Friday, September 6, 2013 at 08:42AM Annoyed when you are typing a document and accidentally the palm of your hand brushes the touchpad, changing the position of the cursor in your document or accidentally clicking on an option. TouchFreeze is simple utility for Windows to solve this problem. It automatically disables touchpad while you are typing text.
Download latest Windows binaries from downloads section.
Wednesday, August 28, 2013 at 09:46AM 
We all know that feeling: You've found an interesting article online, only to discover it wants you to click through 10 pages of a slideshow just to read the darn thing. Here are a few tricks to banishing multi-page articles forever.
Not every site will work with every one of these tips, but with all of them in your arsenal, you should be able to turn multi-page articles into single-page articles on just about any site you come across. Here's what you need to do.
If the site you're reading offers printer-friendly versions of its articles, you're in luck. Just click on the "Print" or "Printer-Friendly" button and you'll get all of the article's pages in one window, no more clicking required. Some sites may also try to print the article when you click that button, but you can just cancel out of the Print window and read the article in its printer-friendly form.
If you don't want to manually hunt for the printer-friendly or "View All" button on a web page, Page One for Chrome and Safari does the work for you. It supports a number of sites, including The Atlantic, The New York Times, Wired, and many more. It only works if the page already has a printer-friendly or "View All" option available, but it means you don't have to click on those buttons to open it—the extension does all the work for you.
Firefox users also have an extension that can help with multi-page articles, and it's called Re-Pagination. Once installed, you can just click the "Next" button on any multi-page article and choose Re-Pagination > Load All to automatically load the other pages of the articles below the current one. It's not quite as smooth as Page One for Chrome, but it also has the potential to work on more sites, since it just detects the next page and loads it.
Lastly, you can send any article to a service like Evernote Clearly, iReader (for Chrome and Firefox), or Readability. These services aim to make the web more readable by stripping ads, formatting, and other junk off a web page for an almost ebook-like view. In most cases, they can detect multi-page articles and import the entire thing, too, so with the click of a button you'll have a full, super-readable version of the article all on one page.
Monday, July 1, 2013 at 10:37AM 
“If you want to avoid having your identity stolen, use long passwords that contain digits, punctuation and no recognizable words. Make up a different password for every Web site. And change all of your passwords every 30 days.”
Have these security pundits ever listened to themselves?
That advice is clearly unfollowable. I currently have account names and passwords for 87 Web sites (banks, airlines, blogs, shopping, e-mail, Facebook, Twitter). How is anyone — even a security professional — supposed to memorize 87 long, complex password strings, let alone remember which goes with which Web site?
So most people use the same password over and over again, and live with the guilt.
There are solutions. Most Mac and Windows Web browsers now offer to memorize passwords for you. But that feature doesn’t work on all Web sites, and is generally of little help when you pick up your phone or tablet. At that point, the only person you’ve locked out of all your online accounts is you.
The only decent solution is to install a dedicated password memorization program (like Roboform, KeePass, LastPass, 1Password, and so on). Last week, one of the best was just improved: Dashlane, now at 2.0. It’s attractive, effective, loaded with timesaving features and available for Mac, Windows, iPhone and Android — and it’s free.
Installation is quick. Dashlane works in Safari, Chrome, Internet Explorer and Firefox. It can import existing password “vaults” from rival programs.
Dashlane has two primary features. First, yes, it’s a password memorizer. Every time you type your account name and password into a Web page and press enter, Dashlane pops up, offering to memorize that information and fill it in the next time.
In fact, it also offers to log you in — not just to enter your password, but also to click “log in” for you. In effect, Dashlane has just removed the login blockade entirely. When you go to Facebook, Twitter or Gmail, you just click your bookmark, smile at the briefest flash of the login screen and arrive at the site.
