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Ever wish you could send your friends or relatives one simple link and say "Here's everything you need?" Enter FatURL to make your dreams come true.

FatURL lets you enter a series of links with individual captions (just enter whatever text you'd like on each line after the link) and gives you one consolidated link to share. When your friend or family member clicks the link you give them, they'll be taken to a page that lists all the apps/sites/whatever you've sent them with the captions clearly laid out. You can label each link with the name of the app or turn them into instructions.

FatURL | via Lifehacker Australia

AutoHotkey is a free, open-source scripting platform for Windows that you can use to automate just about anything. It's fairly simple to use and even simpler to find existing scripts for. We'd like to see what cool things you've done with it.

AutoHotkey is a favorite among our Windows-using life hackers. It even made our Lifehacker Pack for Windows. You can use it to automate repetitive, tedious tasks or to turn just about any action into a keyboard shortcut. We've shown you all kinds of different tricks you can perform, but now we're interested in seeing what you've come up with. Share your best AutoHotkey script below!

Image by rangizzz (Shutterstock).

Yesterday at Google I/O, the company announced something it hasn't before: a stock version of an existing Android handset. Is it better than a Nexus, though? Yes...and no.

First, what exactly is this phone? Well, it's exactly what it sounds like: a Galaxy S4 that runs stock Android. Google will sell it through the Play Store (like a Nexus) for $649. It will work on T-Mobile and AT&T LTE bands and launches on June 26th. It will come with an unlocked bootloader and Google promises it will receive timely updates, much like the Nexus line.

So what's the real difference between this and a Nexus? More than you'd think.

The Hardware Gives You More Control Than a Nexus

Since this phone is using mostly unmodified hardware, there are a few key distinctions between this and Nexus hardware. For starters, you have a micro SD card slot. With the exception of the Nexus One, Google has abandoned the usage of expandable storage on the Nexus line. The company explains that it does so to avoid confusion over where to put data. Simpler for the user, simpler for developers. Of course, there's also the issue of multi-user support, though that's something that can be resolved. It's just very difficult. Regardless of the reasons, though, if you want a device with expandable storage, a Nexus is not an option for you. Now, however, stock Android is.

You also get a removable battery. While there isn't the same policy against removable batteries per se, all of the modern Nexuses (the 4, 7, and 10) lack the ability to easily remove your battery. The Galaxy Nexus still has this option, but it's also about a year and a half old now. The Galaxy S4 is now the most modern, powerful handset running stock Android that you can take the battery out of.

For users who like options, this is a great thing. There's plenty of argument to be made on both sides about whether micro SD cards and removable batteries are necessary features, but if you land in the "Yes" camp, you're covered here.

It Gets All the Same Software Benefits

So, you don't get all the hardware downsides of having a Nexus. What about the software upsides? You get those too! As we stated earlier, you get access to updates sooner. How much sooner? Well, last year, Android 4.2 was announced on October 29th. By November 13th, Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 7 owners received the bump, with other Nexus devices getting the upgrade shortly thereafter.

The first non-Nexus device to get the Android 4.2 treatment was the ASUS Transformer Pad 300. That happened a full three months after the last Nexus device got the upgrade. That was considered a fast upgrade. Android has historically had a bad reputation of rolling out updates across all devices, but if you want to be the exception to the rule, the Nexus—and now, this Galaxy S4—is the way to go.

...But There Are Downsides

All of this sounds fantastic, actually. So, what's the downside? Well, you're going to have to pay out of pocket, for starters. $649 for a phone without a contract. This isn't too bad for a typical modern smartphone, but it's a full $350 more expensive than the cheapest Nexus 4. In fact, you could buy two Nexus 7s—one of each capacity even!—for the price of this one Galaxy S4.

You'll also be limited in your choice of carriers: AT&T and T-Mobile in the US, and only GSM carriers with compatible bands worldwide. If you're on Verizon, Sprint, any CDMA carrier worldwide, or a GSM carrier that doesn't support the right radio bands, you can stop reading now because you can't use it if you wanted to. Granted, worldwide, GSM is the predominant standard, but it's also unclear how many countries this will be available in when it launches.

Of course, even if you are on the necessary carriers, you still can't get it yet. The handset won't be available until the end of June, assuming no delays. Meanwhile, you can buy the regular version of the GS4 on AT&T and T-Mobile today. So if you really want to get in on the action, you'll be waiting over two months for the privilege. Oh, and we're ignoring one very obvious caveat to this phone's entire premise.

Why Not Just Root a Regular Galaxy S4?

In the Android community, there is a certain unstated understanding that any halfway-popular phone will probably get a stable ROM based on AOSP (read: unaltered Android). So, instead of paying twice as much for this new S4, you could just buy a regular S4 and flash CyanogenMod on it instead. However, not everyone's comfortable with rooting, and it can be quite a hassle. So, if that sounds like you, this device is definitely worthwhile.

It's also simpler to unlock this S4's bootloader. The AT&T Galaxy S4 has a locked bootloader. Legendary hacker Dan Rosenberg has already circumvented this barrier, but isn't releasing his method yet. Why? He wants to be able to unlock the Verizon version. If he gives up the goods now, Verizon may be able to patch the hole he's exploiting before it even comes out. If all that is already starting to make your head hurt, you understand why this new S4 could be worth the money: an officially-sanctioned method is better than a locked bootloader you have to fight against. (That said, we still think stock devices can benefit from a custom ROM.)

So, Should You Care or Not?

Clearly, the new S4 has a lot of advantages. There are a few categories of people, however, that we can rule out off the bat. You should not care about the stock version of the Galaxy S4 if you:

• Are on a CDMA network like Verizon or Sprint.
• Don't want to pay $650 out of pocket for a phone.
• Prefer Samsung's TouchWiz/Nature UX software over stock (or at least don't mind it).

That will actually rule out quite a few people. For those of you that are remaining, you should probably care about this phone if you really want stock Android and you want any of the following:

• A micro SD card.
• A removable battery.
• LTE on AT&T or T-Mobile.
• No hassling with root/ROMs.

