So you forgot your power cord on your way to an important meeting or the coffee shop. We’ve all been there. There’s nothing you can do to stop your battery drain, but you can do a lot to slow its inevitable demise.

If you’ve got a laptop with a really old battery that drains in a few minutes after a full charge, there’s not much you can do to make that old thing last much longer—you’ll probably want to replace the battery before you do anything else. For everybody else, these tips can help you keep your battery working at peak efficiency.

What Drains Your Battery?

In order to help maximize your battery life, it’s important to first understand what drains the power from your laptop battery, and in a modern laptop it’s pretty simple—the LCD panel is the biggest culprit by far. Microsoft’s Windows 7 Engineering blog has put together a very useful chart that helps show you exactly what percentage each component will drain, which helps us know where to start when trying to maximize the battery life.

The one thing this chart doesn’t point out are add-on devices like flash drives, USB mice, and especially PC Cards—which are known to kill your battery very quickly. If you’ve got an unpowered hard drive plugged into your laptop through a USB port, it’s going to drain your battery more quickly than if you had a powered one.

Tweak Your Power Plan Settings

The first thing you’ll want to do is make sure that you have a reasonable power plan selected for when you’re rolling on battery power. The high performance plan is always tempting (you’re a high performance user, after all), but you’ll burn through your battery a lot more quickly, so select the Power saver or Balanced plans, and make sure it’s set to turn off the display quickly after inactivity, since that’s the biggest power drain.

Next, you’ll want to dig further into the Advanced Power Plan settings, and make sure that the On battery settings are set to maximize battery life—change the plan to turn off the hard disk quickly, use the low-power mode for your wireless adapter, processor, and especially your graphics card. The System cooling policy setting allows you to specify whether the laptop will rely on fans for cooling, or slow the processor down when the temperature gets out of hand, and can definitely help your battery life, though at the cost of some performance.

Adjust the Screen Brightness

Since we’ve already shown that the LCD screen is the biggest drag on your battery life, the quickest way to save your battery life is to use your laptop’s hardware buttons to control the screen brightness—most laptops require holding down the function key and using the brightness keys, and turning it down as far as you can (while still visible) is a good idea. It may seem like an obvious choice, but it’s worth emphasizing at the top of the list for one reason: Of everything you can tweak to improve your battery life, this one change alone is at the top of the list of tweaks that can dramatically improve your battery life.

Make sure that your power plan is set to turn off the display quickly when your laptop is idle, and don’t use any fancy screensavers that overuse the graphics capabilities of your laptop. Many web sites tell you to disable Aero to squeeze more battery life, and it’s true that you might get a very small bit of extra life, a couple of minutes at the very most—you will be much better off adjusting the screen brightness and using aggressive screen blanking settings.

Optimize Your Hardware for Power Consumption

Does your laptop have a Bluetooth adapter that you aren’t using? What about IR? Each of these devices consumes power just by being enabled, and if you aren’t using them, you may as well disable them to save a little bit of battery. If you’re using your laptop on the plane, train, or somewhere without a wireless hotspot, use the hardware button to disable the Wi-Fi adapter if you have one, or just disable it manually in Control Panel.

Try to avoid using a PC Card adapter, as they can drain your battery quickly, and make sure that your USB devices are set to allow Windows to shut them off to save power—you can find the settings in device manager’s Power Management property pane for the device.

You’ll also want to make sure that your laptop has enough RAM—if Windows has to constantly thrash the disk because you don’t have enough RAM to keep everything in memory, you either should consider upgrading your RAM or running fewer applications at once.

Kill Background Processes and Services

Runaway system processes can do more than just kill your PC’s performance—they can also kill your battery as well. You’ll want to make sure that you close any background applications you don’t need to be running while you are on battery power, and disable any automated updaters, scheduled tasks, and especially search indexing.

Prime targets for removal are things like Windows desktop gadgets, and all of those applications that hide themselves in your system tray. It’s time for a cleanup, so disable or uninstall any application running in your system tray that you don’t actually need. (Only uninstall if you’re still plugged in—no use wasting extra battery life on that now.) It’s not just good for your battery life, it’s a good practice in general.

If you want an easier way to toggle settings on or off, you can use previously mentioned utility Aerofoil to help you automatically disable Aero Glass, switch between power plans, mute the sound, and even disable the sidebar, all with a tiny, lightweight icon sitting in the system tray.

Use Hibernate Mode When Possible

Using Hibernate mode instead of Sleep allows your laptop to completely power down and use zero power, so if you aren’t going to be using your laptop for another hour or more, put it into Hibernate mode instead of sleep mode, which still uses a trickle of battery life to keep everything in memory.

