This week on the podcast we're talking about phantom vibrations in your pocket, free Wi-Fi for everyone (with cable internet), and life at your local hackerspace. Also, we're solving Apple TV jailbreak problems, speeding up slow Windows boot times, and getting Chrome to keep your activity a secret.

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News and Discussion

Phantom Cellphone Vibration Syndrome
Phantom cellphone vibration syndrome describes that moment when you think your phone is vibrating but you've just imagined it. It's easy to develop a habit that encourages to check our phones often when there are constant notifications. The trick to eliminating—or at least minimizing—this effect is limiting your notifications.

Google Chrome Becomes the Number One Web Browser
Google Chrome has displaced Internet Explorer as the most popular browser on the web. This is pretty big, considering Microsoft held the majority long after Internet Explorer became pretty widely hated. Although IE9 is definitely an improvement over past versions, it's still not that great. Another browser's assumption of the number one title has been long overdue. As mostly Chrome users here at Lifehacker, we're happy to see it take the top spot.

Cable Companies Are Bringing Free Wi-Fi "Everywhere"
Want Wi-Fi virtually anywhere you go? Major cable providers are banding together to offer free Wi-Fi for their collective customers. That means if you subscribe to any of the participating cable providers for internet access, you'll receive access to any of their Wi-Fi hotspots around town. This is really great if you use Wi-Fi on the go, and at least a nice bonus if you don't. It also serves to demonstrate how uncompetitive the cable companies are, which has always been a problem. At least this time around we're reaping a benefit of it.

How to Get Involved with a Local Hackerspace
Last week Alan took a look at Hackerspaces and showed us how to get involved. What's a Hackerspace? It's a place you can go in your local community to complete projects with other DIYers. It's a good place to get help from others plus share tools.

Questions and Answers

Each week we answer a few questions from readers and listeners. Here's what we tackled this week.

How can I speed up my sluggish Windows boot time?
Whitson offers up a bunch of solutions. For a rundown, check out our Top 10 Ways to Speed Up Your Computer's Boot Time.

How can I automatically delete my web history and cache when closing Chrome?
Go to chrome://settings/content and check the box next to "Clear cookies and other site and plug-in data when I quit my browser." We offer a couple of alternatives in the podcast, but that's the specific answer to the question.

Can I jailbreak an Apple TV 3? If not, is there any disadvantage to buying the Apple TV 2?
There is no jailbreak for the Apple TV 3 yet, and the most recent 5.1.1 jailbreak doesn't include one. On the plus side, the latest jailbreak includes a method for iOS 5.1.1 on the Apple TV 2. Additionally, Seas0nPass, the primary jailbreak for the Apple TV 2, now supports iOS 5. Learn how to install it and install XBMC—the main reason to jailbreak in the first place.

Because the Apple TV 3 has yet to be jailbroken, Apple TV 2s are currently fetching a high price on the resale market. If you're really set on a jailbroken Apple TV 2 you might want to consider waiting around. That said, there are plenty of other awesome set top boxes. The Verge offers an in-depth comparison of most of them. If you're looking for an XBMC-like experience, Google TV can run Plex and it's basically the same thing (and, in some ways, better). You can also just build an XBMC box on the cheap.

Downloads of the Week

Each week we talk about our favorite downloads. Here are our picks for this week.

Lifehacker Mini Apps
We've been working together to create some posts with built-in mini apps to help you learn if it's legal to use headphones in your state, get a good workout in just 20 minutes, and customize your function keys. Be sure to check them out.

MailStore (Windows)
MailStore is a single-purpose app that connects to your email, backs it up, and doesn't bother you otherwise. It's just about perfect.

Download MailStore

Windownaut (OS X)
Windownaut overhauls window management on your Mac so you can arrange your windows in a multitude of ways, customize the functions of its title bar buttons, and lots more.

Download Windownaut

Sworkit (Web/iOS/Android)
Sworkit generates random workouts that focus on various parts of the body (or all of it) that can last anywhere from five minutes to an hour. It's a lot like our 20 minute workout mini-app, but it works for variable timeframes and you can take it with you on your mobile device.

Download Sworkit

ReadyForZero (iOS)
Previously mentioned debt-management webapp ReadyForZero has come to the iPhone to help you stay on top of your financial obligations anywhere you take your mobile device. It assists by tracking payment due dates, showing you an overall look at your current debt situation, and reminding you when it's time for a payment so you can ensure you don't miss it.

