This week we learned a few simple ways to avoid the extreme negative effects of long days in your office chair, got more from the long press shortcut on the iPhone, dabbled in a new operating system, and more. Here's a look back.

How Sitting All Day Is Damaging Your Body and How You Can Counteract It

Do you sit in an office chair or on your couch for more than six hours a day? Then here are some disturbing facts: Your risk of heart disease has increased by up to 64 percent. More »

All the Awesome Things You Can Do with a Long Press on Your iPhone, iPad, or iPad touch

Long pressing-that is, tapping and holding down on a part of your screen-provides a lot of handy shortcuts on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. More »

Try a New Operating System This Weekend

We write about a variety of platforms here at Lifehacker, and even if you're perfectly happy with what you're using, nothing makes you feel more appreciative (not to mention knowledgeable) than trying something new. More »

The Manual Photography Cheat Sheet Keeps You Familiar with All Your Camera's Different Settings

If you're just starting out with a DSLR camera, you're probably pretty overwhelmed with all the different settings you have available. This cheat sheet from weblog Living In the Stills will help you keep it all straight. More »

How to Look Your Best In Photos

A lot of us hate having our picture taken, but family members and friends insist on doing it anyway. If you freeze and then end up looking like a deer in the headlights in every photo, there's a few things you can do to prevent it from happening.
Photo by Jim Kelly.
The Stupid Things You're Doing... More »

Google Is Facebook Is AOL: What Happens When a Good Google Goes Bad

Two weeks ago, Google announced that they were integrating Google+, their brand new social network, with Google search results, calling the new feature "Search, Plus Your World". More »

What Should I Use for My Home Theater PC: Apple TV, Nettop, Old Computer, or Something Else?

I'm finally in the market to get a home theater PC, and I'm not sure which direction to go. You guys have advocated a number of things, from using an old PC to building your own, or even buying a cheap nettop or an Apple TV 2. More »

The Five Most Common Causes of a Check Engine Light and What You Should Do About Them

You're driving home from work one day when the car owner's worst nightmare happens: the check engine light pops on. It comes without warning and with no explanation. More »

Top 10 Tools for Finding and Moving into a Great New Home

Whether you want to rent or buy, finding a new home can be pretty tough without a little help. Thanks to the internet, that help is freely available. More »

You Don't Need All Those Chargers: How to Consolidate Your Extra Bricks and Still Power Your Gadgets

Every new device you buy seems to come with its own charging brick and cable-which is good, until you have a drawer full of them in your office, or wind up having to pack a dozen charging cables, bricks, and wall adapters before you so much as go to the library with your laptop. More »

How Do I Quit a Job I Just Started?

Dear Lifehacker,
I started a new job a month ago and now realize it's not really a good fit for me. Even after a month I'm still not comfortable and I dread going in every morning. More »

Ditch Hard Drive Clutter with an Organized, Automated Home Folder

Your home folder is the base of operations on your computer, where you throw every document, app installer, photo, and other file you'll need later. So why does it look like it's been ravaged by a virtual tornado? More »

How to Build a (Nearly) Hack-Proof Password System with LastPass and a Thumb Drive

It seems like every day there's news that a new site or service has been hacked. The intruders make off with usernames and passwords, and even if they're encrypted the service forces users to change them. More »

We've shown you how to automatically download TV shows as soon as they've aired, but not everyone has infinite storage to house those episodes after they've watched them. Here's how to automatically delete old episodes and free up space.

One of the most useful functions you find on regular DVRs is the ability to delete episodes once they're more than a week or two old, to keep space free on your hard drive. Unfortunately, Sick Beard—the program we use to turn our computers into an "internet PVR"—doesn't have this feature, and it's not like terabytes of storage grow on trees. The "old episodes" problem is especially prevalent with shows that air daily—like late-night talk shows—since they can eat up storage fast. Luckily, you can fix this problem with our favorite automatic file organizing tools: Belvedere for Windows and Hazel for Mac.