The field of people that this specific set of criteria applies to may be small, but the fact that this device exists is also something of a unicorn in the Android world. A non-Nexus device with a micro SD card, removable battery, LTE, stock Android, and an unlocked bootloader that uses modern, powerful hardware hasn't happened yet. It's probably not going to be enough to sway any but a very small minority of users. If you're part of that group, though, this is probably a godsend.

Probably.

Battery photo by ZDNet.

iOS: Buycott provides a way for you to keep up with which companies support the causes you support, instead of providing a list of companies to avoid.

The app sorts most companies into "campaigns" that you can join. From there you can see which companies should be supported and which should be avoided. Additionally, you can see a family tree for each company so you know which subsidiaries are part of the parent company. Unfortunately, the amount of information for why each company is categorized in whichever group is somewhat minimal, but if nothing else, it provides a starting off point for your own research.

The iOS version is available now, with an Android app coming soon.

Buycott (Free) | iTunes App Store via CNET

We all intend to remember to put our laundry in the drier, but sometimes life gets in the way and we return to a stinky clump of clothing that often smells stale even after you dry them. Instead, DIY Life suggests a half cup of white vinegar will do the trick:

Many people already know that white vinegar in a small bowl will remove smoky or musty odors, and that you can put the bowl on a closet floor or shelf if those odors happen to be stuck in your coats and jackets. What many people do not know is that, if you put white vinegar in your wash water at the beginning of a laundry load, it will both freshen and soften the clothes being washed. The scent of vinegar will have miraculously disappeared by the end of the wash cycle, but everything will smell very clean. You don't need much vinegar: a half cup is sufficient, a full cup is plenty, and exact measurements probably aren't necessary. Don't forget to add your usual detergent, too!

You don't need to run the wash for quite as long the second time. Make it short and sweet and say goodbye to that stale smell.

Vinegar: Laundry's Best Friend | DIY Life

Photo by Marie C. Fields (Shutterstock).

Whether you choose to DIY your home improvements or hire a pro, one thing's for certain: You'll need money for your projects. The major ones can be so expensive they require financing. Here's how to figure out which kind of loan program may be best.

Home owners often have to decide between using credit cards, taking out a home loan, or refinancing for that extra money. In Credit Karma's step-by-step guide to financing home improvements, the financial services company offers this advice:

Our research shows that most projects that are under $15,000 are best financed by 0% or low interest credit card products. Projects that are between $15,000 and $50,000 are generally a good fit for a personal or unsecured loan. Any loan amount that exceeds $50,000 is typically best financed with a home equity line of credit or a cash out refinance mortgage.

Also, don't forget to make sure you can afford to pay back the loan, especially if the debt is secured with your home.

Financing Home Improvements: A Step by Step Guide | Credit Karma

Photo remixed from an original by Aaron & Carol.

Dear Lifehacker,
I have been tasked to make a slideshow for an event at work. I don’t want to make a generic PowerPoint with just boring text or pictures. What are some ways I can enhance the slideshow so it looks impressive and knocks the socks off my audience?

Sincerely,
Panicking About PPT

Dear Panicking,

Giving a presentation is a huge and (sometimes) noble responsibility. After all, only you can prevent death by PowerPoint for your audience. Thankfully, several tips, tools, and other resources can help you take your slides up a notch and make them more professional and captivating. We're focusing on PowerPoint for most of the add-ins and templates below, simply because that's the most widely used business presentation software, but many of the other principles and tricks here apply to other presentation apps. Let's get you started.

Avoid the Most Common Presentation Problems

First, before we take a look at jazzing up your slides, it's a good time to review how to avoid the reasons presentations suck so often.

Lack of preparation or passion. Often presentations don't work because the presenter didn't practice enough or he/she fails to convey the meaning of the presentation. When you passionately communicate the significance of your subject (maybe even with a storytelling structure for drama), audiences pay attention. To do that well, you have to practice giving your presentation; otherwise, even the most beautiful slides won't help you.

Slides are too complex, overloaded with bullets, lacking in focus, and/or filled with poor quality images. It's easy to hate on PowerPoint for presentations that suck, but the real problem is how we're using it. Slides shouldn't be used as a prompter to read to your audience nor a place to dump as much data as possible. Instead, they're a visual communication aid to support the most important part of the presentation: you and your message. Just about every presentation advice we've highlighted before (including 5 design mistakes you need to avoid and how to deliver polished presentations Steve Jobs style) emphasizes three things for all your slides: simplicity, a clear and meaningful message, and quality visuals. The opposite of this:

Seth Godin's five rules for avoiding really bad PowerPoints are a good guide:

1. No more than six words on a slide. EVER. There is no presentation so complex that this rule needs to be broken. [Also recommended in another post: No bullets. Use a separate slide for each sentence or idea.]

2. No cheesy images. Use professional stock photo images.

3. No dissolves, spins or other transitions.

4. Sound effects can be used a few times per presentation, but never use the sound effects that are built into the program. Instead, rip sounds and music from CDs and leverage the Proustian effect this can have. If people start bouncing up and down to the Grateful Dead, you’ve kept them from falling asleep, and you’ve reminded them that this isn’t a typical meeting you’re running.

5. Don’t hand out print-outs of your slides. They don’t work without you there.

Similarly, for our guide on how to create presentations that don't suck, communications expert Nancy Duarte offered this helpful mnemonic to keep in mind as you're making your slides:

Simplify

Lose the cliches

Information needs emphasis

Designate elements

Empathy for the audience

Less is more when it comes to presentations (except for font size): The 10/20/30 Rule recommends limiting the number of your slides to 10 and your presentation time to 20 minutes, but using at least a 30-point font size.

Those are the basic slideshow creation principles. Once you've got them down, take a look at how you can improve the design of your slides and the elements on them.

Enhance Your Presentation

PowerPoints and other presentation tools are visual aids. You want to connect how your slide looks to what you're saying. As Godin writes:

The home run is easy to describe: You put up a slide. It triggers an emotional reaction in the audience. They sit up and want to know what you’re going to say that fits in with that image. Then, if you do it right, every time they think of what you said, they’ll see the image (and vice versa).

