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Windows only: If you’ve ever thought, “That GPS lady is bossy,” or “I wish my Garmin talked like a pirate,” Voice Studio is the answer. With just a microphone, it lets you record and upload custom voices to your Garmin GPS.

The process itself is quite easy, if not a little repetitive—but it’s a small price to pay to have your friend or loved one guide you through the windy roads of America (or wherever you’re from). The software leads you through the process of recording a list of words and phrases that your Garmin uses to form directions, and then downloading it to your GPS unit (you can see a list of which devices are compatible here).

Garmin estimates the process will take 30 minutes, which may seem long for the simple task of saying 65 words, but if you want it to sound as natural as possible, I would suggest taking your time to test and trim each recording. Sadly, my Garmin is not one of the supported devices, so if yours is, try it out and let us know how it worked for in the comments!

Garmin Voice Studio is a free download, Windows only.

Web/iPhone/Android: Got a PowerPoint presentation you want to share with co-workers or clients on short notice, or who are in a different timezone? Free tool MightyMeeting lets you conduct presentations remotely via the web or its iPhone and Android applications.

Upload any PowerPoint presentation or PDF to the site to get started (or just forward presenations from your email account to a private email address) to get started. Once your presentation is in the cloud, you can invite anyone to join you. When they click through to your presentation, they’re looking at the presentation as controlled by you—again, either from a web browser of your iPhone or Android device.

As I mentioned, the free webapp could come in particularly handy for short-notice presentations—you don’t have to set up any projectors or have any files on hand. All you need is a supported device on your end and a laptop the people you’re presenting to can look at. (You can invite multiple guests, too, so a room full of people could watch your presentation directly in front of them.)

You have a MobileMe subscription and an iPhone, do you? Then you can now download a free, Apple-made app called MobileMe Gallery [iTunes link] that will let you easily browse your MobileMe photos and upload more from anywhere.

You can flip through your existing photos in typical iPhone finger-gesture fashion or take new ones with your phone and upload them to the MobileMe cloud. There’s an option to send photos both new and old to friends and colleagues via e-mail, and the app views videos, too.

You can also use MobileMe Gallery to browse friends’ photos; any friend you’re following will have a blue dot next to his or her name when he or she has uploaded new photos. Chances are you’re sharing your photos on Facebook, Flickr or TwitPic directly because not all your friends have Macs or iPhones, but the Gallery app could be helpful for keeping up with friends if you do hang with a bunch of other Mac enthusiasts.

As is the case with many other Apple products, design is prominent; there’s a sliding ticker of recent photos at the top of the app to give it some extra style. If you want to see how it works firsthand before downloading it, there’s a quick tour video over at Apple’s MobileMe product page. We can’t embed the video, sadly.

Tags: app store, apple, iphone, Mobile 2.0

Windows only: Image resizing tools are a dime a dozen, but free utility Shrink Pic is actually an extremely clever original: Instead of any requiring manual processing, it runs in the background and automatically resizes images whenever you attach or upload them.

A perfect tool for frequent Facebook uploaders, for example, Shrink Pic works with a number of applications (most browsers, Outlook, Thunderbird, Skype, and MSN Messenger, to name just a few) to monitor when you upload, attach, or send pictures via IM. When you do, it automatically resizes the images in the background based on user-defined settings, then uploads the smaller image (so you don’t have to wait several minutes for an upload to complete just to have it severely compressed at its destination anyway). It can even resize multiple photos in the same upload. The speed at which it resizes and the quality of the compression are nothing to sneeze at, either.

Shrink Pic saves the resized images in a temporary directory, so your originals are never touched—just copied. You can use any kind of compression level you want, as well as choose from 5 different photo types to check for. If you want to disable it, all you need to do is uncheck an option in your system tray—and re-enabling it is just as easy. You can even install a portable version to a USB drive, so you never have to resize images again—not even at other computers.

Shrink Pic is a free download, Windows only.

Say what you will about AT&T’s customer service and dropped call epidemic—according to tests performed by Gizmodo, it’s still got the fastest 3G network in the nation—at least in a 12-city sampling. Testing average download and upload bandwidth speeds in Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New York, Pheonix, Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, Tampa, and Maui, Gizmodo found that while AT&T battled neck-and-neck with Verizon for average download bandwidth depending on the market, it more often than not came out on top. When it came to less important upload speeds, AT&T handily defeated all of the competitors across markets.

