iGeek to rescue the IT

While a roaring fire in the fireplace is a sight to behold all by itself, you can add some magical flair to the whole affair with these colorful, simple to make pine cones.

The secret to changing a pine cone tossed into your fire from a basic yellow flame into more dazzling colors like blue, purple, green, red, and white is saturating the pine cone with a solution that contains a color-providing chemical.

You mix the powder form of the chemical into a bowl or bucket of warm water and then soak the pine cones in it. After they’ve had a good soak, you pull them out to dry and when the water evaporates you’re left with a pine cone soaked with the chemical. Want pine cones that flare up brilliant white? Make your solution with Epsom salts—the white flame comes from the magnesium in the salts. Many of the chemicals you’ll need are available at your local pharmacy although for some of them you’ll need to visit a specialty store like a hobby shop or chemistry supply store.

A quick and dirty way to make the pine cones, and the one pictured above, is to use boric acid powder—available in the laundry aisle. You won’t get as strong of coloration, but you’ll get a rainbow of colors thanks to the variety of chemicals in boric acid. Check out the full guide at the link below for additional information and tips.

Have your own “better living through chemistry” DIY projects? Let’s hear about it in the comments.

Windows: If you’re on the hunt for which folder and files are chewing up the most hard drive space, Disktective is a free and portable app that makes short work of it.

Disktective scans any drive or folder you point it at and returns a list of the folder and files sizes container therein and a pie chart displaying the portion of the disk or folder in use by the folder or files in question. Once you scan you can drill down through any sub-folders and the chart will automatically update to reflect the ratio in the new folder.

If you want to visualize your data as a radial map, check out previously reviewed OverDisk, and definitely check out our guide to managing your diskspace with the popular WinDirStat and JDiskReport. Diskective is free, portable, and Windows only.

With busy lives, it’s easy to let chores around the house slip through the cracks. Corral the details into this customized planner to help you track everything from daily chores to when you need to change the furnace filter.

Organization guru Donna Young created dozens of planner template pages in two sizes that let you create a household planner system that works for you. All the templates are free to download as PDF files that can be opened with any standard PDF reader.

Planner categories are broken down by calendar style and use. For instance, you might want to grab a two-page block calendar to keep track of monthly chores, and then skip over to the Kitchen category to snag a shopping list or weekly menu. Also be sure to check out the yearly housework reminder sheet, project planning pages, and the chore chart that’s good for adults or kids (why let them off the hook?).

Once you decide what size you want your planner to be—full- or half-size— just print them out and pop them in a binder. You can use the forms just as they are, or convert them to DOC format for further editing. Most of the templates are blank so you’ll need to fill in the blanks yourself. If you need some ideas for what needs to get done around the house on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis, we’ve got you covered.

If you’re a long-time user of photo site Flickr looking to move your files elsewhere, it’s not a one-click export. Blogger John Saddington explains his process for moving roughly 21,000 pictures and videos from Flickr to Picasa Web Albums.

Lured away from Flickr by what he describes as stagnant interface development and the convenience of Picasa for his main audience—his mother—Saddington decided to export more than 20,000 photos, or about 60 GB, and an unlucky 666 videos into Picasa Web Albums—which has recently offered price cuts and Eye-Fi give-aways to lure in folks just like Saddington.

Saddington’s a Mac guy, so he went with Photo Grabbr for his Flickr download tool. For Windows and Linux users, Gina has recommended FlickrEdit, among other solutions, in her roundup of free online account backup tools. Regardless of the tools, Saddington details many of the steps you should go through to ensure your photos are accessible from any backup tool, and offers a clever way of getting to your online video downloads using Flickr’s video management tool.

Have you made the switch from Flickr to Picasa, vice-versa, or between any two online photo services? What caused your biggest headaches, and how did you solve them? Tell us all about it, and share your helpful tips, in the comments.

Windows: You can do a lot more with the free cross-platform utility Dropbox than sync files. In fact, with the free command line tool Akira, you can administer, and grab non-Dropbox files from, any computer linked to your Dropbox account.

