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A single TwitPic of a napping transit ticket collector in Toronto, Canada has jump-started a major controversy that has made Toronto’s transit agency, the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC), the target of citizen and media anger.

First, a little background: Back in November 2009, the TTC announced that they would be raising fares by a quarter starting on January 3rd, along with a price hike for Toronto Metropasses. This move has been quite unpopular with Toronto’s citizens, especially as many riders have been frustrated with the agency’s perceived bloat and bad customer service.

On Friday, January 21st, Twitter user @OGLE_Toronto snapped a photo of a sleeping TTC ticket collector and posted it on TwitPic and his Twitter account. The result has been a media firestorm, bringing the TTC back into the line of fire. The comments under the TwitPic, which now has over 18,000 views, reflect that.

Here are some sample comments:

“Sorry, but if TTC can raise fares and have employees works like this, chat on the cell while driving and give attitude, to riders, then TC deserves to be made fun of. Time for an overhaul. The Transit union WILL fall like Enron!”

“Sure, we’ve all gotten sleepy at work. But I pay this guy’s salary as a regular TTC rider, so I have the right to ridicule him for it.”

“Give the guy a break. Haven’t you ever made a mistake or are you perfect?”

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The Response of the Agency and its Union

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In just two days, a single TwitPic has rekindled consumer anger over the fare hikes. The head of the TCC, Adam Giambrone, has created a “blue-ribbon task force” to propose ways to improve the commission’s customer service.

At the same time, the TTC workers’ union has lashed out at the person who took the picture, stating that someone should have checked on his health instead of ridiculing him. Some TTC workers have medical conditions such as diabetes, making them more susceptible to life-threatening events such as heart attack or aneurysm.

Damage control is already out in full force as the media runs with the story. The controversy has yet to run its course.

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The Power of a Single Tweet

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This story’s unique because it only took one TwitPic and one tweet to start the whole thing. In the past, spreading an image like this one to friends would have taken emails, a website, or calls to the media. In this case, the TwitPic was retweeted until Canada’s media outlets picked up on the image and the controversy.

The world is changing because of social media. Information can be spread in real-time to millions of people. It’s the same power that has helped raised millions for Haiti and forced big companies to listen to their customers.

While it’s unfortunate that this worker has become the center of controversy, he helps teach us an important lesson: be conscious of the actions you take, because anybody can post what you do online and spread it like a forest fire.

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Reviews: Twitpic, Twitter

Tags: Toronto, trending, twitpic, twitter

Netbooks are a great compromise between pecking away a smartphone keyboard or hauling a tank-size laptop around—but they aren’t without shortcomings. Make the most of your netbook with these netbook-friendly tips, tricks, and applications.

Although often derided for being under-powered and a poor substitute for a full laptop, netbooks fill a nice niche. They’re tough to beat for portable browsing, note taking, and mobile computing when a laptop is over kill, the battery life is too short, and using your phone is impractical or uncomfortable. Still, you can do a lot to make life with a netbook easier.

Accept the Hardware Limitations and Tweak When Possible

Netbooks are limited and you can’t be happy using one unless you accept that. Watching video on it won’t be like watching video on a 24″ widescreen monitor. It won’t run Crysis. You’re not going to be single-handedly solving complex protein-folding operations on it and curing cancer. Nearly every netbook has a fairly standard cookie-cutter spec sheet of a 1024×600 pixel screen, a 160GB HDD, 1GB of RAM, and a modest mobile processor.

If you already own a netbook, the best thing you can do is shell out $30-60 and upgrade the 1GB of RAM to 2GB of RAM. It’s a cheap enough upgrade and it provides a significant performance boost. If you’re shopping for a netbook, the best advice we can give is to focus on two things: battery life and the physical inputs, like the spacing of the keyboard and arrangement of secondary buttons—physical design is about the only thing distinguishing one netbook from another these days.

