At first glance, people might mistake the Fiio E5 for some sort of cheap iPod Shuffle clone. Upon closer inspection, however, they will realize that this is not even a digital audio player, but in reality is a clip-on headphone amplifier that functions as a volume booster for your favorite portable media player. It comes with an Apple-style clip, measuring a diminutive 44mm x 38mm x 12.2mm. Despite its small size, it still packs in a pretty impressive performance, capable of 150mW (at 16O; or 12MW to 300O) power output with under 0.009-percent distortion at 10mW. This makes it 30% more powerful than its predecessor, and can last for up to 20 hours of continuous audio playback before requiring a recharge. The Fiio E5 is tipped to retail for less than $20.

(Via Ubergizmo.)

For some time Firefox extensions have allowed users to redesign GMail but now Google has released some official themes that allow you to jazz up the interface. There are 30-odd themes available that can be access through Settings.

At the moment, the themes are being rolled out so you may not be able to see the option yet. More at the Official Gmail Blog. [via]

(Via A Welsh View.)

What would you build an extension to change if you could?  Let us know in the comments!

Download YouTube Videos

Ant Toolbar - The official toolbar for Ant.com includes a YouTube video downloader as well as a built in FLV player so you can play the videos you’ve snagged right from there.

Embedded Objects - This add-on will download pretty much any type of embedded file, including your favorite YouTube videos.

Fast Video Download - Fast Video Download works with numerous video sites and will also add a download link under embedded YouTube videos you find on other sites.

Flash Video Downloader - Besides allowing you to download your favorite videos from YouTube, this add-on will download flash videos from other sites and even games.

Flash Video Resources Downloader - Will let you download videos from most flash-based video sharing sites, will also let you enter a YouTube URL and be presented with the download information without needing to go to the page.

Magic’s Video - Downloader - Assists you with downloading FLV videos from around two dozen video sharing sites, including the market leader, YouTube.

Media Converter - This extension will allow you to not only download your desired videos, but it will also convert them right in the browser to the format you desire.

Sothink Web Video Downloader - Besides downloading videos from YouTube, Sothink will also let you capture videos in swf, wmv, asf, avi, mov, rm and rmvb formats.

Video DownloadHelper - Once installed, Video DownloadHelper’s icon will animate when you come to a page that has a video you can download.  Once you start the download process, you can also choose which format you want to save the file as.

Tools

Better YouTube - Collects some of the most popular Greasemonkey scripts for YouTube that do things like give you an alternate player, a cleaner theater interface and more.

GoogleTube - This extension adds a YouTube icon next to Google search results that have videos associated with them.  Click on the button and you can watch the videos directly on the search results page.

Groowe Firefox Toolbar - Gives you a toolbar that lets you search YouTube, Digg, Delicious and more.

Now Playing X - Allows you to feed videos you are watching to the Now Playing feature on messengers like Live, Yahoo, AIM, Skype and GTalk.

RickRadar - If you really fear being RickRolled, install this and it will evaluate pages. If it feels there is a high probability of Rick Astley being there, it redirects you.

TubeStop - Only has one job and that is to stop YouTube videos from autoplaying.

VodPod - Allows you to grab the embed code for a video and store it at VodPod.com and then publish it to your blog with just a click.

You Old Enough? - Tired of signing in to verify your age? This add-on will let you bypass the whole process.

YouPlayer - YouPlayer allows you to drag videos to your playlist and form your own list from around the Web.  If you find anything you like, right click on it and you can choose to download it.

YouTube Cinema - Allows you to play all YouTube videos in a default that shows them in cinema view.

YouTube Comment Snob - This add-on allows you to hide comments from people with numerous misspellings, excessive punctuation, all capital letters, no capital letters and so on.

YouTube Tooltip - Allows you to hover your mouse over a YouTube link and see what the video may be before you click on it. Can also show author, ratings and number of views.

(Via Mashable!.)