Akira is a bit of a geek tool that requires two Windows computers—one running a server process (Latte) and another issuing commands through a command line client (Akira). That’s not all that new, but the Akira tool sets up the connection through a single, stand-alone folder inside you Dropbox folder, and doesn’t require installation. With Akira’s text commands, you can do a lot of really neat stuff. You can list, navigate to, and grab files from anywhere on the remote computer, grab a screenshot of what’s going on and save it in your Dropbox folder, and, perhaps most helpfully, start and kill remote processes and run applications, or even launch a web site in the default browser.

Akira’s Readme offers a number of ways to set up the Latte/Akira combo, with access to other people’s computers through Dropbox folder sharing, and jumping onto your remotely-controlled computer from anywhere with the previously mentioned app DropboxPortable.

I tested out the Akira/Latte remote control between Windows 7 systems linked to the same Dropbox account, and while there was a notable bit of lag—something to be expected when waiting for a file change to be noticed and synced—it worked as advertised. You’d likely want to set up Latte as an auto-starting, Administer-level process on a system you always keep on, and make sure you’ve got a really good password on that Dropbox account if you were interested in using this. As a convenient remote access trick for those not quite up on setting up a virtual private network with Hamachi or remote control with VNC, however, Akira might just be the ticket.

Akira is a free, no-install-needed application for Windows systems with a Dropbox account. Tell us how Akira could be useful for your own systems, and offer up usage advice, in the comments.

If you’re not planning on getting into 3D gaming on your G1 or MyTouch 3G, and you’ve rooted your phone with the CyanogenMod ROM, you can get more memory performance from your Android handset with one hacker’s custom firmware.

The Absolutely Android blog posted a host of firmware images that can be quickly flashed onto a phone running nearly any recent version of the CyanogenMod firmware. Not sure which version you’re running? Hit the menu key on your home screen, head to Settings, scroll down to About phone, then scroll down to the “Mod version” section and note the number there, down to the last decimal point. You’ll then need to download the corresponding image from the blog, run a single terminal command, and then reboot.

You’ll need a decent terminal emulator and root access to flash the image onto your phone; the post offers up a download-able, installable APK file of the Better Terminal Emulator Magic, but you can just as easily download it from the Market—or just use the Terminal Emulator included with the Cyanogen ROM, or a free app like ConnectBot. However you pull off the command, the image will free up 10 MB of RAM, normally dedicated to 3D graphics, and hand it over to the general system.

It’s a fair trade-off for the more business-minded Android user looking for a bit more snappy response from their phone—which we’ve seen, in light amounts, in our own test. Before taking on such a task, of course, be sure to back up your phone firmware.

One of the most persistent myths about Windows is that you need to reinstall the operating system regularly to keep it running at top performance. Let’s take a look at the real problem and how to fix it.

Today we’re talking about the myth that Windows slows down over time, and how to solve the problem. The reality is that Windows doesn’t slow down if you just take care of your PC a little more. Follow these procedures, and you won’t have to wonder if spending hours backing up data, installing from disc, and re-installing your essential applications is really necessary.

What Does Slow Windows Down Over Time?
I’m not going to sit here and tell you that your Windows PC will never slow down—because for many people, they almost always do. What actually slows your PC down are too many poorly written applications that stay resident in memory and waste CPU cycles, having too many badly written low-level applications that hook into Windows, or running more than one antivirus application at a time. And of course, if you’ve run your PC’s hard drive out of space, you can hardly blame Windows for that.

If you aren’t getting the picture, the problem is usually the person behind the keyboard that installed too many junk applications in the first place. More gently put, it’s often that (very well-meaning) person’s gradual easing of their safeguards and cleaning regimens as time goes by.

Stop Installing Junk Applications
Installing software should be thought of like feeding your PC. If you constantly feed your PC garbage apps, it’s going to get sick and won’t be able to run fast anymore. These poorly written applications clutter your drive with unnecessary DLL files, add always-resident Windows services when they don’t need to, bloat up your registry, and add useless icons to your system tray that waste even more memory and CPU cycles. Usually you can get away with using a few terrible applications, but as you continue to install more and more of them, your PC will slow down to a crawl.

