Whyd for iPhone Makes Your Favorite Songs from Around the Web Portable

iOS: Whyd, the song sharing social network that lets you save tracks you find on YouTube, SoundCloud, and elsewhere around the web, took the wraps off their iPhone app today. Whyd for iPhone brings everything great about the service to your mobile device.

I've been testing out the mobile app for a while now (and yes, an Android app is on the way) and it works like a charm. If you have a Whyd profile like mine that's stuffed with songs you've found and saved from all around the web, Whyd gives you a single place to listen to them whether you're in the car or the train, or just sitting at your desk. Simlarly, you can edit your saved songs and playlists right from your mobile device.

You can also see your stream of songs, posted by users you follow, take a look at new tracks recently uploaded, get suggestions for popular users or musicians on the service you should follow or check out, and more. The app is completely free, and available now in the iTunes App Store. Hit the link below to grab it.

Whyd (Free) | iTunes App Store

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Take the Doors Off Your Kitchen Cabinets for Sheer Convenience

Think about it for a minute: Do you really need doors for the cabinets in your kitchen? Apartment Envy's Kerra Huerta took them off and she's never going back.

It seems like a silly idea at first glance, but it can be useful. Unless you have a major pest problem or dust problem, or have pets in the house, the contents of kitchen cabinets don't need robust protection. But you will use and access these items often, so why have one extra step to get to them? And then there are other hassles like a hard-to-open cabinet door or one that always needs to be slammed loudly. For your convenience, you might want to consider removing your cabinet doors altogether.

Huerta's tip seems especially useful for small kitchens like hers, where open cabinet doors can take up precious space, and give you the odd head injury too. The best part is that you can experiment with this trick easily to see if it works for you. Just unscrew the hinges and take off the doors, but don't remove the fittings yet. Try it out for a week or two and see if it works for you before making a long-term decision.

At the Apartment Therapy link below, you can check out other tips from Huerta, like using blackboard paint on her kitchen walls.

Kerra's Picture-Perfect Perch | Apartment Therapy via The Kitchn

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Piconka Syncs Web Clips with Google Drive (and Looks Good Doing It)

Chrome: Right now, Evernote is probably the best way to clip and save items on the web. But if you want something simple that works with your Google account, then Piconka is worth a look.

Like Evernote, Piconka is a web clipper. The free Chrome extension is easy to use. Select text or an image with your mouse cursor and drag it to the center of your screen. A small green box with a "+" will appear. Drop your selected data in it and you're done.

To check out all your clips, hit the Piconka icon in your toolbar for a good-looking pane where you can also drag-and-drop those items. You can also hook up the service with your Google account so that all the clips are saved directly in your Google Drive in a custom folder. It seems that Piconka is also planning to add the option to save to your Dropbox or Box account in the future, as those options are currently greyed out in the Settings.

Piconka | via Hacker News

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Check a Hotel's PCI Compliance Before Swiping Your Credit Card

When your credit card is charged at a hotel, are you sure your data is secure? Consumer Reports advocates asking for an "Attestation of Compliance" certificate from the hotel to be on the safe side.

A survey found that several hotel managers were unaware that they needed to be PCI compliant—a standard of checks and measures that credit card companies require businesses to have. These include things like running an updated antivirus and firewall, not providing easy physical access to systems, and more. But several motels and hotels fail to live up to these standards, according to Consumer Reports. So what can you do?

When checking in, ask the owner or manager to show you the hotel's "Attestation of Compliance," a document that the business is required to have, which shows that it met minimum standards for data security as of the date of the report. We see no reason why any business should hide this document from paying customers who give them their personal and payment card information.

If this attestation isn't shown, Consumer Reports recommends using a credit card instead of a debit card as the potential loss is easier to trace, rectify and less damaging to your savings. Ideally, you should check for this attestation at the time of booking, not at checkout.

Despite your best efforts, the worst can happen, so here's what to do if your credit card is hacked.

Are you booked in a hacker-friendly hotel? | Consumer Reports

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Eight Terminal Utilities Every OS X Command Line User Should Know

The OS X Terminal opens up a world of powerful UNIX utilities and scripts. If you're migrating from Linux, you'll find many familiar commands work the way you expect. But power users often aren't aware that OS X comes with a number of its own text-based utilities not found on any other operating system.

Learning about these Mac-only programs can make you more productive on the command line and help you bridge the gap between UNIX and your Mac.

This post originally appeared on Mitchell Cohen's Blog, Mitchchn.me.