Strip Your Netbook of Bloat and Crapware

Computer manufacturers love to stockpile their pristine machines with all sorts of crapware. Fortunately, for the most part, netbook manufacturers aren’t too extreme with this practice. Given the already underpowered nature of the machines they sell, we’d imagine they’re paranoid about bogging it down with too much crapware. Nonetheless, it’s still worth your time to give your netbook a solid run through the decrapification-gauntlet. Photo by Fabio Bruna.

You can dig through the bloatware and delete it manually, but some bloatware—we’re looking at you Norton Anti-Virus trial!—is a huge pain to remove by hand. Fortunately applications have been created that are specifically tailored to giving bloatware the boot, like PC Decrapifier—seen in the screenshot above. PC Decrapifier is great for any new computer including netbooks and will help you get rid of applications like Norton Anti-Virus, Microsoft Office Trial Edition, and other annoyances.

One caveat regarding gutting the crapware from your new netbook: Although 90 percent of the junk that is installed is in fact junk, be careful not to delete software that actually does something useful. For example, on my Asus Eee netbook there were two very similar programs with similar Eee branded names. One was a useful aggressive battery monitoring application designed to squeeze even more life out of my 6-cell battery and the other was a fairly useless application dock only for Eee netbook apps. Had I blanket nuked all the installed apps, I’d have kicked out the useful battery tool with the rest of the junk.

Once you’ve booted the factory-fresh crapware off your netbook, it’s really important to keep things clean for optimal future performance. If a little bit of crapware and software creep slows down your beefy desktop a tiny bit, a little on your netbook will definitely gum up the works. Make sure to install an application like CCleaner—a favorite among Lifehacker readers—and run it on a schedule to keep things clean.

Learn to Love Full-Screen Mode and Keyboard Shortcuts

You might have a nice spacious monitor at home and never even think to switch to full screen mode, but on a netbook using full screen mode is an absolute must. The screenshot above shows a comparison between running Firefox in regular mode and running Firefox in fullscreen mode, displaying the Lifehacker homepage. Between the title bar, menu bar, tabbed sites, and the Windows start bar, around 40% of the screen gets chewed up. The same kind of situation exists when you load popular word processors like Microsoft Word and other office applications. Most software designers are simply not designing for small screens anymore; netbooks generally have a 1024×600 resolution, which is nearly 200 pixels shorter than the already quite small 1024×768 standard monitor size that most designers keep in mind when creating toolbar and site layouts.

Unfortunately no standard exists for which a keyboard shortcut will switch an application to full screen mode. Check the menu bar in your application or hit up Google with a “myapplication fullscreen shortcut” query to find it. The full-screen shortcuts for a few common applications are: Firefox/IE/Opera/Chrome – F11 (press again to return to normal view) and Microsoft Office – ALT+V+U (press ESC to return to normal view).

In addition to searching for individual and specific keyboard shortcuts to help with things like full-screen mode, it’s worthwhile to extend your knowledge of shortcuts even further—typing on a reduced size keyboard and mousing on a small trackpad can be rough on your hands. If you extend the range of your Google queries from just the keyboard shortcut to something like “myapplication without a mouse” or “myapplication keyboard shortcut guide” you’ll find gems like this guide to using the Opera web browser completely sans-mouse—or our own guide to mouse-less Firefox. Photo by Declan TM.

The best thing about improving your keyboard chops with the netbook is that all the new shortcuts you learn are transferable to your main workstation. For more information on handy keyboard shortcuts, application tricks involving keyboard shortcuts, and how to make them if your application lacks for them, take a stroll through the archives of the keyboard shortcuts tag here at Lifehacker.

Select Applications with a Netbook-Centric Attitude

Selecting applications for a netbook is a lot like packing for a camping trip. When you pack for a camping trip you select things for your pack that are efficient and lightweight versions of things you use every day at home, and you also pack things that are distinctly related to camping that you’d never use at home. Photo by 玩具王 the Nictoyking.

