If Lifehacker's feeding your reader more posts than you can eat, switch to our trimmed-down top stories feed to skip the extras and get right to the good stuff. Don't care about Mac-only downloads or the election or Google Chrome? Customize our URLs to see only the posts you want. This week's most popular posts include:

• Buy $25 Restaurant Gift Cards for $2
  "From now until Halloween, entering TREATS at the checkout applies a second 80% discount to the sales price."
• Battle of the Thumb Drive Linux Systems
  "These days, it only takes an increasingly-cheap USB thumb drive and a program like UNetbootin to create a portable Linux desktop you can run on any computer that can boot from a USB port."
• Ten Firefox Themes as Dark as Your Soul
  "Ok, your soul isn't that dark, but with Halloween coming up, now's a fine time to dress up your copy of Firefox."
• How to Look Like a World Leader on a Hockey Mom Salary
  "The Republican National Committee spending nearly $150,000 to dress and style Alaska Governor Sarah Palin and her family in the wake of her nomination as the party's vice presidential candidate surprised me."
• Pixolu Finds Images by Similarity
  "Web-based application Pixolu helps you find images by their similarity to each other. Enter a search term and Pixolu searches the image indexes of Google, Yahoo, and Flickr."
• Can Windows 7 Recover from Vista?
  "Our gadget-obsessed siblings at Gizmodo got a chance to walk through Windows 7 at the Professional Developers Conference, highlighting a heaping serving of nice new features."
• How to Present Yourself Powerfully, Part 1
  "You may have a great idea bouncing around in your head. It may be something that could revolutionize the company that you work for, or even change your own career..."
• How Long Does Your Computer Take to Boot Up?
  "PC makers are setting their sights on reducing the amount of time it takes your PC to boot up, reports the New York Times, because users are increasingly impatient about waiting to go about their computing business after hitting that power button."
• Save Money on MP3 Purchases (or Find Them for Free)
  "The Macworld blog offers a few tips on doing comparison shopping between the major MP3 music stores..."

Halloween is a scary day because you never know when some undead miscreant is going to try and harvest your brain. That's why, as Matt Cutts discovered, Google has ordered its robots to disallow any brain-hungry zombies from...well...eating brains. Now we can search the web with the knowledge our heads will be intact every step of the way.

UPDATE: I've just been informed that Google doesn't actually have any real robots, and zombies don't really exist. Apparently, this is some sort of "joke" regarding some robot.txt script which doles out permissions to other search engines trying to crawl the site. I'm not amused. [Matt Cutts via Webware]

Halloween is a scary day because you never know when some undead miscreant is going to try and harvest your brain. That's why, as Matt Cutts discovered, Google has ordered its robots to disallow any brain-hungry zombies from...well...eating brains. I'm not sure exactly how this zombie spotting and robot deployment works, but now we can search the web with the knowledge our heads will be intact every step of the way.

UPDATE: I've just been informed that Google doesn't have any real robots, and zombies don't actually exist. Apparently, this is some sort of "joke" regarding a robot.txt script, which doles out permissions to other search engines trying to crawl the site. I'm not amused. [Matt Cutts via Webware]

Filed under: Desktops

Presumably in an (utterly futile) attempt to bring down the power grid all around the Mediterranean, print magazine PC World Greece benchmarked three powerful Nehalem desktop processors -- the Core i7 Extreme Edition 965, and the apparently non-extreme Core i7 920 and 940. Names aside, performance from all three was extreme compared to most stuff currently on the market. The data for number nerds: in 3DMark06 the 920 finished ever-so-slightly behind the Core 2 Extreme QX9770's 4,922 marks with 4,818 while the 940 and the 965 both opened a can of you-know-what at 5,282 and 5,716 respectively. More titillating figures await enthusiasts through the read link, but for you normal folk only concerned that Nehalem wouldn't be fast enough to justify an upgrade (and you weren't), rest assured that it triumphed in this no-holds-barred CPU cage match.

[Via techPowerUp! Forums, thanks sk]

Intel Core i7 benchmarks make Core 2 Extreme look like a washed-up has-been originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 31 Oct 2008 19:38:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Despite the humiliated faces of these two dogs dressed as a Nintendo Wii and a Wiimote, this photo has had two effects in me. One, it made me chuckle. Two, it made me scramble all over the house looking for cardboard, white paint, black and blue markers, a dog mask, and fur coat (trust me, all these elements are somewhere in my closets). Sadly, I couldn't find them on time, so I'm going to have to wear again my rubber chicken outfit, which keeps sticking on all the wrong places.

[Thanks Andrew for the photos]

Happy Halloween! Have fun and safe trick-or-treating out there. Don't eat any Pirate's Gold foil-wrapped coins, they've been recalled for melamine!