1. Open

open opens files, directories and applications. Exciting, right? But it really does come in handy as a command-line double-click. For instance, typing:

$ open /Applications/Safari.app/ 

…will launch Safari as if you had double-clicked its icon in the Finder. Recall that OS X apps are not true executables, but actually special directories (bundles) with the extension .app. open is the only way to launch these programs from the command line. It can also launch other files that are truly bundles, such as Pages documents.)

If you point open at a file instead, it will try to load the file with its associated GUI application. open screenshot.png on an image will open that image in Preview. You can set the -a flag to choose the app yourself, or -e to open the file for editing in TextEdit.

Running open on a directory will take you straight to that directory in a Finder window. This is especially useful for bringing up the current directory by typing open .

Remember that the integration between Finder and Terminal goes both ways – if you drag a file from Finder into a Terminal window, its full path gets pasted into the command line.

2. Pbcopy and Pbpaste

These two commands let you copy and paste text from the command line. Of course, you could also just use your mouse—but the real power of pbcopy and pbpaste comes from the fact that they're UNIX commands, and that means they benefit from piping, redirection, and the ability to be in scripts in conjunction with other commands. Typing:

$ ls ~ | pbcopy 

…will copy a list of files in your home directory to the OS X clipboard. You can easily capture the contents of a file:

$ pbcopy < blogpost.txt 

..or do something crazier. This hacked-up script will grab the link of the latest Google doodle and copy it to your clipboard.

<code>$ curl <a href="<a href=" http:="" http://www.google.com="" doodles#oodles="" archive"="">http://ift.tt/1lL4zLu>">http://ift.tt/1wm4nVb;>http://ift.tt/1lL4zLu> | grep -A5 'latest-doodle on' | grep 'img src' | sed s/.*'

Using pbcopy with pipes is a great way to capture the output of a command without having to scroll up and carefully select it. This makes it easy to share diagnostic information. pbcopy and pbpaste can also be used to automate or speed up certain kinds of tasks. For instance, if you want to save email subject lines to a task list, you could copy the subjects from Mail.app and run:

$ pbpaste >> tasklist.txt 

3. Mdfind

Many a Linux power user has tried to use locate to search for files on a Mac and then quickly discovered that it didn't work. There's always the venerable UNIX find command, but OS X comes with its own killer search tool: Spotlight. So why not tap into its power from the command line?

That's exactly what mdfind does. Anything Spotlight can find, mdfind can find too. That includes the ability to search inside files and metadata.

mdfind comes with a few conveniences that make it stand out from its big blue brother. For instance, the -onlyin flag can restrict the search to a single directory:

$ mdfind -onlyin ~/Documents essay 

The mdfind database should stay up to date in the background, but you can also troubleshoot it (as well as Spotlight) using mdutil. If Spotlight isn't working the way it should, mdutil -E will erase the index and rebuild it from scratch. You can also turn off indexing entirely with mdutil -i off.

4. Screencapture

screencapture lets you take many different kinds of screenshots. It's similar to Grab.app and the keyboard shortcuts cmd + shift + 3 and cmd + shift + 4, except it's far more flexible. Here are just a few different ways you can use screencapture:

Capture the contents of the screen, including the cursor, and attach the resulting image (named 'image.png') to a new Mail message:

$ screencapture -C -M image.png 

Select a window using your mouse, then capture its contents without the window's drop shadow and copy the image to the clipboard:

$ screencapture -c -W 

Capture the screen after a delay of 10 seconds and then open the new image in Preview:

$ screencapture -T 10 -P image.png 

Select a portion of the screen with your mouse, capture its contents, and save the image as a pdf:

$ screencapture -s -t pdf image.pdf 

To see more options, type screencapture --help

5. Launchctl

launchctl lets you interact with the OS X init script system, launchd. With launch daemons and launch agents, you can control the services that start up when you boot your computer. You can even set up scripts to run periodically or at timed intervals in the background, similar to cron jobs on Linux.

For example, if you'd like to have the Apache web server start automatically when you turn on your Mac, simply type:

$ sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.apache.httpd.plist 

Running launchctl list will show you what launch scripts are currently loaded. sudo launchctl unload [path/to/script] will stop and unload running scripts, and adding the -w flag will remove those scripts permanently from your boot sequence. I like to run this one on all the auto-update "helpers" created by Adobe apps and Microsoft Office.

Launchd scripts are stored in the following locations:

~/Library/LaunchAgents

/Library/LaunchAgents

/Library/LaunchDaemons

/System/Library/LaunchAgents

/System/Library/LaunchDaemons

To see what goes into a launch agent or daemon, there's a great blog post by Paul Annesley that walks you through the file format. And if you'd like to learn how to write your own launchd scripts, Apple provides some helpful documentation on their Developer site. There's also the fantastic Lingon app if you'd prefer to avoid the command line entirely.