Since Dashlane is now storing and auto-entering your passwords, you’re now free to follow the security experts’ advice. You can make up long, unguessable passwords — a different one for every Web site, since you don’t have to remember any of them. In fact, each time you sign up for a new account, Dashlane offers to make up such a password for you, and then, of course, to memorize it.
Dashlane’s second huge feature is even more amazing. It can also fill in other kinds of Web site forms: your name/address/phone number, and even your credit card information.
When you’re buying something online, and you click into the credit card number box, Dashlane displays pictures of your credit cards: Visa, MasterCard, American Express or whatever — even PayPal.
When you click the one you want to use, Dashlane instantly fills in the long card number, your name, the expiration date, even that accursed security code, in the right boxes. Every time you order something online, you save between 30 seconds and five minutes, depending on whether you have your card information memorized or have to go burrow through your wallet.
When you make a purchase, Dashlane even offers to store all the details in a digital receipt that you can call up later, along with a screenshot of the Web site where you shopped. This feature makes online shopping so frictionless, every dot-com retailer on earth ought to be promoting Dashlane as if its profits depended on it.
In fact, Dashlane can fill in all kinds of forms automatically: phone numbers, job titles, tax numbers and so on. If you’ve ever recorded multiple answers — you have two different Twitter accounts, say — two tidy buttons appear beneath the name box, bearing the account names. Click the one you want.
Unlike some rival programs, Dashlane doesn’t require you to associate one set of personal information to each “profile.” If you have three addresses, for example, you’re always offered those three when filling in a form. You don’t have to create three personalities’ worth of personal information.
So far, Dashlane probably seems designed for convenience, and that’s true. Behind the scenes, of course, its ultimate goal is security.
No system is foolproof. But Dashlane notes that it doesn’t ever see your passwords or your credit card information. They’re all stored on your own computer, encoded by the AES-256 encryption method, an open-source standard approved by the National Security Agency. Your entire Dashlane universe is protected by a master password. It’s intended to prevent a laptop thief from heading online with your missing computer and going on a shopping spree.
In version 2.0, furthermore, you have the option of using two-factor authentication — fancy lingo for an extra layer of security. To unlock Dashlane, you have to enter your master password as well as a code that Dashlane texts to your phone. It’s a pain, yes, but it effectively ruins the day of any ne’er-do-well who was hoping to guess or steal your master password.
Version 2.0 also introduces a convenient security dashboard, which identifies reused and weak passwords. It also eliminates the baffling points system of 1.0, which rewarded you for logging into Web sites. Thank goodness. There are iPhone and Android phone versions of Dashlane — also free and also fantastic.
The other big change in Dashlane 2.0 isn’t quite so joyous. True, Dashlane can wirelessly synchronize all your passwords between your computer and phone, so that the phone, too, automatically enters them as you surf. But in 2.0, that feature now costs $20 a year. (It used to be free, and still is if you used earlier versions of Dashlane. The company does urge the earlier Dashlane fan to make a one-time contribution — $40 seems to be its favorite suggestion.)
An annual fee? Really? That seems a steep charge by a company that, until now, seemed remarkably customer-friendly. Alas, that seems to be the model these days. Dashlane’s archrival LastPass is also free for Mac and Windows computers, and also stores your credit card and other information. But to use LastPass on a phone, you have to pay $12 a year.
Still, Dashlane is much better looking, better designed and easier to use. To fill in credit card information, for example, LastPass requires you to choose a “Choose Profile and Credit Card” command from a menu. Dashlane saves you one step and six pounds of terminology.
It’s not perfect. Each time Dashlane stores a password for you, it also nudges you to put it into a category (e-mail or social media, for instance) and associate it with one of your e-mail addresses. The company says that all of that paperwork is only a convenience — you can click right past it — but it’s still a befuddlement every time.
Now and then, I found a Web site that Dashlane couldn’t auto-log into, too.
