Losing Weight: Sorry, but your diet is blown sky high when you carry around a briefcase full of sausage—as is your resolution about not having heart attacks in 2010. [Link]
Get More Enjoyment Out of Life: Unfortunately, if you purchase any one of the gadgets on our list of the 50 (+10) worst gadgets of the decade, the chances of leading a more joyful life are significantly reduced.
Get On a Budget and Save Money: If you want to save more money in the upcoming year, you should probably steer clear of impulse Back to the Future Delorean replica purchases on eBay—no matter how insanely detailed they might be. [Jalopnik]
Get a Promotion: Forget a promotion, you will be completely unemployable if you decide to bust out the office babe score cards. [Smutty Gifts]
Stop Drinking So Much: After New Year's Eve, I'm going to cut down on the alcohol—and this time, I mean it. Unfortunately, that goal is going to be a lot harder to achieve with a booze-loading shotgun lying around. [Giftlab]

And if you plan on going out tonight and getting completely hammered, make sure to check out our PSA on the dangers of mixing alcohol and gadgets. You've been warned.

Meet a Nice Woman: If you go around wearing a shredder hoodie everywhere, 2010 probably isn't going to be the year you get lucky in love. ['80s Tees via Link]
Stop Smoking So Much: Cigarette smoking is one thing, but using the Volcano Vaporizer for the purpose in which it was intended is quite another. Instead of smoke, you inhale vapor, which eliminates many of the toxins but retains all of the flavors and mind numbing effects. Sounds great, but this little guy simultaneously puts four new year's resolutions in jeopardy: get organized, learn something new, get promoted or find a new job, and establish a budget (it costs $500). [Volcano Vaporizer via Link]

In 2000, I was just another kid out of college in Boston escaping to the Golden State's climate and opportunity. The perfect job didn't present itself for six long months; four months later, it burst with the bubble.

It's not important what the job was. I was fired not just because the company was eating shit but also because I spent extraordinary amounts of company time online, obsessively reading about games and gadgets. That was fate, it seems.

My toys were nothing fancy; a leftover Dell Inspiron laptop with a 266 MHz processor, maybe 256MB of RAM, and no 3D graphics; a Motorola Startac variant on T-Mobile (300 minutes, no data plan—can you imagine!—or even text messages).

I don't think I even had a portable media player, playing Napster MP3s only at home on Winamp. For video games I had a first generation PlayStation, games rented from Kosmo and copied with a CD burner, played on an Aiwa 24-inch TV that was built around a Sony Trinitron CRT tube. At the time, these were important brands.

Since then the companies that made the gadgets I loved started looking old-fashioned, following that simple-minded formula of chasing more MHz, more pixels.

Then: iPod.

And I ignored it. It was pretty but I couldn't afford one. It almost seemed stupid, since lots of other MP3 players advertised more features for less cash. I didn't own a Mac, nor did I plan to. It was white—and who wanted a white gadget? Silver was my kind of cool. Fake plastic silver, even. Anything with a metallic flake in its finish. I didn't get it, conceptually or literally.

Remember Creative? They made better stuff than Apple for less money, and I wanted one of their players. Today, I don't know if Creative even makes MP3 players. I use iTunes and Amazon.com for music buying. I bet you do, too. It took more than a few failed experiments, but a lot of us are actually buying music again.

Digital changed cameras, too.

My first digital camera was a Kodak, because Kodak was the brand for imaging even through the late '90s, before the Canon and Nikon train barreled past Rochester, leaving Kodak a ghost town. Kodak was invested in the past.

This was the decade I got into PC gaming hardware—then got out. I wasn't even that into the games, but loved slapping cheap components into tall steel Taiwanese cases, looping wires through sharp-edged bays for fans, lights, optical and hard drives.

A year into this habit, I realized I was in an pointless upgrade loop. I'd get a few more frames per second out of a new video card, but the games weren't more fun at higher frames-rates or resolutions, especially when everyone got stuck playing Counterstrike for two years straight. (I was still playing consoles, but my fervor was waning; I waited in line for a PS2 and only to collapse onto my bed with the box, too tired to open it.)

One sweltering day my PC suffered a fatal crash and lost a lot of data. That was that. I gave in to Mactardedness—and not because I loved Apple, but because I hated inconvenience. Maybe using a Mac would provoke less cursing. I even got an iPod. Slowly, my brain released its desire to tinker, and I used my rebuilt PC less and less.

I noticed Friendster. Joined. It got slow.

Joined MySpace. It got filled with junk.

Joined that Facebook thing because Nick Denton made me. Man is it ugly. I didn't log back in for a few years.

Signed up for Twitter. No one I know in real life uses this thing. Didn't sign in for a few years. I didn't get the social web, at first. Google—not other people—was my door to the internet.

Got a PS3. Turned it on for Metal Gear. Squinted at menus. It asked me to log in for its store, but there was nothing in there. Beat Metal Gear twice, turned it off. Dust looks like a matte finish on a PS3.

Got an Xbox 360. Added my friends. Liked knowing where my friends were and what they were doing. Liked killing my friends on Xbox, even though PS3 has faster, quieter, nicer hardware. I guess I am not as anti-social as I thought—as long as being social involves assassination. (Twitter would be better if you could use it to murder your friends.)

Bought HD-DVD. Blu-ray won the battle the last physical media format ever. Now I just subscribe to 15 different movie services. (Wait, is that better?)

Ten years ago, Dell was shaking things up because it sold through the internet for cheap. Now they're shrinking. You can't tell the difference between an Inspiron or Latitude or XPS with a 15-inch screen. People who shop for computers now often look to Apple simply because it's easier to pick a size—small, medium, or large—and then pick the expensive or the cheaper version. (Do you want fries with that?) Dell's branding and model line up is an American heartland clusterfuck.

Sony stopped cooking up so many proprietary—often imaginary—formats, but only because they'd lost. The company that made the Walkman now makes iPod docks. Sony's hardware continues to be fantastic, but does it matter? They're the only gadget company with a music label and movie studio. Can anyone name the Sony iTunes alternative? Does anyone talk to their friends about their love for the TX-1234xZR? Or its cousin without Bluetooth, the TX-1234xZRnbt? Or the TX-1234xZRnbt2xz with an extra 2X zoom? Sony's branding and model line up is a Japanese megacorp clusterfuck.

For an all-too-brief moment, T-mobile was hip because they were cheap, had a phone called the Hiptop, and Catherine Zeta Jones was hotter than Ma Bell. You could get your problems taken care of in one call. Also: pink logo. Then we all got phones capable of doing real things that needed real pipes. AT&T was convinced by Apple to do some cheap flat rate thing on that iPhone. Sorry TMO.

Apple came back. It was Steve, a man who lost the first round 20 years ago and came back to fight the mobile war with all the old lessons from the PC war in pocket. Design, manufacturing, sourcing of components, marketing and maybe most importantly, software. He had almost everything under control. They went Intel, declaring that hardware wasn't the thing that defined a better computer.

And, this little thing called iPhone. We had an email debate at Gizmodo about calling this decade the "iDecade". Naming a decade after a gadget, no matter how great it is, makes me want to vomit. So does calling the iPhone the gadget of the year. It just seems too easy, too cliche.

But it was the one. It has been the culmination of decades of development across countless industries, all coming together into a single little slab of near-perfection. After a decade filled with so many aborted, ill-conceived clones and ideas tuned more for profit than progress, the iPhone was a rare gem. Just because it's obvious doesn't make it less true.

For years, the received wisdom was that specialized devices would always continue to progress at a rate that made all-in-one devices poor solutions.

Here are the things replaced by my iPhone: Mapping and GPS; point-and-shoot camera; Flip camcorder; Game Boy; calculator (okay, I didn't carry this around ever); calendar; organizer; any book-of-the-moment; phone; Playboy; newspaper; notebook; voice recorder; iPod; video player (can you believe this was a whole gadget category just three years ago?); weatherman; TV; wrist watch; radio; alarm clock; compass; pedometer; musical instrument; Bible, medical journals, dictionary, any reference book. Sometimes, even my laptop. Put together enough "good enough" solutions, it turns out, and they begin to outweigh even the specialized devices.

Thank goodness it's looking like it's not going to just be the iPhone. (Although credit where it's due; Apple pushed the whole industry forward by five years, easily, if judged by the rate the rest of the industry was moving.) Whether Android, Palm, maybe even Windows Mobile if Microsoft really buckles down, little portable internet computers with an ever-expanding array of senses we have (save taste/smell, but just wait) and little applications that make them more and more useful, are finally pushing gadgetry forward in ways we never fully expected.

None of this happened randomly. Those who ended up on top had luck and timing and resources. But why they came out ahead was predicated by several things, naturally highlighted in hindsight.

The four rings of gadgetdom in the 2000s were design, the social internet, powerful but inexpensive hardware, and a real software ecosystem.

Only five companies have a shot at nailing the home, mobile and work hat trick, from software and hardware to internet: Apple, Microsoft, Google, Sony and Samsung. They're all failing in some way. Apple's cloud services are a joke. Sony can still make great hardware but have no idea how people want to use it. Samsung can't write code. With Android, Google can't figure out if they want to be Microsoft or Apple. Counterintuitive as it may seem, I think Microsoft has a real shot at winning the next decade, if they listen to their entertainment group who have figured out how to do a platform right.

Little companies don't really have a shot at this level of unified, do-all gadget greatness. The age of the garage hardware start-up belongs to the web generation, not the next generation of gadget makers. Smartphones have become analogous to PCs of the '90s. There's little room for a new PC platform to come online, but a vast potential space for start-ups to use the big platforms as a springboard with new accessories and software.

Gizmodo has undergone fundamental changes in the last few years. It's really hard to get excited about copy cat hardware made from the same underlying chips and parts, often in the same factory. Any blog that covers press release after press release indiscriminately is doing readers a serious disservice instead of focusing on what makes a real difference to gadgetry: content, social context and applications. What gets us excited are evolving operating systems that pump the hardware full of new life and devices that continuously inhale new movies, music, and messages from friends through the internet.

Right now, I'm in Japan. It's already 2010. When I look ahead at this year, it's easy to see why the anticipation for tablets is boiling over, even though the idea of tablets, like smartphones five years ago, is perhaps old hat. Now that we've seen what happens when companies really nail a unified smartphone, we're projecting our hopes on the generation of tablets to come.

The best tech, as it approaches a zenith of purpose and polish, becomes invisible. It gets out of the way of the user, becomes just a portal to...stuff. One does not give much thought to a faucet as long as it provides water. Finally, at the end of this decade, we've had a taste of what it's like when network capability, slick software, sensors and—most importantly—content and communication come together in such tiny, shrinking hardware.

It's not shiny things that captivate me anymore; it's what they shine.

None of these are dangerous on their own as long as the drivers and passengers use common sense if, you know, you believe in common sense.

Technology: Cameras
Example: Range Rover Sport
Why it's getting dangerous: It started with a backup camera piped into the navigation screen, then cars started getting wide angle cameras on the nose to help peek around corners, but the Range Rover Sport boasts five cameras littered around the perimeter of the vehicle to supposedly help in off-roading. The likelihood of any Range Rover Sport so much as dirtying a tire is next to nil, so drivers will probably just use them to perv it up and check out sexy pedestrians on the sly.

Technology: Customizable/animated gauge clusters
Example: Ford Fusion Hybrid
Why it's getting dangerous: Anyone who's driven a Ford Fusion Hybrid will tell you the first 20 minutes in the car are rather dangerous because you can't help but fixate on the cool LCD gauges. They grow leaves when you're driving economically, give you all kinds of information about the way the car's operating and generally completely distract you from the task of driving.

Technology: In-car wireless
Example: Chrysler UConnect system
Why it's getting dangerous: There are few things as distracting as the internet and putting it into a car is just begging for trouble. Let's assume drivers aren't dumb enough to go surfing while they're driving, that doesn't mean passengers aren't constantly showing off the latest disgustingly brilliant creation on thisiswhyyourefat.com.