To make your presentation stand out visually, use and choose these carefully:

Fonts: Use your own font instead of the default fonts on your computer. Smashing Magazine has a list of sources for free, quality fonts or you could buy a font at many other typography resources. Godin likens this to "dressing better or having a nicer business card. It's subtle, but it works."

Images: Professional quality images, rather than cheesy clipart, will make your presentation stand out. You can buy photos at sites like Getty Images or find a free stock photo using the Everystockphoto.com search engine.

Diagrams and shapes: Simple graphics and diagrams can illustrate or highlight your information better than text can, but using them effectively can be tricky. This non-designer's guide to creating diagrams for slides will help you make sure the visuals you use for emphasis are consistent, appropriately sized, and otherwise communicate well. Similarly, choose the best chart for your data so you're presenting your information as clearly as possible.

Templates: Even if you don't want to use a cookie-cutter approach to your presentation, a template could be a good starting point for later customization. Microsoft offers a collection of PowerPoint templates, many of them professionally designed. Even better, Microsoft's picture and text effects templates (over 150 of them) include bold and captivating slides that combine graphics with simple or animated text—and the instructions for how to create them. VisualBee not only offers free PowerPoint templates, it can automatically design your presentations for you. One last resource: Slidevana provides over 150 truly beautiful slide templates. It costs $79, but if you often make PowerPoint presentations, it might be worth the investment.

Add-ins: Boost PowerPoint's capabilities with third-party add-ins. PPTools offers several, including this starter set, with tools to help you zoom in and out easier, import pictures faster, and more (it's an old add-in, but still available). Previously mentioned pptPlex, now part of Microsoft Office Labs, gives you the ability to jump directly to specific slides and zoom in and out of slide sections. TechRepublic offers a list of a few other potentially useful add-ins.

Other presentation helpers/tricks: Work your presentation like a pro with a few shortcuts. PowerPoint keyboard shortcuts help you create and advance slides with just a few keystrokes. To redirect the focus from the slide to yourself, you could temporarily black out the screen. Check out the other tools that can make your presentation more memorable, including apps that can focus on just part of your screen.

Explore Additional Resources

Finally, there are a wealth of other resources on the web that can help boost your presentation, including alternative presentation software.

Alternatives to PowerPoint: PowerPoint is still the most widely used presentation tool, but if you find it to be overkill or its linear format too limiting, many alternatives can fill in for your presentation creation needs. These include Prezi, with its unique zooming interface, and Haiku Deck, which is the easiest way to create gorgeous presentations with an iPad. Even if you stick with PowerPoint or are required to use it, just looking at Haiku Deck's sample presentations might inspire you.

Learn from masters of presentation design. For further reading, check out these great sites, which focus on making presentations beautiful and effective: Presentations Zen, Beyond Bullets, and Duarte.

Good luck with your presentation!

Love,
Lifehacker

Have a question or suggestion for Ask Lifehacker? Send it to tips+asklh@lifehacker.com.

Photos by Tobias Toft, @tmiket/InFocus, Brandon George/Haiku Deck .

Gawker Kanye West Throws Another Tantrum, Loosens Grasp on Reality | Jezebel Smoke Weed and Be Skinny: The Stoner Diet Plan | Deadspin Workout Video Features Dude Pooping In The Background | Gizmodo How Lasers May Have Revealed a Legendary Lost City of Gold

When you juice a lemon or lime by hand (without any special unitasker tool or juicer), all too often the seeds end up with the juice. To prevent the seeds from coming along for the ride, all you need is some cheesecloth.

As Household Magic Daily Tips recommends, wrapping a wet piece of cheesecloth around the cut end of the lemon will collect the seeds while the juice strains through. Alternatively, you you could use another other kind of mesh material such as sterile gauze.

While you're at it, if you want to get as most juice as possible for your drinks or dishes, we know a few tricks for that too.

Pit-Free Lemon Juice Without the Sticky Fingers | Household Magic Daily Tips

Photo by Daniella Segura.

Learning to match your shirts and ties together so they work well may be an art, but it's one you can learn. This infographic from men's designer footwear company Beckett Simonon shows you how to mix the riskiest kinds of shirts and ties: ones with patterns.

The graphic offers examples for a few rules of thumb, such as starting with the primary color of your shirt and pairing large patterns with smaller ones. One piece of advice I'm not so sure about is the tip to always wear a tie darker than your shirt (what if you're wearing black?), but otherwise, these tips could help you avoid looking like an optical illusion.

Here's the full cheat sheet for your pattern-combining reference:

How to match shirt and tie patterns. | Beckett Simonon

We all know that exercise is good for you, but when you understand why, it makes getting off the couch and into the gym a lot easier. Here’s an explanation of what happens when you work out, and how it can help you deal with the pains and the gains you'll run into down the line.

The body is a complex machine. While we like to think that when we work out we'll immediately feel and look better, it's not always that simple. A lot happens in your body when you first start working out, and the longer you work out the less things change. To get a grasp on what's going on, I spoke with Brian Parr from the Department of Exercise and Sports Science at the University of South Carolina Aiken, and Dr. Carly Stewart, Medical Expert at Money Crashers Personal Finance. Here's what you can expect, what's happening, and how you can use that knowledge to improve your workout routine.

What Happens to Your Body When You First Start Exercising

The first thing you notice when you start working out is that you're out of breath and your pulse is high. This is always a bit disconcerting, but it's perfectly normal. When you first start working out, your body responds by raising your heart rate and causing you to breathe heavy.

While those first few weeks are tough, exercise gets a lot easier as you go along, and it's because your body starts adapting to your workout. Of course, everything in your body is connected, so while you might only feel a difference in your breathing or heart rate at first, Parr points out that it's tied to your muscles as well:

The way you get the oxygen to the muscle fibers is by breathing oxygen into your lungs and then your heart pumps the oxygenated blood into your muscle. So, today you jump on the treadmill for the first time and you run three miles. Your heart rate is pretty high, your breathing is pretty heavy, and you feel pretty crappy. But if you do that every day for three or four weeks you'll notice that at the same speed your breathing won't be that hard. The reason for this is because your muscle has changed and it's using oxygen a lot better which lowers your heart rate.

