Homemade Drain Cleaner Without Toxic Chemicals

Here are a few simple ingredients to clean drains without standard drain cleaners that contain several toxic and harmful chemicals:

Baking soda
vinegar
boiling water

1/4 cup baking soda
1/2 cup vinegar

1. Pour 1 cup of baking soda down the clogged drain.
2. Pour 2 cups of boiling water into the drain. Wait a few minutes.
3. pour another cup baking soda down the drain then add 1 cup of white vinegar and plug the drain immediately.  
4. When the bubbles have passed, pour the remaining boiling water down the drain.

2. Pour the vinegar down the clogged drain.


via:
Homemade drain cleaner [Greenlivingideas.com]
Homemade Drain Cleaner And Declogger Recipe [Food.com]
Homemade Drain Cleaner [About.com]

Mac Software Worth Paying For

Parallels Desktop - run windows applications easily and without having to reboot your computer into bootcamp.  Great for running some obscure Windows programs,  Windows-only DVD burning applications, and Internet Explorer browser testing for website development.  Version 7 allows an automated virtual machine setup for Windows XP after your license key is entered.  Once up and running you can create a snapshot of your virtual machine to completely backup it's state at any time.  This will protect your VM should a virus, malware, or anything else compromise it.  Parallels 5 recevied a 4/5 review from Macworld.
[$66, Amazon | $80 direct]

1Password - This is a must have if you are a web developer, project manager, or if you need a way to manage a plethora of web logins.  With extensions for Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari (Chrome?), it allows you to save many logins under one "master password" and then login to a website such as online banking, email, ebay, etc., with just a few clicks and no need to remember each unique login. This tool can save you an incredible amount of time when juggling many, many website accounts.
[$50, AgileBits]

Screenflow - demonstrate how to do something on your mac with this slick screen capture and editing application.  After recording you can add pan, zoom, and other effects and also record new audio tracks to polish your screencast. Many of the recent mac screen casts on Youtube were created with Screenflow.
[$99, TeleStream]

TextExpander - this text-replacement utility runs in the mac menu bar and allows you to save personal "snippets" of text so you don't have to type them repeatedly.  Since I started using this app in 2008, I almost never have to type my email address, or mailing address unless I'm on someone else's computer.  If you're a web developer, you can save snippets of HTML, CSS, or any other string of text.  Secretaries might find it handy for repetitive typing, such as unique email signatures for different clients.
[$35, Smile Software]

Audio Hijack Pro - this app, like its name, will hijack the audio from any application on your system and allow you to record it to a variety of audio formats.  Some great uses for Audio Hijack are:

- record music from streaming sites such as Grooveshark, Pandora, Slacker, or Last.FM
- record Skype conversations
- record webcasts
- record DVD audio
[$32, Rogue Amoeba]


Transmit - an excellent, intuitive FTP application for mac.  Dual panes make this a much faster and more effective than most other FTP apps for mac.  You can also drag files from the finder to a server to transfer them.  If you're a graphic designer, web developer, or in some other position where you frequently make FTP transfers, Transmit will simplify the process.
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Mouseposé - an indispensable tool for presentations, screencasts, and web conferencing, this app puts a spotlight around your cursor so that an audience can easily follow what you're demonstrating.  It also features appearance changes for mouse clicks so those can also be followed.  Watch a video of Mousepose in action.

Easy Cloud Backup with Dropbox

This week my family's iMac ran into some error messages that essentially made the computer unusable. At this point, we're taking the computer to a local certified Apple tech, because one of more of the RAM memory sticks is probably bad.

We've made no backups of any computer files since the iMac computer was setup at our house in August 2010. Luckily, even though error messages prevented the computer from being usable, I was able to transfer all the family's documents to my computer with Target Disk Mode and a Firewire cable. This also reminds me that I should have setup a separate "troubleshooting" account, which would have allowed me to test whether another account was also having problems loading the Finder.

With the near minor tragedy of loosing all of our family's documents, I remembered that I had not made a backup of my own documents in a few months. In comes Dropbox. The DMG installation file is 21.6MB as of version 1.0.28. The installation and setup is dead simple and fast. You get 2GB of storage with a free account and 250MB of extra space for each person you invite that signs-up for Dropbox.



Dropbox uses a folder on your computer to sync your files with their server. Any time you copy files or folders to your Dropbox folder, they are automatically backed-up to the Dropbox server. Your online Dropbox account gives you access to all these files from any computer or mobile device with web access.

While finishing my taxes, I copied my business report spreadsheet as well as my State and Federal tax returns to my Dropbox folder and they are now backed-up in case anything happens to my computer, and in case I don't make a regular backup to my external hard drive.

Why use Dropbox:

• Backup to an off-site location protects your files from fires, floods, and other acts of nature.
  
• Get peace of mind that the important document or project you are working on is backed-up.
• No log-in required for backups once Dropbox is installed on your computer
• Access your stored files from any internet connected computer or mobile device.

Rounded Corners with CSS

CSS Round Corners - Ben Ogle's blog. Yeah!
Good examples, shows how to make a color section for the heading, and shows how to do a thin border on the outside of the rounded corner.

Rounded Corner Generator - CSS Portal
This code is a little bit longer, because the classes are named "rnd_b1" instead of "b1, b2"

It will be much better once Internet Explorer supports the border-radius property in CSS3 as Firefox and Safari do.

How to fix padding/space below images in Internet Explorer

Unwanted Padding in IE Image Rendering in div Tag - Rick Strahl's Web Log
This article by Rick Strahl describes the problem of Internet Explorer adding extra spacing below images and he offers a few solutions to fix the problem.

The fixes:

a) If the image and closing DIV tag are kept on the same line, the spacing will be fixed.
<div><img src="http://www.blogger.com/image.jpg"></div>

b) <img src="http://www.blogger.com/image.jpg" style="display: block;">
Tested this on 5/6/10 and it worked!

IE space below image? - Stack Overflow
describes using this property to fix IE's automatic buffer around images:
img {margin-bottom: 0;}
Note: the margin-bottom property defined in the stylesheet did not fix the IE problem I was seeing of extra space below an image inside of a DIV.
Another programmer recommends using the * to declare all elements with margin: 0; padding: 0; at the top of the stylesheet.

Another commenter wrote about why IE has this problem in the first place.
The theory goes that, since divs are containers for mixed content, meaning both textual content and other markup content, IE considers your line return as "significant content" when in reality it is merely an indentation standard that helps markup readability.

Get a Hardware Summary for Drivers Before Reinstalling Windows

Both of these applications, Belarc Advisor and System Information for Windows have been mentioned on Lifehacker.

These programs create a list of all the hardware on a machine and also list the windows hotfixes and software installed. Software license numbers can even be listed with at least one of the programs.

Gina Trampani featured Belarc Advisor in her article about formatting a hard drive and installing Windows XP from scratch.

System Information for Windows was featured here: Download of the Day: System Information (Windows) - Data Recovery - Lifehacker

And Speccy is still in Beta, but looks very promising and received a mention from Lifehacker

Text Replacement Applications

Finding the best free text replacement applications

Texter (made by the Lifehacker crew)
PhraseExpress

Use Texter to Supercharge Your Repetitive Typing - Texter - Lifehacker

PhraseExpress Text Replacement App Updates, Better than Ever - Windows - Lifehacker

Project Management Tools

Need a Basecamp Alternative? | PM-Sherpa
* Alternatives organized by category and features

Project2Manage - Tour
$4/month for 12 projects
$10/month for 25 projects

Online project collaboration, management software: Zoho Projects

Clocking IT
-- Hosted and Free