Technology: Massaging/Active Seats
Example: Mercedes-Benz SL550
Why it's getting dangerous: The idea of massaging seats aren't particularly new, but combined with the now normalized seat heater it's a recipe for nap time, napping of course being the most passive version of distraction.

Technology: OnStar Route Guidance
Example: Anything from GM
Why it's getting dangerous: On the face of it, OnStar route guidance seems like the antithesis of distraction, but after you've called OnStar and had them beam directions into your car's computer a disconcertingly sexy voice dictates the turn-by-turn directions. Men have been distracted by much less.

Technology: Mercedes Splitview
Example: Mercedes S-Class
Why it's getting dangerous: Here's an idea, arrange two video sources on the navigation screen so the driver can see only car stuff and the passenger can watch TV or a DVD. All's fine and dandy until the passenger starts watching porn. You know it'll happen.

Technology: Sync iTunes tagging
Example: 2010 Ford products
Why it's getting dangerous: Zipping along listening to music is a time-honored part of motoring, but in 2010 Ford's going to let you tag the songs you like to remind you to buy them on iTunes later. It's probably innocuous if it's just the driver, but when the brood in the back launches into the front seat to insure the latest teeny-bopper manufactured garbage tune is tagged it'll get a little distracting.

Technology: iPhone Turn-by-Turn Nav
Example: Any car
Why it's getting dangerous: The iPhone turn-by-turn app actually works fairly well for providing directions, what it doesn't do is prevent drivers from fiddling with their fancy widget while it's stuck to the windshield, or taking phone calls, or fiddling with other applications, or texting...

Technology: Refrigerators
Example: Ford Flex
Why it's getting dangerous: The fridge in the Flex is situated between two captains chairs in the middle row and the door flips forward, things specifically designed to keep drivers from using it. Drivers will use it, and because it's in the back they'll have to do some pretty severe acrobatics to get into it, and we're not even going to get into what might go in there.

Technology: Histograms
Example: Lexus RX450h
Why it's getting dangerous: That hybrids put drivers to sleep through crushing boringness should be enough, but they all pretty much include some form of fuel economy graphing system. Hybrid drivers are naturally inclined to want to eke out the most fuel economy possible and fixating on bar graphs detailing fuel consumption is a great way to get higher readings, it's also hugely distracting.

Over at Maximum PC, we just posted a guide that show's you everything you need to know to build the cheapest PC I'd recommend to anyone for use as his or her main PC. It's a surprisingly beefy machine, capable of playing games, ripping DVDs, editing video and photos, and playing 1080p video with nary a dropped frame. For a mere $647, we managed to pack a quad-core CPU, a great video card, 4GB of memory, and Windows 7 Home Premium into a surprisingly fashionable mid-tower. However, if you don't need as well-rounded a general purpose PC, you can go cheaper, especially if you're willing to make some sacrifices. Let's take a look at the parts we used, and then we'll start making cuts.

Let's look at the price chart. If you're not a gamer and aren't using one of the handful of applications that's accelerated by general-purpose GPU-based computing, then there's no good reason to spend 25% of your budget on a videocard that will lie fallow for most everything you do. The Gigabyte motherboard sports integrated graphics that will do everything you need to do, including hardware accelerated decode for video playback. Pulling the videocard brings our total cost down below $500, to $481. Not too shabby, but we can save even more.

If you're not going to be running tons of apps, editing photos, or encoding videos, that quad-core is massive overkill. To save a few bucks, we're going to replace that quad-core Athlon II with a single-core Sempron LE-1250. It costs less than a Blu-ray disc at Best Buy, a mere $32. Unfortunately, that still doesn't get us below $400, so we need to dig deeper.

Since you ditched the quad core CPU, your PC won't be up to running many applications at once, so we can cut back on memory. You can buy a generic 1GB stick for $22 at Newegg, which is the minimum requirement for Windows 7.

Since you won't be creating content, there's absolutely no reason to spend big bucks on a massive 500GB hard drive. In fact, you could probably even get by installing Windows on a decent-sized flash drive, but that's more expensive than what we have in mind. It's tough to beat a more-than-adequate 80GB drive for a mere $35. Oh, and while we're at it, you should ditch the optical drive. Odds are, you won't need it for anything after you set up your machine, and it's easier and faster to install Windows from thumbdrive (which you probably already have anyway).

After more than halving the price of our PC, Windows is looking mighty expensive. At $105, the OEM edition of Windows Home Premium is more than a third of the total cost of this machine. It's time to start thinking about Ubuntu, which will get our total price down to a cool $200. But wait, we can go even cheaper.

If you're just going to browse the web on this machine, why spend money on a real CPU? A Foxconn Atom motherboard that comes with the CPU costs a few bucks less than our AMD motherboard alone, so it's time to trim the fat, yet again. Sure, we could spend a few bucks more and get the same CPU in a motherboard equipped with Nvidia's Ion chipset, but EVERYTHING MUST GO!

For a machine with power requirements this meager, there's absolutely no reason to spend 20% of our budget on a quality power supply. Instead, let's get a case that includes an integrated power supply. It may not be reliable, but it sure is cheap!

Now, I'm reasonably certain that there's no way to build a cheaper machine. The only bad news? You just built a nettop.

Don't forget to check out Will's complete guide to the cheapest PC he'd actually recommend you to build.

Will Smith is the Editor-in-Chief of Maximum PC and has been building PCs longer than he cares to admit. He enjoys long walks, Rock Band, and is anxiously awaiting the first great Android Phone and the Apple Tablet.

Top image by Tim Rogers/Flickr, used under CC License

For the full directory of Gizmodo's Essential iPhone Apps for 2009, click here. Here are the best of the month, and what we've added to the directory:

December's Best Apps

For a single-page view, click here.

Essential App Directory Inductees

As you can see, it was a hell of a month in the App Store—we're adding a fair few of the month's best to the Essential Directory.

Pastebot, for giving the iPhone the clipboard it deserves, and coming so close to greatness (lack of backgrounding capabilities are the only thing holding it back, and not the dev's fault). $3

N.O.V.A, for finally showing the world how to make a proper FPS on the iPhone. $7.

Mint, because as far as personal finance apps go, things don't get much better than this. With the last few updates, it's become basically perfect. Free.

Dragon Dictation, for getting voice recognition right on the first try, and providing an extremely useful tool for text input. Free.

Gorilla Cam, for offering most of the features of a paid camera app for free.

Ustream, for giving iPhone users live video streaming capabilities they can actually use, and for not neglecting older iPhones. Free.

Bing, for providing decent, well-packaged alternatives to services that Google previously dominated, and even improving on some of them—I'm looking at you, maps. Free.

And that's it! What counts as an essential iPhone app changes all the time, and so should our guide: If we've missed anything huge, or you've got a much better suggestion for a particular type of app, let us know, or say so in the comments. We'll be updating this thing pretty frequently, and a million Gizmodo readers can do a better job at sorting through the app mess than a single Gizmodo editor. Enjoy!

"Thai, salad or ramen?" It's lunchtime on a typical Thursday and it strikes us that millions of people all over the world are pondering the same question. This question is our launchpad, making us part of the thousands of people who wanted to build an iPhone app for "that."

I'm a product and marketing guy with some design and coding skills. Roy is a developer with some business savvy. Combined, we make a great team and complement each other's skills well, but we only started working with Objective-C last year, like many others who are trying out iPhone development. We've already built an app or two, so we're familiar with the language and frameworks. However, as with all new projects, you usually have to do a little research to understand how to approach the different challenges...especially in a world defined by 320x480 pixels.

For the longest time, we've played around with the idea of creating an app for fun. After discarding a couple of good ideas (because they were too complicated or a quick search in the App Store showed that someone else already does it well), lunchtime lands us on a simple, fun idea to help people stuck between decisions.

But while most people want to create a great iPhone app, my friend and I go one step further, making a pact to finish the project within a weekend—or realistically, our app would never get completed.

On a piece of paper, we scribble out two-three wireframes and developed an outline for some basic screens. We decide on an app that offers up to three multiple choices. You can write your own answers—for example, Thai, salad or ramen—and you simply pick a randomized choice to see the answer to your decision. We decide to use playing cards as the theme. Immediately, we circle the "must have" features (first priority), then the "like to have" features (last priority), and finally the features that needed more investigating. We leave lunch on Thursday with a little homework and a plan to get together on Saturday.

My homework includes determining the look, feel and interaction on each screen. Roy needs to research some of the Xcode features we haven't had a chance to play with yet in our "real" jobs, mainly animations and randomization.

On Saturday morning, we meet at a local coffee shop that had free Wi-Fi, claim a large table so we can sit side-by-side and grab the first of many large cups of coffee. Then we create a shared Dropbox folder for this project—a Basic account is free and comes with 2GB of storage. The Dropbox is important because it allows us to multitask on the same project with any/all changes synchronizing in real time. For larger projects, you may want to consider GitHub.

We pull up a more detailed outline of what we want to accomplish for our app as well as basic wireframes. Given that we only have a weekend to complete this app, we decide to focus only on the "must have" features. A developer can always issue feature updates at a later date to include the "nice to have" features.

Going screen-by-screen, we detail the elements on the page, style treatments, layout, timing, etc. We also discuss what Roy learned about animating the card's flip motion, since this was one of the core functionality of the app. We briefly review the Quartz 2D and Core Animation libraries, since we had not previously done any work with those. We even discuss using a UIWebView to render the animation within WebKit's CSS. Ultimately, we find a simple solution using standard UIViews and UIButtons. The UIView class has some animation class methods, and one of the built in transitions is a flip effect. As for the randomization, we knew most languages provide a random function, and Objective-C is no exception. For purposes of this app, all we wanted was a simple method to randomize an array. Roy found a couple of examples of this, but one that stood out was over at Dr. Touch's website. He describes an approach with which to implement a class extension method so you can easily shuffle any array.

We dive into our respective MacBook Pros with a Borg-like focus on our individual areas of expertise. I open up Photoshop and began building screens. The first screen is the default image. This is the very first screen people see when the app starts and begins loading. Apps can be built in either portrait or landscape view. If you choose to build your app in landscape view like ours, you still need to create a default image that displays in portrait view. Simply create your landscape view and rotate clockwise or counter-clockwise (depending on whether you want left or right landscape view). Now the default image loads in portrait view but since your images is rotated, the user will twist the iPhone to landscape view.

I then spend the next couple of hours creating comps, background images, buttons, card (front and back) and info page. I also spend some time focusing on the app icon. This is obviously the "face" of your app—a badge of honor—so you'll want to put careful thought into the icon imagery. Remember, you'll need the icon in both the 57x57 and 512x512 sizes. Once completed, I upload it to Dropbox so that Roy could start using the creative elements.

By the time I glance back to Roy's laptop, he's created a new Xcode project and is already playing around with code to animate green boxes that flip on a click. While he's working on the prototype in the iPhone Simulator, I grab the info.plist file and edit some of the settings - remove status bar, app display name, remove gloss from icon, etc. We then decide it's time for us to add some real images to our prototype. We put in the background image, the front and back of the cards and the navigation buttons. The positioning is off (by a lot) but the cards look good and it's flipping smoothly. We do some bad math, but eventually get the exact spacing and positioning that we want for each card. We play around with the timing of the flip, set the on/off states for the navigation button and now it's feeling pretty good.

Seeing the pieces come together in the app shows me that there are a couple of images that needs fine tuning. I make changes as Roy begins working on the customizing screen and info screen. The customize screen is the place that allows people to type in whatever they want to show on the face of the card. We limit it to 25 characters... anything more than that and it writes over/outside of the card. We talk through this screen a bit more in detail. The interaction in each field, how the keyboard acts, and how we save before going back to the cards. We spend a bit of time in Interface Builder wiring up exactly how we want this page to look and act. The info page is completely optional, but we like to have it because it includes additional ways to reach us.