Having kids is a good thing - once they’re old enough, you can always boss them around the house with this thing called ‘chores’, and shoveling snow from the driveway is one of those tasks involved. The Roofus concept could be a replacement for kids with heavy bones though, as it is able to collect and dump snow automatically or via a remote, where the latter is certainly much more fun as you get to perform your house chore from the comfort and warmth of your home with a mug of hot chocolate on the table, waiting to reward you once the chore is done. Good thing the designers have decided to make the Roofus versatile, as it can be hooked up to a bunch of attachments for use around the garden even after winter is over.

(Via Ubergizmo.)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(Via Slashdot.)

10. Use Google to read HTML copies of huge documents

Ah, Adobe Acrobat. It’s free and universally used to view documents exactly as they’d print, but few things bottleneck a browsing session like an 8MB PDF file, especially if your browser crashes before showing it. But we can all benefit from Google’s zeal to index everything on Earth. If you’ve got a Google Docs or Gmail account, uploading or emailing a PDF gives you an option to view its as an HTML, which is going to come through a lot faster. The same holds for PowerPoint presentations, Word 2007 .docx files, and nearly any document you can find in Google search. One of those work-arounds that’s so simple, you’ll be glad when you remember it when you’re trying to jam through that presentation on a terrible hotel Wi-Fi connection.

9. Use TraceMonkey in Firefox 3.1

More and more developers and established web sites are moving their services online and using JavaScript to create interactive web pages these days. So when you’re browsing Flickr, MySpace/Facebook, or nearly anything made by Google, as a few examples, the speed at which your browser runs all the developers’ code can matter a lot. For more responsive pages, it’s hard to beat the mind-blowing speed of TraceMonkey, the new JavaScript engine for Firefox 3.1. Mozilla offers nightly builds of TraceMonkey-enabled Firefox 3.1 (called ‘Minefield’ when you run it, because it can be a bit, well, buggy), but Windows users can also test drive 3.1 without harming their existing Firefox. Of course, depending on who you ask (and which test you run), Google Chrome’s V8 and the brand-new script engine in WebKit, the foundation of Safari, are potentially faster. In any case, your current browser probably isn’t this fast, so taking these speed demons for a test drive can’t hurt.

8. Use Safari or Opera

Look at nearly any web site’s traffic statistics, and Apple’s Safari and the Norse-made Opera browser are just a sliver compared to how many use Internet Explorer and Firefox. In our own browser speed tests, though, we found Opera and Safari to be the champs at loading web pages and rendering JavaScript and CSS templates, respectively. There are lots of reasons to use Firefox (extensions! theming! Greasemonkey!) and Internet Explorer (some sites only work with it!), but if your browser is mainly just a window on the web, consider keeping a copy of Safari, Opera, or the well-rounded Google Chrome on hand for speeding up your site visits.

7. Make Faster, Fool-Proof Downloads with Down Them All

Right-clicking a picture or link, selecting ‘Save Link As,’ choosing a download spot—it gets real old, real fast, especially if you try to do it on every picture in a Flickr set, every MP3 on a music blog, or anywhere else you do your downloading. Free Firefox extension DownThemAll, our readers’ favorite download manager, makes it easy to do all those things, or set up smart filters and settings to make any page with tons of files easy to navigate. For a good guide on setting that up, try our tutorial on supercharging your Firefox downloads with DownThemAll.

6. Bump up your cache size (and make other configuration tweaks)

Another set of revelations from living in dial-up land, the configuration options that you’d normally never touch are serious life-savers if you’re on weak Wi-Fi, an older, slower system, or just tired of watching your mouse cursor do it’s ‘waiting’ animation over and over. Upping your cache size definitely speeds up your back button action and speeds up repetitive banners and graphics. Sites that really don’t need graphics to work can be disabled with site-by-site exceptions in Firefox, and these days, any browser can open sites you might need to wait on in a new tab while you keep grooving in another. For getting something done on Google Docs or Zoho, reading feeds in Google Reader, or managing tasks in Remember the Milk, there’s Google’s Gears extension to work offline and connect only when you need to sync your data.