How Do I Submit a Question?

There are three ways to send in your question:

• Record a video, upload it somewhere, and send a link to tips+asklhshow@lifehacker.com
• Call (347) 687-8109 and record a question. Calls are awesome! We like them!
• Email your question to tips+asklhshow@lifehacker.com.

Please keep your questions as brief as possible. This means about 3-5 sentences for emails and 30-60 seconds for calls and videos. Your questions can be specific, but broader questions are generally better because they'll apply to more people. For example, "how can I breathe new life into my old PDA?" is much better than "what can I do with an old HP iPAQ 210?" Either way, we look forward to hearing from you!

This podcast was edited by Kyle J. Norris.

Newspaper, Computer, and Clock (by Brandon Hopkins) provided by the Noun Project.

If you're a night owl, you know how much a regular white web page can hurt your eyes when you open it up. Here are two browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox that will make the web a little bit nicer at night.

We've shared a few ways to make your screen more eye-friendly in the dark, but Google recently released an extension designed to make the web more night-friendly. Here's the lowdown on it and a similar extension for Firefox.

High Contrast Inverts Colors on a Per-Site Basis in Chrome

Google's official High Contrast extension for Chrome is pretty great. By clicking on its icon in your menu bar, you can invert the colors of your web pages, making blindingly bright black-on-white sites white-on-black for easier viewing. It ignores photos, too, so you can still see pictures without them looking like film negatives. You can also choose an inverted greyscale if the colors get too wonky for you.

What's especially nice is that you can set it on a per-site basis, so if you frequent sites that already have "night modes" built in, you can ignore them from being inverted. And, you can set Ctrl+Shift+F11 to toggle inversion on any site you want. Above all, it actually looks good when it's enabled—a lot of color inversion tweaks can really make your screen look weird, while this extension makes everything look somewhat natural.

Blank Your Monitor Lets You Customize Your Inverted Color Scheme in Firefox

Firefox users have a similar extension called Blank Your Monitor that, with a keyboard shortcut, will invert the colors in your browser for easier night reading. Unlike Google's extension, however, you can open up the options and customize the colors for page backgrounds, text, and links, so it looks exactly how you want it to look. It also has a cool feature in which you can select text and press a keyboard shortcut to put it on a reader-friendly, inverted page.

That said, certain page elements can sometimes look weird with this extension (like Google's Instant Previews, page logos, and text boxes), so if you prefer an alternative, check out the Myflavolours userstyle, which also inverts your colors but leaves these things intact.

These aren't the only ways to make your browser more night-friendly, of course. OS X users have a built-in shortcut for inverting the entire screen, and apps like F.lux will change the color temperature automatically based on the time of day, but this is a slightly more extreme solution for those of us with ultra sensitive eyes. If you have any of your own solutions for nighttime screen brightness, share them with us in the comments!

Dear Lifehacker,
My cable company's web site doesn't work in Chrome, and it's really annoying. What's going on and how can I fix it?

Sincerely,
Broken Browser

Dear Broken,
A web site may not work properly for a lot of reasons, and sometimes those reasons aren't immediately obvious. Luckily you can hunt down and fix a lot of these problems yourself. Here are a few things you should try before throwing in the towel.

Change Your User Agent

Some web sites will tell you they don't work in a browser like Chrome, but all that normally means is that they haven't updated their "works with" checks in a very long time (if they don't support Chrome, they probably haven't updated since Chrome was released). If that's the case, all you need to do is trick that web site into thinking you're using another browser, and you can do this by changing your browser's user agent. A user agent is just a string of text that tells a web site what browser you're using. So, in this case, by changing Chrome's user agent string to Firefox, you can make that web site think you're using Firefox and let you through.

Changing Chrome's User Agent

To change Chrome's user agent, you can either download the User Agent Switcher extension (which makes the process quick and easy), or do it without any extensions by going to Tools > Developer Tools > Settings > Override User Agent. This will only change your user agent while you have the Developer Tools window open, so don't close it until you're done with that web site.

Changing Firefox's User Agent

On Firefox, you can download the User Agent Switcher extension for quick changes, or change Firefox's built-in setting, which is a bit more involved. To do this, type about:config in the address bar, promise Firefox you'll be careful, and create a new string by right-clicking on the page and going to New > String. Type in general.useragent.override for the string's name, and a user agent string as the value, which you can find on the internet. For example, the user agent string for Chrome 19 is:

 Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/536.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/19.0.1084.9 Safari/536.5 

Again, this method is a bit more roundabout, but doesn't require any extensions installed.

