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pimg src=”http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2008/10/shoutcast_itunes.jpg” height=”140″ width=”179″ align=”right” hspace=”4″ vspace=”2″ align=”right”/The CyberNet blog details an iTunes trick that expands the player’s internet radio options beyond the Apple-controlled list installed by default. The basic method involves finding stations that broadcast in the .PLS, or playlist, format, at media aggregators like a href=”http://shoutcast.com”Shoutcast/a and adding them to their own playlists. It’s similar to the method used to a href=”http://lifehacker.com/software/front-row/add-internet-radio-stations-to-front-row-238131.php”add .M3U-format stations to Front Row/a, but more suited to adding a few favorite streams rather than a host of search-able options. Have your own iTunes radio work-around? Let’s hear it in the comments. div class=”related”a href=”http://cybernetnews.com/2008/10/23/cybernotes-add-shoutcast-radio-streams-to-itunes”CyberNotes: Add Shoutcast Radio Streams to iTunes/a [CyberNet]/div/p br style=”clear: both;”/
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a href=”http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/lifehacker/full?a=oZsEM”img src=”http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/lifehacker/full?i=oZsEM” border=”0″/img/a a href=”http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/lifehacker/full?a=rpP9M”img src=”http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/lifehacker/full?i=rpP9M” border=”0″/img/a a href=”http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/lifehacker/full?a=lgRVm”img src=”http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/lifehacker/full?i=lgRVm” border=”0″/img/a a href=”http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/lifehacker/full?a=V5Nim”img src=”http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/lifehacker/full?i=V5Nim” border=”0″/img/a
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pimg src=”http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2008/10/spreed_news.jpg” align=”left” hspace=”4″ vspace=”2″ width=”494″ height=”203″ style=”display:block;float:none;” /Free speed-reading webapp Spreed:News lets you choose from a wide array of news sources and have their articles read to you in small clusters of words. Working from the principles that make for faster reading, you can scale the tool between 240 and 1500 words per minute, and set up an account to save your favorite sourcesmdash;from Boing Boing to the New York Times and dozens moremdash;for quick browsing. Spreed offers a tally of the seconds you’ve saved from word-by-word reading, and offers an iPhone-optimized interface for speed reading while on commutes or trips. Spreed is free to use, requires a sign-up to save your feeds. For tips on honing your speed reading, check the how-to article on the via link below./p div class=”related”a href=”http://www.spreednews.com/Home.aspx”Spreed:News/a [via a href="http://howto.wired.com/wiki/Speed-Read"Wired How-To Wiki/a]/div br style=”clear: both;”/
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The Firefox extension that adds a smart keyboard interface to Firefox—Ubiquity—now supports bookmarklets. Developer Aza Raskin describes, step by step in the video above, how to set them up. In short, you can add any bookmarklet to Ubiquity’s command set, and invoke the Ubiquity prompt to execute them from anywhere using only your keyboard. Of course, you can do something similar (but not as good-looking) using Firefox keyword bookmarks, too. (With the right keyword set up, hit Ctrl/Cmd+L to go to Firefox’s address bar and type it.) Still, Ubiquity has that lovely Quicksilver/Launchy-like suggest-as-you-type command window going on. Here are our top 10 useful bookmarklets to try this out on.

Using a couple of basic tools in Photoshop and other image editing programs, you can take a flat image and make it pop with just a little bit of effort and no experience in the finer arts of exposure and color correction. With a little practice, you can get some quick and dirty work done in just seconds that will make your presentation, blog, or social network profile pictures look a lot better online. Even cellphone snapshots can be made presentable while your instant noodles soften. Here’s how:

This bulldog is quite cute, but the flat contrast, dead colors, blur and noise aren’t doing it’s already comically bemused mug any favors. Let’s see if we can’t create a profile picture that will get the pack on Dogster howling. While for the purposes of this demonstration I’ll be using Photoshop, the same work can be done in GIMP, Paint.NET and other full-featured image editing software applications.