(Photo: krodinjw)

If you've been feeding your ego with vanity searches and Google alerts, you may be happy to know that the once email-only digest of Google alerts is now available in RSS feed format, too. Delicious.

Send a batch of email, IM, SMS or even voice messages with Notifu. The site is designed as a iPhone webapp, but it'll work in any browser. Simply add a list of recipient email addresses, IM handles or text or voice phone numbers and send a message to a group of folks quickly and easily no matter how they prefer to be reached. Your typewritten message will be delivered to callers or voicemail via text-to-speech, and you don't need an IM account to send messages to AIM, Yahoo IM, GTalk or other chat clients. Sign up to register and you can save a set of contacts, get confirmation of message delivery and manage replies.

What you are you seeing in these screenshots may seem like a real iPhone application, but it's not. It's a web page displayed in full screen, completely out of Safari, behaving and looking exactly as any native iPhone program would do. The best thing: It is not a new feature of the incoming iPhone OS 2.2 update: The secret feature is "hidden" in the current 2.1 version and only requires one thing: HTML code embedded in the web page itself. No iPhone modification is required. If you are browsing this from the iPhone, you can try it yourself very easily:

1. Click here to go to the Web page. Safari will open this time.
2. Click on the + icon and add the page to the iPhone home screen.
3. Go out and click on the saved application.

Magic! [AppleInsider]

When the Lenovo laptop Rick ordered for his college-bound daughter was super-duper delayed in arriving and he hadn't heard anything from the company, he did the opposite of an EECB (executive email carpet bomb). Instead of blasting his complaint to every single executive he could find, he wrote a well-crafted letter laser-targeted at a single individual, the SVP of operations. The result? An email from the Chief of Staff in the CEO's office. His order was expedited, and, in the meantime, they got a $5000 "Reserve Edition" leather-wrapped laptop as a loaner. Here's his letter that got him the fix:

Rick's letter to Lenovo:

As the Senior Vice President for Operations, I want to bring to your attention an operations business practice which I believe is bad for your customers and is leaving Lenovo with a negative public opinion.

First, a little background...

My daughter will be starting her freshman year at Portland (Oregon) State University in the last week of September. Since she will be a commuting student, I was looking for a small and lightweight laptop for her to carry daily. I have been following "netbook" development activities of several companies, including Lenovo. As soon as I learned the IdeaPad S10 was available to order, I placed an order via Lenovo.com (Order # ) on August 19.

I knew I could count on a Lenovo product; for eight years, a previous employer provided me with a series of ThinkPads which served my flawlessly.

A few days after I placed my order, I was able to log-on to my account. I saw my order had an estimated ship date of 09/16/08. Though this was four weeks away, it would arrive before my daughter started her studies.

As September 19th approached, I started checking the ship date more-and-more often; it never changed. With less than one week until September 19, I started getting worried. Using Google, I found a number of message boards with commentary from customers who had ordered S10s, had their estimated ship date come-and-go, and had heard nothing from Lenovo. Some people have called Lenovo, only to be told there would be a two month delay in shipping any S10s!

Today, I too called Lenovo. I was told there was a 50-day slip in shipping. This is very, VERY disappointing on two points:

* The huge amount of time between ordering and shipping
* Lenovo has made no effort to update its customers

On a personal level, this means my daughter will not have her S10 until mid-November — too late for the start of her first term.

This also means I need to reevaluate my decision to order a Lenovo S10 and either buy a larger laptop or to consider a Dell Mini-9, Asus Eee, or MSI Wind.

I'd much rather buy the S10....

I urge you to look into error in your processes which had led to the second bullet above.

Rick S.
Sherwood, OR

Rick's letter to us after he sent out the first one and heard back from Lenovo:

The next morning, I received an email from the Chief of Staff in the CEO's office! He again apologized for the issue and looked into my order. Over the next week, we exchanged several emails but the bottom line is that unfortunately, there was nothing he could do to ship the S10 any sooner than October 14. He then offered to ship me a loaner laptop – a Lenovo "Reserve Edition". I discovered this is a $5000 limited edition leather-wrapped laptop! While a bit worried about handing-off this über-laptop to my daughter, I accepted this generous olive branch. I was then handed-off to a woman in the "Office of Bill Amelio, President & CEO", who arranged for the Reserve Edition laptop to be shipped overnight. She even included the labeling for Lenovo to pay the cost of the eventual return to Lenovo.

It's going to be difficult to return this sweet notebook in a few weeks and downgrade to the S10. I must commend Lenovo for their handling of my concern. As I told the Chief of staff, "This is analogous to loaning a Maybach when having a Hyundai serviced."

To other Consumerists, I offer this advice: If you have a problem with a product or service, reach out, be polite, and take the time to craft a well-written letter. Your efforts may be rewarded.