We've detailed how to use these programs before, and this specific rule is easy to put together. Just set up a new rule for the TV show folder you want to monitor that looks something like this:

Date last modified -> Is not in the last -> 1 weeks

Since our setup downloads TV shows as they air, the "Date Modified" date should be the same as the air date (plus or minus a day, depending). Obviously, change the timeframe as you see fit—if it's a daily show, you might want to use something low like a week or a few days, while weekly shows can probably go with longer periods of time. You'll need to set up a different rule for each TV show's folder (which is fine, since you probably have different rules you want to put in place for different shows).

Remember also that the computer running Belvedere or Hazel doesn't need to be the same computer housing your files. If you're storing your TV shows on a NAS, for example, you can just share your NAS' media folder with your main PC, install Belvedere on your main PC, and point it to the shared network folder. As long as you keep your main PC on or use it on a relatively regular basis, Belvedere will run in the background and clean up those episodes whenever they get a little stale.

iTunes has never been great at automatically syncing new songs or folders of music, but with a little finesse and the latest version of iTunes, you can automatically sync any new music you download to iTunes, with relative ease.

Photo remixed from Shutr.

Love it or hate it, tons of people still use iTunes to manage their music library. Maybe it's because of your love for the iPod, the iTunes Music Store, or whatever—we're not here to judge, we're just here to help you make iTunes work better.

When you're done with this guide, you're iTunes library will automatically sync up with any music you download, whether it's via BitTorrent, the web, or even Dropbox. The guide will walk through how to set up automatic music-to-iTunes syncing on both Windows and Mac.

What You'll Need

• iTunes
• Belvedere (Windows) or Hazel (Mac)

How It Works

The basic setup is actually pretty simple. Apple quietly added an Automatically Add to iTunes folder in a recent release of iTunes 9, which means that, while iTunes still doesn't support watching and syncing custom folders, it does give us a pretty slick avenue for hacking together our own solution. Here's how it works:

Belvedere (Windows) and Hazel (Mac) are automated file management tools that keep track of folders of your choosing and perform actions on files in those folders based on rules you set up. Basically, we're going to set up Belvedere (or Hazel) to monitor all the folders to which you download new music, and automatically add those files to iTunes' Automatically Add to iTunes folder. (Note: By default, Belvedere only scans folders once every five minutes; if you want it to scan more frequently, just open the app, go to your Preferences tab, and change the sleep time. It's a lightweight app, and I've never had problems running the scans every minute or less.)

You'll likely want the behavior to vary depending on what kind of downloading you're doing, so I'll lay out a few different setups below.

Sync Music from Your Web Downloads Folder

Let's start simple: You occasionally browse the web's vast offering of searchable MP3s to snag a one-off single. When you download an MP3 from the web, it ends up in your browser's default Downloads folder. What we're going to do is set up your automated file manager to watch that folder for new MP3s and move them to the Automatically Add to iTunes folder. In Belvedere, such a rule would look like you see in the screenshot below:

(Note: If you're a Firefox user, you could also try an extension like Automatic Save Folder to detect and automatically download specific file types to specific folders. In this case, you could tell the extension to save all MP3s to iTunes' Automatically Add to iTunes folder.)

As you can see, Belvedere monitors my C:\Users\User_Name\Documents\Downloads folder for new MP3s, and when it finds them, moves them to C:\Users\User_Name\Music\iTunes\iTunes Music\Automatically Add to iTunes\. iTunes regularly scans that folder for new music, and when it finds it, automatically adds it to my library and organizes it in my iTunes Music folder. If you'd like Belvedere to ask you before attempting to move newly downloaded files to iTunes, click the Confirm Action checkbox.

That was simple enough, right? Things get slightly more tricky when you're dealing with BitTorrent.