Love Your Curves

Select Image > Adjustments > Curves from the Photoshop drop-down menus. Welcome to the most awesome digital image editing tool known to human (and bulldog) kind.
See the three eye-dropper icons near the bottom? Our first chore is to select the first one to set the black point of the image. The goal is click on the darkest portion of the image in order to set the low threshhold for detail. The point you select and everything darker will become true black. I selected a corner of shadow in the top-left of the image.
Next, we use the middle eye-dropper to set the gray point. It doesn’t matter how dark or light the point is — just that it’s supposed to be a neutral gray tone. This can quickly remove a color-cast, which often occur when a camera set to indoor light is used outdoors or vice-versa. If a gray object has a reddish tinge, for instance, this feature will make it color-neutral and shift the colors in the rest of the image accordingly. I selected a bit of what’s supposed to be white wall near the top of the image.Finally, we use the last eye-dropper to set the white point. This is pretty much the opposite of setting the black point. Click on the brightest portion of the image, in this case, the highlight on our furry friend’s cheek.
Now our simple black diagonal line has been joined by red, green and blue friends. These represent how the eye-droppers adjusted the red, green and blue parts of the image. Behind them, the gray shape is called a “histogram,” and shows the distribution of tones in the image. What we want to do is make sure the range of tones in the final photo equals the possible range of a digital image. So we grab those little sliders at the bottom and adjust the dark and light points to match where the colored lines first meet the bottom and the top of the graph, respectively.
Now that the image is as color-correct as you can expect after twenty seconds of fiddling, we’ll want to bump up the contrast. Why should you hate Brightness and Contrast? Because it would preserve all the image data in the shadows and highlights that our histogram promises is there. So instead we’ll create an “s-curve” to pump up the contrast. First, select a point midway along the black diagonal line. Just click to select — don’t move it.
Now we’ll select another point halfway between the midpoint and the highlight, or three-quarters of the way up the line. This we’ll move very slightly up and to the left.
Add a point on the other side of the mid-point, and move it a little down and to the right. The more extreme your “s” the more contrast you’ll perceive. (Inversely, if you have a u-shaped histogram with lots of color information in the dark and light areas, you can reduce contrast by pointing the “s” in the other direction.)

Unsharp Mask is Your New BFF

There are two problems with this image, and we can fix one but not the other — namely, it’s a little blurry thanks to the cheap plastic iPhone lens, and it’s “noisy” (the spattering of grainy color throughout) because of the cheap iPhone image capture chip and heavy doses of JPEG compression. Sharpening increases the contrast between a range of pixels, which can make the image clearer but also brings out the noise. Normally you might just try Filters > Sharpen > Sharpen or Filters > Sharpen > Sharpen More and eyeball it, but this calls for a little finesse. Since I’ll be reducing the image size quite a bit, I’m going to go for sharp and a little noisy, and use Filters > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask to massage it. Amount sets how much additional contrast is desired, radius determines the are sampled around each pixel, and threshold sets how different two tones need to be before the filter kicks in. Futz with these for a few seconds until you like what you see — I’d say my adjustment is about medium-to-light sharpening.

Don’t Be an Image Size Queen

While you want to start with the highest-resolution image with the least amount of compression you can, and do all your adjustments and filters at that size, you don’t want to choke up someone’s screen real estate and bandwidth with a huge image. And nothing smooths over the bumps in a photo’s personality like a trip to the shrink. Select Image > Adjustments > Image Size and re-size it to something appropriate (in this case, I re-sized to 247 pixels wide by 300 pixels tall for the before-and-after images at the top).

Compress Your File Into Skinny Jeans

Don’t be a bandwidth-hog with fatty files. Use File > Save For Web to let you set the compression level and preview both the image quality and the file size. By default, I usually set the JPEG compression level to 65 — which in this case means an image just a tad under 25 kilobytes, which shouldn’t bother broadband users. Et voila, our sweet puppy will soon be getting invitations to all the best purebred parties.

(Original image by Artur Bergman)

If you’ve got a MacBook past warranty and are looking for more hard drive space, Seattlite Tim Molter offers a detailed step-by-step guide to a do-it-yourself upgrade with photos. His method is particularly clever because rather than buying a blank drive, Molter just buys an inexpensive USB external drive, which allowed him to both create a fully bootable backup from his original drive and provided an enclosure for his old hard drive—all for less than half the cost of an upgrade from Apple. The old drive makes for a handy complete backup or, properly formatted, can be sold on classified ad or auction sites for the equivalent of a cash-back trade-in. The same general idea will work with any laptop with a 3.5″ 2.5″ hard drive (which is most of them), and doesn’t involve any tools more complicated than a small screwdriver.

