Nothing in today's featured office is extraordinarily expensive or custom built, but the office looks like it was designed by a professional thanks to a unified color scheme and use of accessories.

Lifehacker reader Veronica Domeier made over her home office and since then she has been steadily tweaking the layout since. She writes:

So this year I decided I needed some inspiration in my home office. The new book shelf was a great start but nothing pops like a new coat of paint.

Last weekend we went down to HomeDepot and picked up some paint. I had already decided I wanted red before we got there. Looking through the swatches we came across one called "red, red wine" Perfect! One it was a nice shade of red, dark but not to dark and two it had the word 'wine' in it - I love wine. Sold!

Here are the results...I must say I'm really enjoying the new look :)

The images here show her office immediately after the make over and with the addition of an nice spacious external monitor.

If you have a workspace of your own to show off, throw the pictures on your Flickr account and add it to the Lifehacker Workspace Show and Tell Pool. Include some details about your setup and why it works for you, and you just might see it featured on the front page of Lifehacker.

• The magnetic strip on my student ID card is weak. It still works in doors, but more often than not fails to swipe in the meal plan registers. Is there a way to make the magnet stronger?
• Anyone have any recommendations for a good/durable/economical ice cream maker?
• Is there a way to block images in Google Reader feeds?
• Any suggestions on getting a suction cup to regain its suction?
• Does anyone know how I can mount only a single folder from an external drive to a folder on my Windows/NTFS partition?
• How do I burn an .img file on Mac?

In this case the burning sensation is "delicious," not "first degree and could result in your death." And apparently it really works too, although the advertised "time to awaken" period seems a bit too long for my taste.

Effective over an area of 50 feet, the Wasabi alarm can typically wake people up within two-and-a-half minutes. Update: This is a non-traditional fire alarm, for the deaf community. With that in mind, this could certainly save lives.

Two years ago this alarm was but a concept. Now it's a $560 (?!?!) reality. [CNET via Technabob]

Amazon has given in to Macmillan, and will switch to a pricing model that sees bestseller and new hardcover releases offered to customers at $12.99 to $14.99. The official statement is as follows:

Dear Customers:

Macmillan, one of the "big six" publishers, has clearly communicated to us that, regardless of our viewpoint, they are committed to switching to an agency model and charging $12.99 to $14.99 for e-book versions of bestsellers and most hardcover releases.

We have expressed our strong disagreement and the seriousness of our disagreement by temporarily ceasing the sale of all Macmillan titles. We want you to know that ultimately, however, we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan's terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books. Amazon customers will at that point decide for themselves whether they believe it's reasonable to pay $14.99 for a bestselling e-book. We don't believe that all of the major publishers will take the same route as Macmillan. And we know for sure that many independent presses and self-published authors will see this as an opportunity to provide attractively priced e-books as an alternative.

Kindle is a business for Amazon, and it is also a mission. We never expected it to be easy!

Thank you for being a customer.

Well, that was quick. [Kindle Community]

It was quite the week for Apple, first with its best-ever earnings and then the launch of the iPad. While Apple didn't create this category of device, it did answer the fundamental question of why this form factor needs to exist. The meta lesson is that the story told is as important as the hardware, software and services being sold -- and while everyone may not be convinced, I do think Apple will win over the majority of a skeptical audience with high expectations. But there's also four important lessons that Apple taught the market this week, as it enters a space that's been mostly a failure.

1. Define what your product does. The first thing Apple did was answer that question immediately and then define what the product needed to do. Apple explained what capabilities need to be in the this class of device and then went on to show how each of those features not only worked but were optimized for the iPad. That's something we've seen lacking in this category to date.

2. Leverage what you've done before. I believe the iPad is likely to do well with consumers as it leverages Apple's previous successes with the iPod and the iPhone. At the base level, that's compatibility and synchronization with iTunes as well as backward compatibility with existing applications. That's important -- as a user I can use my existing content library and my application collection. It also means that iPad has 140,000-plus applications at launch. But it's more than that. Apple is not only leveraging its ecosystem of devices and software, it's leveraging the lessons it spent a decade teaching consumers. Apple taught its market about MP3 players, digital music, smartphones, capacitive multitouch screens and mobile apps. It can now go directly to selling the form factor, as well as new features such as productivity and e-books.

Continue reading Entelligence: Lessons from the iPad launch

Entelligence: Lessons from the iPad launch originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 31 Jan 2010 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Developer and blogger Darren Beckett rounds up a crop of five e-readers and gives them a short price and feature comparison with the newly released iPad—and rolled the results in to an eye-friendly infographic.

(Click the image above for a closer look.)

We may have our problems with the iPad, but that doesn't mean people aren't interested in buying it. This comparison pits the iPad against other similar devices, highlighting price, screen size and type, storage, input, multi-tasking, multi-function, and connectivity. The charts not perfect (it only compares the bottom-of-the-barrel iPad, so when it says the connectivity is only Wi-Fi, keep in mind that more spendy iPads also have 3G), and it's not as detailed as, say, this excellent comparison of the current crop of smartphones (which includes monthly fees for a true cost of ownership), but it still offers a nice overview of the market if the iPad's piqued your interest.

Most e-reader enthusiasts would likely point to the iPad's lack of e-ink as a pretty big red mark—and that because of that the iPad maybe isn't something you'd even want to compare to an e-reader. But convergence devices like the iPad are certainly attractive when they can swallow the functionality of other devices (like e-readers) and offer a lot more at a similar price, so you can be sure that a lot of people interested in buying a Kindle will also be considering the iPad.

Give your thoughts on the matter—especially if you've got experience with any of the other readers listed—in the comments. (Note: The JooJoo is still an unreleased product but is, in theory, more like the iPad.)

We recently highlighted personal development blogger Dragos Roua's suggestion to treat yourself as a computer to become the best version of yourself. One of his suggestions: Defrag your mind. Here's a closer look at what he meant.

Roua extended his brain-as-computer metaphor a bit further, offering five steps to defragging your mind. It may sound a little silly, but a lot of it is actually pretty solid advice. For example, in step three Roua explains how to establish priorities:

If you ever witnessed a defragmentation, you saw that the most frequently accessed information is usually moved in the first sectors of your hard-disk. That would make it easier and faster to be accessed. And you're going to do exactly that: make things easier to manage.

Identifying priorities is obviously closely related to the dominant setup. If you're going to work more than usual, then one of your priorities would probably be to have your laptop charged as often as possible. If your main setup would be traveling related, maybe the tool which should be constantly charged is your mobile phone.

The easiest way to assess the priority is to use a scale from 1 to 5, 1 being the higher point of the scale. Take the previously gathered information and run it through this filter. Just start practicing and in time you'll get better at it.

There you have it. Roua offers similarly good advice for each step in his mind-defrag process, so hit up the full post for his rundown.