Avicennasis - Apply directly to the forehead!

Senators want to end telecom immunity for spying program

Looking to add a little more stealth and a little less "Here I am, world!" to your web browsing? StayInvisible not only catalogs free proxy servers but provides tools to test proxies and information about anonymity and encryption.

Many resources that provide proxy lists provide little else. StayInvisible has lists of proxy servers as well as online tools for testing just how anonymous your connection is: proxy checkers, IP verifiers, and email testers. In addition to the proxy tools, they also have a proxy encyclopedia to help you decipher the various terms used, and a basic text encryption tool.

Have a favorite proxy site or program? Sound off in the comments.

The Consumer Action Handbook is a free government publication, stuffed with advice on filing consumer complaints, finding money for college, resolving air travel issues, and much more. You can grab a free PDF now, or have it mailed to anybody.

The tech-savvy types will probably just want to download a PDF or browse its topics online. If you know you've got a lot of buying and money issues coming up, or you want to help out a friend or relative more prone to reading a dead-tree version, free copies (up to 10) can be sent just about anywhere. It's a decent resource if you're looking for unbiased answers.

Whether your filing system has gotten away from you or it was never really under control to begin with, you can use our handy guide to beat it back into shape. Photo by juan23for.

Many people have a filing system that is largely accidental. At some point they had more papers than they could store effectively on their desk so they started squirreling them away in cabinets, drawers, and so on. In other cases you inherit a filing system, like with a new job, and an office packed with paperwork.

What can you do to tame your file cabinet and make it a useful storage and reference tool instead of a paper orphanage? You need a filing system workflow. A filing system workflow is a road map for papers to follow as they navigate through your office. We can't provide an exact road map for you, but by answering some of the questions below and assessing your home and office needs you'll be able to construct an effective filing system workflow of your own.

Make an Assessment: What do you want from your filing system and what does your filing system need to provide? Whether looking at your personal file cabinet in your home office or a bank of cabinets in your traditional office, before you do anything with your file system you need to hammer out what exactly it is that you want from the system and why you're displeased with its current state enough to be reading a guide to beating it into shape.

• Can you easily find documents?
• Is file removal and replacement easy to do or do you have to force folders back in?
• Are files within cabinets you use most frequently current and immediately necessary and useful?
• Do you have adequate space for the files you need to have on hand?

Some issues are easily resolved. If your difficulty in finding documents is the handwritten labels left by the previous occupant of the office you can remedy that situation with a label maker and a free afternoon. Other issues will take a little more time to sort through, like having far too little storage space for the files at hand. Before you put in a purchase order for ten new file cabinets however, you'll need to do something first.

Purge Your File Cabinet: You've looked over your cabinets and listed some reasons why you're not happy with them, but before you make any radical changes you need to dive in and ditch the dead weight. There are two kinds of file cabinet purges, in one phase you shred old and unnecessary files and in the other you move necessary but old files into deep storage—deep storage can be a separate file cabinet in the basement, the records room at your office, or any place that is away from your central office. What are candidates for the categories?

Candidates for Shredding:

• Utilities Bills - If you have a current bill in your hand and the information on it is correct, you can shred the old ones. Do you really need a cable bill from 2002?
• Pay Stubs from Prior Years - Once you receive W-2 or other official document from your employer at the end of the year, you can ditch the pay stubs.
• Bank and ATM receipts - When you see the amount appear on your online or paper statement, there is usually no pressing need to keep these annoying little pieces of paper.
• Credit Card Statements - You can shred these, like utility bills, once you have a new one with the correct balance on it. You may consider placing a credit card statement that has a large purchase on it like an HDTV in with the warranty information for that large purchase if your credit card has extra consumer protections that would help with replacing the larger purchase.

Candidates for Deep Storage:

• Tax Returns - The oft cited rule here is 7 years. Almost all audits occur within 3 years, but who are we to risk the ire of an agency with an 8 million dollar firearms budget?
• Bank Statements - Keep bank statements for at least 3 years, most people error on the side of caution and keep them for the same 7 year span they retain tax documents.
• Critical Personal Documents - Marriage licenses, birth certificates, and other difficult to replace documents should be kept in deep storage—preferably a waterproof and fireproof deep storage location.
• Retirement Saving Statements - Anything related to investments, contributions to an IRA, and so on should be kept indefinitely.

The above example list is in no way comprehensive, but it gives you a starting point for considering the lifespan of your individual files. If you have a fairly simple tax situation you can find tons of reference lists online regarding how long you should keep various files. If you have any questions, we highly recommend consulting with your accountant.

Create a Workflow: Now you've assessed things that you would like to change about your file system—needs better labels, cabinets are poorly designed, etc.—and you've purged files to create some room in your cabinets. The creation of a file workflow will ensure that you're not sitting there in a year spending a weekend beating your file system back into shape. Your file workflow can take several shapes depending on the needs of your office and the size of the organization system you're wrangling, but for simplicity's sake we're going to assume you're not the archivist for a multinational corporation.

A common file workflow for a home office might look something like this:

Daily: Empty inbox and sort mail. File or shred new documents by end of day.