One of the other benefits of using Hibernate mode that many people don’t consider is that there are any number of ways that your laptop can be accidentally woken out of sleep mode—for instance, a scheduled task for an application that pulls your laptop out of sleep mode to do backups, or just an unruly device that triggers the laptop to wake up. If you are using Hibernate mode, nothing can wake the laptop other than the power button.

Take Care of Your Battery by Avoiding Heat

Laptop batteries are always going to slowly lose their ability to charge over time, but when a laptop is constantly overheating or used in a very hot environment, your battery is going to die very quickly. Photo by JustinLowery

Today’s laptops use Lithium batteries instead of nickel, but there’s a lot of incorrect information out there about how to charge or drain your batteries, so let’s set the record straight: Nickel batteries required being fully drained before a recharge to optimize your battery life, but Lithium batteries are the opposite—you do not need to fully discharge it before recharging, and in fact, if you fully deplete a lithium battery and don’t recharge for a while, it can become incapable of holding a charge.

You’ll also want to make sure that your battery is not always fully charged—Wikipedia points out that if your lithium battery is fully charged all the time, you will lose up to 20% of your capacity every year, no matter what you do. Make sure to discharge the battery sometimes, and if you spend most of your time plugged in at a desk, you would be better off running the battery down to half, and then simply removing the battery and storing it in a cool place. You can use Hibernate mode to save exactly what you were doing while still shutting down the laptop completely.

photo credit: jared

Icons are an effective aid in helping users quickly find and gather information. They not only communicate information but help break it up and add visual interest to grab the users’ attention.

With thousands of icons available, with endless gradients, colors and reflections, it can be overwhelming as to what will best suit your minimalist design. There are alternatives to all those over-glossed icons, should you require a more simple, elegant design style.

Here are ten noteworthy icon sets which match the minimalist design ethos.

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1. Iconic

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Iconic is a beautiful set consisting of 120 icons in raster and vector formats. The icon set packages are in both PNG, SVG, and SWC image formats with Omnigraffle stencil formats also included. The raster-format icons come in 8×8, 12×12, 16×16, 24×24 and 32×32 pixels; however, if you require a different size you can create your own with the original SVG icons. Iconic also comes in 14 separate colors to meet most designers requirements.

The beauty of Iconic is it’s flexibility, with each icon rendering from eight to 800 pixels, while maintaining a high legibility. Many of the icons in the set come in at least two variations to further increase flexibility. The strict adherence to a grid system also helps keep the look of the set consistent. While the icons are minimal in style they are highly stylized yet subtle enough to be easily incorporated into most design projects. The icons were originally designed for a WordPress theme, and it is within a blog format where they would perhaps be showcased best.

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2. Mono Icons

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Available as a free download, this pack consists of 108 icons in a 32×32 pixel PNG format. While the icons are gray you can easily customize the color in Photoshop, by using layer styles and applying Color Overlay. In Fireworks, simply apply Filters → Adjust Color → Color Fill and choose your color.

The icons are simple, bold and extremely well designed and would fit well within most applications, perhaps best though within either a software application UI or blog format. The ease with which they can be customized and colorized make them an attractive option for your next project.

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3. Pictoico

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With over 100 fully scalable icons, available free for download, Pictoico is an attractive package which bundles both vector and SVG formats. It is the start of a visual initiative to create over 1,000 symbols which will be released to the public over the course of 2010. Pictoico aims to create a contemporary, simple icon which can be used in a variety of ways.

The icons could be incorporated into your online, print, mobile and software applications. The author even suggests utilizing them for signs in the real world around your street, campus, resort or even city.

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4. Gentleface Toolbar Icons

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Available free or with a Royalty Free license, the entire set totals 244 original icons (including eight cursors) optimized for 16×16 pixel size and available in 16×16, 32×32 and 48×48 pixel sizes. The set includes vector icons in EPS and flash SWF formats, which allow complete control to resize without loss of fidelity, color, and effects.

The icons include pagination arrows, ratings and voting controls, social interaction symbols, file system icons and text editor actions. These icons are extremely versatile and would be ideally suited to wireframes and software mock-up creation; however, they would also work well within software applications, toolbars, and even within iPhone and iPod apps.

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5. PICOL

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PICOL stands for PIctorial Communication Language and is a project to find a standard and reduced sign system for electronic communication. PICOL currently offer 3 sets of icons each totaling 517 beautifully designed icons. 16×16 and 32×32 pixel formats are available along with a SVG vector package, all free to download.

The icons offer a unique take on many of the standard symbols, such as application, firewall, internet, cut, copy and paste. Each icon has been designed to be simple, yet effective in conveying the message.

The PICOL icons were heavily featured in the History of the Internet video (by the same designer), which has amassed over two million views and explains the Internet in a fun and incredibly simplistic and elegant way using the icons.