And Dashlane doesn’t work in the built-in browser on the iPhone. (No password keeper can, Dashlane says, thanks to Apple’s rigid programming rules.) Instead, it offers its own little iPhone browser. (The Dashlane app for Android also has its own built-in browser now.) It’s fast, it’s almost exactly like Safari and it auto-fills all the Dashlane-ish stuff, but it’s more trouble to find and open.
Still, complaining more than briefly about Dashlane’s drawbacks is like grumbling about the taxes when you win the lottery. It saves you infinite time and hassle, it’s (mostly) free, and it belongs on your computer and phone this very day.
Wednesday, June 19, 2013 at 09:42AM 
Android doesn’t have an iTunes-like desktop program, so the process of syncing your data may not be as obvious as it is with an iPhone. However, you don’t need a desktop syncing app — even iPhone users are leaving iTunes behind.
While you can move files back and forth with a USB cable or wireless network connection, the ideal way to keep data in sync between your devices is by relying on online services that do the work for you.
If you do want to transfer files the old-fashioned way, you can copy files directly to your Android device. This is ideal if you want to copy music, videos, or other media files to your Android phone or tablet. After copying the files over, they should be automatically appear in your Android media player app. You can also use a file manager app to view them.
There are third-party syncing apps that try to replicate that iTunes experience with an Android phone, but you don’t need them.
Want all your browser bookmarks, open tabs, history settings, and other data to follow you between your phone and computer? Just enable the sync option in your web browser, install the appropriate browser on your Android phone, and activate the sync option there, too.
Users of Internet Explorer or Safari don’t have an official syncing solution. There are unofficial sync apps available, but we haven’t tested them.
You could connect a USB cable and copy all your music files to your phone, but that won’t be ideal if you have too much music to fit on your phone. Instead, try using Google Music Manager, which will upload a copy of your music files to Google’s servers for free. You can then use Google’s Play Music app on your phone to listen to your entire music collection if you have an Internet connection, or to cache music on your device to make it accessible offline.
You may also want to try using a third-party music apps, instead. Read more about ways to get music on your Android without iTunes here.
In the old days, people synchronized their palm pilots and old smartphones with their computers to keep their contacts, calendar events, and other data in sync between their PC and their handheld device. This isn’t the way things are done anymore — in fact, you would have trouble finding a software solution that let you sync your data in this way.
Instead, data is synced by relying on online (“cloud”) services, and Android does this by default. Your Android’s contacts and calendar events are automatically synchronized with Gmail’s Contacts and Google Calendar, where you can access them from a web browser by logging in with the same Google account. Any changes you make to the Contacts or Calendar from your browser will replicate themselves on your phone.
Instead of worrying about synchronizing data back and forth, look for services that have solid Android apps and useful websites or desktop apps and use them to keep your data in sync across your devices. For example, it’s much easier to use the popular Evernote (or another note-taking app, such as Google’s own Google Keep) to keep your notes in sync across your devices than it is to take text notes on your Android and copy them back and forth using a USB connection.
Assuming you use the same services on your PC and your phone, keeping their data in sync should be a snap. This part should happen automatically.
How to Share Data and Files Between Your Android Phone and PC
Backup, Cellphones, Google, Utilities, Wireless Monday, June 3, 2013 at 10:23AM Not every scanner is a great one if you're thinking about going paperless. You need a good one that'll handle all the documents, receipts, and oddly-shaped papers you need to digitize, and preferably one with great software support to help you keep all that stuff organized. Here's a look at five of the best, based on your nominations.
Earlier this week, we asked you which document scanners you thought were the best for the job. Not just any old scanner, or multi-function scanner/printer/copier—specifically which document scanners were best for helping you empty that filing cabinet and go paperless. We have a favorite of our own, but we've shown you how to go paperless with any scanner, and even cleared up some of your questions after the fact. After tallying up your nominations, here's a look at the top five.
The poll is closed and the votes are counted! To see which of these top five took the crown as the Lifehacker favorite, head over to our hive five followup post to see and discuss the winner!