Monthly: As new bills come in, shred old statements. Once a month take a few minutes to read over the labels in your file cabinet and determine if any files can be shifted to deep storage. January is a critical month for being merciless about what goes to deep storage, lest you start the new year with the old year's clutter.

Quarterly: In addition to your monthly appraisal, look over your deep storage and see if any files there have outlived their usefulness.

Yearly: Once a year you'll be sifting through files for information related to taxes. This is an excellent time to be brutal in your weeding. Send old files to the shredder, cull out files related to projects that are defunct or no longer interesting. Any old bills, receipts, and so on that aren't directly related to your taxes and somehow escaped your eye earlier in the year should be shredded.

Adhere to the Workflow: You don't lose weight by thinking about exercising and intending to eat better, and you don't get a tight and easy to control file system by intending to finally empty your inbox and get around to sorting through your files. If your file system is a wreck you're going to have to spend some time beating it into shape, labeling folders, and making decisions about what to shred and what to put into deep storage. Once you've got the file beating out of the way, however, you'll simply need to follow the workflow you've set down for yourself and the documents and files will naturally find their way to where they belong and practically march themselves to the shredder when their time is up. Using a file workflow is a habit that rewards you with an easy to use filing system and a file cabinet that won't creak under the weight of useless files.

For more information about setting up a functional file system, we'd recommend checking out a past feature Geek to Live: Extreme Makeover, Filing Cabinet Edition.

I remember back when I was 11 years old, I was trying really hard to get a ham radio license so I could talk to people all over the world.  I still remember staying up late nights, trying to learn English and Ham Radio at the same time.  Well, Make has a great tutorial on how to get started on Ham Radio without a license.

In the days before Internet and Dial-ups, I think Ham Radio was like the "thing" you can do to talk to people all over the world.  I am not sure how popular Ham Radio is nowdays but I am sure it's still very a lively community.

Boy, I want to pursue this Ham Radio path again soon…

There's plenty of fun to be had with ham radio even if you don't have a license. You can get a hand held radio to listen in on what's going on while you are out and about or get a base station/desktop radio. You can listen to activities on local repeaters. Repeaters allow ham radio operators to talk locally, they send a signal to a repeater and it transmits the signal to other radios in the area. You can listen in to their conversations or to Nets, regular ham meet us on repeaters that discuss a certain topic. A larger desktop radio with a longer antenna will also be able to receive amateur HF communications sent directly from ham radios around the world, you can listen to conversations from places like Germany, Kazakhstan, or Japan.

via make

Brought to you by: Zedomax.com

The FCC today launched OpenInternet.gov, a new web site designed to engender discussion on the topic of net neutrality. We're big supporters of net neutrality around Lifehacker HQ, considering we're all about the unrestricted use of broadband connections. That means, for example, that we don't think ISPs should be able to throttle your internet connection based on what you choose to use your bandwidth for. (See previously mentioned Measurement Lab to test if your connection's being throttled.)

Wired points out that the FCC is even going so far as to say that net neutrality should extend to all broadband services, from your wired connection at home to the wireless data connection on your phone. [OpenInternet.gov]

The early bird may get the worm, but there's something to be said about burning the midnight oil. In fact, according to a new study, staying up later and longer may increase alertness and productivity more than being an early riser.

Photo by myyorgda.

According to the study as reported by Scientific American:

An hour and a half after waking, early birds and night owls were equally alert and showed no difference in attention-related brain activity. But after being awake for 10 and a half hours, night owls had grown more alert, performing better on a reaction-time task requiring sustained attention and showing increased activity in brain areas linked to attention.

Of course we wouldn't be surprised if another study were to come along touting the opposite conclusion, so it's worth taking this news with a grain of salt, but the post is an interesting addition to the early bird versus night owl discussion. If you're looking to find your peak performance time, check out our previous post on the best times morning people and night owls should get work done.

Have something you want other people to read but not spam bots and search-engine crawlers? TxtNinja will turn your plain text into an image to keep the bots at bay.

Why might you want to forgo plain text? One of the more popular reasons is to mask your email to keep spam bots from sucking it up as they scan web pages. Leaving your email@someprovider.com in the open makes it ripe for picking. TxtNinja allows you to turn that plain text into:

The result is an image file which is human friendly but not machine readable.

TxtNinja allows you to change the font, font size, color, background, and supports international character sets for a dozen non-English languages.

According to research conducted by the Nielsen company (you know, the TV ratings folks), the average internet user now spends 68 hours online per month. That may sound like a lot, but it only comes out to an average of about two and a quarter hours a day—something we'd guess many Lifehacker readers demolish. So how about you? 68 hours seem about right? Let's hear your thoughts in the comments. [Nielsen via Mashable]

Twenty-four big names in internet and tech pen an open letter in support of net neutrality, IMDb turns 19, and Gmail users have better credit scores than people who use Yahoo Mail.

• Credit Trends
  Online credit-checking service Credit Karma displays what average credit scores look like by email domain. Yahoo is the worst, Gmail is one of the best, and Hotmail falls somewhere in between. [Credit Karma]