Evsion Lab

Lifehacker snowing you under with too many daily posts? Turn down the volume and get only the good stuff using either our once-weekly Highlights feed or daily, trimmed-down top stories feed. This week's best posts include:

• Power replacements for built-in Windows utilities
  "Power users need power utilities, and Windows' default system programs barely get the job done."
• A Beginner's Guide to Mind Mapping Meetings
  "Do you have trouble keeping up with meetings because you can't take notes as fast as the speaker talks?"
• Get boring but necessary tasks done online
  "We are all busy, busy people. However, we've all got necessary grown-up tasks that usually end up on the bottom of our to do list because they have something to do with bureaucratic red tape..."
• Chat with AIM, MSN, Yahoo, and other contacts over Google Talk
  "Today I'll show you how to chat with all of your instant messaging buddie—with all the benefits of Gmail and web integration—using Google Talk as a universal chat application."
• Top 10 PDF Tricks
  "Chances are you've already got a free PDF reader installed on your computer, but you can do a lot more with your PDF files than you might think."
• Show Us Your Go Bag
  "...today we're taking a look at the bag full of gadgets and productivity tools you throw over your shoulder as you head out the door, confident that you've got everything you need to get things done."
• Clean out old files with the Windows Janitor script
  "Recover hard drive space and keep your "junk drawer" from getting too cluttered with an automated task that sweeps through that temporary folder and deletes the old stuff you don't need."
• Use your wristwatch as a compass
  "Hold a watch with 12 o'clock at left. Move your arm so the hour hand points at the sun. The spot halfway between the hour hand and the 12 is south."
• Automatically download new TV shows over BitTorrent with ted
  "Freeware application ted (torrent episode downloader) is like Tivo for BitTorrent, providing an easy-to-use interface for setting up season pass downloads for your favorite television shows."
• Find people with Pipl
  "Pipl returned an impressive number of results for my own name, including my personal homepage, press mentions, SEC documents, MySpace page, Amazon wishlist and profile—stuff I didn't realize or forgot was online."
• Copy music from your iPod to your Mac or PC
  "Your computer hard drive crashed and now all your precious music is trapped on that little white iPod of yours. Fear not: you can copy music from an iPod back to a computer, even if Apple won't tell you how."
• Batch process images with FastStone Photo Resizer
  "Image processor FastStone Photo Resizer can edit, correct, crop, rename, and watermark your digital images in batch mode—that is, in big bunches all at once."
• Add a folder to the sidebar with Cmd-T
  "Got a file you need to remember later today? Cmd-T."