6. Say

This is a fun one: say converts text to speech, using the same TTS engine OS X uses for VoiceOver. Without any options, say will simply speak whatever text you give it out loud:

$ say "Never trust a computer you can't lift." 

You can also use say to speak the contents of a text file with the -f flag, and you can store the resulting audio clip with the -o flag:

$ say -f mynovel.txt -o myaudiobook.aiff 

The say command can be useful in place of console logging or alert sounds in scripts. For instance, you can set up an Automator or Hazel script to do batch file processing and then announce the task's completion with say.

But the most enjoyable use for say is rather more sinister: if you have ssh access to a friend or coworker's Mac, you can silently log into their machine and haunt them through the command line. Give 'em a Siri-ous surprise.

You can set the voice (and language!) used by say by changing the default setting in the Dictation & Speech panel in System Preferences.

7. Diskutil

diskutil is a command line interface to the Disk Utility app that comes with OS X. It can do everything its graphical cousin can, but it also has some extra capabilities—such as filling a disk with zeroes or random data. Simply type diskutil list to see the path names of disks and removable media attached to your machine, and then point the command at the volume you want to operate on. Be careful: diskutil can permanently destroy data if it's used incorrectly.

8. Brew

Alright–this isn't technically a native command. But no OS X power user should be without Homebrew. The website calls it "The missing package manager for OS X," and that couldn't be truer. If you've ever used apt-get in Linux, you will feel right at home in Homebrew. (In truth, Homebrew is more similar to FreeBSD's Ports system than Linux's apt. It uses a hybrid source/binary system: if no binary is available for a particular package it will simply download the source tarball and compile it—not a problem on today's multicore Macs.)

brew gives you easy access to thousands of free utilities and libraries from the open source community. For instance, brew install imagemagick will set you up with ImageMagick, a powerful utility that makes it possible to do anything from whipping up animated gifs to converting images between dozens of different types. brew install node will introduce you to NodeJS, the hot new tool for developing and running server-side JavaScript apps.

You can have fun with Homebrew too: brew install archey will get you Archey, a cool little script for displaying your Mac's specs next to a colorful Apple logo. The selection in Homebrew is huge—and because it's so easy to create formulas, new packages are being added all the time.

Archey—My command line brings all the boys to the yard.

But the best part about Homebrew? It keeps all its files in a single directory: /usr/local/. That means you can install newer versions of system software, such as python and mysql, without interfering with the built-in equivalents. And if you ever want to get rid of your Homebrew installation, it's easy to remove using the uninstall script.

For more fun with Terminal.app , here is an A-Z list of all available console commands in OS X 10.9 Mavericks.

Thanks to reader feedback, I've written about a few more commands in a follow-up post: (And eight hundred more).

Eight Terminal Utilities Every OS X Command Line User Should Know | Mitchchn.me

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Mitchell Cohen is a writer and technophile from Toronto. He writes about coffee, code, journalism, language, insomnia and giant spiders over at his blog, Mitchchn.me. You can follow him on Twitter at @mitchchn.

Want to see your work on Lifehacker? Email Andy .

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The Ice Cream Rule Helps You Save Without Feeling Deprived

Putting away money for the future can be difficult. MoneyCrush suggests thinking of saving like sharing a bowl of ice cream with a friend.

When we share ice cream, we rarely worry about the bite we didn't get:

Most of us don't sit around thinking about how deprived we are because we gave a bite of ice cream to our friend. We don't think of that as "cutting back", and we don't go around talking about how we're "giving up a spoonful of ice cream" as our New Year's resolution.

Instead, most of us wouldn't give it a second thought, and we certainly wouldn't notice the spoonful we didn't eat.

But a spoonful of ice cream is about 10% of two average-sized scoops of ice cream.

If you think about saving 10% of your income like you are sharing a bit with your future self, saving becomes a lot easier.

Use the Power of a Bowl of Ice Cream to Secure Your Financial Future | MoneyCrush via Rock Star Finance

Photo by taylor n.

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Tilt Your Head to Prevent Swimmer's Ear

Swimmer's ear can be a real pain. Literally. We've shared a few fixes for it, but Consumer Reports shares a technique for preventing it.

When you get out of the water, tilt your head to one side and then pull on your earlobes. This helps get the water out of your ears. Then just gently dry your ears with a towel. Keeping your ears dry is smart because it's water in the ears that causes the infection.

How to prevent swimmer's ear | Consumer Reports

Photo by DVIDSHUB .

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