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6. Brightmix

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Featuring 104 wonderfully elegant icons within one EPS vector format, Brightmix offers a flexibile package which can be resized, edited and colorized simply and efficiently to suit most projects.

The icons were originally designed for the relaunch of a newspaper site, and as the authors created and added to the set and utilized them for other projects, they later decided to release them as a free download. Of particular interest is the WTFPL license under which they are released!

The icons are an update to a previous version and include a wider range of icons, which would be useful for various mediums, such as presentations, iPhone applications, wireframes and software applications.

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7. Token

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A beautiful, minimal set of icons which is available as a free download or with a commercial license ($50), Token includes 128 unique icon designs, available as an ICO bundling of 16×16, 32×32 and 256×256 pixels icons, or as a PNG at 128×128 pixels. Each icon has both dark and light variants, and comes along with a PSD which includes the layer styles for each resolution.

Token was created as a sequel to the designer’s earlier icon set, Mnml, and has been regularly updated and expanded. You can now download the additional Token File Type set which includes 32 icons, has a dark and light variant, and is saved as a windows ICO that displays crisply at most resolutions.

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8. BackToPixel

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Designed in a retro pixel style, BackToPixel is available as a free download of 75 icons in 9×9, 18×18 and 28×28 size pixels, in both PNG and GIF formats. The package also includes the icons in over 10 separate colors.

This unique set also includes three button styles which are optimized for lighter backgrounds. The icons could be utilized especially well within a blog design (perhaps an 80s, old-school or retro styled blog) and equally well within both presentations and website design.

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9. Eclipse2

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Available as a free download, the package includes 116 system and 165 application dock icons in 16×16, 32×32, 48×48 and 128×128 pixel sizes in PNG format.

Whilst originally created as a replacement for system and applications icons, the simplicity and clarity of each icon means they would fit perfectly within presentations, as well as web and software applications.

You can also extend the set by downloading the supplementary pack for additional system and application icons (e.g. Acrobat Reader & Microsoft Office) and the complementary Syzygy icon pack which builds upon Eclipse2.

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10. Helveticons

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No minimalist icon showcase would be complete without including the beautiful Helveticons – a selection of vector icons, glyphs and symbols based on the Helvetica Bold typeface.

The purchasing options range from the basic set ($279) to the complete set of 477 icons with extras ($439), which includes a very helpful PSD file to inspire you on how to make the best use of the icons, with examples ranging from basic web buttons to strong logotypes. The set includes seven file formats of which six are scalable vectors as well as the GS format for Omnigraffle icons and CHS for Photoshop shapes.

The icons are stunning in their clarity and overall design and would be perfect for almost any medium, including; wire-framing, presentations, web applications, buttons and promotional material.

What other minimal styled icon sets have you discovered? Be sure to share your picks in the comments below.

Office 2010 hit the shelves yesterday, and Office remains a not-cheap money maker for Microsoft. Here’s a reminder of how you can try out any version of Office 2010 free for 60 days—and then, with software, maybe more.

We’ve been peeking at, poking around, and taking screenshots of Office 2010 since it started showing up on the web, legitimate release and otherwise. After a hands-on look, a Q&A about whether it’s worth an Office upgrade, a showdown of Office Web Apps versus Google Docs, and even a comparison of Office to its own Web Apps, it’s pretty much up to you, the license buyer, to determine if Office 2010 is worth the full freight.

Luckily, those in the U.S. and U.S. territories can grab a free trial product key at the link below, good for 60 days of free use. After those 60 days—or 30 days with a standard, installed-but-not-licensed copy—you’ll start getting nagged and shut down on without a registration. This trial extender software can give you up to six 30-day reprieves, or “rearms,” as we’ve previously mentioned.

Grab the trial, keep it running, and decide for yourself. What have you thought of Office 2010 so far, now that you’ve had a chance to kick the tires a bit?

If you’re watching the World Cup, you’ve no doubt learned about the vuvuzela, a buzzing horn capable of drowning out TV announcers. Here’s how to filter the vuvuzela buzz from your World Cup broadcasts.

A German hacker named Tube details how he banished the vuvuzela from his World Cup audio by selectively muting four frequencies on your equalizer. A (loose) translation from Tube’s German post:

For the Vuvuzela-killer, we need only a high-slope band stop filter that takes out the corresponding frequencies. For this, in principle, any modern computer that has a sound card with low latency and corresponding software should work. In our case, we used a Mac Mini and Logic Express 8. (Actually, such a complex software such as Logic Express is not necessary. We use it only because it was already on it on the computer and the necessary filters are included.)

You Don’t Need a Computer

In fact, you don’t need a computer at all. If you’ve got a stereo with an equalizer or even a TV with a built in equalizer, you can adjust your hardware settings to significantly filter out the noise. For example, the Book of Joe blog details the process on a Samsung TV.