Wow, seven hours and fours large coffees later, we have a lot done, but there's still lots more to go. What we have now is an app that fires up; displays a default loading screen; gets people to a screen that shows three cards (back of the card showing); they can select any/all of the cards and the cards flips to show the front of the card; they can click on a button labeled "Try Again" to reset the cards; they can click on a button labeled "Customize" that opens a new screen; the "Customize" screen allows you to enter text into 3 separate fields with a max of 25 characters in each field; and you can get to the Info screen. We spend the last hour of the day together cleaning up code and discussing what we have left to accomplish tomorrow.

On Sunday, we meet at another coffee shop with free Wi-Fi. Coffee first. We feel like we're about 80 percent done before we start working again. The major work left for the day ahead is saving the custom text, displaying the custom text on the face of the card, and randomizing the text. We had additional functionality ideas, but we kept ourselves honest, and kept the scope creep to a minimum. One example of this was the method for storing/saving the custom text on each of the three cards. Roy could have created a sqlite database or used Core Data, but the easiest approach was to just use the built in standardUserDefaults object found in the NSUserDefaults class. Using this method stores the values to the app's settings just fine for our needs and saves us a lot of time.

While Roy is working on those items, it's a perfect opportunity for me to prepare some of the things we'll need later that day. When you submit an app to the App Store, it's not a simple upload of a file. Apple requires the following information for every app submission: Application Name, Application Description, Device Requirements, Primary and Secondary Category, Subcategories, Copyright, App Rating, Keywords, SKU Number, Application URL, Screen shots, Marketing Description, Support URL, Support Email Address, End User License Agreement, and Pricing / Availability.

So, I prep all the app submission information while Roy is busy coding away, first searching the App Store for similar apps and their names. We like "Stuck?" and luckily no one else is using it, so we go with that name. I create the app description, add some keywords, set the price and determine where we want to sell this app (just in the USA, certain countries or worldwide). Then I register a domain name (stuckapp.com) to be used for the application URL/support URL and linked it to a newly created Tumblr account. I also created the required support email address. The other items you'll want to prepare in advance are: screenshots (up to five), a large icon (512x512) and, if this is your first time submitting an app, any certificates/provisioning profiles.

Things tend to take longer than you expect, and even though we're basically finished with the app by early Sunday afternoon, we still spend a couple of more hours tweaking it and preparing everything for the App Store submission—cleaning code and fine tuning as we go along. We spend the majority of the day on one computer pushing pixels, formatting, and ensuring the timing and user interaction was exactly as we both wanted. After almost five hours of work on Sunday, we have the app that we both envisioned. We begin testing in the iPhone simulator and then on devices (both iPhone and iPod touch) for stability and functionality. Again, being a simple app, it was easy and quick to test.

After proving its stability, we decide to publish Stuck? to the App Store. My first attempt at publishing another app by myself took two days—attempt, fail, Google, attempt, fail, Google more, etc.—until it finally worked. But the second time around was much easier and faster. We copy/paste all the text prepared earlier and then added the screenshots and images. All in all, we have our app uploaded in about 15 minutes. At this point, we're excited, hungry and tired, but also quite proud that we completed a solid app over a weekend in a coffee shop.

We had our fingers crossed that the App Store would approve our app. And, as amazed as we were that we could finish an app over the weekend, the real surprise came after we submitted to the App Store. We submitted the app on Sunday evening. It changed status from Waiting for Review‚ to In Review, on Monday. On Tuesday, we received an email informing us that our app was Ready for Sale. Approved in two days! That has to be a record‚ especially before the holidays.

Especially after talking about building an app together for so long, like so many people reading this article, I must say, the fulfillment is immense. We finally did it.

TIPS FOR COMPLETING AN APP OVER A WEEKEND

1. You can't do it yourself. You can, but you wouldn't want to. Ideally, you want to partner with someone with a different, complementary set of skills. Partner with someone who knows and respects your area of expertise, but is even more confident and knowledgeable about their own skills. Good communication is implied in an effort such as this so you'll go through periods of rapid fire questions bouncing ideas off each other and then periods of silence as you work on separate tasks. There's a lot to get done and multitasking will be key.

2. Multitask. As suggested above, working with someone who complements your own skills allows you to multitask. What do I mean? For example, in the beginning, once you scratch out a wireframe of an idea, one person can begin coding - putting placeholder buttons and blocks into place. At the same time, the other person can create comps and then cut out each element to use when they get to the right stage. Also, at the tail end of the project, one person can wrap up the project and clean the code while the other prepares all the images and marketing copy for the App Store submission process.

3. Do at least one thing well. Unlike most desktop applications or web project, you have to remember that most good mobile apps fulfill a need that can come anywhere, any time. Your app idea doesn't have to be complicated, but good apps seem to do one or more of these things well:
- Solves a problem; - Is entertaining; - Serves a specific niche; - Engages the user; and/or - Takes advantage of the unique features of the iPhone.

4. Set goals and milestones. Whether your goal is speed to market, just to gain experience, or to build the best damn app that does (blank), clearly state your goals. Initially, it will help you focus on the areas that are important/critical for success. It will also help you later down the road as you face hard decisions about "must-have" features and "like-to-have" features. Remember, you can always issue feature updates so focus on the "must-have" items and do whatever is necessary to meet that goal.

5. Get a Dropbox account. For small- to medium-sized projects, you cannot beat Dropbox. It allows you to store, share and synchronize files with others. Stop sharing files back and forth on your USB memory stick. Get a Dropbox account and share files in real time. We abused the hell out of our free, shared Dropbox folder and it worked flawlessly. For larger projects, you might want to give GitHub a try.

6. Test. Test. Test. When you see the finish line, it's easy to gloss over the important step of testing your app. Test in your iPhone simulator, but also try to get your hands on an iPod touch and of course on an iPhone as well. Depending on the complexity of your app, you might want to create a test plan to make sure all the use cases and functional tasks are covered. The last thing you want is to have an app in the App Store that crashes or doesn't work as expected. You may never recover from all the ego-shattering feedback.

7. Understand the App Store submission process. Apple provides a PDF document detailing to submission process. But that document is only available for registered developers. If you've already registered, read that document thoroughly before you begin the upload process. It will give you a good idea of what's involved, but also what you'll need to prepare in advance. Apple also provides some good tips for app store submission and approval .

Thanks to David Quinlan for sharing his story and advice with us. If his narrative has compelled you to try out Stuck?, it's $1 at the App Store. And, of course, share war stories of your own long weekends writing apps in the comments. [Stuck]

Each image links back to the original post containing the answer.

Hint: Once you find out what it is everything makes sense. Don't over think it. [Click to see the answer]


Doc Brown's flux capacitor? A blinged-out religious relic from the future? A Tron 2.0 prop? [Click to see the answer]


Jellyfish attacking an undersea monster? That would be cool, but the reality is much simpler, and more beautiful. [Click to see the answer]


Ready for some mystery? The answer is... [Click to see the answer]


The engine room of the next Enterprise? A glimpse at the heart of some new particle accelerator? The lens of a new US military laser? [Click to see the answer]


While it may look a bit like Galactica's CIC it's probably older than you are. [Click to see the answer]


It looks like a gigantic bird hunting device but it will actually let you become one with nature rather than destroy it. [Click to see the answer]


Some kind of circuit board close up? No. A nuclear power plant's control panel full of gauges and labels? No, that's not it either. [Click to see the answer]


No, that's not the moon... [Click to see the answer]


A shot from the Iron Man sequel? A costume from a 22nd-century staging of Swan Lake ? My new back tat? [Click to see the answer]


They aren't shiny radio dishes or deadly antimatter arrays in Area 51. [Click to see the answer]


A huge version of Darth Vader's light saber? Close, but not quite close enough. [Click to see the answer]


Is this a cosmic dover over the skies of California? Maybe the aliens are telling us to chill out. Or perhaps the Holy Ghost went to grab some In-n-Out. [Click to see the answer]


Is this the entrence to Jason Chen's secret lair where the Gizmodo magic happens? Maybe a place to lock up anyone with the swine flu? What on Earth requires a HAL 9000 to keep guard? [Click to see the answer]


At first glance I thought this was a NASA image of some sort, maybe a solar flare. I even wondered if I could get a high-res version in turn into a poster. Then I found out what it actually is. [Click to see the answer]


Tattoo under a powerful microscope? One near some feminine naughty bits? No. [Click to see the answer]


This is a tricky one. What's the QR Code on that flag our little Android friend is waving? [Click to see the answer]

As you can see, the chances are very slim. As slim as the chances of the new security rules having any real effect in preventing any new attacks, sadly.

[Data collected by Nate Silver]

We've taken a good look at the handy Buyer's Guide over at MacRumors and given you some background and our own recommendations for safe shopping. Enjoy, and try not to throw too many elbows out there. And don't worry! If you hate all things Apple, we've got you covered here.

iPod Shuffle

Whether a major revamp or a new selection of colors, Apple has updated Shuffle twice a year, like clockwork, every year since 2006. A new generation should debut in February, and given our issues with the current Shuffle's form factor it's probably best to hold out a few more months. Recommendation: WAIT

iPod Nano

This was just updated in September, the fourth year in a row that their only refresh has been in the fall. You should be fine to buy for now; expect new models to show up again in another nine months. Recommendation: BUY

iPod Classic

Same story as the Nano. You're fine for now, if you absolutely need 160GB of storage from a PMP. Since it's unlikely that you or anyone does, just get an Touch or (or even a Zune HD) instead. Recommendation: DON'T BUY, unless you somehow need to watch TV show made since 1995 on that teeny-tiny screen

iPhone

Even if it hadn't already been 200 days since the last update, there are also plenty of rumors out there about a 5MP camera coming in June. Hold off until then if you can. Recommendation: WAIT

iPod Touch

The iPod Touch has been on the same product cycle as the Classic and Nano since its 2007 debut, but the first generation model also received a memory upgrade five months after its initial release. The 5MP camera rumor applies here, as well, so it's best to see what happens. Recommendation: WAIT

Mac Mini

Apple's no-frills desktop just got a spec increase and added a server model in late October. It shouldn't be getting any more updates any time soon, which is a shame, because it's still not a very competitive product for the price. Check out the Acer AspireRevo R3610 as a more than viable alternative. Recommendation: DON'T BUY unless you insist on Apple, even when it flies in the face of all logic

Mac Pro

While it hasn't gotten an official refresh since March, Apple did just add a 3.33GHz Quad Core processor option on Dec. 4tth. There should still be another upgrade this spring worth waiting for, especially with rumors that the Mac Pro is about to get a Core i7-980X processor. Recommendation: WAIT

iMac

The iMac was updated at the same time as the Mini, but widely reported display problems make us cautious. Roll the dice if you want, but it's probably best to see if and when these issues are resolved. Which as of today, they're clearly still not. Recommendation: WAIT

Cinema Display

Apple added a 24" model in 2008, but the rest of the Cinema Display line hasn't seen a spec change since fall of 2006. There's no indication that new models are in the offing, so if you want that 30-inch screen you should be all right. Keep in mind, though, that the 27" iMac screen has 90% of the resolution of the 30-inch Cinema, making it a solid replacement once they get the bugs sorted out. Recommendation: CAUTIOUS BUY

MacBook

Apple's basic laptop model was just updated with multitouch, an LED display and a unibody form on October 20th, and it's not likely to be revamped again any time soon. If you'd prefer a more powerful notebook it might be worth waiting to see if the MacBook Pro gets a price drop in a few months. Recommendation: BUY, if you definitely don't want a MacBook Pro

MacBook Pro

The MacBook Pro line gets a refresh every 200 days, on average, and we're just about there now. More importantly, there have been rumors that Apple's going to upgrade to Intel's new Core i5 and i7 processors as soon as early January. You can hold off until then, right? Recommendation: WAIT

MacBook Air

It's hard to say about the MacBook Air; it's a newer product, so there's less precedent to work with. We do know that the light-as-a-feather notebook last got an upgrade in June, and we can speculate Apple may wait until a ULV i5 or i7 processor is available before ushering in next-generation models. It's worth waiting to see if those processors get announced at CES next week. Recommendation: WAIT

Today we're talking about the myth that Windows slows down over time, and how to solve the problem. The reality is that Windows doesn't slow down if you just take care of your PC a little more. Follow these procedures, and you won't have to wonder if spending hours backing up data, installing from disc, and re-installing your essential applications is really necessary.

