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Tuesday, December 18, 2012
Top Stories from the last 24 hours
Hack Your Life in One Day: A Beginner's Guide to Enhanced Productivity
December 18th, 2012Top StoryHack Your Life in One Day: A Beginner's Guide to Enhanced ProductivityBy Whitson Gordon
If you've been reading Lifehacker for a long time, you already know LastPass, Dropbox, CrashPlan, and other tools backwards and forwards. This guide is for absolute beginners—the people who are ready to take the dive into better productivity, but don't know where to start. Check it out for yourself (you never know what you might have missed) and pass it on to your friends and family during your next annual tech support session! Back Up Your Computer Automatically with CrashPlanTime Required: 30 Minutes How It Works: You've probably heard people say it a million times before, but you should really back up your computer—and not just to an external hard drive, either. A good, cloud-based backup ensures that you never, ever lose any of your important files—a pain that many of you already know—no matter what happens. The process only takes a little bit of time, and is dead simple to set up. Here's how:
You can change a lot of other options in CrashPlan, as well as back up to different locations like another computer. This simple setup yields great results for most people. Once you've set it up, you'll rarely—if ever—need to open CrashPlan again. Further Reading: Our Beginner's Guide to CrashPlan and How to Move Your CrashPlan Backup to a New Computer Create Better Passwords and Store Them in a Password ManagerTime Required: 2 Hours How It Works: Do you use the same password for nearly every site? Is it something easy to remember, like First we'll install LastPass, and then we'll use its password generator to change all of your insecure passwords to something better. Here's how to set it up:
It seems difficult, and you won't be able to remember these passwords off the top of your head, but you'll be much more secure (after all, the most secure password is one you can't remember). When you need to type in passwords on your smartphone, you can either view your passwords in your LastPass vault on your computer (by clicking the LastPass button), from the LastPass mobile site, or by using the LastPass mobile app that requires a cheap subscription to use. Further Reading: Our Beginner's Guide to LastPass, Our Intermediate Guide to Mastering Passwords with LastPass, Why Strong Passwords Aren't Enough, and Why You Should Turn On Two-Factor Authentication Right Now Keep All Your Notes in One Place with a Cross-Platform Note TakerTime Required: 30 Minutes (more if you're importing notes) How It Works: If you're the kind of person that has Post-It notes all over your monitor, crumpled up pieces of paper in all your pockets, and endless reminders in a hundred different apps, it's time to consolidate everything into one, cross-platform note-taker. Evernote is the most popular, and with pretty good reason: it can store anything you imagine in one central place, digitize your physical notes, manage to-do lists, and you can search for nearly anything with just a few taps. Nearly every person we interview about productivity names it as the number one app they couldn't live without. And luckily, it's very easy to get started with it.
This is just a very basic setup. Unlike some of the other tools in this article, Evernote is more about using it than setting it up and forgetting it. Once you've got a few notes in there, though, you can use it to house just about anything. Jot down text notes, save pictures and diagrams, or even save audio notes straight from your phone. The more you use it to store and organize your stuff, the more it'll help in your daily productivity. Learning how to use the search feature will be a big boon, too, especially if your notebooks and tags are well organized. Check out some of the other clever Evernote uses in our Further Reading below for more ideas. Further Reading: What's All the Fuss About Evernote?, Expand Your Brain with Evernote, Clever Uses for Evernote, and The Complete Guide to Going Paperless Access Your Important Files Everywhere with Cloud StorageTime Required: 30 Minutes How It Works: If you're tired of emailing yourself files, you need to start using a cloud storage service. Cloud storage fixes the problem of multiple computers, which most of us deal with these days. Maybe you have a desktop and a laptop, or a computer at home and at at work. If you're tired of emailing yourself files, it's time to start using a cloud storage service like Dropbox. Once you set it up, you'll forget it's even there and all your important files will appear on all of your computers. You'll even be able to grab them from the web if you're on a computer that isn't yours! Here's how to set it up.