Sync Music from Your BitTorrent Downloads

When you're downloading music via BitTorrent, you don't want Belvedere to attempt to move any tracks before they've completed downloading, and since BitTorrent downloads can sometimes take a while, you could potentially run into a situation where Belvedere might try moving a song before it's completed downloading. So to handle your BitTorrent music downloads, here's what I'd suggest:

(I'm using uTorrent as my example because it's the most popular BitTorrent client, but most have similar features.)

Set uTorrent to move completed downloads to a specific folder on your computer—for my example, I'll call it Completed Music Downloads—like so:

Next set Belvedere to monitor that folder for new MP3s (or other audio file types you normally download) just like you did in the example above. When it matches, move the files to the iTunes watch folder. Make sure to tick the Recursive box to ensure Belvedere checks inside folders instead of just scanning the root, since most BitTorrent downloads will hold the MP3s inside a folder.

(Ideally we could copy files in this instance rather than move them so your BitTorrent client could continue seeding the download until you decide you don't want to seed it anymore [at which point you can manually remove it]. Unfortunately Belvedere doesn't yet remember files it's performed actions on [it's a feature we may add at some point in the future], so we'll have to settle for moving at this point.)

Use Dropbox to Add Music Remotely

As coincidence would have it, this guide found its way into my newsreader last night while I was working on this very feature; the MakeUseOf author suggests remotely adding songs to your iTunes library with Dropbox using a very similar method. Basically you'd create a folder inside Dropbox (he uses iTunes Temp), monitor that folder for new music, and automatically move any new tunes to the Automatically Add to iTunes folder. Using Dropbox, you could add songs to your home iTunes library from any computer—even from work.

The methods I use in the examples above will still work with Dropbox, but the author's setup uses an Automator action that Mac users may want to consider trying. (Similarly, a MUO reader suggests using a previously highlighted method for syncing files and folders outside of Dropbox—creating a symlink between your iTunes Temp Dropbox folder and the monitored iTunes folder—to streamline the process even more. The upshot: A lot of roads lead to Syncville.)

Catch Whatever Falls Through the Cracks

If for some reason iTunes has a tough time adding something you've put in the Automatically Add to iTunes folder, you'll see a new folder inside that folder named Not Added. It contains date-stamped folders of the stuff that didn't make it through the import. In my experience, however, the only stuff that doesn't make the cut is album art and other items that weren't meant to go in that folder anyway, and I haven't had any problems with the items I've added using my automated method.

How Do You Do It?

If you made it this far, you've also realized that you can approach this task from a hundred different angles. I really like the Belvedere/Hazel method, but if you've got another tool you've successfully used to keep iTunes synced up with your new downloads, let's hear about it in the comments.

Adam Pash, the editor of Lifehacker, hates doing anything his computer can do for him. Follow him on Twitter and keep up with his Hack Attack features here on Lifehacker.

Firefox only: Clicking through multiple product images while shopping on Amazon is really a chore. PictureFox, a handy Firefox add-on, opens all the images in a single gallery so you can stop making with the clicky-clicky all the time.

If you don't shop at Amazon often, then you may not realize what a pain—literally—slogging through products with tons of images can be. Nothing makes your repetitive-stress injured mousing finger ache more quickly than clicking on dozens of images to compare the features of a purchase you're trying to make.

PictureFox installs quickly and follows you every time you visit Amazon's website. Just click on the arrow the add-on displays along side a product's main image, and all its associated images—including user photos—all pop open in a single gallery page. The add-on also overrides Amazon's native "Zoom Viewer" feature and opens up images up to 14 megapixels in high resolution so you can see details before you buy.

To manage PictureFox, just choose Add-ons from Firefox's Tools menu. Then select what options you want to enable: Use image-flow gallery, show customer pictures, and allow multiple gallery instances. You can also uninstall the add-on from here, if it's not working out for you.

If you want a full package of Amazon-centric tweaks for Firefox, then be sure to check out Gina's Better Amazon Firefox extension. It shortens Amazon URLs, enlarges product images, and more.

Got a trick for surfing the vast digital aisles of Amazon? Dreaming of a perfect add-on that will make shopping there easier? Talk about it in the comments.