Those muscle changes are important, and it's not exactly as simple as you might think. Depending on the type of exercise you're doing your muscles can change in different ways:

For example, in your legs you have two different kinds of muscle: you have fast twitch muscles and slow twitch muscles. The slow twitch muscle has muscle fibers that are better suited for long-duration endurance exercise. The fast twitch fibers are better for short, high-intensity bursts. For example, a distance runner would have a lot of slow twitch muscle fibers. Whereas a sprinter would have more fast twitch muscle fibers.

Let's say we all start at the same baseline where we have half slow twitch muscle fibers and half fast twitch muscle fibers. When you start an exercise program that's about endurance, like jogging, your muscle changes so it has more slow twitch muscles and less fast twitch muscles. This means your muscle can generate force for a longer period of time without fatiguing.

Why Your Muscles Feel Sore

The awful truth of exercise is that while it can make you feel better over time, you're going to feel pretty bad at beginning. The reason, as Parr notes, is that exercise actually damages your muscles:

Someone who has been a couch potato for a while and starts working out will notice that they're sore. What's happening is they're doing microscopic damage to their muscles each time they work out. It sounds bad, but it's actually good. The muscle responds by repairing itself and that makes the muscle stronger than it was before.

It's not the old adage of "no pain, no gain," though. You need to be careful when you're first starting because an injury will likely cause you to break your habit. Thankfully, we know what you should expect to feel when you first start:

So you're sore, and you're weak. That's because the muscle damage causes inflammation and pain. That's a critical part of the muscle adapting and getting stronger. That soreness usually lasts for 24-48 hours. It's called delayed onset muscle soreness. People should feel it, but it shouldn't make them never go back.

Dr. Stewart also points out that what you need to watch out for is "severe pain:"

Minor to moderate pain or soreness is considered normal. Severe pain, however, is considered abnormal, and may be caused by overexertion or poor breathing techniques.

Both Stewart and Parr note that you'll experience a little pain, but it's a necessary step. If it gets to a point where you can't do the exercise again, you need to back off and lower the intensity a bit until your muscles catch up. Take days off in-between exercises, or work different groups of muscles. If you do push yourself too hard, take some time to recover and treat yourself right.

Why Exercise Makes You Feel Better

We always hear that exercise makes you feel better in all sorts of ways. From the brain to the lungs, you benefit from a bit of exercise every day. That doesn't really mean anything to you until you actually start exercising though. In addition to everything above, Parr notes a few other changes you'll feel right away that make life a bit easier:

The other thing that happens is your heart gets bigger and stronger. Those are the things that people notice. You're getting these changes in the muscle that actually make exercise feel easier. In addition to your heart rate slowing down and your heart getting bigger and stronger, your blood vessels become more elastic. That's really good. That means your blood pressure can be lower.

Additionally, you're also burning calories and fat, which contributes to weight loss. Your body typically burns calories from carbohydrates for energy first, and then moves onto burning fat as a source of energy. When you burn more calories than you take in, you'll tap into fat for energy and lose weight. If you don't use calories for energy, your body starts to store them as fat cells for an energy reserve.

On top of easier breathing, a lower pulse, lower blood pressure, and everything else, your brain function also improves. Dr Stewart explains why:

Exercise improves oxygen flow to the brain. It also helps the body release hormones that assist in brain cell growth. Additionally, it helps the brain with both learning and memory capabilities.

Dr. Stewart adds that you'll feel these improvements pretty quickly, even if you don't see a change in your body:

Generally speaking, you can expect to feel healthier and stronger after two to three weeks of exercise (along with a proper diet). However, you may not see any significant changes in muscle growth or weight loss (depending upon your goals) until after the first few months.

Essentially, when you start exercising, you feel better because your brain and body can do more. You're not winded walking up stairs. Your heart rate and blood pressure goes down, which decreases your risk for a number of diseases and gives you more energy. Your brain benefits from the added oxygen to help you perform basic tasks easier.

Use Science to Pick the Right Workout

So what can you do with this information? Depending on your goals, certain workouts are better than others. Since your muscles and body react differently to different workouts, it's important to come up with your goal first, and then chose the workout.

If You Want to Just Maintain a Healthy Lifestyle

If all you want to maintain a healthy lifestyle, your best bet is to work out all your muscles in a few different ways. Parr notes that for most people, the usual recommendation of 30 minutes of moderate intensity workouts a day—including walking, jogging, swimming, or biking—is a good starting point for most people.

We’ve featured a bunch of low impact exercises, and the Lifehacker Workout is excellent for keeping yourself in shape without working yourself too hard.

That said, if you don't have a lot of time, exercises like the seven-minute full workout or the 20-minute workout make it a bit easier to fit a workout into your schedule. You won't see big fitness gains, but your overall health will remain consistent. Once your body adapts to what you're doing, it doesn't continue to build on that muscle. Parr suggests that for some of us, this is fine:

One of the things we've learned is that health benefits can come from a lot less than what you need to see the strength and endurance benefits. Someone who goes from nothing to doing about 30 minutes of exercise a day will see a big improvement in their health and maintain that. Obviously it gets better if they add more time to that. The benefits sort of plateau. It's benefits like better control of blood sugar, lower blood pressure, and lower blood cholesterol, so those are good things to have plateau.

Once you get going, Dr. Stewart has a few suggestions for balancing your diet with your new workout routine so you can maintain that health:

The best way to support a healthy exercise regimen is to moderately increase carbohydrate intake, in addition to eating foods high in healthy fats. Foods high in [good] carbs that support a workout program are whole grains, dairy products, and fruits and vegetables. Foods high in healthy fats include avocados, fish, peanut butter, and olive oil.