What Does Slow Windows Down Over Time?

I'm not going to sit here and tell you that your Windows PC will never slow down—because for many people, they almost always do. What actually slows your PC down are too many poorly written applications that stay resident in memory and waste CPU cycles, having too many badly written low-level applications that hook into Windows, or running more than one antivirus application at a time. And of course, if you've run your PC's hard drive out of space, you can hardly blame Windows for that.

If you aren't getting the picture, the problem is usually the person behind the keyboard that installed too many junk applications in the first place. More gently put, it's often that (very well-meaning) person's gradual easing of their safeguards and cleaning regimens as time goes by.

Stop Installing Junk Applications

Installing software should be thought of like feeding your PC. If you constantly feed your PC garbage apps, it's going to get sick and won't be able to run fast anymore. These poorly written applications clutter your drive with unnecessary DLL files, add always-resident Windows services when they don't need to, bloat up your registry, and add useless icons to your system tray that waste even more memory and CPU cycles. Usually you can get away with using a few terrible applications, but as you continue to install more and more of them, your PC will slow down to a crawl.

Be Smarter About What You Do Install

We feature and recommend a lot of software applications around here, but you should keep in mind that we aren't trying to tell you to install every single one of them at the same time-just install the applications that you actually need and you'll generally prevent the dreaded format and reinstall.

Here's a few tips to help you know what applications you should be careful with:

• Apps that function as an Explorer plug-in, because they directly hook into the shell and any problem will make your entire PC slow or in the worst case, crash repeatedly.
• Antivirus applications are notorious for slowing your PC down, and you should never, ever, ever use more than one real-time antivirus application at a time. We recommend Microsoft Security Essentials as a free, fast, and awesome antivirus tool.
• Anything that says it will "Speed Up Your PC" or "Optimize Your RAM" will most likely slow it down, or best case, do nothing at all. Avoid these like the plague.
• Make sure to install official system drivers from the manufacturer website. Drivers have a huge impact on performance, and you want to have stable, updated drivers.
• Registry cleaners are a mixed bag, and really aren't going to speed up your PC in most cases. The biggest problem, however, is that too many of the commercial registry cleaners set themselves to run at startup in the system tray, wasting your memory and CPU cycles.
• You should strongly consider the idea of using portable applications wherever possible, since their self-contained nature means they won't clutter up the rest of your PC with things you don't need.

Keep Your Computer Clean and Trim

Once you've rid yourself of your junk application habit and resolved to only use healthy, useful applications, you'll want to make sure to keep your PC clean of any remaining clutter that doesn't need to be there. You can set up a shortcut to manually run CCleaner silently with the push of a button, but your best bet is to set up CCleaner to run automatically on a schedule, so you don't have to remember to do it.

Since CCleaner is only going to clean up temporary files, you'll still need a good solution for keeping the rest of your PC clean-and Lifehacker's own Belvedere can help you automate your self-cleaning PC or automatically clean up your download folder.

With all of this automated file deletion going on, your hard drive is likely to get a bit fragmented. If you're already running Windows 7 or Vista, automatic defrag comes out of the box and probably shouldn't be messed with, but Windows XP users will need to use Windows Tasks to setup a schedule and automatically defrag their drives.

Use a Virtual Machine or Sandbox to Test Software

If you still want to test out all of the latest software, including apps that look a bit rough around the edges, your best bet is to use a virtual machine to test out anything before putting it onto your primary operating system. You can install all of your software in an XP or Windows 7 VM just like it was a real PC, and with the latest VMWare player releases, you can even enable Windows Aero in a guest VM. If you are new to the idea and need some more help, you should check out our beginner's guide to creating virtual machines in VirtualBox, or Windows 7 users can check out our guide to using XP Mode. If you don't want to go the virtual machine route, Windows XP and Vista users can alternatively use Windows SteadyState to protect their PC and roll back all of the changes on a reboot.

The How-To Geek reinstalls Windows only every few years and has no speed problems at all. His geeky articles can be found daily here on Lifehacker, How-To Geek, and Twitter.

The 3-D image was of a human rib cage, and it rotated in midair. And the holographic rib cage rattled me.

It was my first experience with a Display Of The Future, and it set me on a mission. In the subsequent years, I've been hunting down display prototypes, talking with experts, and visiting labs. In short, I've been on a quest for the perfect display.

Now You See It

Even though holographic video blew me away when I first saw it, I quickly composed myself. It's simply not the sort of thing that will be commercially available any time soon.

I talked to Gregg Favalora, 3-D expert and founder of Actuality Systems, about the commercial viability of high-resolution 3-D video. His company broke resolution records with its display-a 100-million-voxel (3-D pixel) device that made images for radiologists and engineers hunting for oil reserves. The details of these 3-D images look eerily realistic, but Actuality had a heck of a time finding the right market for it.

In the end, the company only sold 30 systems at $200,000 each and it has now ceased engineering operations. And that MIT holographic video system I saw in a few years ago is still trapped in the lab. The lesson: no matter how extraordinary your technology, it's impractical for the people unless you can efficiently manufacture it in large numbers.

I See Practicality

At the opposite end of the price spectrum is LCD. It's cheap as dirt thanks to the billions of dollars of factories built over the past two decades. I wanted to get a look at the way LCDs are made and try to find clues for how a more interesting or useful display-like a reflective e-reader or an OLED screen-could scale up and become cheap.

So I took a trip down to Applied Materials in Santa Clara, California, a company that supplies 90 percent of the LCD industry with manufacturing equipment. What I saw was impressive: the newest fabs are built around sheets of glass—backplanes of LCDs—that are the size of a garage door. They're only as thick as six sheets of paper, and each one can yield eight large screen TVs.

The machines that deposit electronics on the glass are behemoths-taller than I can reach and with an area slightly larger than a garage door. In a fab, six of these machines are arrange circularly, and from above they look like a giant mechanized flower. The sheets of glass slide in like a floppy disk into a drive, and come out coated with thin film transistors.

The bigger the glass, the more displays can be pumped out of a factory, and the cheaper all sizes of LCD displays become. According to Sid Rosenblatt, the CFO of Universal Display Corporation, a big fab can make six 50-inch LCDs every three to four minutes. At that volume, how can anything else compete with LCD?

Fitting In

Well, instead of beating them, startup Pixel Qi decided to join them. The company's screens are all LCD—built on the same lines and with the same materials as any other liquid crystal display—but with an additional mode in which the power-hungry backlight is off, and the display reflects ambient light.

I've seen Pixel Qi's displays and visited with Mary Lou Jepsen, the startup's founder and the former CTO of the One Laptop Per Child project. Jepsen spends most of her time in Taipei, the capital of Displayland, but on a sunny day last fall, I caught her at her houseboat in Sausalito. It was the perfect time and place to try out an LCD that is most impressive in bright light.

In its reflective mode, the display is black and white, similar to a Kindle or Sony Reader except it's faster-capable of video, albeit in monochrome. The first batch of Pixel Qi screens is scheduled to come off the line this month. Jepsen says more designs that further reduce power consumption are on the way. In one, she explains that the screen, when not needing to refresh, should be able to shut down the central processing unit(and wake it up within milliseconds when it's in use).

As for a color reflective mode, Jepsen says it could be possible in a couple of years. The concept, which involves a particular arrangement of liquid crystals, is based on her PhD thesis, but it's admittedly a more complex design than the first Pixel Qi screens. Her first priority, she says, is making sure that Pixel Qi can ship its first products quickly and successfully.

Bright and Beautiful

While Pixel Qi might be making cheap displays that are easy on the eyes and energy efficient, they can't compare to the beauty and simplicity of OLED screens, in which each pixel emits its own light. The whites are whiter, the blacks are blacker, and the overall image is just gorgeous.

Even better, the manufacturing process is as simple as it gets. It's layer of organic material that can be printed between two layers of electrodes. This means that OLED displays have the potential to fold, roll, and be built over large areas.

Concepts I've seen: a paper-thin, flexible display slammed by a hammer without breaking, a display that's see-through when the power's off, and large area OLED coating that act as a window, a wall, or a display, depending on its mode.

In terms of touch, I'm keeping an eye on a new type of technology that's being integrated into the electronic foundation of OLED displays and LCDs too. It's called in-cell technology, and there are a number of variants, but one type incorporates photodetectors into the pixels of a screen. It's ideal for OLED displays, because it can be added without adding thickness, allowing them to maintain their sleek good looks.

If there were ever a perfect display, OLED is it.

The Holdup

In a conversation with Vladimir Bulovic, a professor at MIT (and star of the famous light-emitting pickle video) we waxed poetic on the possibilities of OLEDs. Bulovic believes that it's only a matter of time before OLEDs take their rightful place at the head of the display industry. The reason we have to wait is simply bad timing. "If back in the 1970s, we had OLEDs, no one would even know what an LCD is today," he said.

The widely understood problem with OLED displays, however, is that the technology doesn't exist to mass manufacture them on large sheets of glass like those I saw at Applied Material. Therefore, their beauty is relegated to smaller screens like cell phone displays, Sony's 11-inch (expensive) TV, and concept demos.

Engineers are working on the problem, of course. Bulovic told me about a former student of his, named Conor Madigan, who has an OLED-printing startup in Menlo Park called Kateeva. I got a hold of Madigan who said his company, which uses a hybrid approach to printing large-scale OLED display, is well funded (even in these difficult economic times) and the display industry is really starting to push large-scale OLED technology.

While it's true that big display makers are promising big OLED screens in the next couple of years, I'm not holding my breath. Even when the technology for printing large-scale OLED displays arrives, it will still take significant investments to scale up manufacturing. It's difficult for companies to justify investing too much money in OLED displays while LCD sales are still doing well and continue to get cheaper. Besides, these large-screen OLEDs will still be made on glass, just like LCD, which keeps things rigid, fragile, and heavy.

Past Glass

In order to have a light, flexible, rugged OLED display, it's obvious that display makers must go with plastic instead of glass. Plastic Logic, is promising the world's first plastic-backed screens with printed organic transistors, by early next year.

I've handled a proto-version of Que, Plastic Logic's e-reader, at the company's Mountain View headquarters and was impressed by the form factor. While it's still rigid, it's light as a thin stack of papers. And because it's made of plastic, it's robust. I felt like flinging it across the boardroom where I sat with the head of marketing and a public relations handler. I didn't.

Here's the bad news for Plastic Logic: it all comes back to scalability. At the recent Printed Electronics conference in San Jose, I had lunchtime conversations with people who just shake their head at Plastic Logic's challenges. A number of them expressed skepticism that the manufacturing process could scale.

Printed organic transistors currently can't compete in speed with amorphous silicon transistors used in LCDs and OLED displays. And the company's printing technology is done in a single fab in Dresden, which could make it difficult to produce the e-reader in large volume. In other words, it won't be cheap or widespread, at least in the near future.

Roll With It

However, the folks at HP Labs think they have a scalable way to make plastic-backed displays with fast silicon transistors. On a recent tour of HP Labs I saw the proof: sheets of plastic, tens of meters long, are rolled onto tubes and are loaded and locked into a system that imprints silicon transistors onto the material.

