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Windows: Back in November we highlighted TouchFreeze, a small utility designed to prevent you from accidentally moving your mouse cursor and messing up text what you’re typing while you’re typing. Reader bobbo33 made an improved version with a clever AutoHotkey script.

Photo by Patrick Denker.

From bobbo33 at the Productive Geek forums:

A few months back, LH posted a link to TouchFreeze:

This program was designed to stop you from accidentally hitting your laptop/netbook’s trackpad with your thumbs while you are typing. However, this program didn’t really work for me—I still accidentally jumped the cursor from time-to-time.

So here’s my Autohotkey version, which has been working very well for me for the last couple of weeks since I created it. (Note that you can tweak the timer line if the 500ms default still isn’t quite long enough for you.) I’ve noticed no performance lag at all with method, since it’s a keyboard hook.

I think it’s always better to add little functions like these to my AHK master script, rather than installing YAU (yet another utility) for these small tweaks.

; Script Function:
;       Disables trackpad for 500ms any time a key is pressed (prevents accidental mouse clicks)
;

#NoEnv  ; Recommended for performance and compatibility with future AutoHotkey releases.
SendMode Input  ; Recommended for new scripts due to its superior speed and reliability.
SetWorkingDir %A_ScriptDir%  ; Ensures a consistent starting directory.

;keyboard hook code credit: http://www.autohotkey.com/forum/post-127490.html#127490
#Persistent
OnExit, Unhook

hHookKeybd := SetWindowsHookEx(WH_KEYBOARD_LL   := 13, RegisterCallback("Keyboard", "Fast"))
Return

ReenableTrackpad:
BlockInput, MouseMoveOff
Return

Unhook:
UnhookWindowsHookEx(hHookKeybd)
ExitApp

Keyboard(nCode, wParam, lParam)
{
   Critical
   If !nCode
   {
      BlockInput, MouseMove
      SetTimer, ReenableTrackpad, 500
   }
   Return CallNextHookEx(nCode, wParam, lParam)
}

SetWindowsHookEx(idHook, pfn)
{
   Return DllCall("SetWindowsHookEx", "int", idHook, "Uint", pfn, "Uint", DllCall("GetModuleHandle", "Uint", 0), "Uint", 0)
}

UnhookWindowsHookEx(hHook)
{
   Return DllCall("UnhookWindowsHookEx", "Uint", hHook)
}

CallNextHookEx(nCode, wParam, lParam, hHook = 0)
{
   Return DllCall("CallNextHookEx", "Uint", hHook, "int", nCode, "Uint", wParam, "Uint", lParam)
}

Want a little stronger security lock-down for your iPhone than what the 4-digit PIN offers? Weblog 9 to 5 Mac details how to enable a more secure alpha-numeric passcode on your device with a few tweaks.

You’ve always been able to turn on the passcode lock in Settings -> General, requiring users to enter a four-digit PIN to unlock your device. But if you’ve ever wanted a little added security, 9 to 5 Mac has put together a simple profile using Apple’s corporate development kit that you can install on your device to enable the alpha-numeric passcode. It’s a one-click download-and-passcode affair, but if you’d prefer not using their pre-made profile, you can make one yourself by following these instructions.

Filed under: Software, iPad

1Password, the oft-mentioned password manager and form filler, has just posted mockups of their in-the-works iPad version. Previously available on the desktop and for the iPhone, 1Password has undergone some visual overhauls already. The iPad version appears to take the current interface a little further with a few nice visual tweaks, and take full advantage of the large touch area of the iPad.

The design looks great to me, and I especially like the main toolbar with its recessed icons. The developers (and their graphic designer) appear to be taking the new form factor into consideration and generating a very usable interface. I’m really looking forward to getting my hands on the iPad version, pending the purchase of an iPad, of course. Check out the post at the developer’s blog for a better look!

TUAW1Password on your iPad originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 17 Feb 2010 13:42:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Firefox only: Clicking through multiple product images while shopping on Amazon is really a chore. PictureFox, a handy Firefox add-on, opens all the images in a single gallery so you can stop making with the clicky-clicky all the time.

If you don’t shop at Amazon often, then you may not realize what a pain—literally—slogging through products with tons of images can be. Nothing makes your repetitive-stress injured mousing finger ache more quickly than clicking on dozens of images to compare the features of a purchase you’re trying to make.