Essentially, if you can consistently keep up the 30 or so minutes a day of exercise then you're on the right track to maintaining a healthy lifestyle. You're not going to see big endurance or muscle gains, but you'll hit the targets needed to improve your health.

If You Want to Lose Weight

Losing weight requires a different approach because you want to work the slow twitch fibers in your muscle more that the fast twitch. Parr explains:

When you exercise for a longer duration, you're going to use the slow twitch fibers that are really good at burning fat. If you went and did a couple hundred meter sprints for your workout, it only works the fast muscle fibers, and they use primarily carbohydrates and don't burn that much fat at all.

For example, when you get on an elliptical or treadmill you can push the "fat burning" button, it will be longer and lower intensity because that favors the muscles that are going to burn more fat. So if you do a jog instead of a sprint, you're burning more fat.

That said, it's not all cut and dried. While lower intensity workouts are better at helping you lose weight, you still need to mix it up a little:

It also depends on how many calories you burn. So you could walk really slowly, but that's burning just fat and you're not burning that many calories. So there's a balance between whether you burn more fat in the muscle and how many total calories you're burning. Somewhere in the moderate intensity range is probably right. That said, doing high-intensity interval training will burn more fat because it's so intense that you're burning enough calories to get to the fat.

So, the answer to what workout you should do to burn fat really depends on what you can handle. A high-intensity interval workout will burn the fat after it burns the calories, but it's a lot harder to get into because it's such an intense workout. For many, starting with moderate intensity exercise will ease that process. Moderate intensity has a different meaning for everyone depending on your starting point, but it can range from a brisk walk to swimming. Mayo Clinic suggests that moderate exercise means: your breathing quickens a little, you develop a light sweat after about 10 minutes of exercise, and you can carry on a conversation but can't sing.

Of course, when you're losing weight, you also need to moderate your diet for it to stick because you don't want to take in more calories than you're burning. If you need a little help with motivation, we've shown you how to track your weight loss.

If You Want to Increase Your Strength or Endurance

Strength and endurance training are where things get a bit harder to track. As we noted above, the more you work out, the more your body adapts. That means you need to keep pushing it if you want to see improvements in your strength or endurance. Since muscles grow when you push them too hard it eventually gets difficult to do that:

Once your muscles start to adapt, what you'll need for anything to happen is "overload." The first time you lift weights that's a lot of overload because you're used to doing nothing. Then over time it gets easier. That's when people increase their weight. They do that to generate the overload to continue the adaptation. That progression is true for lifting weights, or endurance performance, or anything else.

We've talked before about getting over plateaus. It's a combination of overloading your muscles, and managing your diet. For weight training, this just means increasing your weights so your muscles continue to adapt. For endurance training, it means upping your mileage or intensity. As Parr notes, "if you do a little you're going to get stronger, if you do a little more, you'll get stronger still."

When all is said and done, exercise is about finding a good medium. When you know what kind of results you want, and what your reasons are behind exercising, it's a lot easier to actually pick a workout you'll stick to.

Photos by Sebastian Kaulitzki (Shutterstock), joesuspense, Official U.S. Navy Imagery, Richard Masoner, Gabriel Amadeus, Jim Bahn, Terry Robinson, Official Navy Page.

Google has added the feature to upload your own ebooks to Google Play Books. This means you can upload your own files and read them on any of your devices with the Google Play Books ereader app installed.

You can upload up to 1,000 EPUB or PDF files, or import files you already keep in Google Drive. Once uploaded, you can read your books in the browser, from the Android app, or iOS app. Your page position, bookmarks, and notes are all synced across all of those devices.

Google Play Books | via Ghacks

Mac: Recent Menu is an app that sits in your menu bar and offers up all the recently accessed files, folders, and apps so you can get to them quickly.

Recent Menu is simple, but powerful. On the surface it simply shows you a drop-down menu with all your recent files. However, you can set it up so it only shows certain file types, file names, and for select durations of time, which makes it incredibly helpful for specific projects. Macs have this built-in a little with Spotlight and the Recent Items menu, but Recent Menu makes it a lot easier to find what you're looking for right away.

Recent Menu (Free) | Mac App Store

Chrome: When you're reading articles that have a lot of big numbers in them it's hard to actually wrap you mind around what they mean. A number like "342,234 acres" doesn't really mean much to most us, but Dictionary of Numbers is a Chrome extension that turns those numbers into terms we can understand.

Dictionary of Numbers is pretty simple. When you're browsing the web and run across a large number, it drops in a point of reference you'll actually understand. For example, 342,234 acres is followed by "~Los Angeles, California, USA (city)." Dictionary of numbers also pulls up suggestions when you're typing large numbers, and allows you to search for terms. If you struggle to wrap your mind around large numbers, whether it's money, size, or distance, Dictionary of Numbers makes it a lot easier to get a grasp on what an article is talking about.

Dictionary of Numbers | via Boing Boing

You can put an end to most ant problems with inexpensive products from the home center or hardware store (and save the expense of hiring an exterminator). Whether you've found the pests inside your home or outdoors, the folks from Family Handyman tell you everything you need to know to get rid of them for good.

Identify the Ant

Start by identifying the type of ant in your house so you can find out its nesting habits and have a better idea of where they're living (they may be nesting outdoors). Take a close-up photo of the ant and e-mail it (or snail mail it) to your local university extension service (enter your state's name and “university extension service” into any online search engine). The extension service will tell you the type of ant you're dealing with and where it nests. It may give you fact sheets about the ant species and maybe even some advice on getting rid of that particular species.

Keep it Clean

A clean house is your first defense against ants. Sweep up food crumbs, wipe up spills, take out the garbage, and don't leave dirty dishes sitting around the house. This takes away the ants' food source. Spray vinegar mixed with water around bowls of pet food to keep ants from feasting there.

