It's Friday, people! Take your tax refund check and go have some fun this weekend. But first, treat yourself to some of our most popular posts of the week:
- Turn Your iPod Touch into an iPhone
"Today I'm going to show you how to make VoIP phone calls from your iPod touch or iPhone using a freeware application called SIP-VoIP." - Five Best DVD Ripping Tools
"Even those in-the-know find it difficult to keep up with the best tools to rip DVDs, especially in the face of increased copy protection." - Battle of the Notepad Alternatives
"If you've done any more than cursory text editing using Windows' built-in Notepad application, you know that Notepad is at best sorely lacking in the features department and at worst downright buggy." - Top 10 Email Productivity Boosters
"The first message one could consider email was sent more than 30 years ago, and that's probably when people began associating angst and uncertainty with the words 'Inbox' and 'unread messages.'" - Free Alternatives to the MacHeist Bundle
"I'm rounding up no-cost alternatives to the current MacHeist bundle (minus the three games) that will give you most if not all of the functionality of their shareware counterparts for a grand total of $0." - DIY Two Dollar Laptop Stand
"Build a lightweight, sturdy laptop stand for a measly two bucks using a couple of twisted wire easels he picked up from the local dollar store and a few common household items." - Analyze Your Email Usage with Mail Trends
"When a flurry of new email snows you in within an hour of every inbox sweep, it's time to dig in and get to the source of your email traffic." - Stitch Photos Into Panoramas with Free Software
"You can get decent photos out of a standard, consumer-grade digital camera, but a little post-processing can turn them into fantastic wide-angle landscapes."
DIY web site Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories steps through putting together your very own obscured USB thumb drive, with the end result looking like a sawed-off standard USB cable.The guide is thorough, and the steps are surprisingly simple. For the cost of one slim USB drive and a cable you're willing to destroy, you'll be the envy of all your friends and coworkers. No, this one's not likely to significantly boost your productivity, but sometimes you need a little Friday fun in preparation for the weekend.
If you're regularly sent TinyURLs but have been burned one too many times by clicking through to an embarrassing link at the wrong time, head to TinyURL's preview page and enable previews. This old but useful feature will set a cookie in your browser, and henceforth all TinyURLs you click on with direct you to a landing page that will display the full link so you can make a more educated decision as to whether or not you should wait to visit the link. For similar solutions that change or preview TinyURL links on-the-fly, check out previously mentioned 
The 37signals weblog highlights an Automator workflow that downloads the front pages of popular newspapers from 