For more info on user agent strings and how to change them in your favorite browser, check out this how-to from our friends at How-To Geek.

Open Your Browser with a New Profile

Sometimes, your problem can be a bit more complicated, and you'll actually see rendering errors on the page. For example, I recently found that I couldn't view Lifehacker's reader polls in Firefox—the poll portion of the page just wouldn't show up. To determine whether this was an issue with Firefox or an issue with my particular setup, I opened the page with a new Firefox profile and discovered the problem was on my end.

Creating a New Profile in Chrome

To open Chrome using a new profile, open up a Windows Explorer window and type in the following file path:

Windows Vista/7:

 %LOCALAPPDATA%\Google\Chrome\User Data\ 

Windows XP:

 %USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\User Data\  

Mac and Linux users should open up their respective file managers and go to Go > Go to Folder or its equivalent, and type in the following paths:

OS X:

 ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/ 

Linux:

 ~/.config/google-chrome/ 

Once you're there, find the folder called "Default" and rename it to "Backup Default". When you reopen Chrome, it'll open with a clean slate, after which you can check the problematic web site and see if it renders correctly. If it doesn't, then Chrome is to blame, and you'll have to use another browser to access it for the time being. If it does render correctly, then your particular Chrome setup was the problem, and you'll want to keep that new profile and reinstall your extensions one-by-one (in case one of them was the problem). You can delete the old profile if you no longer need it by deleting the "Backup Default" folder. Check out Chrome's help page on profile management for more info.

Creating a New Profile in Firefox

To open Firefox using a new profile, open up a Command Prompt in Windows (or, if you're on Mac/Linux, a Terminal window) and type one of the following commands:

Windows:

 "C:\Program Files (x86)\Firefox\firefox.exe" -P 

OS X:

 /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin -profilemanager 

Linux:

 ./firefox -profilemanager 

Be sure to replace the file path in the command with wherever you installed Firefox or Aurora.

If you entered the command correctly, you should see the profile manager pop up. Click "Create Profile" and give it a name. You should be greeted with a clean Firefox slate, after which you can check the problematic web site and see if it renders correctly. If it doesn't, then Firefox is to blame, and you'll have to use another browser to access it for the time being. If it does render correctly, then your particular Firefox setup was the problem, and you'll want to start fresh with that new profile and reinstall your extensions one-by-one (in case one of them was the problem). You can delete the old profile from the Profile Manager if you no longer need it. For more info, check out Mozilla's help article on the profile manager.

Open The Problematic Site In Another Browser

If creating a new profile doesn't help, it's probably an issue with that browser, and you can't fix the problem yourself. Instead, you'll just need to open that page in another browser from now on. It's kind of a pain, but there are a few things you can do to make it easier. Firefox users can download the Open With extension, which will let you right-click on any link and open it in the browser of your choice. Chrome users don't have a comparable extension, but you can always open up Firefox and drag the URL from Chrome's Omnibar into Firefox's tab bar. This is a quick way to open your current page in another browser.

Sincerely,
Lifehacker

P.S. Got any of your own tips for troubleshooting broken web sites? Tell us about them in the comments.

Chrome: Kill Evil is a simple extension that disables annoying scripts all across the web, like sites that won't let you right-click, sites that won't let you copy images, or sites that paste in citation links whenever you copy their text.

Most of these annoying tweaks run on JavaScript, and while you can disable all scripts with an extension like NoScript, you risk disabling JavaScript features you actually want. Kill Evil is a happy medium between the two: It lets JavaScript run on most pages, but disables some of the more popular annoyances people can add to their sites, including:

• Sites that disable the right-click menu
• Sites that automatically bring up the print dialog when you view the printer-friendly version of an article
• Pages that prevent you from copying their text, add citation links to copied text, and more
• Sites that don't let you resize the window in a certain way
• Sites that force you to open all links in a new tab

Every once in a while, it does get something wrong though, so if you find a page isn't working correctly, you'll still want to whitelist it in Kill Evil's preferences (many of the extension's reviews mention that you should whitelist most Google services, since they run a lot of JavaScript). That said, it's a great way to quickly get rid of some big web annoyances without blocking scripts altogether.

Kill Evil is a free download, works wherever Chrome does.

Kill Evil | Chrome Web Store via GHacks