Wired’s How-To Wiki runs down how to optimize your web connection using tools like OpenDNS, a regular old router, and add-ons that block bandwidth-hogging content you don’t care about. If you’re stuck on dial-up or a cellphone data modem, see also our guide on how to survive a slow internet connection.

Got a stack of LPs you want to store on your hard drive instead of on a shelf? Wired’s How-To Wiki runs down the steps to convert LPs into MP3s using free software. Of course, you’ll need a turntable and a computer with a line-in port on the sound card to get the job done, too. Photo by timsamoff.

Reader Justin writes in with a clever idea for quickly launching downloads with the popular command-line download manager, wget. His method: Make wget available to Launchy, then pass the URL of the file you want to download to wget through Launchy. Here’s how it works:

1. Install Launchy.
2. Download wget and copy the files from the unzipped folder to C:Windows.
3. Create a shortcut to C:Windows/wget.exe and rename it dl.
4. Place that shortcut in your Start menu. To configure wget to start minimized, right-click the shortcut, select Properties, and tick the checkbox next to Run minimized.
5. Finally, to set the download directory, set the working directory (Start in) to your download folder of choice.
6. Now simply rebuild your Launchy index, and voila!

To download a file with wget, just invoke Launchy, type ‘dl’ (though I actually stuck with wget), hit Tab, then paste the link. It works great, and it’s a really handy shortcut if you want to start a quick download. Not terribly familiar with wget but like this idea? Check out our previous guide to mastering wget. If the command line isn’t your cup of tea but you wouldn’t mind a little more flexibility with your downloads, take a quick look at the Hive Five Best Download Managers. Thanks Justin!

Whether you’re on Wi-Fi or an EDGE/3G cellular connection, many web pages would load up a heck of a lot faster on the iPhone’s Mobile Safari browser if you weren’t stuck waiting for “LOWER YOUR INTEREST RATES NOW” and the like to push through on Mobile Safari. If you’ve jailbroken your iPhone or iPod touch, however, there’s a none-too-hard hack you can make to block a good number of ads from slowing down your page loads. Here’s the step-by-step instructions for doing so:

1. If you haven’t done so already, you’ll need to jailbreak your iPhone or iPod touch. We’ve previously posted guides for doing so in Windows with WinPwn, and with the PwnageTool on a Mac.
2. Click the Cydia icon on your jailbroken device. Choose the “Search” function from the bottom, and type in “OpenSSH” (without the quotes) until you can see that package. Click it, choose “Confirm” in the upper-right to install, then re-start your device.
3. Once your iPhone/touch reboots, head to Settings, then Wi-Fi, then click the arrow next to the Wi-Fi server you use at home. Write down the IP address. Head back to Settings, choose General, and set Auto-Lock to “Never” (for the time being).
4. You’ll need an FTP client with SFTP (secure SSH connection over FTP) to connect and trade files with your device. Windows users should try the free FileZilla (which also comes in a no-install portable package), and Mac users’ best bet is Cyberduck.
5. On your computer, download this replacement hosts.php file from the James is Bored site. Open your FTP client, set it to connect over an SFTP connection, and then put your iPhone/touch’s IP address in the “host” section. Your username and password (unless you changed them) are root and alpine, respectively. The connection may take a few minutes at first, and you may be asked to accept a host key; say yes to any prompts, and be prepared to try again if the connection fails at first.
6. Navigate to to the /etc folder at your device’s root. Grab the hosts.php file you see there, and place it somewhere secure on your computer (i.e. somewhere it won’t get over-written with the James is Bored modified file). This can usually be done in a drag-and-drop fashion.
7. Copy the modified hosts.php file to your device and replace the version there. Close your FTP client, and restart your iPhone or iPod touch.

You should start seeing blank spaces or compressed frames where ads used to be. This hack will still leave blank spaces where Flash-based ads would normally be, but display ads from a number of common ad servers should be blocked. If anything important gets blocked, you can easily re-copy your original hosts.php file back to your device.

I found a few sites—including the New York Times—where the ad-blocking just didn’t seem to work, likely because the ads are served through an in-house server. Other places, it worked liked a charm.

Got another method for scaling back ads on your iPhone? Have a better, compatible hosts file to replace the default with? Tell us about it in the comments.