List Price: $495.00
The ScanSnap S1500 is technically no longer available, having been replaced by the newer ScanSnap iX500, but those of you who own them and nominated them noted that both models are exceptional at quickly scanning documents of different sizes and shapes, and even converting some text documents into searchable PDFs. While the S1500 was Windows only, the iX500 extends support to Mac users who want to organize their lives too. The S1500 sported 20ppm scanning, and the iX500 brought that up to 25, and both models have a document feeder that makes scanning multi-page documents as easy as loading the tray—no feeding each page one after the other. The iX500 also supports scanning to iOS and Android devices, can make PDFs with one button, and more. It'll set you back $500 retail ($430 at Amazon).
The Doxie Go is a great scanner—so much so that our own Adam Dachis used it to go paperless in two days, and showed you how you can do it too. It's a tiny thing, portable enough to fit into a bag and go with you almost anywhere, is powered via USB, and great for scanning everything from photographs to multi-page documents to tiny receipts on thermal paper. Best of all, the Doxie comes with software that makes the most of its features and helps you organize the documents you scan with it. If you scan text, the companion app does OCR so you can search the text in those documents, and if you prefer to use another platform like Dropbox or Evernote to organize your files, it syncs with those services as well. Even if you don't use another web service for your documents, the Doxie's software can sync with all of your (iOS) mobile devices and computers on its own. The Doxie Go will set you back $199 ($187 at Amazon), but the other Doxie models are a bit cheaper.
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If you're looking for a more affordable ScanSnap document scanner than the previously mentioned iX500, the S1300i brings a smaller, space-saving form factor to your desk without sacrificing much of the power that makes the ScanSnap line a great one for digitizing documents. It does away with the large body in exchange for a smaller, more streamlined model like the Doxie Go or the NeatReceipts, but still includes a fold-out document tray for multiple pages and papers of odd sizes. You can keep the tray closed and feed photos or other documents yourself though, and the fact that it's tiny and USB-powered makes it portable enough to take with you if you travel. It even supports multi-sided documents, and it comes with the ScanSnap software for Windows and OS X to make getting your documents in a format you can use easy. The ScanSnap software can also sync with and scan to other web services, including Evernote, Dropbox, and Google Drive, if you prefer to use one of those services to organize your newly digitized documents. The S1300i will set you back $300 retail ($260 at Amazon).
Despite its appearances on infomercials and late night television, the Neat Scanner is actually a capable document scanner, and those of you who nominated it praised it for being speedy, portable, and able to handle documents of all sizes easily, from business cards to full-sized sheets of paper. The Neat comes in two varieties, the NeatDesk (shown here) and the NeatReceipts, a smaller, USB-powered version similar in size and shape to the Doxie Go. Both models include supporting software to make scanning and organizing your documents easy, and that also sync with the Neat mobile app for iOS and Android. Neat's angle is to get you hooked with the device, and then sell you additional services, like its Neat Cloud service, which is essentially a Dropbox clone with a monthly fee, or its NeatVerify service that puts a human eye on every document you scan to make sure it's been processed correctly. On its own though, the Neat scanner and software package make a powerful enough combination to keep your paper clutter to a minimum. The NeatDesk will set you back $400 ($380 at Amazon), and the NeatReceipts $179 ($140 at Amazon). Both models come with the desktop software.
Several of you said that your smartphone's camera and an accompanying organizational app would work just fine for you. It's free, not including the cost of an app you may use, and it only requires the equipment you already own. This is true, but this is a perfect case of getting what you pay for: it may be free and easy, but it's slow, especially compared to the other contenders in the top five, and scanning large, multi-page documents you may want to digitize will undoubtedly be an agonizing process with a smartphone's camera. If you want the document you photograph to be legible and useful, or even searchable once you save it and organize it, good luck. Still, enough of you nominated it that it's worth mentioning as an option. Photo by Mauricio Lima.
Backup, Networking, PDF, Storage, Utilities 