5. Throttle your home wireless network

Your home’s wireless router doesn’t have to be a neutral observer while watching your XBox, BitTorrent downloads, multiple laptops, and other web-connected apps and gear fight it out for a finite amount of bandwidth. Many routers let you negotiate connection rate treaties using Quality of Service settings—and those that don’t can often be made to do so by installing DD-WRT or Tomato. The end result? You can let World of Warcraft run rampant in the evenings, set BitTorrent free in the dead of night, and keep your browser unthrottled during the day. Check out Adam’s guide to ensuring a fast net connection when you need it for the geeky details.

4. Swap heavy sites for RSS feeds and mobile versions

Here’s a not-so-secret tip about your Lifehacker editors—we couldn’t possibly read the full version of every blog, news site, and aggregation site we pull our post material from every day. RSS feeds are this blog’s bread and butter, and they’re great for getting a lot of reading done in a short amount of time. We’re split fairly evenly between the Google Reader webapp and NetNewsWire/NewsGator’s desktop clients, but both are a great way to catch up on your regular web reading with a minimum of bandwidth, or no connection whatsoever. Along those lines, you can run any site that’s chock full of text-y news through the Google Mobilizer for a version that’s fast enough for a mobile phone, and very fast on a desktop.

3. Block Flash and/or JavaScript

Our side editor suggested this move after spending a week on a dial-up connection. Firefox users have it easy: Install the Adblock Plus and Flashblock extensions, and sites bogged down mostly by unnecessary Flash and huge display ads will come through a lot quicker. If you’re cool with tweaking your router a bit, you can set up universal ad-blocking through it with the Tomato firmware, or use a solution specific to Chrome, on Internet Explorer through the Toggle Flash add-on or IE7Pro plug-in, and even on your iPhone or iPod touch. Lifehacker is, of course, an ad-supported site, and we’d ask that you use such tools only when bandwidth or time are at a serious premium, or for sites that bludgeon you over the head with lowering interest rates, free laptops, and the like.

2. Set up OpenDNS on your browser or router

If you’re a customer of Time Warner, Verizon, or most any commercial internet provider, you’ll occasionally end up at an ad-filled page whenever you typo your way to a non-existent page, and how quickly your browser knows where to find its data depends on their heavily-taxed servers. You can do a lot better with OpenDNS, a free service that can speed up your page connections, open pages from keyword shortcuts, serve as a parental filter, and avoid spam-y ‘no site here’ pages. The service provides detailed how-to instructions for both individual computers and routers, so it’s definitely worth at least a try.

1. Use Secure, Automatic Passwords

Auto-saving, auto-filling passwords have made their way into most every browser, but, by default, they’re only as secure as your ability to keep someone away from your keyboard. If your browser offers a master password option, use it—in Firefox, it’s the only barrier between you and a single button unveiling all your passwords to snoopy friends or nefarious interlopers. Of course, if you’re using the same weak password across all your site logins, you’re just asking to have somebody get into your email, private social messages, and other private data. Using a secure password system can fix that. If you’re using multiple browsers across different systems, you can keep your time-saving password fillers synced with Dropbox, or take care of bookmarks as well with the (Firefox only) Foxmarks.

Whether you need to get your browsing done quick, or you’re just a fan of streamlined web surfing, what do you use to get more out of your time online? Tell us your own tips and tricks in the comments.

(Via Lifehacker.)

(Via MacUpdate - Mac OS X.)

This is a guide that, if followed, will unchain your Apple TV from its cruel iTunes tether, turning it into the useful living room conduit of music, video and web-based content it should have been all along via the media center software Boxee. Boxee can be installed fairly easily via the ATV’s USB port to bring Hulu and Comedy Central streaming, playback of any video or music file anywhere on your network in virtually any file type imagineable, and a bevy of internet A/V sources like Flickr, Last.fm, NPR and BBC podcasts and tons of others—all upping the usefulness and fun of Apple’s notoriously underachieving box by a factor of 10, easily. If you have an ATV, Boxee is a must-install, and it’s 100% free. Let’s get started…

(Via MAKE Magazine.)