Be Smarter About What You Do Install
We feature and recommend a lot of software applications around here, but you should keep in mind that we aren’t trying to tell you to install every single one of them at the same time-just install the applications that you actually need and you’ll generally prevent the dreaded format and reinstall.

Here’s a few tips to help you know what applications you should be careful with:

Apps that function as an Explorer plug-in, because they directly hook into the shell and any problem will make your entire PC slow or in the worst case, crash repeatedly.
Antivirus applications are notorious for slowing your PC down, and you should never, ever, ever use more than one real-time antivirus application at a time. We recommend Microsoft Security Essentials as a free, fast, and awesome antivirus tool.
Anything that says it will “Speed Up Your PC” or “Optimize Your RAM” will most likely slow it down, or best case, do nothing at all. Avoid these like the plague.
Make sure to install official system drivers from the manufacturer website. Drivers have a huge impact on performance, and you want to have stable, updated drivers.
Registry cleaners are a mixed bag, and really aren’t going to speed up your PC in most cases. The biggest problem, however, is that too many of the commercial registry cleaners set themselves to run at startup in the system tray, wasting your memory and CPU cycles.
You should strongly consider the idea of using portable applications wherever possible, since their self-contained nature means they won’t clutter up the rest of your PC with things you don’t need.
Keep Your Computer Clean and Trim
Once you’ve rid yourself of your junk application habit and resolved to only use healthy, useful applications, you’ll want to make sure to keep your PC clean of any remaining clutter that doesn’t need to be there. You can set up a shortcut to manually run CCleaner silently with the push of a button, but your best bet is to set up CCleaner to run automatically on a schedule, so you don’t have to remember to do it.

Since CCleaner is only going to clean up temporary files, you’ll still need a good solution for keeping the rest of your PC clean-and Lifehacker’s own Belvedere can help you automate your self-cleaning PC or automatically clean up your download folder.

With all of this automated file deletion going on, your hard drive is likely to get a bit fragmented. If you’re already running Windows 7 or Vista, automatic defrag comes out of the box and probably shouldn’t be messed with, but Windows XP users will need to use Windows Tasks to setup a schedule and automatically defrag their drives.

Use a Virtual Machine or Sandbox to Test Software
If you still want to test out all of the latest software, including apps that look a bit rough around the edges, your best bet is to use a virtual machine to test out anything before putting it onto your primary operating system. You can install all of your software in an XP or Windows 7 VM just like it was a real PC, and with the latest VMWare player releases, you can even enable Windows Aero in a guest VM. If you are new to the idea and need some more help, you should check out our beginner’s guide to creating virtual machines in VirtualBox, or Windows 7 users can check out our guide to using XP Mode. If you don’t want to go the virtual machine route, Windows XP and Vista users can alternatively use Windows SteadyState to protect their PC and roll back all of the changes on a reboot.

After you conduct a search, you can narrow your search even more by checking off additional services offered by the agencies in Google’s database. They include Online display advertising, Search engine optimization, Traditional advertising (print, TV), Web design, Website analytics, Affiliate programs, New media (mobile & social networks), Creative and design services, Call recording and tracking, Auto-optimization tools and Marketing consultancy.

Google has not yet announced this new beta search.

As 2009 draws to a close, the debate over the implementation of usage-based billing frameworks (so-called “metered billing”) for broadband services is far from over. But while as Stacey has pointed out, some broadband execs believe metered billing is inevitable, existing and proposed implementations contain significant shortcomings. So if metered billing is inevitable, what would be a fair construct? Or is it even possible to be fair?

