.5 beta is a free download for Windows Mobile only.

Microsoft is offering unlimited toll-free tech support calls for compatibility and installation issues with Windows Vista (Service Pack 1) through March 2009, in nearly any country. You'll need to have your Product ID handy (right-click on My Computer->Properties to grab it), but it's a nice last resort for you or anyone you don't have time to troubleshoot for. [via]

When the heat turns unbearable this weekend, get the kids outside anyway: head to the hardware store and pick up some PVC pipe, joints, and small plastic "mister jets." With those supplies, after drilling a few holes, screwing in a few jets, and gluing a few joints, DIY-er m32825 made a "kid wash" water spray hooked up the garden hose that the little 'uns could run and ride their bike through and cool off in the July heat. This project seems like something even an inexperienced DIYer could handle, and the result is totally worth it.

Thanks to this week's sponsors for keeping the CPU fans whirring: Chevy Fuel Solutions, Eve Online, HP TouchSmart, Mighty Leaf Tea, Puma, Sharp Aquos, Starwood Hotels, and T-Mobile. You want a piece of us? Advertise on Lifehacker.

We've shown you how to set up free push email, contacts, and calendars on your iPhone, but for those who aren't using Gmail, or who only want live calendar and contact syncing, one intrepid blogger has found a free, low-key service dubbed NuevaSync that acts as a free Exchange server for just those two services (for now). Hit the link below for detailed instructions on setting up NuevaSync inside your iPhone, as well as Windows Mobile and Palm Treo devices.

If you're trying to be more frugal but find the day-to-day struggle too taxing to win, the Simple Dollar finance blog suggests a relaxing way to cut back on spending: A money-free weekend. There are just two rules:

We are not allowed to spend any money on anything, no matter what. In other words, we can't make a run to the store to buy food, we can't spend money on any sort of entertainment, and so on. Since we often do our grocery shopping on Saturdays, on a "money free" weekend, we delay it to Monday or Tuesday.

We can use our utilities, but no extra expenses on these utilities. No renting movies on cable, no text messages that aren't already covered by our cell phone plan, and so on.

The post offers up 100 activity ideas for that weekend, including learning tasks (like changing your own oil or getting better at photography), taking advantage of free parks/zoos/museums, and even just trying out free software.

What would you do during a money-free weekend? How would you keep yourself (and your family) entertained if your financial hands were tied? Let's hear it in the comments!

Google Documents has added a full-screen editing mode to the "View" menu on individual documents, a convenience previously available only through a Greasemonkey script. Combined with Firefox 3's serious fullscreen capabilities and GDocs' fixed-width page view, it lets one turn the online office suite a no-distraction writing environment—provided you can resist popping open another tab with Ctrl+T. It's worth noting that Zoho Writer has a similar "Maximize editor" function, but it's not as severe as Google Docs' nothing-but-white implementation.