Is it a gift card with a digital camera, or a digital camera with a gift card? We’re not quite sure, but this holiday season, Target will begin selling a combo gift card/digital camera, giving customers something to do with their gift certificate other than just spending it while being insulted that a loved one didn’t put a little more thought into the present.

The quality might sound bad, but it’s probably on par with most camera phones. The hardware features a 1.2MP sensor with 8MB of onboard storage holding 50 pictures. If the camera itself sounds useless, realize that it comes bundled with a USB cord, driver disk, instruction manual and a voucher for 40 free prints at Target. The USB cord alone and voucher alone might be worth the hassle, even if you don’t plan on ever using the camera.

Running on two AAA batteries (that’s how they get you!) the digital camera gift certificates will be available at no additional charge (unless ordered online) in denominations ranging from $50 to $1000. Those giving gifts in excess of $100 might consider a name brand digital camera instead. [Target via gamertell and Coolest Gadgets]

(Via Gizmodo.)

The revenue for the network as a whole was reported to have tripled in 2008, though the press release doesn’t have any hard numbers as to what the total dollar amount was. Oddly, and unlike most media networks, rather than talking specifically about viewership and download numbers, Rev3 highlighed the amount of watching going on by quantifying it in minutes of ‘viewer engagement.’

It’s definitely a term that’s being used to obfuscate the amount of actual viewership taking place.  Given how they seem to sell their ads (pre-rolls, post-rolls, host-read ads and certain affiliate relationships), it might be a more telling and insightful number to report exactly how many episodes viewed there were, rather than saying simply that they had achieved 140 million minutes of engagement monthly.

‘Despite today’s tumultuous economic climate, Revision3 is making huge strides, dramatically increasing both viewership and revenue,’ said CEO Jim Louderback in a statement today. ‘Like everyone else, we’re being cautious in how we approach 2009, but we anticipate continued growth over the coming months.’

They highlighted quite a few of their 60 advertising partners, including the Air Force, EA, Sony, Anheuser-Busch, Dolby, Virgin America, Go Daddy, Zune, Dr. Pepper, Carmex, Adobe, Microsoft and Axe.

The ones that are most prevalently advertising on the network these days are GoDaddy, Netflix, Michelob and Becks beer, GoToMeeting, and GoToMyPC, as we mentioned last month. Most of these seem to be affiliate style relationships, which definitely leaves the network with a lot of head room to grow.

2009 will see the online video market’s battle of the business models.

Revision3 is definitely one of the horses I’ve been watching run the video network race since their start in the business, and I’ve always had an affinity to its founders and many of their on-air talent. They’ve done a good job of pulling together a combination of recognizable faces, interesting genres and engaging shows. Because they’ve approached the business as creatives focused on video rather than aggregators with a broad-stroke approach (like Wizzard Media), they’ve an uphill battle on two fronts.

The first difficult front is that of content and audience monetization. Their application of commercialization has been uneven so far, though it seems to have markedly improved since the hire of Jim Louderback as CEO. Since the majority of the team is so focused on the creative side rather than the monetization side, this is to be expected, to a certain extent.

The other side of the business that’s an uphill battle for Rev3 has been the high cost of doing business as compared to a lot of the other players in their business.  Aggregators like Wizzard don’t have to front the costs of production, only that of distribution. That’s why they’re able to sustain their business off the same type of advertisments that Rev3 may have a hard time breaking even with.

This isn’t to say that Wizzard has a superior business model.  I think that if you talk to the business side over at Wizzard, they’ll readily admit that on average, the shows being produced at Revision3 are superior to what they host - that’s to be expected. Wizzard hosts tens of thousands of producers, whereas Revision3 hosts tens of producers.

That’s why Revision3 has made moves to crowdsource some of their production, but at it’s heart Rev3 is still a production house (not an aggregator). During the tough economic times we’re now facing for the forseeable future, it’s going to be a battle of the business models to see which one is boud for success.

(Via Mashable!.)