One of the reasons so many consumers view metered billing negatively is that early attempts to implement it have been somewhat crude. For example, most metered billing incorporates a flat price up to a ceiling (the “cap”) and a per-gigabyte (GB) charge above that level (the “meter”). Criticism of such an approach rightly points to the following deficiencies:

Most non-technical consumers don’t know what a gigabyte is. Head over to the computer section of any Best Buy, for example, and you’ll see hard drive capacities expressed in term of photos, songs or movies. If retailers have figured out how to speak the language of the average consumer, why can’t broadband operators?
Even technical consumers (myself included) have no idea how many gigabytes they consume in a given month. As a result they’re unsure if they’ll be penalized for their usage or not.
Most offerings fail to provide consumers with real-time visibility into monthly usage — which is appalling given the tools available to most wireless users.
Just as electric utilities are trying to encourage energy consumption during non-peak hours, cap-and-meter models treat a byte at 3:00 a.m. as having the same cost as a byte at 7:00 p.m.
Arguably the fairest approach would be one in which the entire bill is variable and in which unit (per-byte) cost declines as usage increases. Fair in that all users pay relative to the quantity of resources they consume but, like any good business relationship, heavier users enjoy volume discounts. This approach might seem too radical for all involved, however; even consumers who save money may look askance.

So assuming the above problems could be ameliorated, and further assuming that the “cap-and-meter” approach is the one that prevails, what exactly is a fair cap?

In 2009 the average U.S. broadband household downloaded 7.27 GB/month, according to market research firm IDC, a figure it expects to grow to 12.5 GB/month by 2013. However, looking at the average is deceiving because the mean is undoubtedly much lower. Using a simple “80/20 rule” (20 percent of the users consume 80 percent of the traffic) results in the top 20 percent of users downloading 29.1 GB/month (growing to 50.3 by 2013) while the lower 80 percent download 1.8 GB/month (growing to 3.1 by 2013). A 90/10 split results in the top 10 percent of users downloading 65.4 GB/month (growing to 113.2 by 2013).

These back-of-the napkin numbers don’t conclusively show exactly what a cap should be but they do suggest that it should high (say at least 30 GB and probably more like 65 GB) and also that it should be indexed to increase annually as average traffic loads increase. Without indexing the cap consumers would encounter the same problem many encounter with the alternative minimum tax.

Yet while capping and metering is not the best approach to usage-based billing, it seems to be the train that’s leaving the station. Broadband service providers have rolled out caps ranging anywhere from 5GB to 250GB; those at the low end would be well advised to push them higher, unless their real goal is to encourage heavy users to churn off their networks.

The growth of data revenues was a huge story for the mobile industry in 2009, and those gains are sure to ramp up over the next few years as connectivity continues to expand beyond phones to new devices like netbooks, e-readers and a host of other consumer electronics. That uptake will increasingly be a double-edged sword for carriers, though, which are already struggling with ways to support the increased traffic driven by Apple’s iPhone and other multimedia-friendly devices.

Which is why AT&T and its competitors are beginning to discuss ways to minimize congestion on the network as they increase revenues from data-hungry consumers. There are lots of ways to attempt that, of course, from the current “unlimited” caps that generate disdain among users — and have largely failed to address bandwidth issues — to the congestion pricing that cable companies are beginning to toy with. But as Stacey points out in the latest report from GigaOM Pro (sub. required), each option has some important pros and cons. Variable-pricing models can be confusing to consumers who (like me) don’t know how much bandwidth they typically use. And while embracing alternative technologies like Wi-Fi can ease traffic on the cell network, it can also cut into the mobile-data revenues that will increasingly become crucial as margins from voice whittle away.

The dramatic surge in mobile data usage will continue to ramp up quickly as Android gains traction and superphones become more commonplace. Among carriers, the rich are getting richer thanks to that uptake, but they’re also beginning to experience the kind of network hiccups that invite users to move to rivals that can handle the traffic. The challenge for operators, then, is to figure out how to deliver — and monetize — data-heavy services to the relatively few users who demand that kind of bandwidth without sacrificing the connectivity required from more mainstream consumers. The carriers that can most effectively solve those issues will have a significant edge as we move from 3G toward 4G.