This test doesn’t address the coverage battle AT&T and Verizon are currently locked in, but most of us don’t roam the entire country, either. This information may not be too helpful if you’re stuck in the middle of a multi-year contract, but it’s good to know if you’re in the market for a new carrier. It also doesn’t mean that your new carrier should be AT&T (note: AT&T users have plenty of other things to complain about); it just means that AT&T’s 3G network is pretty speedy in most cities. Hit up the full Gizmodo post for more details. [Gizmodo]

iPhone 3GS: It’s been a long time coming, but Apple’s finally approved a (notable) live video streaming app for the iPhone 3GS. Ustream is one of the first out of the gate, and it seems to deliver on its promise.

Ustream already has an app in the Store that lets you record video and upload it to Ustream, YouTube, or other locations—but not live, and that’s kind of the whole point of Ustream.tv. After another phone-to-phone live video app was approved last week, Ustream’s potential has been fully unlocked, allowing for live record-and-stream on 3G or Wi-Fi connections.

Lifehacker East lacks a 3GS to try the app out with at the moment, so if you’ve given it a shot, tell us how it’s working in the comments.

If you use Zoho for its customer relationship platform, Zoho Mail, or as a secondary document space, but keep some files in Google Docs, the web suite has made it very easy to upload and attach documents from Google’s service.

It’s not officially announced yet, but a wiki page and Zoho Show presentation show off the new Google Docs uploading powers that many Zoho products have added. We’d say that “nearly every” Zoho product has added Google Docs uploading, but there are so many tools at Zoho’s platform that we’d be remiss to even try and cover them all.

Here’s how Zoho shows off its Google Docs integration:

Are you a Zoho user who also digs Google Docs, or vice-versa? Tell us how you use Zoho and Google to get things done.

A persuasive e-mail from an iPhone developer to Steve Jobs helped Pointy Heads Software get its Knocking Live Video—the first official iPhone app capable of streaming live video over 3G and WiFi connections—approved for sale in the App Store. The app relies on a private API—well-known among iPhone developers—to enable its video streaming feature, so its approval is a good sign for other companies developing video-based apps. It’s also a good sign that Apple is taking developer complaints with the App Store approval process seriously.

Knocking Live Video uses an interesting take on streaming video. Unlike Qik, which is designed to stream video to multiple clients, Knocking streams from one iPhone to another. (It should be noted that the iPhone version of Qik wasn’t approved with live streaming—it can only upload the video to Qik’s website after recording for later streaming.) You simply launch the app and “knock” another iPhone user with Knocking Live Video installed. That user will receive the “knock” via push notification. Once answered, you can then stream live video directly to them. An iPhone 3GS or iPhone 3G is required to transmit video, but other iPhones and iPod touches can receive and view the stream via WiFi.

Screenr is a web-based screencasting application that makes sharing short screencasts painless. You can see Screenr in action as we demonstrate how to search Lifehacker.com with Google.

Screenr is Twitter-centric but sports a high-degree of functionality even if you don’t actively use Twitter. You can easily tweet your screencasts from Screenr—the default, unless you specify otherwise is to share your screencasts on Twitter. If you opt to not share the screencast on Twitter you can download it as an MP4, upload it to YouTube, embed the screencast, or simply share the URL via email or IM.

When you start the Screenr recording tool you can specify which region of the screen you want to record—it uses a simple drag-to-resize box—and what audio input, if any, you’ll be using. Hit the record button to start and the big green Done button to end your recording.

Below is a quick screencast we put together demonstrating how to search Lifehacker.com via Google instead of the built-in search tool here on the site:

If you’re stuck on a computer where you can’t watch flash video the secret sauce is to type: site:lifehacker.com your-search-terms-here in the Google query box.

Want a beefier screencasting tool? Check out the Hive Five on screencasting tools here. Screenr is free, requires a Twitter-account for login, and has a limit of 5 minutes per screencast. Know of another great web-based screencasting tool? Let’s hear about it in the comments.

DailyBooth is a photo sharing site that has been growing in popularity, as it easily lets you capture a photo of yourself via webcam and share it on Twitter.

Now, one of the largest photo sharing services for Twitter – yFrog – has just added a dead-simple webcam capture feature for both photo and video sharing.

Using the feature is easy. From yFrog’s homepage, select “webcam” as your upload method and a pop-up will let you select video, photo, or photo in 5 seconds (if you want time to get ready for your photo). Sign-in with Twitter using OAuth and the photo or video is published to your stream, with a link to the image on yFrog.

It’s a pretty neat feature that adds a visual twist to the status update, at least if you’re the type of person who carries your laptop with you everywhere.

Tags: twitter, yfrog