PictureFox installs quickly and follows you every time you visit Amazon’s website. Just click on the arrow the add-on displays along side a product’s main image, and all its associated images—including user photos—all pop open in a single gallery page. The add-on also overrides Amazon’s native “Zoom Viewer” feature and opens up images up to 14 megapixels in high resolution so you can see details before you buy.

To manage PictureFox, just choose Add-ons from Firefox’s Tools menu. Then select what options you want to enable: Use image-flow gallery, show customer pictures, and allow multiple gallery instances. You can also uninstall the add-on from here, if it’s not working out for you.

If you want a full package of Amazon-centeric tweaks for Firefox, then be sure to check out Gina’s Better Amazon Firefox extension. It shortens Amazon URLs, enlarges product images, and more.

Got a trick for surfing the vast digital aisles of Amazon? Dreaming of a perfect add-that will make shopping there easier? Talk about it in the comments.

GMAIL USERS: You’re welcome to join the discussion over on Mashable’s Google Buzz account.

Google Buzz only launched four days ago but it’s already taking off in a big way. Google already made some changes to how Buzz works on Thursday but today the company has created a blog post highlighting some additional changes — including some ways to turn Buzz off altogether.

Here are some of the big changes that Google is making to buzz, that it plans to roll out over the next few days:

Auto-follow will become auto-suggest — Based on privacy concerns from users who aren’t happy with the current auto-follow structure, Google Buzz will instead prompt users with some suggestions of what users they want to follow, based on who they e-mail most. This is what that screen will look like.

Existing Buzz users will be able to review and confirm their followers via similar screen over the next few weeks.
Buzz will no longer connect to Google Reader or Picasa Web Albums automatically — Although only public items were shared via these two connect options, due to feedback from concerned users and confusion, Google Reader and Picasa Web Albums will have to be added manually to your Google Buzz profile just like Twitter or Flickr.
New Buzz tab in Gmail Settings — You can see what the Buzz tab looks like below, but it offers you a chance to decide to show or exclude who you follow on your public Google profile and gives you the option to hide Buzz from Gmail. You can also disable Buzz completely.

One other note — at the bottom of the page in Gmail, you can select a turn-off Buzz button. This will hide Buzz from your Gmail account, although you can turn it back on without losing your information.

Tags: gmail, google buzz, privacy

Continue reading Sony Ericsson outs Xperia X10 mini and Xperia X10 mini pro

Sony Ericsson outs Xperia X10 mini and Xperia X10 mini pro originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 14 Feb 2010 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Netflix Watch Instantly fans could be due for a big upgrade, as CNET has heard the company will roll out 1080p and 5.1 surround sound later this year. No word on timing or any other details, but this could mean its moving to version 3 of Microsoft’s Silverlight streaming platform with its additional tweaks for adaptive streaming and hardware graphics acceleration. Also unknown is how much bandwidth would be necessary, but considering Microsoft already uses very similar technology for its 1080p Instant On videos on Zune Marketplace through the Xbox 360 while only requiring 3 Mbps and VUDU HDX 1080p videos only state a minimum of 4500 Kbps, a massive jump in available bandwidth might not be necessary if you already get clear 720p video. The last big hurdle? How much content will be available that way, Gizmodo points out only about 6 percent of current offerings stream in HD we’ll be watching carefully if the pace picks up going forward.

1080p, 5.1 surround sound coming to Netflix Watch Instantly in 2010? originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 08 Feb 2010 18:12:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Reader t.click’s desktop sports an amazing, totally transparent skin for the Opera browser that uses Aero Glass to render virtually the entire interface.

We’ve already shown you how the latest snapshot version of the Opera browser gives you great Windows 7 integration, and that functionality can be used in alternate skins as well—which is how the Z1-Glass skin turns the entire interface into glass.

The rest of the desktop consists of:

• Z1-Glass skin for Opera 10.5 snapshot
• Start Killer
• 7Stacks

Got your own awesome desktop customization trick or fully-tweaked desktop configuration? Post it over in the Lifehacker Desktop Show and Tell Flickr Group or the new Productive Geek featured desktops forum complete with a description of the programs and tweaks you used (and preferably links as well!), and we just might feature it here.

Though publishing videos on the web has been child’s play for years now, the process of getting them to rank high in search remains enigmatic at best, frustrating at worst. The pace of video publication is accelerating faster than ever, and though video SEO seems to have been left behind the rest of the industry, it’s finally starting to catch up through some exciting developments that will hopefully provide more incentives for publishers to produce great video content.