Carl Taussig, the director of HP's information surfaces lab, walked me through the process of the so-called Self Aligned Imprint Lithography. Plastic, with a shiny coating, spins on a series of cylinders, where it is exposed to chemicals, ultra-violet light, etching solutions, and ionized gasses. The roll-to-roll setups are compact, and they don't require clean-room level purity that other display processes do.

Taussig, who is also responsible for inventing the DVD-RW, showed me prototypes, built with HP's silicon-on-plastic transistors. One of these plastic backplanes controlled an E Ink display. Some of the pixels that were supposed to be black appeared gray, but these prototypes help the researchers find the problems in the roll-to-roll process. If they see a blown-out pixel, they retrace their steps to find where in the process the problem arose. 


In another demonstration, I saw a new type of reflective display developed at HP that was about the size of a smart phone screen. It has color and video and is one of the best-looking reflective screen I've seen. Technical details were sparse (they will come out early next year), but Taussig told me that part of the trick is to make a pixel out of three layers of color dyes that take incoming white light and reflect specific colors of it back at you, something like the way that butterfly wings reflect light.

Within Two Years

While Taussig doesn't think roll-to-roll will replace LCD processes anytime soon, he hopes it can help plastic become the foundation for reflective displays as well as emissive displays like those made of OLEDs. HP has licensed its roll-to-roll technology to PowerFilm, a thin film solar manufacturer. And recently, PowerFilm's subsidiary Phicot has started to commercially developing the process for electronics. The first products will be displays for soldiers that may be integrated into clothing or wrap around their arms.

Combining HP's roll-to-roll manufacturing with OLEDs and a reflective reading technology is the closest thing to the perfect display that I've seen. So I ask Taussig how long it's going to take to make the process reliable. He's optimistic that Phicot can iron out the problems soon. "To be successful we need to roll this out within two years," he says, since the first plastic displays will hit the market in 2010.

In talking with Taussig, it's clear to me that even though he's a researcher, he's focused on making plastic displays practical. He knows the only way to do that is with solid, cost-effective manufacturing. Once the manufacturing problems are solved, he says, plastic displays become inevitable. "My grandkids will never believe that we made displays with glass," he says. "Everything will be on plastic."

I can't wait. The perfect screen will be lightweight, energy-efficient, and able to take various forms—flexible, transparent, and with touch or some other form of gesture recognition. I want colors so vibrant that images look real enough to grab. Still, I want to read on it without feeling like I'm staring at a flashlight. And it's got to be cheap.

So far, the displays I've seen come close. And while nothing yet gets it all right, there are some up-and-coming technologies-and, crucially, emerging manufacturing processes-that give me confidence that the perfect display is on the way.

Kate Greene spends most of her day staring at the screens of her MacBook Pro and iPhone. She became a journalist by way of physics, where she worked in a basement lab with lasers and a lot of liquid nitrogen. Currently, she writes for publications like The Economist and Technology Review and goes on display hunts for Gizmodo. She can be found on the Internet at kategreene.net and on twitter

Duh: Get To the Airport Early

Oh! More confirmation just this second from Kotaku's chief, Brian Crecente who is flying back from Australia right this moment with some very whiny kids (not his) a few rows away:

We had a second screening at the gate. Hands on thorough check of every bag. Also asked me to open my laptops, but not to turn it on. Then did a metal detector sweep of everyone and very quick pat down. Male security guards for men, women for women.

His captain said that there would be some security procedures they'd have to follow that "won't hurt" but are "slightly unusual."

Will They Search Your Underwear or Crotch For Air Safety?

No word on crotch pat downs, yet. UPDATE: It appears that the pat downs focus on the "torso" and "upper legs". Upper legs not quite the crotch. I'm torn. I'm happy to retain my security screening virginity, but Hhow will they find the rest of the underwear bombs without going all the way?

Be Ready For Anything, Especially Surprises

We have heard that only international flights entering the US are going to be going through these pains. But we've seen other data to the contrary, and again, we don't have official word about which flights will enforce these rules, except that we should expect randomness, especially in domestic flights (emphasis added):

"Passengers flying from international locations to U.S. destinations may notice additional security measures in place. These measures are designed to be unpredictable, so passengers should not expect to see the same thing everywhere. Due to the busy holiday travel season, both domestic and international travelers should allot extra time for check-in."

However, readers are coming in with evidence that even domestic flights are being restricted somehow.

And from a Gynranger, who flew domestically:

I few yesterday, just a domestic flight, from New York, NY to Savanna, GA. We were allowed to use electronics but during take off until cruising alt and about 30 minutes before landing they made us shut everything off, including iPods or computers and other devices even those that didnt broadcast.

Again, be ready for hell.

The Important Stuff: Gadgets

It sounds, as if we'll be ok between take off and landing, with gadgets. British Airways is letting people bring electronics on the plane. Some flights are letting people use gadgets up until the last hour, some the last thirty minutes. But as said in this Jetblue audio recording, there will be no in flight entertainment system; "no movies, no tv, no xm radio, the system is required by federal government to be shut down." But it sounds like most flights are allowing gadgets, and all the variation in restriction is happening at landing.

Where You Are is a Secret. Like the Apple Tablet. So Not Really a Secret.

The government, according to some of our readers, have requested the in flight maps be turned off, too, to, I presume, eliminate the risk of geo precise bombings near the end of the flight? Then again, the flight attendants warning you to not get up the last hour of flight and landing gear dropping are sure signs of landing, so WTF.

It's Always Gonna Be Sweater-Weather

You're not allowed to have anything genuinely useful on your lap in the final hour of flight—the sterile period—and that rule includes blankets and the like. This makes attempting to snooze through the remaining portion of the trip chilly and awkward, particularly since pillows are banned as well, so it might be wise to at least dress warm enough to maintain some semblance of comfort.

Bring a Book or Prepare to Die of Boredom

Bring a book. Not a Kindle, not a Nook, not any other sort of ebook reader, but a plain ol' low-tech book. Because apparently books are pretty much the only thing you can have in your hands during the final hour of your flight ("the government says ok") and how the hell else will you keep from falling into a cold and uncomfortable slumber?

Here, more inconsistency appears, with some readers saying no books on landing either.

From Arturo:

We flew from Eugene, OR to San Francisco today: they would not even let us read paperback books that we had brought with us. According to them, the new TSA directive is that in the last hour of flight, we are not allowed to leave our seats, nor use or have anything from our carry-on luggage or personal items.

But it is unclear if the books were being restricted because the flyers didn't already have them in hand, or if they were in bags. Again: Confusing!

Update: Arturo wrote in to explain that he already had the book in hand at the time of the announcement:

I already had the book in my hands when they made the announcement. I never accessed my carry-on. They made us put our reading material away anyhow. This included magazines and anything else that we brought on board. Strangely enough, they didn't seem to mind passengers accessing their wallets when beverage service came through the cabin.

Even more confusing!

Tinkle Before the "Sterile Period" Starts

As if having to abandon your personal items during the last hour of the flight isn't enough, you're not allowed to get up to use the restroom during that time. The captain in the audio recording referred to the Since I doubt that your flight attendants would appreciate seeing you break out a bedpan, just plain head to the lavatory before the seat belt sign hits and a line forms.

Then again, some readers are reporting that on their flights, they saw plenty of standing up and walking around going on after the mandatory buckle up:

I must have seen 30 people still doing whatever 20 minutes in and half a dozen people just get up anyways for the final 40 minutes to use the bathroom, go to their bags, whatever, and that was just where I was sitting.

Again: Madness!

More News Soon, Says Pilot

We've been keeping an eye on what's happening in the news regarding flight security measures and gadget-centric regulations, but based on the pilot's announcement, it sounds like some "more news" will hit the wires "tomorrow". No idea if this recording happened yesterday or today, but we'll find out come Monday. I mean, the TSA has to say something, right? I mean, other than "Oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit" with their actions.

What Now?

That's what we've learned from that almost chilling recording. Of course, whether any of that will actually improve actual security is questionable. One thing is certain: All these procedures have raised my personal terror status to the sunset hue of orange-red. [Thanks, Jake Lodwick]

Special Addendum: If I am a Head of State or Roll Deep With Heads of State, Do I Have To Put Up With This Shit?

Answer: No! (See the TSA's Security Directive.)
Previously: The New, Terrifying No-Electronics US Flight Rules, Underwear Bomb: The New, Stained, Patted-Down Crotch of Terror, Electronics May Still Be OK for Some US Flights.

Photo by goincase. Wallpaper on monitor available here.

Earlier this week we asked you to share your favorite wallpaper site. We quickly learned that—while not everyone has a strong opinion about Linux distributions or encryption software—everyone has a favorite wallpaper site; readers logged nearly 500 votes for their favorite wallpaper sites. Now we're back to share the five most popular sites used by Lifehacker readers to dress up their monitors with fresh wallpaper.

VladStudio

Vlad Studio features the work of Russian wallpaper artist Vlad Gerasimov. He cranks out hundreds of great wallpapers, ranging from holiday themes to abstract art. Vlad Studio has wallpaper in a wide range of sizes suited for everything from your mobile phone to a multi-monitor setup. Mobile wallpaper and desktop resolutions at 1600x1200 and below are available for free. Images larger than that are available only to registered users. If you want access to the larger resolutions, now is a great time to pick up a subscription. Vlad is running a Christmas-special where the $30 lifetime membership is available for $20.

4Chan Wallpapers/General/

4Chan is an image-based forum where anyone can anonymously post and share images and comments. It's divided into sub-boards devoted to all sorts of topics like Anime, video games, etc., but has gained notoriety for some of its more unsavory sub-boards. The /Wallpaper/ board, nonetheless, is bustling and updated nearly 24/7 with images from around the web. Since the 4Chan boards are a bit kludgy to use if you're not trying to comment and just looking for images, a variety of scrapers have sprung up to help you pick through all the images in /Wallpaper/. You can visit 4Chan directly at the link above or you can use services like Nik.Bot and 4Walled to browse through the wallpapers available through 4Chan. Be strongly forewarned, however: although the /Wallpaper/ forum is much tamer than other areas of 4Chan, you'll still find a large number of Maxim-level NSFW wallpaper images and the occasional Playboy-level NSFW images when you're browsing. If you're not prepared to explain some really awkward internet memes to your boss, you'd better save 4Chan /Wallpaper/ for home.

Social Wallpapering

Social Wallpapering borrows the vote up/down model used by many social aggregators (Reddit, Digg, etc.) and applies it to desktop wallpaper. Users vote up their favorite, vote down their least favorites, and upload their own images to be ranked by other users. You can browse by rank, category, view random images, and sort by screen size to help you drill down through the huge collection to find the wallpaper you want. Prefer to grab everything and sort it out later? Social Wallpaper makes their entire wallpaper collection available for download via BitTorrent. If you're looking for a site where you can not only find fresh wallpaper but participate in helping your fellow wallpaper lovers find the best images, Social Wallpapering is a solid choice.

Interfacelift

Interfacelift is an enormous repository of wallpaper images. Thanks to the button-based layout at the top of the screen, you can easily drill down through wallpapers using factors like rating, number of comments, screen type, and so on. Once you select your screen type—widescreen, full screen, dual monitors, etc.—you can pick from available resolutions so you never end up clicking on an image and finding out it's not available in the resolution you want. Every search result gives you information about the image plus a drop down menu for size selection and a quick download. Interfacelift has recently added a feature called "The Loupe" which allows users to vote on incoming submissions to accelerate the process of new materials being added to the database.

DeviantART Wallpaper

If you've visited your fair share of wallpaper sites and gotten tired of the endless stream of glowing line-art and video-game wallpapers, then you'll enjoy browsing the wallpaper archives of DeviantART—a subdivision of the artist-centric site. You'll find everything at DeviantART from the more common glow-lines variety of abstract wallpaper to quirky paintings, photographs, and computer-rendered images. Most of the users at DeviantART are prolific contributors, so if you find a wallpaper you really like, make sure to check out the user's gallery to see if they have any other gems to share. DeviantART doesn't have the advanced wallpaper-oriented search features that many of the other wallpaper sites have, but you can still search by image size and sort by popularity.