It's really that simple to use. Just start using your Dropbox folder as your main documents archive and everything will be synced to your other machines. You can do a ton more with it, too, like see old versions of your documents and share files with your friends. Just right-click on a file in your Dropbox and go to the Dropbox menu for those options. If you start running out of space in your Dropbox, check out our guide to getting more free space on Dropbox to add more. Further Reading: Our Top 10 Clever Uses for Dropbox, The Cheapskate's Guide to Getting Free Dropbox Space, Get 8GB+ of Extra Dropbox Space for Free with Google AdWords, and Supercharge Your Dropbox with Wappwolf Automate Your Budget With Mint |
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The Case Of The Made-Up BioWare Interview
December 18th, 2012Top StoryThe Case Of The Made-Up BioWare InterviewBy Jason Schreier
But last week, we saw something rather uncommon even for the Internet's standards: an interview with BioWare that was made up entirely. And we've talked to the person behind it, who tells us that he expected to be caught. On December 5, a website called GamerSyndrome published an interview that they said was with BioWare. Although there was no name attributed to the BioWare representative, none of the answers seemed strange or out of the ordinary. In other words, it seemed legit. A week later, as sometimes happens with these things, the interview started to make its way around the gaming press. One particularly newsworthy piece of information—that the new Mass Effect wouldn't be out until 2014 or 2015—spread to a bunch of major websites: IGN, Eurogamer, GameSpot, and yes, even Kotaku. Then, something rather unusual happened. BioWare's Mike Gamble tweeted that the whole thing was a lie. When I followed up with BioWare, they echoed Gamble's tweet: "We were working with that outlet on an interview, but at no time did anyone from EA or BioWare provide any answers to questions from GamerSyndrome," a BioWare rep told me in an e-mail. Strange and stranger. I reached out to GamerSyndrome's managing editor for comment, but he wouldn't say much more than what he had written on his website:
Over the past few days, I've been in touch with the writer of the interview, a 25-year-old college student who agreed to speak with me under condition of anonymity. Although you can find his name on the byline of his interview, the writer would only speak to me if I agreed not to use it. At first he said that he had been conned by someone claiming to have been from BioWare. He said that the conman had made up answers to all of his questions. He said there were e-mails on his GamerSyndrome account that could prove this, but he couldn't get to them, because he was no longer with GamerSyndrome. For the past few days I've been trying to piece together and verify that story. Until today, when he sent me another e-mail. "Look, it's not fair that I do this to you or to anyone," he said. "What I've told you isn't correct. Here's the actual truth. "The entire article was fake, I didn't talk to anyone for it. No one had ever hired me to write for a gaming website before, so I was trying so hard to impress them. I wanted them to see the interview and be impressed by what I wrote. When BioWare didn't respond with the answers to my questions I decided to finish the post myself. I took quotes from past BioWare interviews and inserted them into my post, as well as quotes from The Art of Mass Effect and The Final Hours of Mass Effect 3. I didn't expect the article to go anywhere so I thought nothing of it. However, I'm sorry for the article. There's nothing right with what I did and I apologize to anyone who was misled by this article." So why? What drives someone to make up an entire interview like that? What's the logic behind it? "I had been talking the interview up among the writers on GamerSyndrome and they all seemed so impressed with the fact that I could get an interview with [BioWare]," the writer told me. "Plus the administrator of GamerSyndrome seemed super impressed by it [so] I felt I needed to get the article up. I had been promising the article for a few months and BioWare had yet to respond to the email containing our questions. I felt that I had to get the article up, otherwise no one would think it was something." I asked him if he thought he'd be found out. "Truthfully, yes I did think I would get caught," he said. "I didn't do it with the intent of deceiving people or spreading around lies. I only did it because I wanted to get the article finished and move on from it." He wanted to be a games reporter. He just wanted to get the big scoop, impress his friends and peers at GamerSyndrome and elsewhere. But now he thinks he's sabotaged his dream. "I don't plan on ever writing for a website again because of this situation," he said. "It was not fair for me to do this and all I can do now is say I'm sorry."  |