Erase Their Trails

Where you see one ant, you're bound to see others. That's because ants leave a scented trail that other ants follow. Sweeping or mopping isn't enough to eliminate the scent. Instead, mix one part vinegar with three parts water in a spray bottle, then spray wherever you've seen ants in the past. This will stop outdoor nesting ants that entered the house to forage for food (ants that come inside are not necessarily trying to establish a nest). But vinegar and water won't stop ants that are already nesting indoors. You'll need to kill them with ant bait (see the next step).

Wipe Out Colonies

When you see an ant, your first impulse is probably to step on it. But don't. You'll kill it, but for every ant you see, there may be hundreds more hiding in the house. The ones you see are scout ants, foraging for food to take back to the colony. Use these scouts to wipe out the entire colony. Prebait ants in areas you've previously seen them. Ants' tastes change during the year. They usually prefer protein in the spring and sweets or fatty/oily foods in the summer.

Once you know what the ants like, buy and set out ant bait that's geared to their taste. Look on the bait package for words like “controls both sweet and grease eating ants. ” Expect to see more ants (initially) when you set out the bait. That's a good thing. It means more ants are taking the bait (which is toxic) back to the colony where they'll share it with the rest of the ants, including the queen, and kill them. There might be thousands of ants back at the nest. Liquid bait works best for many sweet-loving ants. Other ants prefer solid baits. If you still have ants after two weeks, replace the bait containers. If that doesn't work, it's time to hunt down the nest.

Hunt Down the Nest

Sometimes the solution to an ant problem is getting rid of their nest. If you're dealing with carpenter ants, which can do structural damage to your house, it's vital that you wipe them out ASAP. Finding the nest may not be easy and takes some detective work. Ants generally prefer damp areas, such as framing or flooring that's soft and spongy from a plumbing or roof leak. Start by looking for areas with water damage. Attics, bathrooms and exterior walls are obvious candidates. Cut small holes in water-damaged walls to track down the ant nest. (You're going to have to repair the walls anyway.)

When you find the nest, spray it with an insecticide that contains bifenthrin, permethrin, or deltamethrin (look on the label). Be sure to fix the water leak and replace damaged wood. If you can't track down the nest, hire a pest control service. Pros can get expensive, but they spend about 80 percent of their time hunting down nests, and know what to look for.

Spray Entry Points

After ridding the house of ants, take steps to ensure they don't come back. Caulk and seal holes, and then spray insecticide around doors and windows. Use an insecticide that contains bifenthrin, permethrin, or deltamethrin. Spray a 4-in.-wide band along entry points, just enough to wet the surface. Once dry, the spray leaves an invisible film that repels ants so they won't enter the house. Each spring, spray the insecticide to guard against ants. But keep in mind that this only works to keep ants out—it won't kill ants that are already inside, and it can actually interfere with the use of ant baits.

Spray a Barrier

If you're still getting ants in your house after spraying interior entry points, spray a 12-in.-wide band of insecticide on the foundation and siding. Use an outdoor insecticide that says “barrier treatment” on the label.

Destroy Exterior Nests

If you frequently see ants in the same area on the siding, there's probably a nest in there. Look for holes in the siding where ants are crawling in and out. The holes are often located between bricks where mortar has fallen out, under lap siding or in cracks in stucco. Once you locate the nest, or the vicinity of the nest, spray the area with an insecticide containing bifenthrin.

Kill Ants in the Yard

Anthills are eyesores in yards, and the ants can ruin outside dining. If you only have ants in a certain area, like along your sidewalk, spot-treat the area with an outdoor insecticide. Liquid or granules work fine. For large-scale ant problems, use a lawn and garden insect killer that contains bifenthrin as the active ingredient. The spray will also kill other insects (read the label for a list).

First mow the grass, then spray the insecticide on the entire lawn. Spray in the early morning or late afternoon when the ants are most active. If ants are still building mounds after six weeks, treat the lawn again (the insecticide works for up to six weeks). You won't kill every ant in your yard (nor would you want to!), but spraying will eliminate most of them and stop the annoying mounds.

Kill Fire Ants with Bait

Fire ants are found in the Southeastern United States and Southern California. Standard insecticides are much less effective at killing them. You need a special product that's designed to wipe out these biting critters—look for products that mention fire ants. Apply the granules with a broadcast spreader. Fire ants carry the granules, which they think are food (it's actually toxic bait) back to their mounds. The ants share the bait and die. Some types of poison are longer-lasting and will keep killing fire ants for up to a year. As with other baits, it may take a few weeks for you to see full results.

Eliminate Safe Havens

Once you kill the ants in your house and yard, take steps to ensure they don't come back. Trim back bushes, shrubs, and trees that brush against your siding or roof and provide a bridge for ants to reach your house. Keep a 3-in. to 6-in. clearance space between the soil around the foundation and the bottom row of siding to prevent ants from nesting in the siding (and make sure the soil slopes away from the house). Avoid stacking firewood next to the house. Firewood makes a perfect retreat for ants. Ants like bare spots in the yard and they like to build nests under layers of thatch. Maintaining a healthy lawn is one way to discourage ants. If anthills pop up in bare areas, spray the mound with insecticide and plant grass in the bare spots. Rake the lawn or bag the grass when you mow to eliminate thatch.

Remember: Ant poison is also toxic to pets and humans. No matter what product you use, read the instructions completely and follow them carefully.

How to Get Rid of Ants | The Family Handyman

Travel planning service TripIt is one of our favorite ways to organize your tickets, hotels, and travel plans all in one place for a stress-free travel experience. Now the service makes the trip there more comfortable, and can notify you when a better seat is available on one of your flights.

If you've ever been stuck in a middle seat on a long flight, you know a special kind of hell that most of us don't want to endure often. Most of us prefer an aisle or a window seat for a reason, and now TripIt will take your preference—along with whether you'd rather be in the front or the back of the cabin, or whether you're willing to pay for extra legroom or a cabin upgrade, and even if you're traveling in a group that would like to stick together—and actively scan your flights to see if seats matching your choices turn up. If they do, you'll be notified so you can jump on the opportunity to switch.