We have two honorary mentions to hand out this week to extremely deserving sites that have contributed a multitude of awesome wallpapers over the years: Digital Blasphemy and Mandolux. Got more to say about your favorite (or a favorite that didn't make the list)? Let's hear it in the comments.

Click the image to view a larger version.

Based in New York City, Shane Snow is a graduate student in Digital Media at Columbia University and founder of Scordit.com. He's fascinated with all things geeky, particularly social media and shiny gadgets he'll never afford.

Uh, What's It Called?

The iPhone was called the iPhone years before Steve Jobs ever took the stage to announce it. We don't have the luxury of such clarity here. I would think the name has no more than two syllables, personally.

Overwhelmingly what "evidence" there is points to some form of Slate. Not only did Apple register the domain iSlate.com through an intermediary to keep it a secret (discovered by Mark Gurman), they've trademarked it through a shell company called Slate Computing (signed for by Apple's Senior Trademark Specialist) and registered domains and trademarks in Europe through their usual IP law firm, utilizing their standard secret trademark practices, last used with the iPhone. They've also registered "Magic Slate" through the same company. And, while we initially blew off NYT editor Bill Keller referencing an "Apple Slate" in a speech as meaningless, it's a whole lot curiouser now.

Update 12/29/2009: Another shell company, iGuide Media—using Apple Senior Trademark Specialist Regina Porter as the signatory—applied for a trademark on iGuide, which seems, from the trademark description, to a be service less so than a piece of hardware:

Downloadable electronic publications in the nature of books, magazines, newsletters, journals, and blogs in the fields of entertainment, sports, science, history, culture, celebrities, news, current events, politics, technology, and education

Borders referenced an "Apple iPAD" in a survey, but it sounds like the sad invention of a survey copywriter who hit caps lock instead of shift, not to mention a digital feminine hygiene product. Apple also registered a trademark for TabletMac, but most likely to protect the Mac brand name from modders (it sounds unwieldy and gross).

Apple's put a lot of effort into iSlate it seems. Is that the name of the Apple Tablet?

When's It Coming?

Well, obviously everybody who picked a day before today is wrong. Which leaves everyday after today! The overall consensus is that's being announced in late January—note, though, that a lot of the people who're part of the new January cabal were the same people convinced it was coming in the fall.

iLounge predicted awfully specifically back in September that "Apple is currently planning to announce it on or before January 19, 2010." The Financial Times
said two days ago that Apple is expected "make a major product announcement on Tuesday, January 26th" at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, where Apple's rented a stage for "several days." Silicon Alley Insider says that Apple is going to demo a tablet in January.

But when can you actually hold one? From most to least specific: The Wall Street Journal says the tablet is actually going to ship in March, and an analyst said it's coming in March or April. iLounge says it'll hit stores in May or June, like the iPhone. Digitimes reported Foxconn is supposed to have almost half a million of 'em shipped by April. Little emperor of Apple analysts Gene Munster says the first half of 2010. A bunch of connected Mac people just say 2010.

Everybody from the WSJ to Apple fan sites are convinced the tablet is being announced sometime late next month, shipping 2-6 months afterward, so hype and development can bloom, like the iPhone. (Though most of 'em were wrong three months ago.)

How Much Is It Gonna Cost?

The iPhone was $600. Then sales stopped being a-mazing and it dropped to $400. When the iPhone 3G came out, it went to $200 and everybody bought one. So, uh, how much is the tablet gonna be?

Everybody says roughly the same thing: AppleInsider has said it's "expected to retail for somewhere between the cost of a high-end iPhone and Apple's most affordable Mac notebook." Our insider told us it would "cost $700 to $900," or "more than twice as much as a netbook." Taiwan Economic Times says it's between $800 and $1000. China Times, while they got the date pegged to the price horribly wrong, said 800 bucks. And then there's DigiTimes, who says the whole reason the tablet was "delayed" was because it was getting an OLED upgrade, so it'd be a whopping $1500 to $1700. The final word comes from Steve Jobs who said "we don't know how to build a sub-$500 computer that is not a piece of junk."

Survey—and logic—says it'll be pricier than an iPhone and more expensive than a MacBook. Which doesn't say a lot. If you had to pick a number, $800ish seems like the safest bet.

How Big Is It?

The most important spec—and maybe the biggest mystery—is, well, how big the tablet is. Three sizes dominate rumors, tied to the size of panels produced by display manufacturers: 7 inches, 9.6 (or 9.7) inches, and 10.6 inches.

Let's go from least to most specific. Apple reportedly told publishers it's "small enough to carry in a handbag but too big to fit in a pocket." A company discovered in its traffic logs an "unannounced Apple product with a display somewhere between an iPhone and a MacBook," reported the NYT. The WSJ reported it's "smaller than [Apple's] current laptop computers but bigger than the iPhone or iPod Touch."

Apple analyst king of the dweebs Gene Munster, after speaking to "component contacts" in Asia, says it's between 7 and 10 inches. TechCrunch says it's 7 or 9 inches. Digitimes says there's two tablets, one that's 9.6 inches (with OLED) and another that's 10.6 inches. Taiwan Economic News says 9.6 inches too. Actually respectable news organization Dow Jones says Apple ordered displays from Wintek that are "between 9.7 and 10 inches." Oh, and there might be ginormous tablets somewhere out there.

The Financial Times and Reuters both say it's 10 inches. So does our insider.

iLounge presents a unified theory of the tablet universe that would explain the multiplicity of sizes: There have been three prototypes, and the initial one had a 7-inch screen, which was too small, so the latest version is 10.7 inches. Whatever the exact size, they say, it has "7x the touchable surface area" as the iPhone

Let's just stick with bigger than an iPhone, but smaller than a MacBook.

What's Inside

There's been surprisingly little discussion of the actual specs beyond the size of the screen—storage, memory, processor, etc. Most of what little talk there has been has revolved around the networking capabilities.

There could be versions with 3G and without. Specifically, HSDPA (meaning it would only work on AT&T or T-Mobile in the US). Oh look, a SIM card tray! But maybe it'll be on Verizon said BusinessWeek. Hey, maybe even Verizon LTE 4G wireless!

As for the processor, Intel Germany CEO passed gas about a bigger "version of the iPhone" powered by Atom. Dean Takahashi says that the tablet will be the first device using chips that Apple's designed in-house through PA Semi, the chip company Apple bought a while ago, and that the chips are possibly ARM-based.

Aaaaaannnd it coooooooould have an OLED screen, if it cost 1500 bucks.

A 3G option seems very possible, as does a secret-sauce processor, but who knows?

Who's Involved?

Um, Steve Jobs, duh. A whole bunch of new multitouch engineers. Oh, and the Newton guy is back.

Quanta might be making it. Or Foxconn (who makes the iPhone and got a guy killed over a leaked prototype). With a display made by LG (who makes the gorgeous, if flaky, panel inside the 27-inch iMac.) Or maybe the display's from Wintek, according to Reuters and Dow Jones. The battery might be made by Dynapack.

Besides Apple, again, who knows?

Patent Soup

The thing about patents is that, besides the fact they're patenting something, they don't say a whole lot, at least not about actual products. But here's a few interesting ones pertaining to a tablet.

This patent for a "display housing for a computing device" sure sounds like a tablet, which might fit into the tablet docking station in this patent, and you might use two hands, as shown in this patent, to interact with a multitouchable OS X, generously illustrated in this patent, unless you use a pen (ha ha ha). And it might be bumpy, in a cool way.

Patents don't mean a whole lot, so don't expect any of them to actually make it into a tablet. They could, though.

The Backstory

It's fairly well known the iPhone was born from efforts to develop a touchscreen tablet computer. It was simply miniaturized, and uses tech from FingerWorks, a touch interface company Apple bought. The NYT reported Apple's been working on it since 2003, when they built several prototypes using a battery-slaying PowerPC processor. Our insider said that Apple's been working on it for 4-6 years, and that the first prototype of the current version was developed in 2008. Steve Jobs killed the PowerPC tablet, according to the NYT, because Jobs asked what tablets were good for besides surfing the web while sitting on the toilet. The WSJ reported he's killed it twice already.

What's It Going to Do?

Perhaps the most important question of all: What's it actually like?

Well, it depends on the OS. iPhone OS 3.1 had clear traces of new Apple iProducts, and some people say it's a bigass iPod touch, or at least running iPhone OS, which sorta fits with iPhone app developers supposedly being asked to make higher res versions of their apps for demonstration. It apparently fits in with the iTunes remodeling Apple's got going on.

The NYT reported "You will be very surprised how you interact with the new tablet," whatever that will come to mean. As much as Steve Jobs saying they've got some "interesting ideas" about small computers, presumably. Martha Stewart is hyped about it, maybe 'cause it has something to do with diners.

Most of the excitement lately is that it's going to redefine newspapers, books and magazines, which we heard from some publishers, and maybe textbooks, which an insider told us. We're not the only ones who've heard it's got an ebook bent.

Everybody pre-conceived the iPhone based on the iPod and, to a lesser extent, the Newton. Everybody was wrong. Today, most everybody is pre-conceiving the tablet based on the iPhone. Maybe we're all wrong again, or maybe the leaks are better this time.

Your Turn

You know our mantra about rumors: Never trust them. But putting all of them together, we've definitely got some ideas now.

If there's any rumor we missed—or you have a tip (we're good at keeping secret identities)—let us know.

Make Your PC and Mac Share Stuff Like Best Friends: Getting PCs and Macs to play nice over a home network seems like something that should be trivially easy by now; incompatibilities like that feel like a relic from the 90s. Yet somehow, after all these years, it's still a pain in the ass. Unless, of course, you read this guide.

Totally Overhaul Your Phones With Google Voice : You've probably heard about Google Voice in abstract terms, and with a unified, multi-phone phone number, a web-based voicemail dashboard, free text messaging and cheap international calls, it probably sounds great. Also: confusing. Here's how to get totally and painlessly set up with Google Voice.

Clean Your Filthy Gadgets: Look down at your keyboard. Your smartphone. Your PMP. Your DSLR. Your HDTV. Notice how some of the most expensive things you own are completely disgusting? Here's how to clean them up on the cheap.

Back Up Any Smartphone: Smartphones do just about everything your PC used to, so why don't we care about backing them up? We should, and in this post, we do. iPhone, Pre, WinMo, BlackBerry, Android—instructions are all there, ready to indulge your sexxxilyy cautious urges.

Make Windows 7 Play Nice With All Your Gadgets: Windows 7 is the first version of Windows that really respects the gadget hound—it knows us, it understands us, and it gives us tools. Getting your media players, phones, network devices, displays and cameras to work with Windows is easier than it's ever been, but it's also fairly different than it used to be. If you sense tension between your gear and your new Windows 7 PC, look no further.

Hackintosh a Dell Mini 10v Into the Ultimate Snow Leopard Netbook: From dumpy Dell to full-on Mac netbook in one lazy afternoon. I use mine everyday (for pooping!) and you will to.

Survive Boot Camp (and Run Win 7 on a Mac): Boot Camp, the Mac app that lets you dual boot Windows with OS X, works pretty well, except when it doesn't. Matt runs us through the simplest ways to make sure your Windows 7 install goes smoothly, and how to salvage it when it doesn't.

How To: Virtualize Any OS For Free: A great man once said, "Any sufficiently advanced virtualization software is indistinguishable from magic." Something like that, yes! Who cares. Point is, Virtualbox is free, and it lets you install pretty much any OS within any other OS, so you can introduce your Zune to your Mac, your Word to your Linux, your Ubuntu to your Snow Pussy. Again, magic! And again, free!

Install Homebrew On Palm Pre 1.2.1There's really no reason not to crack your Pre open for homebrew, which offers new apps, new functionality, themes, etc. Plus, software updates don't usually break your patches, like iPhone updates do jailbreaks. The version numbers in this guide are old and the software tools a bit different, but hey, the equivalent tools still work.