For example, you may use Firefox loaded down with 1,001 extensions on your quad-core home computer but opt to run Firefox with only one or two critical extensions or Google Chrome on your netbook. Also, just like with camping, selecting lightweight tools that are multifunction is valuable. Why use a bloated media application when something snappy and light like open-source VLC can take care of all your movie and music needs? In the same vein, look for ways to ditch software that is known for being bloated and resource hungry, like swapping out Adobe-gonna-eat-all-y’RAMs-Reader with FoxIt Reader. If you’re unsure where to start when it comes to selecting lightweight software, you might want to check out past Lifehacker Hive Five topics. Lifehacker readers tend to gravitate towards the fastest and lightest-weight solutions even when constraints like using a netbook aren’t brought into the equation.

Aside from searching out lightweight versions of applications your normally use, the netbook also benefits from applications you’d likely never use on a desktop computer.

Netbooks, for example, make pretty handy ebooks. They’re full color, they have no annoying DRM or restrictions, and they’re lightweight with a long battery life. I’ve been experimenting with using my netbook as an ebook reader and don’t have any complaints to log. If your netbook doesn’t already support screen rotation, you can easily remedy that situation by downloading EeeRotate—in use in the screenshot above. The tiny application allows you to rotate your screen using CTRL+ALT+RIGHT (you can rotate it so that you hold the netbook with the screen on your right or left hand side) and it reverses the axis of the mouse so you can still use your mouse without hassle. Pressing CTRL+ALT+UP will return the screen to normal.

If you’re a Gmail user, you’ll definitely want to enable Offline Gmail to allow you to compose emails in Gmail when you’re between wireless hotspots and unable to access the net. If you’re not a Gmail user it’s worth downloading an full-fledged email client like Thunderbird and configuring it to use your web-based email so you can enjoy the same functionality.

Even if your keyboard chops are up to par, it’s still a pain to launch applications on a netbook. Although I’ve yet to install Launchy—as much as I love it!—on my main Windows 7 desktop, most netbooks run Windows XP and Launchy can go a long way towards making application launching pleasant on the tiny keyboard and touchpad. Check out our guide to doing more with Launchy here.

Being able to shuttle files between your main workstation and your netbook, as well as keeping them backed up, is a must. Dropbox is a valuable addition to your netbook for this task. It’s lightweight, it’s fast, and for most users the free account is more than adequate. While writing this article I used Dropbox multiple times to easily toss screenshots and installation files between my netbook and desktop and as I took notes about the netbook—on the netbook!—I saved the .TXT file to Dropbox. Check out how to use Dropbox for more than just file syncing here.

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Netbooks serve as an excellent go-between tool for lightweight and portable notetaking and web browsing, especially with the proper tweaking and software selection. While our list of tweaks and software suggestions is long, it’s certainly not exhaustive. If you have a netbook of your own, it’s time to sound off in the comments with your tips, tricks, and favorite applications for maximizing your netbook’s capabilities.

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.

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So what about you? Do you always take the reinstall route, or have you devised your own best maintenance practices? Share your experience in the comments.

The How-To Geek reinstalls Windows only every few years and has no speed problems at all. His geeky articles can be found daily here on Lifehacker, How-To Geek, and Twitter.

Windows only: The Sumatra PDF Viewer is a tiny, open-source, portable, and, most of all, lightning-quick replacement for the bloated Adobe Reader we’ve all learned to replace. It’s only a 1.2 MB download, so why not give it a try?

Sumatra opened every PDF we threw at it without any issues, along with a table of contents in the left pane if available. You can head into the Options to choose the default layout and zoom, or choose whether to have the sidebar display automatically. Want to copy text to the clipboard? Just hold down the Ctrl key and select the text with your mouse, then use Ctrl+C to copy it. There’s even a full set of hotkeys, including Gmail-style navigation. It’s not as full-featured as Reader or Foxit, but if all you are doing is reading PDFs, it’s definitely worth a look.

With giant hard drives and dirt-cheap memory these days, perhaps the biggest reason to switch to an alternative to Adobe Reader isn’t even the bloat anymore—it’s the non-stop security holes that seem to plague the popular reader, leaving you vulnerable to drive-by attacks. If Sumatra isn’t for you, at least check out one of the other five best PDF readers.

Sumatra is a free download for Windows only. If you plan to keep Adobe Reader installed, be sure to check out the manual for instructions on using Sumatra as your default viewer when reading PDFs from the web.

