@geekworking: The company I worked with encrypted all of their notebooks. Not because they did something illegal but to avoid that data gets in the wrong hands, e.g. other companies. The guys traveled a lot but none of them ever got problems as it's legitimate to protect a companies data. But you must insist that your…

I use HostsMan [www.abelhadigital.com] and the MVPS hosts file [www.mvps.org] with auto-update. Tynt is already blocked in the current update and I had nothing to do manually. Great tip for everyone - adblocking regardless of used browser.

@Andrew Lam: Absolutely! Beats them all.

@wickedcupofjoe: paper towels are BAD. The fibre tends to scratch the glasses pretty fast. A great way is blowing them dry btw (with a can of air or simply with your breath). Not very fast but safe and suprisingly efficient.

@styfle: maybe you logged in via fb connect? LH and ReadWriteWeb are there at my account, too... but I definitely don't log into LH via FB. Strange.

@infmom: I use hot water (really hot) and a regular fresh cotton towel for years now and it is perfect. Ok, it can't compete with those fancy ultrasound cleaning things but it's definitely cheaper.

@bobkoure: With Shinding (by Apache: [shindig.apache.org]) and OpenSocial there is already a great option for implementing a distributed FB alternative (if there only wasn't so little time...). Or OpenSocial in general is a good start. Takes everything FB does and puts it into protocolls.

@gburke: I am pretty sure you could write something like this in rainmeter. It has plenty of weather widgets so all you would need to do is blow one of them up to fullscreen and find images to display for every kind of weather. Sure, technically it is not a wallpaper but it is very close to it.

Having a 20mbit line I can say: I am set. RSS, Torrent, TVRename and XBMC provide me with a constant flow of TV series which I wouldn't even be able to receive on crappy german TV. A few DVDs from the rental around the corner for the occasional movie. No ads, breaks when I have to pee and not when someone wants to…

@minibeardeath: I use a Antec Sonata case [store.antec.com] which provides suspension mount and matching slots for optional case fans. All in all it has a great cooling and silencing concept. The price is quite a bit but at least it comes with a quite psu.

With no FFF Tusj [www.dafont.com] and no Bleeding Cowboys [www.dafont.com] the chart is a bit incomplete. Great find anyway.

XBMC jumps right to the movie if you configure it that way (which is by default IIRC).

Best downloader for sharing sites ever. period.

Very often yes. Everytime I am treated like a pirate AFTER I bought the product. Let's say when a game refuses to run after three installs or a CD installs a rootkit on my PC or I get like 10 minutes of anti-piracy-commercials on a DVD.

VOTE: Rainmeter

@ja2038: that is probably the most disturbing comment I've ever seen on lifehacker ...

@Windcape: I am totally ok with 40mb of my 4 gb. why would I have 4gb if I don't use it? and even with Firefox and Rainmeter and a bunch of other stuff I only use 35% of my RAM.

@ara: I use the portable version of rainmeter and it creates two additional folders. no background process but rainmeter.exe.

@ara: it consumes about 20-50mb and 2-4% of CPU so I wouldn't it call a ressource hog. I don't have all the widgets activated (who needs all of them anyway?) but quite a few (19 of 30 to be precise). I think it's a pretty good deal considering the infos you get.

@StormPooper: I use this setup and it takes 42mb, while others claim it needs only 20-something. Phoshi on the other hand wrote in another comment that it took 90mb on his machine.