Rip Your Music Like a Pro: Please, please don't just leave your music ripping up to iTunes. Do right by your music, by ripping it as cleanly and purely as possible. It's actually pretty easy, once you've got the right tools. Your ears will thank you.

Back Up All Your Stuff For Free, No Hard Drive Needed: Excuse the grotty MacBook, it's been replaced. Which was pretty painless, because I backed up all my important stuff for free! Peace of mind, people.

Kick Your Torrent Addiction With Usenet: Usenet trolls sent me actual death threats over posting this article, which apparently threatened to ruin their top-secret file haven (did you jerks know I went on the radio with this thing? Ha!) So it with it with the utmost glee that I backlink here. Usenet is awesome—faster than just about anything else, and full of sweet, sweet filezs. Here's how you, person who doesn't really know what Usenet is, can be saturdating your internet connection within an hour.

Bake Your Own Chrome OS, Right Now: You can actually download the real Chrome now, so it wouldn't really make much sense to follow this guide today. But it's worth a read, if just to see how close Chrome matched our sad, modest expectations. To the people who said they hope Chrome is nothing like the imagined version in this post: oh well!

Install Windows Mobile 6.5 Right Now: A lot of newer Windows Mobile phones have official updaters, so you can bring your handset up to speed without resorting to hacks. Older ones, though, don't. The ROMs will be different that listed in this guide—better, now—but the process still works.

Calibrate Your Turntable For the Best Possible Sound: Because having a poorly calibrated turntable is more damaging to your audiophile cred than not having one at all.

Manage An All-Lossless Music Library With iTunes: From a music listener's standpoint, lossless music is the way to go. From a person-who-has-to-use-iTunes-because-that's-just-how-things-are-nowadays' standpoint, it doesn't. Luckily, it is possible to make iTunes and a lossless library play nice.

Remote Control Your Home Computer From Anywhere With VNC: VNC, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Vee-Enn-See: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Vee. Enn. See.

Use BitTorrent Like a Pro: It's embarrassing to admit that you don't know how to use torrents properly in this day in age, but let's face it—most people don't. Give them this guide! Or use it yourself, discreetly.

Create Stunningly Realistic High Dynamic Range Photographs: Love them or hate them, high dynamic range (HDR) photos are something any good photographer should know how to take. Ex Gizzer Johnathan Mahoogles lays down the steps to snapping hyperreal photos, one by one.

Rip Blu-ray Discs: Optical media is dead! Well, it should be. Here's how to help kill it, by ripping your entire Blu-ray collection to your PC where it belongs.

Hackintosh a Dell Mini 9 Into the Ultimate OS X Netbook: Remember that Dell 10v hackintosh guide up above? This is that, except for the older, more popular Dell Mini 9.

Install Ubuntu On Your PS3 For Vintage Gaming Emulation: So your PS3 can run Linux, BFD. But what the really means is that your PS3 can play pretty much any vintage game, ever, through emulators. It's all about phrasing!

Add Wi-Fi To Your Xbox 360 Smartly and Cheaply: I was really hoping this guide would be obsolete by now, but man, Xbox wireless adapters are still way, way too expensive. Buying and bridging an entire router, as described here, is still a better deal.

So that's about it (for this year)! Let us know in the comments if there's anything you'd like to see in 2010. Happy holidays, folks.

What You Need to Buy

There are plenty of smartphone accessories that are worth considering, and a few that you actually need. Proceed with caution, but don't be afraid to treat your new smartphone, and yourself, to a few goodies.

A Case: They look goofy, Jason hates them, and they screw with your device's carefully designed curves. But here's the thing: smartphones are fragile. They aren't like dumbphones, and a single fall—especially with devices with a glass screen—can poop all over your new smartphone party. Until you're trained, play it safe. Wrap your unit. Case brand isn't important, so just take your pick from your local Best Buy or wherever. Just make sure your device's corners are covered, because it's edge impacts that break the most glass. Just remember, you're stuck in a multi-thousand dollar contract with this device, which itself would costs hundreds of dollars to replace. It's actually kind of terrifying! Pretend it's a baby, if that helps.

Headphones: Your smartphone is now your primary media player, too, so you're going to need to ditch the headphones or headset it came with. Yes, they all suck; no, your phone's aren't the one exception. If you don't care about a microphone, treat yourself to a decent pair of in-ear headphones. If you do, get a midrange wired headset.

Storage: Phones either come with internal storage, like the Pre or the iPhone, or taunt you with "expandable" storage, which pretty much means they've got an empty microSD slot. If your phone comes with less than 2GB of space and has said slot, you need to fill it. Buying a microSD card is a little different than buying a regular SD card, because speed doesn't really matter, and nothing you're using your phone demands particularly high transfer speeds. This is a place to store your music, photos and videos—that's it. Buy these online, where branded 8GB cards regularly dip below $20—in stores, you'll pay much, much more. Also, don't worry too much about getting a full-sized SD adapters, as pictured above. Most phones will allow you to mount your smartphone's microSD card as mass storage when they're plugged into a computer, so removal is rarely necessary.

Cables: Pick up a spare charging cable for your phone. For most smartphones this is a simple mini/microUSB cable, while for iPhones it's an iPod dock connector. Why worry about the spare? Think of it this way: if you lose your only iPod cable, you can't listen to music until you buy another one. If you lose your only iPhone cable, you're out of touch with the rest of the world in a matter of hours.

What You Don't

Of course, the temptation of new accessories is great, and there are legions of companies waiting to seize on your post-transactional bliss. When buying smartphone accessories, proceed with caution.

A dock: Again, people have a tendency to confuse their PMPs with their phones, which may look and act similar, but are used in a completely different way. Unless you want to dock your smartphone near your bed to use as an alarm, it's going to be charging—and syncing—with your computer whenever it's not in your pocket. An impulse-purchased dock will, in all likelihood, live a lonely life. Don't let this sad thing happen!

A branded navigation mount: These are almost always overpriced, and all they really do is hold your phone in your line of sight. Just buy a dirt-cheap windshield or dash mount, buy a 12v DC converter to plug your USB charging cable into, and you've got all the functionality you need for about $20.

Cleaning Kits: Cleaning your smartphone isn't hard, and it shouldn't cost you much at all. Just follow our instructions, and avoid any smartphone-specific cleaning kits. They're a guaranteed waste.

Bluetooth anything: Bluetooth headsets can make anyone look like a dweebish soccer dad, and while they might make chatting on the phone while driving more legal, they don't really make it much safer. Just hold your phone like a normal human, put it on speakerphone, or take the call later. You should avoid Bluetooth headphones too, but for a different reason: they suck. They sound terrible, they'll drain your phone's battery and they're overpriced. If you have to buy a pair, spend as little as possible.

Getting Started

If your smartphone is a newborn, this is where we teach it to walk.

Contacts: Somehow, in over two decades of cellphone development, we haven't settled on a simple way to transfer contacts from one phone to another. Here's how you should proceed through this somehow-still-painful process:
• Get your carrier to do it. If you're upgrading handsets on one carrier, they should be able to transfer your contacts, and probably for free. If you're switching carriers, there may be a small fee. Don't spend more than five bucks.
• Use your SIM. Are you on AT&T or T-Mobile? Is your smartphone on the same carrier as your old dumbphone? Most phones will have an option to write all contacts to a SIM card, which is the little chip that your phone uses to identify itself on a cell network. Do this, pop your old card out, pop it into your new smartphone, and transfer all your contacts from the old SIM onto your new phone's memory. Sadly, this won't work with Verizon or Sprint phones, which are CDMA-based, and therefore don't have SIM cards at all.
• Google Sync. Through a protocol called SyncML, Google Sync supports quite a few features phones, and can pull all your contacts into your Google account. Your new smartphone can then yank them back down from the cloud. Bonus: they're now backed up to Google server's, too.

Email: Email, you'll find, is one of the best things about owning a smartphone. Setting up your email varies from smartphone to smartphone (iPhone, Android, Palm Pre, Windows Mobile) and service to service (Exchange and Gmail setups will be completely different, obvious) but there are few rules of thumb to keep in mind during account setup. For example, use IMAP (versus POP) whenever you can—this will keep your messages and their read/unread statuses in sync with your desktop clients. And since most of your email downloading will be happening over 3G, set the individual message size limit at or below about 10kb. This will ensure your messages come in quickly, but also that you have something to read once they arrive.

Calendars: If you keep a Google Calendar, having it sync with your smartphone is a revelation. Android phones will automatically sync with your default Google account's calendars, as will the Pre, while the iPhone will need to be configured with CalDav. If you don't keep a calendar, your new smartphone is a good excuse to start.

Media and Syncing: Most smartphones rely on some kind of desktop software to transfer personal info, music, video and photos to and from the handset. For the iPhone, this basically means downloading iTunes—which you have to do anyway. For BlackBerry, this means downloading BlackBerry Desktop Manager. Windows Mobile phones are best served by Windows Device Center, while Android and Palm phones—and optionally Windows Phones, iPhones and BlackBerrys—play nice with doubleTwist, a cross-platform music player/media syncing app.

Converting Video: You can't just copy your torrented videos or home movies over to your smartphone; you need to downsample those videos, stat. Just download Handbrake for this—it's basically magic, and it works on Windows, OS X and Linux. These instructions are iPhone-centric, but videos converted to 320x240 h.264 will be suitable for most new smartphones.

Apps! Apps! Apps! Apps!

Without apps, smartphones are nothing. With apps, they're practically anything. Every smartphone platform has an app storefront now, from Apple's pioneering App Store to BlackBerry's App World to the Android Market, and they're all, to different extents, treasure troves.

iPhone: First stop, Gizmodo's Essential iPhone Apps Directory. These are the best of the best, and everything you need to make your iPhone into a mobile powerhouse. If you're averse to spending money on your new iPhone—this thing wasn't cheap, after all—check out our Essential Free Apps. We do regular posts and weekly roundups around here too, so just keep an eye out.

Android: It's got the second best app selection, which is to say there's some really great stuff out there. Our Essential Android Apps roundup cuts through the noise of the App Market, while our monthly roundups keep you up to date with the latest additions to the store.

BlackBerry: We cover the biggest new additions to App World, but it's best to defer to a specialist site like CrackBerry for this one—they have their own app store too, which isn't really much better or worse than BlackBerry's janky official shop.

Palm: We've just pulled one of our patented "Essential" roundups fresh out of the oven, so consult that first. Beyond that, PreCentral's official app reviews are fairly fantastic. Also worth checking out is their extensive homebrew app gallery, which has about as many decent apps in it as the official Catalog.

Windows Mobile: App development for WinMo isn't exactly picking up nowadays but there's a tremendous backlog of useful reviews and materials at WMPowerUser, WMExperts, XDA and MoDaCo. And yeah, we occasionally still do Windows Mobile app roundups, though until things get exciting again, expect less, not more.

Living Happily Ever After

Lastly, a few odds and ends to make sure your metal'n'plastic darling lives a happy life, at least before the end of its two-year contract.

How to back up your smartphone: Your smartphone probably contains as much personal data as your computer, and it's subjected to way more physical risk. Preempt the pain. Back it up.

How to keep you smartphone clean: These little machines are fantastic at collecting fingerprints, dust and grime. Wipe them off every once in a while.

Any other tips for new smartphone owners? Chuck them down in the comments. Happy Holidays!

1. Check Out Snow Leopard's Interface Tweaks: They're not life-altering, but Apple's spiffed up the OS X interface in a couple of ways in Snow Leopard. Notably, there's Dock Expose (which works like Windows 7's Aero Peek) to show you all the windows of open app by clicking and holding on its icon in the dock. Also, giant, scalable thumbnail previews.