Windows only: No one likes being bugged by Apple’s Software Update Utility in Windows, but many of us deal with it because we need QuickTime to use iTunes or view the occasional video. QT Lite aims to fix that.

If you don’t use iTunes (or any other Apple software), you can finally rid yourself of Apple’s Software Update bloat by replacing QuickTime with QT Lite. QT Lite installs only what is necessary to play QuickTime files and nothing more. It still has all the same settings and preferences as the normal version of QuickTime, though.

QT Lite is very similar to QuickTime Alternative, which we featured as one of our superior alternatives to crappy Windows software. The only difference is that QuickTime Alternative also installs Windows Media Player Classic, so it should also work as a QuickTime replacement if you want to install iTunes without the QuickTime bloat.

QT Lite is a free download, Windows only.

Windows: Looking for a text editor that helps you write text or code and doesn’t get in your way? Sublime Text lives up to its name. It’s a white-on-black, keyboard-friendly editor chock full of powerful, but unobtrusive, features.

Without digging into the menus, you’ll notice from the get-go that Sublime Text is fairly familiar, at least if you’re a programmer—white text on a black background, with line numbers and row/column counting in the lower left corner. Jump up to the menus, though, and you’ll find a whole lot of power user features if you want them. Macro recording, code helpers and context highlighting, savable text snippets, project organization, extensive layout tools, and more than we’ve had the time to really dig into this morning.

You could just use Sublime Text for when you need to get writing done and nothing else—it comes with distraction-free full-screen views, and only the “Mini-map” on the far left is showing when you’re typing, and that’s a fairly handy tool for skimming around your text. Realistically, though, you’ll want to take a deep dive into Sublime Text, learn its keyboard shortcuts, and dig into the features that save you time and automate the grunt work of writing.

Sublime text is free to download for trial use; a license for a single user on infinite machines, with free upgrades, is $59. There’s seemingly no limit set on the trial, but when you peek around this program, you’ll hopefully feel that the designers have earned their keep.

Windows only: If all you really want out of your iPod experience is the ability to load music, movies, and podcasts onto your iPod without any bulk or bloat, portable and free CopyTrans Manager is a speedy iTunes-alternative.

Click on the image above for a closer look.

You can use CopyTrans Manager to manage your iPod, iPod Touch, and iPhone. All major functionality, sans things like access to the iTunes stores and ripping CDs, is present in CopyTrans Manager. You can create and edit playlists, import artwork, edit track information, search and synchronize your music, and even store CopyTrans Manager on your iPod to access it wherever you can access portable applications.

CopyTrans Manager is available as a stand-alone portable application or part of the CopyTrans Suite which includes CopyTrans (allows you to repopulate your iTunes library from your iPod) and CopyTrans Photo (photo syncing between your iPod and PC).

CopyTrans Manager is free, Windows only, and portable.

Want to see what others are saying about a web page with Google’s newly released Sidewiki but don’t want to install Google Toolbar to do it? Amit at Digital Inspiration has cooked up a simple bookmarklet that lets you do just that.

To use it, follow the link below, find the Sidewiki Comments bookmarklet link, and drag and drop it into your browser’s bookmark toolbar. Then simply click the bookmarklet from any web page to view the Sidewiki comments for that page. It’s not the most polished viewer in the world (it’ll redirect you to a pretty barebones page with just the comments), and you can’t add your own Sidewiki comments this way, but if you just want a quick look at what people have to say, it’ll do the trick nicely without the extra bloat of installing a full-on toolbar.

Windows only: Free application Explore&Burn adds an entry to your right-click context menu that allows you to quickly burn files and folders to CD or DVD.

This right-click utility is dead simple: Click any file, folder, or disk image (e.g., ISO, IMG), select the Burn to disc context menu option, and go through the very quick burning wizard. The application supports most types of burnable media (including Dual Layer discs) and skips the bloat that accompanies a lot of burning software, opting instead for a completely pared down interface and footprint.

Explore&Burn is freeware, Windows only.