A Big List of Sites That Teach You How To Do Stuff With all due respect to Kevin Smith, the web is no longer only for complaining about movies. In fact, there are a large number of very helpful sites that teach you how to do things. These are do-it-yourself sites, but we're not talking about building a deck or baking a cake -- the web is full of more general interest sites that give quality instruction on all sorts of fun and useful projects. Including, sometimes, how to build a deck or bake a cake. In this horribly-titled, but hopefully useful round-up we will specifically focus on such general purpose sites that include some sort of rich media instruction (generally video). We also might throw in a tech-focused site or two, since this is after all, a tech-focused blog. If you know of any instructional sites that are missing from this list, please mention them in the comments below. Note: Household Hacker is a humor site, some of the tutorials have some truth to them, but you probably shouldn't try them. Image credit: docman
Pack for Mac: Our List of the Best Free Mac Apps Finding excellent free software for your Mac is increasingly tough. In our fourth annual Lifehacker Pack for Mac, we're highlighting the best free downloads for better productivity, communication, media management, and more. The Lifehacker Pack is a yearly snapshot of our favorite, must-have applications for each of our favorite platforms. Want to skip to a specific category? Productivity Quicksilver Simply put, Quicksilver makes everything you do on your Mac easier. Download Page Notational Velocity What makes Notational Velocity great is that it has the exact amount of features needed in a note taking app with no fluff. Download Page DashExpander Text expansion is one those pieces of productivity software that most people only associate with power users, but it's incredibly handy for just about everyone. Download Page Wunderlist Download Page Internet/Communication Chrome Everyone has their reasons for loving one browser or another, but on Mac we prefer Chrome over Firefox. Download Page Adium
Motherboards and PC Hardware. Top 100 Network Security Tools My Collection of Funny Emails. Send funny emails to your friends! Reynolds Wrap has lock in taps to hold the roll in place The color on the bread tab indicates how fresh the bread is And those colors are in alphabetical order: b, g, r, w, y. You can divide and store ground meat in a zip loc bag. If you place a wooden spoon over a pot of boiling water, it won't boil over. Marshmallows can cure a soar throat. Stuffing a dryer sheet in your back pocket will repel mosquitoes. You can freeze cupcake batter for later use. You can paint upholstery You can make your own laundry soap. . You can dye plastic buttons. You can run a paper bag through your printer. You can print directly onto fabric. A dry erase marker can be used on most desk tops. You can mail anything that will take a stamp and weighs less than 13ounces without a box? If you break your blender jar you can replace it with a mason jar. Cereal canisters make the perfect trashcan for your car. Medicine cabinets are NOT the safest place for medicine
Top 10 Hardware Boosting Hacks I just did the pogoplug hack this weekend. The LH article is outdated, but the info is available online at ArchLinuxARM.org. I'm not sure rooting a pogoplug is worth the bother now. Rasberry Pi is now available, unless $30, two extra USB ports and Gigabit ethernet is critically important, the RasPi blows the pogoplug out of the water (the additional IO is nice, but the real win is a larger developer community). I did get a pogoplug with the intention of rooting it but realised that its was much more useful to me as it stood. I realize this is article is a few days old, but I just wanted to second this. Now I've just got to figure out what I want to put on it... It's a fun project. I tried running Subsonic, which I used to serve up media from my old computer, but the pogoplug doesn't seem to have enough horsepower for on-the-fly LAME transcoding.
Customized IPC A 610 CIS Training IPC-A-610, Acceptability of Electronics Assemblies, is the most widely used inspection standard in the electronics industry and has earned an international reputation as the source for end-product acceptance criteria for consumer and high reliability printed circuit assemblies. Certification in this course demonstrates your commitment to continuous improvement of product quality and reliability. The IPC-A-610 Operator/Inspector Training & Certification course provides individuals with a portable credential that represents their understanding of IPC-A-610. This course of designed for those associates involved in many facets of the electronics assembly business. This class does NOT include any hand soldering instruction. Please see the "Assembly Courses" for hand-on training. The IPC-A-610, Acceptability of Electronics Assemblies is the most widely used specification published by the IPC for the electronics manufacturing industry. - Be able to reference the IPC-A-610 standard
Sculpting text with regex, grep, sed and awk Theory: Regular languages Many tools for searching and sculpting text rely on a pattern language known as regular expressions. The theory of regular languages underpins regular expressions. (Caveat: Some modern "regular" expression systems can describe irregular languages, which is why the term "regex" is preferred for these systems.) Regular languages are a class of formal language equivalent in power to those recognized by deterministic finite automata (DFAs) and nondeterministic finite automata (NFAs). [See my post on converting regular expressions to NFAs.] In formal language theory, a language is a set of strings. For example, {"foo"} and {"foo", "foobar"} are formal (if small) languages. (Mathematicians don't typically put quotes around a string, preferring to let the fixed-width typewriter font distinguish it as one, but I'm guessing that programmers are more comfortable with the quotes around strings.) In regular language theory, there are two atomic languages: Useful grep flags The +? #!
Interview Questions You Must Ask In many ways, moving ahead in our careers depends on our bosses: the people who can motivate us, advise us, challenge us, or — on the other hand — make our lives miserable. If you've never had a boss who made you miserable, consider yourself lucky. And if you want to wind up lucky in a new job, you need to know something about your would-be boss. That's why you should ask these three questions in your first or second interview to determine whether this is someone you’d want to work with: What words would you use to describe the people who report to you? What you want to hear: A quick answer with positive-sounding words like creative, smart, friendly, or talented. If you had a problem with something I did, how would you tell me? What you want to hear: A thoughtful answer spoken in a soft tone — something like, "I'd ask you to come into my office, explain why it was a problem, and ask why and how it happened. Mistakes happen, and they're often our best lessons for improving our skills.
Download and Install Google Fonts on your Computer Google Fonts are beautiful web fonts that can be used without restrictions. You can download and install Google Fonts on your computer for writing Office documents. Google Fonts is an absolutely awesome collection of web fonts that you may use in your HTML web pages without any restrictions. These fonts not only look more beautiful than the common typefaces like Arial and Verdana but they are more readable as well since the fonts have been designed specifically for the web. Google Fonts are hosted on google.com and all you need to do is include a few lines of CSS (or JavaScript) to embed one or more of these fonts in your web pages. Other than websites, you may also use Google fonts in your Office documents, Photoshop designs or any other computer program. There’s no trick involved here. How to Download Google Fonts? There are two ways to download Google Fonts to your computer. The other recommended approach is selective download. A word of caution though.
IPC-A-600 CIS Training IPC-A-600, Acceptability of Printed Boards, is the most widely used published specification on printed wiring boards. This specification has set the standard for PCB workmanship quality with its comprehensive acceptance criteria for target, acceptance, and nonconforming conditions on bare printed boards. It includes extensive acceptance criteria including full color illustrations and photographs showing all types of printed board surface and internal conditions. PCB manufactuers and assemblers alike rely on this internationally recognized document to improve their understanding of printed board issues as well as to help enhace communication with their suppliers and custombers.It is important so that both user and manufacturer of printed wiring boards may "speak the same language" with respect to PCB specifications. Worker Proficiency students will be evaluated on their mastery of the IPC-A-600 material through end-of-course tests that have both open-book and closed-book components.