2. Move All Your Stuff: The funny thing about switching OSes or moving to a new one is that it's really not hard anymore, since so much of the stuff we do is online. The most complicated gambit for most people, I'd wager, is moving your iTunes library to a new machine—especially going from Windows to Mac—since organizing that stuff (if you're anal about it like me) takes forever. Luckily, there's a hack for that. And if you're going from old Mac to new Mac, well it's pretty easy to move all your crap with the built-in Migration Assistant.

3. Learn What's Actually Under the Hood of Snow Leopard: Apple says a lot of the magic of Snow Leopard is actually under the hood, so you can't see it, like Grand Central Dispatch, which promises in the future to make applications use all of those cores in your machine that much better to become superfaster. Or OpenCL, which uses your graphics card for non-graphics applications to go more fasterer. And there's a whole bunch of other standards Apple's real big on too.

4. Don't Buy MobileMe, Sync Your Stuff With Yahoo or Google: Don't buy MobileMe. Instead, sync your contacts with Google, straight from Address Book, and use Google Sync to deliver 'em to your phone. Same deal with calendars—use the open standard CalDAV to sync iCal with Google or Yahoo, which is as simple as putting in your account info now. And you can upload photos to Flickr directly from iPhoto. Online storage? That's free too.

5. Install Windows: Whether you do it through Boot Camp so you can play PC games ('cause gaming on a Mac sucks, at best) or use Parallels or Fusions to virtualize it and run alongside your Mac apps, with Windows 7 being $30 with a valid .edu address, there's no reason not to. It's even easier to move your Windows apps and files over that you wanna keep if you're making the slow transition, with Parallels Switch edition, which has a handy USB transfer tool.

6. Back Up to Any NAS With Time Machine: Time Machine, OS X's built-in backup, is indispensable. Unfortunately, if you wanna do it over the network, it's kinda limited, unless you know what you're doing. After you figure out your network storage of choice (HP's Windows Home Server with Time Machine compatibility is a damn good option; and for those on a budget, there's Iomega's ix2 200), it takes just a few minutes a couple of lines of code in Terminal to get your Time Machine backup going on any NAS you please.

7. Make It Play Nice With PCs On Your Network: If you get a NAS, you obviously don't have to worry about moving crap back and forth directly between your Macs and PCs, but if you want a method that will work every single time, this is how to do it. It's progressively easier with newer versions of Windows—stuff seems to just work more often.

8. Forget Apple TV, Stream to Your Xbox or PS3: If you've already got an Xbox 360 or PS3 (who doesn't?) there's no reason to bother with another media streamer, even if you're ditching Windows. The programs Connect 360 and Rivet will stream music, movies and photos from your Mac to your Xbox for $20. For the PS3, there's MediaLink, from the guys who make Connect 360, which does pretty much the same deal, but with slightly better integration with iTunes and iPhoto. The P2P app Vuze—which is free—also streams videos to Xbox 360 and PS3 from any OS it runs on, but obviously it's a little less feature-rich.

9. Download the Best Free Software: At first, there seems to be less freeware on a Mac, but you just need to know where to look. Lifehacker's essential free apps has you covered on everything from the best IM app (Adium) to better disc burning (Burn) to video playback (VLC, of course).

10. Remote Control It: Sure, you could shell out for MobileMe to use Back to My Mac—except, you shouldn't—but why bother when you do the same thing and remote control your computer from anywhere with VNC? An afternoon and you're done.

That's it from us. Share your own tips and tricks in the comments, and Merry Christmas!

1. Take a Spin Around the New Interface: Still glassy, glossy and damn near glittery, the Windows 7 interface is actually a major progression for Microsoft: It's not just easy to use, it's a whole new paradigm with the revamped taskbar and Aero Peek making multitasking with multiple windows more natural than ever.

2. Turn Off Everything You Don't Need: While Windows 7 is missing some odd things, like a mail application, the flip side is that you can turn off pretty much every major feature you don't want. Internet Exploder 8? Gone. Windows Media Player? Poof. And if you're used to tweaking the crap out of Windows, you still can—a lot of the old tricks, like for manipulating context menus, still work.

3. Move All Your Crap from Your Old Machine: Windows 7 actually has pretty decent built-in powers for moving all your crap from your old and busted PC to your new pride and joy, though you need to download Windows Easy Transfer separately onto XP if you're pulling stuff from that.

4. Master All of the New Keyboard Shortcuts: Why deal with flipping around a mouse or scribbling on a trackpad when you do the same thing in a tenth of a second with a keyboard combo? The Start key (oh sorry, Windows key), which I've always neglected as a useless monotasker, is supremely useful in Windows 7, as the underpinning for a metric ton of keyboard shortcuts.

5. Get It to Play Nice With All of Your Gadgets: The good news about Windows 7 is that, unlike Vista, most of your gear that worked with your computer a couple years ago with Windows should still work. And newer gear interacts with Windows in a fancy new way with a big ol' splash graphic and easy access to all the stuff you'd wanna do with it. While even simple things, like adding a second monitor, are more straightforward now, here's a device-by-device breakdown on getting everything to touch Windows 7 appropriately.

6. Share Stuff With Your Other Computers, 'Cause It's Easier Now: The networking UI hasn't just gotten a facelift to make it more accessible, it's actually easier to use with HomeGroups—join a HomeGroup, and all of the stuff you want to share with other computers spreads like herpes to the rest of the HomeGroup, no arduous networking required. Also, network in general—like with Macs—seems to just work better with Windows 7.

7. Stream Your Music and Videos Everywhere: Connecting your PC to a TV sounds so 1999. Well, you might not know this, but your Windows 7 PC is a badass music and video streamer, DVR, photo viewer, video aggregator and everything else you'd want out of a multimedia box, all thanks to Windows Media Center. The living room PC is legit now. Not to mention Play To, which beams music (and video and photos) to any compatible device on your network, no setup required (really!). All it takes it a right-click, and those Sonos speakers on the other side of your house will magically start yelling the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

8. Upgrade Your Netbook to Windows 7 Home Premium: If you got a Windows 7 netbook, there's a good chance you got stuck with the artificially gimped out Starter edition, which sucks. The cheapest way to fix this is to buy Windows 7 for $30 using a valid .edu email address, then follow our guide to installing Windows 7 on any netbook.

9. Set Up Some Network Storage: A fresh computer is a fresh start—meaning it's a perfect time to start a new life with fully networked storage for backup, especially if you're using your machine as a DVR with Windows Media Center. (But skip on faster drives.) One awesome option? A Windows Home Server machine, which can do backups and stream out media to all of your computers.

10. Remote Control It From Anywhere with VNC: While diving deep into the system and futzing with your network at the same time, you might as well set up a VNC server so you can control your computer from anywhere, whether it's to pull files or schedule downloads.

That's it from us. Share your own tips and tricks in the comments, and Merry Christmas!

All you gallery-haters, click here.

WHERE: WHERE integrates several widgets designed to answer any question that starts with its name. Where's the nearest coffee shop? Where's the nearest gas station? But it's more flexible than that, able to answer some questions that start with "what," as in "what's the traffic on I-95 like?" Hell, it can even do some "whens," like "when is Fantastic Mr. Fox playing?" It's got Yelp, YellowPages, Starbucks and more. Free

Evernote: Evernote is arguably the best note-taking app on every platform on which it appears (iPhone, Android) and on Pre it's nearly as good. For some reason the Pre version lacks voice notes, but it's still what I use for grocery lists. Free

Pandora: It's Pandora. It's great. Especially essential on the Pre, which has a mere 8GB of non-expandable memory. Free

Fandango: Another one that you probably already know, Fandango's the best movie-finding app on WebOS. It saves nearby or favorite theaters, uses GPS to find those closest, lets you watch trailers—it's everything you'd want in a movie app. Free

Twee: I had a hard time deciding between Twee and Tweed for the title of Palm Pre Twitter Champ, but decided on Twee for two reasons. First, I like its story—it was a jailbreak app first, and muscled its way into the App Catalog on sheer moxie and pluck. Second, it offers a free version, which is the one I actually use. Tweed has a more conventional (read: prettier) interface, but I'm not sure that's worth three bucks when TweeFree is totally competent. Free

NYTimes: An essential for any smartphone platform, the Pre's NYTimes app falls in between the iPhone's and Android's in quality. It's less buggy and better-looking than Android's, but its smaller screen and slightly slower performance gives iPhone the edge. Regardless, it's a great app for the greatest news outlet in the country, and lets you feel informed even though you're just skimming headlines while sitting on the toilet. Free

TasteSpotting Today: TasteSpotting is my favorite food website, but the things that make it great (huge and constantly updated selection, links to external websites, great photography) also make it a headache to read on a mobile device. But TasteSpotting Today puts the massive amounts of info in an easy-to-read format. Great for anyone who likes food. $1

Tea Timer: Honestly, I don't really like tea. I can never get it to taste like much besides tea-flavored hot water, and, you know, I always feel like could be drinking coffee instead. But I have to say, Tea Timer, which provides exact steeping times for a huge variety of tea types (as well as a countdown timer), did result in the best cup of loose-leaf Rooibos I've ever had. Still tasted like tea-flavored water, but it was the best tea-flavored water I've ever made. Way to go, Tea Timer. $1

Topple Ball: The Pre's definitely lacking in games compared to the iPhone, but Topple Ball is the perfect waiting-for-a-bus game. It's kind of like that tilting maze game Labyrinth, but with obstacles like bumpers, launchers and teleporters to provide extra challenge. Surprisingly tough, but my go-to timewaster. $2, free version available

Stitcher: As with Pandora, it's important to have a source of streaming media to make up for the Pre's anemic storage, and Stitcher is my favorite podcast app on the platform. It's sleek, fairly full-featured, streams quickly, and has an easy-to-use interface. Free

Scoop: Scoop is my pick for best RSS reader on the Pre, due to its solid integration with Google Reader. Feeds is the other frontrunner, but it's five times more expensive and you definitely aren't getting more for your money. $1

Open Table: Open Table is a great (albeit sometimes limited) way to reserve tables at restaurants without having to, like, talk to a human being. It's really effective in major urban areas like NYC and SF, although in my suburban Pennsylvania hometown I was better off using Yelp and calling the restaurants. Free

Accuweather: Tells you the weather. Free

Dealert: Tracks deals from a variety of online deal purveyors, like SlickDeals, DealNews and FatWallet. That's provided you need some other source of deals beyond our own Gadget Deals of the Day, shocking though that may be. $2

Yelp: The premiere source for sometimes-corrupt listings of restaurants and local businesses. Need pan-Asian-Ethiopian fusion food right now, in the middle of Little Italy? Yelp's got your back. Free

JogStats: If you're one of those weirdos who likes jogging even when there's a perfectly nice couch you could be sitting on, JogStats is the best running assistant on WebOS. It tracks your distance, speed, calories, altitude, all that stuff that makes me exhausted just typing it. $5

Classic: For the guy who just can't let go to the past, this oddly third-party app recreates the classic Palm OS on your Pre or Pixi, complete with virtual buttons, and will run any Palm OS app. Free

GDial: The Palm Pre's Google Voice app is damn good—in John Herrman's words, "The Pre handles Google Voice nearly as well as Android, and obviously way better than the iPhone." Free

Crosswords: It ain't from Will Shortz, but the Pre's Crosswords app is surprisingly excellent. Clever puzzles, huge selection, with a range of challenge from Monday to Saturday (there's a little crossword humor for you). Seems expensive, but if you're into crossword puzzles, this could mean dozens of hours of entertainment. Or, if you're like me, hundreds of hours. $10

Media Remote: A version of Apple's very first iPhone app, Remote, Media Remote takes the idea to the next level by letting you control several different programs on a Windows PC—WMP, iTunes, MediaMonkey, VLC and XBMC. Pre only (since the Pixi has no Wi-Fi) and yeah, Windows only is lame, but I use this app all the time to control my XBMC-running media center and it works great. Free