The new seat tracker is only available to TripIt Pro users ($49/yr, 30-day free trial available), which is well worth the money if you do any regular traveling. TripIt Pro also includes check-in reminders, live fare tracking so you always get the best price, and push notifications of any changes in your itinerary, like flight cancellations, delays, or other alerts. Free users get tons of features too, like a unified itinerary of all of your flights, hotel bookings, meetings, and more, complete with the reservation and booking information you'll need when you get there, directions from place to place, and even the weather forecast for your destination.

Hit the link below to read more about TripIt's new seat tracker, and to sign up if you don't already have an account.

TripIt Seat Tracker | TripIt

We've featured Dan Carr's desktops before. They're always beautiful and functional, and this one is no different. The photo of a quiet, cloudy winter morning in Paris makes for a great backdrop for his widgets, all arranged so they don't detract from the image, but don't distract when it's time to work.

You can't see it in the image above, but Dan's task bar and social buttons are hidden from view so they're not a distraction when he wants to work. You can see them unhidden over at Flickr. It's not difficult to make this desktop your own—or at least grab the wallpaper and add it to your personal rotation. Here's what you'll need.

• The wallpaper from Wallbase
• The XWidget customization platform for Windows
• The CPU and RAM charts from the XWidget gallery
• The Minty Search Bar for quick access to Google search in the top right corner of the desktop
• The Typewriter widget for the time and weather (modified so it fits in with the theme, you can grab Dan's tweaked version here)
• The Blue RSS widget for RSS feeds across the bottom (modified so it fits in with the theme, you can grab Dan's tweaked version here)
• The RocketDock application launcher on the left side of the screen (hidden above), used for quick buttons for Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr
• The Helvetica Light Condensed font for all visual elements

You can read more about Dan's inspiration for the desktop (and check out the video that inspired him) over at his Kinja blog. You can also ask him questions while you're there, and don't forget to tell him how much you like the desktop while you're over there!

If you have a good-looking, functional desktop of your own to show off, share it with us by posting it to your personal Kinja blog using the tag desktop showcase or adding it to our Lifehacker Desktop Show and Tell Flickr pool. Screenshots must be at least at least 640x360 and please include information about what you used, links to your wallpaper, skins, and themes, and any other relevant details. If your awesome desktop catches our eye, you might get featured!

Quiet & Still | Kiss Kiss Bang! Bang!

Android: TouchPal Wave is the latest beta for the TouchPal Keyboard (which we've mentioned before). Wave combines gesture typing and predictive text to let you type out entire sentences in the time you would spend typing words with other keyboards, all with fewer errors.

The video above does a good job at explaining how the new keyboard works. In practice, it's a little less smooth than the video makes it out to be, but it does work. TouchPal Wave learns the words you use and the things you most frequently say in order to improve its word prediction. Once it has a good idea, as soon as you hover over a letter, it'll suggest a word. If you like it, hold until it displays and then move on to the next letter in the next word to repeat the process. If you don't, just swipe through the rest of the word like normal. Once you get good at it (and TouchPal understands you fully), you can type entire sentences in seconds. If you make a mistake or TouchPal insers the wrong word, tapping on it brings up alternatives.

The TouchPal developers unveiled the beta over at the XDA Developer Forums. Getting access is a little sleazy though: You have to follow them on Twitter, retweet their promotional tweet, email them with your XDA ID and link to your tweet to say you've done so, and they'll send you a registration code to activate the app. Once you've done all of that, you'll be able to use the app, which is updated frequently based on the feedback they get from the XDA thread. Hit the link below to visit the thread and get started.

Next Generation of Ultra Gesture Keyboard: TouchPal Wave | XDA Developers Forum via XDA Developers Blog

When Yahoo acquired Astrid earlier this month, we all knew the inevitable was coming: The service would be shuttered and we'd have to go somewhere else. Thankfully, Astrid's developers have made it easy to get your data out, and a number of other to-do apps have rolled out the welcome mat for Astrid refugees with import tools that will get you up and running in seconds. Here are a few, and how to make the switch seamlessly.

How to Export Your Data from Astrid

If you currently use Astrid, you should notice there's a new option in the webapp to export your data. The word didn't exactly go out to subscribers yet that the feature was there, but a few enterprising users discovered it a few days ago. Here's how to use it:

1. Head to the Astrid web site and log in.
2. Click your name in the upper right corner of the screen. In the drop-down menu, you should see "Export your data." Select it.
3. On the following page, you'll be notified that the data export feature is still in beta (so there may be errors), and the process can take a few minutes. You're also asked if you want to export tasks that have been shared with you by other users. Check the box if you do, then click Backup My Data.
4. Astrid will package the export behind the scenes and send it to the email address they have on file for you.

The confirmation page says that the export process can take up to 24 hours, and you can still use Astrid normally while your data is being backed up. Your backup file is essentially a ZIP archive that contains a CSV with all of your to-dos, categories, notes, due dates, and other data in it. It's pretty portable by itself, but there are some services that have gone out of their way to make it easy to make the switch.

Services with Import Tools Just for Astrid Users

Now that you have your data and you're ready to leave Astrid behind, where should you go? Well, you have plenty of options, but a few services have opened up special Astrid import tools that will pull in your data, either using Astrid's exported package, or directly from your Astrid account. Here are a few, willing to walcome you with open arms.

Wunderlist

Wunderlist, is our favorite to-do app for Android, the Mac, for Windows, and for Linux. It was also one of the first services to unveil a migration plan for Astrid users. You don't even need your Astrid data to make the switch, either.

Wunderlist put together a special migration tool to make the transition easy. After you log in to Wunderlist and to Astrid, the tool pulls down all of your to-dos, lists, recurring items, reminders, and regular notifications. After you start the transfer, the migration tool does its magic and will email you when everything's moved over. Obviously, some things don't port over too well, like comments and notes you may have saved in Astrid, but everything else comes across nicely, and you'll be back up and running in no time. Of course, if you were an Astrid Premium subscriber, Wunderlist would love it if you checked out their new premium services, too.