As we start a new year and a new decade, here’s a look at the state of web video SEO right now.

The State of Web Video

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When you produce a video now, there’s no dearth of places to publish it. Though YouTube remains the dominant player in the industry, Vimeo, Blip.tv, Viddler, Metacafe, and a host of other sites (most of them free) have fragmented the market. There’s no need to build or host your own video player, and you can leave the heavy bandwidth duties to them rather than your own server.

Just as there’s lots of competition in the platform arena, competition among videos themselves is growing wildly. YouTube spokesman Aaron Zamost said over 20 hours of video are uploaded to the site every minute, and about 120 decades of video are uploaded each year.

Hundreds of little tweaks and tricks exist in optimizing a webpage for search, yet the entire realm of video SEO right now consists of only a few to-dos and a lot of finger-crossing. Zamost summed up the basics for ranking high in a YouTube search:

“Have a clear, descriptive title, and include as many accurate tags as you can. For example, if you’ve created a video that shows how to tie a bow tie, your title should be ‘How to tie a bow tie.’ That’s really important, because that’s [what] your target viewer probably wanted to learn. So think visually — ties, dress, how to dress nice, how to tie a tie, how to tie a bow tie, etc.

It’s also important to note that many users who are searching for video just want to be entertained, and may not be looking for something that precise. So if you’ve created compelling content, think about how a user would likely find it. Tags like ‘funny video,’ while generic, can be very useful.”

Many publishers, however, are concerned with getting links and traffic to their site, not just their YouTube page. Rand Fishkin, CEO and co-founder of the multi-million dollar SEO agency SEOmoz, emphasizes the importance of placing videos on your own site and submitting a video sitemap to search engines.

“Video results are often far easier to ‘rank,’ than standard web results, but there are some hoops you’ll need to jump through,” Fishkin said in an e-mail.

However, users sharing videos by embedding or linking to them in their own sites often leads to traffic and link juice being sent to the third party site (like YouTube or Metacafe) that actually hosts the video, rather than a publisher’s own. A vital part of SEO strategy is getting other websites to link to your site. If people are linking to your content on YouTube, your site doesn’t build much (if any) link equity or page rank at all, which can be discouraging for web publishers.

New Developments

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Because search engine robots only understand actual text, they can’t determine the quality of a video by the content inside it — only by the links to it and the content around it, like the title or tags. People have muddled over this problem for a long time, and a couple of realistic solutions have recently emerged.

First, YouTube now has the ability to place captions on its videos. The transcript of a video can be attached to its timeline, allowing users seek to specific portions of YouTube videos by phrase. This transcript can be searched and indexed by the engines, meaning your video content itself can count toward ranking now. Whereas originally you had to provide your own captions to attach, YouTube can now do captions automatically. As with any robotic transcription however, human intervention may be required to fix computer-generated mistakes in the text.

Placing a video’s transcript in its description has been a somewhat common SEO practice in the past, but the marriage of the transcript to the video timeline itself is a definite advancement.

Another company to recently stumble on a similar solution for web video SEO is the New York-based SpeakerText. SpeakerText helps you perform the same transcript-to-video matrimony as YouTube captions, but further puts SEO power in publishers’ hands through a concept it calls “QuoteLinks.”

Basically, once your video has been “speakertexted,” you can embed it on your own website with the transcript attached. Visitors can select a chunk of the transcript, copy it, and paste it in their own blog or website as a link to the exact moment in the video where the quote appears. The link goes to the publisher’s site, not YouTube’s. Right now SpeakerText only works with YouTube, but the company says it plans to provide the service for other platforms in the future.

“Anytime somebody quotes, it will link back to the original source, which is good for the end user because they can actually see it in context,” said CEO Matt Mireles, “… and the publisher gets rewarded because it not only sends viral traffic directly, but then the link creates huge SEO.”

SpeakerText is free if you provide your own transcript, and you can order transcription through the site at what it claims is roughly half the cost of traditional transcription services. SpeakerText utilizes an army of “Turkees” at Mechanical Turk to do the transcribing.

The Future

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So what’s next for video SEO?

Fishkin believes that new platforms like the iPad and the Android Marketplace have big implications for the future. “I suspect this divergence of video from the open web to closed platforms (a curious shift indeed) may have some substantive impact in the future,” he said.