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Ladies: Exercise Is More Important Than Your Hair
December 18th, 2012Top StoryLadies: Exercise Is More Important Than Your HairBy Hamilton Nolan
The shocking findings of the new real survey, out of Wake Forest University: "40 per cent admitted to avoiding exercise because they didn't want to ruin their hair-dos." That's almost half! Most of the women got only half the recommended amount of weekly exercise, and a quarter didn't exercise at all. I for one am shocked, not to mention appalled. Before I totally blow this thing women do out of the water with knowledge bombs, let's note the ways in which this is a tricky area for fitness and sex analysts: 1. The survey involved only women. High sexism/ misogyny potential. Nevertheless, this issue is too important too ignore. It calls, indeed, for some real talk. So where more intellectually timid and/ or wiser (white, male) pundits would bow out of this discussion, citing "a thing" that they "forgot" they have to do, I shall forge ahead. Now. Here is the problem with the common attitude among ladies that they must not mess up their hair by exercising: your hair is less important than your body, when it comes to "looking good." If you object that "looking good" is a purely subjective measure that cannot be quantified at all across cultures or even across individuals, I will say yes, you are correct. But everyone is, deep down, secretly, interested in whether someone else thinks they look good, and I am someone else, so let's proceed. If you object that you may care if someone thinks you look good but not if I think you look good, I will say, "Do you see anyone else here? No, it's just us for now, sorry." If you object that this issue is "not just about looking good," I will say that you are lying. If it is not about looking good then hey, fuck your hair, start exercising—at least exercise is good for your health. In order to determine whether great hair or a great body is more important to looking good, simply try the following thought experiment: Imagine one woman who is bald, with a great body, and another woman who has great hair, and no body. Who is more likely to get a date, or be able to accomplish simple physical tasks requiring at least a basic sort of locomotion? The answer is clear. (The same answer applies for men, by the way.) The good news is that, here in "the real world," the choice need not always be so drastic. Ladies, you can exercise, have a great body, and men (I do not propose to speak for lesbians, unless the lesbian community would like for me to speak for them, in which case I have many interesting theories) probably won't even notice your hair, even if it is busted, because they are focused on your body. Or you can neglect exercise, spend a lot of time and money and effort on your hair to make it look great, and men still will not pay attention to your hair, because I just don't think we really care that much about it, one way or the other. The choice is clear. Yes, I understand that hair care for black women is often an expensive and time-consuming proposition, and that its inherent cost and effort make the protection of a hair do a very seductive priority. I am simply proposing here that, if you are the type of person given to seeing hair care and exercise as an either/ or proposition in which one or the other must be chosen, exercise is clearly the proper choice. Of course, a woman might very well say, "Who the hell are you and why the fuck should I care about your opinion, since you appear to be just some random asshole spouting your opinions on the internet, and I'm not sleeping with you or trying to sleep with you or trying to 'attract' you in any way whatsoever?" Well, that last part's not what I heard, but otherwise, that is a justified response. Sure. Fine. That makes sense. You can convince your friends of that. You may even be able to convince yourself. But you will never be able to convince me that hair care should be prioritized over exercise, because I have too much love for womankind in my soul to allow such a myth to flourish. Yes, perhaps I love too much, as did Jesus (and look what happened to him). But I must assert that there is a very strong chance that some of you, ladies, are using your hair as an excuse not to exercise. And in the hardcore heart, there is no room for excuses. (All the room is taken up by love.) So jump up, run out, and sweat until your hair looks like a god damn mess. It is the right thing you do. If you need me, I will be on the couch. My hair is really short. I'm a man, so it really doesn't matter. [Photo: AP]  |
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