How to Filter the Vuvuzela Drone

We spent the morning here at the Lifehacker labs trying out the settings ourselves, and found that if you duck your EQ at 465Hz and 235Hz, you can in fact filter out the buzz with great results. Ideally you’ll reduce each frequency by at least 40dB (which got rid of the drone completely for us), but if your equipment can’t quite duck that low, just go as low as you can. Here’s how it worked when we tried it in GarageBand on a Mac:

Before and After

Video by Adam Dachis.

Remember, the video is just an example of the EQ adjustments in action. You should be able to use those basic settings in any software or hardware that can handle them. As you can see, it’s not all that difficult to silence the vuvuzela with an equalizer—again, at 465Hz and 235Hz (or as close to those numbers as you can get). Got another method that’s worked for you? Let’s hear it in the comments. [Image credit: The Run of Play]

photo credit: Stéfan

When Google launched its panoramic photomapping service back in 2007, it was the first time many netizens had the chance to explore a swathe of detailed street-level photos from their armchairs.

In the U.S., Street View’s rivals now include Microsoft’s Silverlight-powered “Streetside” via Bing Maps and MapQuest’s 360 View. Elsewhere in the world, other international sites offer rival photomapping for their particular part of the globe, even as the reach of Google’s Street View steadily increases.

We’ve picked our five favorite websites from around the world that offer extensive street level imagery from places as varied as Munich, Mae Hong Son, Moscow and Miskolc. So grab your Panama hats and get ready to hit the virtual sidewalks of streets many, many miles away, then let us know your favorite services in the comments below.

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City8

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There are a number of Chinese services that offer street level photography of the country, with one of the first being “virtual tour” software designer Easypano’s City8. It claims to have beaten Street View to the web by a year.

City8 currently offers fairly comprehensive imagery for more than 40 Chinese cities, however, navigating the site can be a little tricky unless you read and speak the lingo, which sadly, we don’t. The photo maps won’t display if you’re viewing the site through Google Translate (in Firefox anyway) so you’ll have to navigate back and forth (or go for a dual screen option) to find out what you’re looking at. However, the photos of everyday China are fascinating so it’s definitely worth the hassle if you have an interest in the People’s Republic.

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NORC

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NORC’s photo mapping services cover Eastern and Central Europe. Currently, you can see landmarks and parts of cities in Austria, the Czech Republic, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Hungary and Russia (Russia is accessed via a separate site — Mappi).

Luckily for those not blessed with multi-lingual skills, the site is available in English, making zipping round the back streets of Innsbruck, Austria a breeze. NORC ups the value by making most map views available as 3D images — if you have the correct glasses. You can identity which maps are 3D by the glasses icon on the top left of the display.

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MapJack

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Mapjack.com offers a slightly random mix of imagery from a few select areas on America’s West Coast and parts of Thailand.

“What others have done with NASA budgets and Star Wars-like equipment, we’ve done on a shoestring budget, along with a few trips to Radio Shack,” the site claims.

Those Radio Shack trips were worth the effort however, as Mapjack’s image quality exceeds that of Street View with particularly clear, bright scenes and vivid colors. We recommend Mapjack for seeing crisp photos of the Yosemite National Park and for soaking up the brilliant street scenes of Chiang Mai.

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SightWalk

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This German website offers street level photos of Bonn, Berlin, Dusseldorf, Hamburg, Cologne, Munich and Stuttgart. Thankfully it’s also available in English.

We were quite impressed with SightWalk’s option to share locations with your social circle via Facebook, Twitter, and e-mail. It also overlays map data with points of interest along with Wikipedia links (which are in German).

The site is easy to navigate — we were headed down the Potsdammer Platz within seconds of selecting Berlin from the homepage — and the imagery is in decent quality.

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Yandex

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As Russia’s leading search engine, Yandex started a photographic index of Eastern European cities starting with the biggest ones: Moscow, Saint Petersburg and Kiev. It has just recently expanded to also offer panoramic views for Kazan, Nizhny Novgorod, Samara and Chelyabinsk.

The service is in Russian, which can make navigation fairly difficult, but the clarity of the street maps (designed by the geek legends of Art Lebedev Studios) make the site less of a challenge to use.

Whether you want to see the exotic roofline of the the Kremlin as it appears from the street, or view the brutal tower blocks that pepper the cities, Yandex is a great place to go, especially considering Google is yet to get its camera-equipped cars across the Russian border.

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BONUS: VideoStreetView

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This is a bonus site because it actually offers 360-degree panoramic videos. In a nutshell, this Swiss firm has recorded footage as it drives down streets, and as you watch the clip you can pan around at will, looking left and right, up, down and even behind you. The commercial possibilities for panoramic video are really quite exciting for lots of different areas and industries, so be sure to check this out to see what the future might hold.