Zamost said that “social elements are playing an increasingly important role in the development of new features on YouTube, especially related to search and discovery.” The incorporation of social trends in search algorithms could spell big changes indeed for the SEO industry.

Whatever happens next, it’s clear that video SEO is finally starting to catch up to the rest of the web. With services like SpeakerText and YouTube captions emerging to help eliminate unsearchable content issues, the future likely holds more automated and accurate video-text mapping and perhaps eventually video editing in the cloud.

What changes are you hoping for? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

More web video resources from Mashable:

- YouTube Is the Top Social Media Innovation of the Decade
– 5 Eye-Popping 3D YouTube Videos
– 8 Companies That Are Reinventing TV Online
– 5 Best YouTube Sports Moments of 2009
– The 10 Most Innovative Viral Video Ads of 2009
– 7 of the Most Inspiring Videos on the Web

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, parasoley

Tags: metacafe, Search, search engine optimization, SEO, social media, speakertext, stats, viddler, video, Vimeo, web video, youtube

Readers offer their best tips for avoiding trial subscriptions that automatically charge your credit card, browsing the web without distractions, and cleaning dish towels overnight.

Don’t like the gallery layout? Click here to view everything on one page.

About the Tips Box: Every day we receive boatloads of great reader tips in our inbox, but for various reasons—maybe they’re a bit too niche, maybe we couldn’t find a good way to present it, or maybe we just couldn’t fit it in—the tip didn’t make the front page. From the Tips Box is where we round up some of our favorites for your buffet-style consumption. Got a tip of your own to share? Add it in the comments, share it here, or email it to tips at lifehacker.com.

Avoid Automatic Subscription Charges After Free Trials

Jeremy Bensley shows us how he keeps his card from automatically being charged after trial periods:

Avoid subscription dues when your “Free Trial” expires by using a temporary credit card number issued by your bank (e.g. “ShopSafe”) that has a lower limit than the subscription amount. When the service tries to charge the card it will be rejected for insufficient funds.

Use Multiple Browsers to Avoid Distractions

Jo shares her system for staying on task in her web browser:

I’m currently writing a 5000 word project for my MBA but kept getting distracted in Firefox. I’m using Google Docs so I can access my work from anywhere, whether or not I have my laptop with me but I’d been finding it hard to concentrate when working on it from Firefox (my default browser) as I’ve got all sorts of alerts and customisations in place. My tweaks such as permanent, faviconized tabs for gmail and Google Reader (with unread counts), my blog stats and Remember the Milk kept distracting me and making me ‘just quickly go and check them’ and find I’d accidentally spent two hours looking at random things online. I’ve also got a Twitter notifier which tempts me with unread tweet counts (though I did at least get round to disabling the pop-ups as new tweets arrived. Given that I was finding it hard to concentrate anyway, these distractions were too tempting.

I’d downloaded Chrome to play with and see if I liked it but hadn’t really used it much until I realised that it would be perfect to use when I wanted to ignore everything else and get on with some writing. I now close Firefox and just use Chrome when I want to thrash through some writing and it works perfectly – no tempting distractions. Using the full screen view and hiding the Google Docs toolbar means I just have a clear screen with just my writing on show (see attached screenshot with my text blurred) and it is much more of an effort to sneak off around the internet and get distracted.

Soak Dish Towels Overnight for Clean Washing Tomorrow

Photo by Kirrily Robert.

sirmeili describes how to keep dish towels clean:

I was reading the article on replacing paper towels with cloth ones and someone mentioned how unsanitary that could be. So I thought I would offer up this tip for Dish towels (the type for washing, not drying). At the end of each night simply boil a kettle of water and pour that, a little dish soap, and a cap full of bleach to the sink. Just add your towels and let them soak over night. In the morning (or when you’re ready to use them), just drain the sink, wring them out and they’re ready to go! they even have the added benefit of having a little soap in them for when wiping down counters and dishes. You’ll also find this helps to keep your sink clean as well. I hope this helps some people out and gets them to drop those pesky paper towels!

Google Model Numbers for Details, Archiving

quintus314 tells us how he organizes his devices’ model numbers:

When I get a new device, I like to Google the model number. That way, I know of any oddities it may have, and later, I can go into my search history for the model number instead of finding my device.