Any.DO

Any.DO is one of our other favorite to-do apps for the iPhone and for Android, and the new Any.DO Moment overview of your daily to-dos is something that really does help you start the day off right. While Any.DO is lacking a proper webapp (we really wish it had one), it does have a Chrome extension to go along with its iPhone and Android apps. If you're an Astrid user, fire up your preferred mobile app, because you can import your to-dos and categories right from the palm of your hand.

Once you open the app on your smartphone, the Astrid import tool will open automatically. Just tap "Import," and the app will pull in the Astrid data from your phone, and add your to-dos seamlessly. It took a couple of seconds on my device, and when it was finished, all of my Astrid to-dos were in Any.Do, organized neatly by category, complete with their due dates. Recurring to-dos were properly set, and I was back up and running in moments. Since Any.DO is completely free, it's worth giving it a shot just to see if the app fits with your workflow. Of all of these, Any.DO is probably the closest in look and feel to Astrid, and it comes with some bonus features (like the ability to add missed callers to your to-do list, and Any.DO Moment) that you may enjoy.

Sandglaz

Sandglaz isn't quite as large as some of the other to-do services in our roundup, but it's a solid to-do app and calendar for individuals and teams. We've mentioned them before, and the service has only grown since then. If you need a refresher, the video above will show you what the service is all about. If you're a fan of productivity methods like Personal Kanban or tools like Trello, you might like Sandglaz. They've also rolled out the red carpet for Astrid refugees, as long as you've exported your data first.

Here's the deal: Sandglaz is a freemium service, and free users get three "grids," or projects, to use to organize their activities. That can run out pretty quickly, so you can earn more (up to 8 with a free account) by referring friends to the service, or you can sign up for a pro account, for $8/mo or $69/yr. If you're a current Astrid user though, you can try Sandglaz Pro for free until August 1st. All you need to do is sign up through their Astrid promo page and import your Astrid data once you're logged in. That's all there is to it. If you like the service, you have the option to continue paying for it once the promo period is up, and you get to bring all of your projects, to-dos, and data along for the ride so you don't waste time getting set up and organized with a new tool.

Wrike

Wrike is designed to be a collaboration and project management tool for groups, so using it just to organize to-dos might seem like overkill, but it works just as well as a personal organization tool as it does for groups. The service is welcoming former Astrid users with open arms, and has an easy-to-use web importer to prove it. You'll need your Astrid data and a Wrike account in order to use it, but once you have both, you're all set. Wrike accounts are free (although they have premium plans too). Once you're all logged in, tap the "Import" button at the top of the page and select Astrid. Upload your data, and all of your to-dos, categories, and due-dates will be imported.

Wrike has all of the features you're probably used to in Astrid and then some. Free accounts come with access to Wrike's webapp, iPhone app and Android app. From there, you're all finished, but since Wrike is packed with features for people who want to collaborate with others, you can invite other users to use the service as well. If you thought Astrid was great as a to-do app, but wished you could use something more robust to keep track of all of your plans and projects, Wrike might be worth a look.

These four services are the ones we found (or that reached out to us) that specifically have tools designed to bring Astrid users into the fold. That doesn't mean they're the only ones that will import Astrid to-dos. For example, Remember the Milk, another tool we've mentioned several times, doesn't officially support importing Astrid data, but that hasn't stopped one enterprising user from finding out how to make it work.

We checked on Producteev, but they say they don't do it and that's that. There is, however, a roundabout way to do it through ToodleDo, but at that point you may as well just use ToodleDo. Either way, Astrid does sync with Google Tasks, so you can always get to your to-dos that way, and virtually everything supports Google Tasks at this point. Regardless of where you choose to go, it should be easy enough to take your data with you—but these services have made breaking up a little easier to do.

Readers offer their best tips for putting your laptop to sleep, keeping your gadgets in one place, and making your keyboard's number pad better.

Every day we receive boatloads of great reader tips in our inbox, but for various reasons—maybe they're a bit too niche, maybe we couldn't find a good way to present it, or maybe we just couldn't fit it in—the tip didn't make the front page. From the Tips Box is where we round up some of our favorites for your buffet-style consumption. Got a tip of your own to share? Add it in the comments, email it to tips at lifehacker.com, or share it over at our user-run blog, Hackerspace.

Put Your Laptop to Sleep With Fn+Esc

Luke Krasner shares a shortcut for many laptops:

Maybe everyone knows this, but I survived with no sleep key on my Dell Studio 1558 for years, until I recently mistakenly discovered this works.

This might not work on all laptops, but I tested it on another of my friends (don't remember the model) and it did. For a little background, I have the function keys set to use their media key functions by default, i.e. you must hold Fn normally to activate F1-F12. Pressing Fn+ Esc is not labeled for anything, however it does put the laptop to sleep, which is how I normally like to keep it.

Photo by Iain Buchanan.

Turn a Toiletry Kit Into a Gadget Organizer

James finds a great way to keep his gadgets together:

Perhaps I'm the last to discover that a toiletry bag makes an excellent organizer for gadgets and their associated cables, adapters and other peripherals. I picked up an REI Grande Shower Kit and poured a huge assortment of these items into it. It has the added bonus of being able to stand up, plus you can hang it as well. The removable inner bag is perfect for little adapters, and the flat see-through pockets are great for cables.

Get a More Calculator-Like Number Pad with AutoHotkey

Dustin Luck scripts his way to a better number pad:

I whipped up the following AutoHotkey code to fix a couple minor annoyances when using the Windows calculator. The most useful change is remapping the Num Lock key to the ESC key, making the number pad much more like a traditional 10-key calculator. The other thing it does is ensure that numbers are sent regardless of the Num Lock state.

#IfWinActive ahk_class CalcFrame
    NumLock::Send {ESC}
    NumpadIns::Send 0
    NumpadEnd::Send 1
    NumpadDown::Send 2
    NumpadPgDn::Send 3
    NumpadLeft::Send 4
    NumpadClear::Send 5
    NumpadRight::Send 6
    NumpadHome::Send 7
    NumpadUp::Send 8
    NumpadPgUp::Send 9
    NumpadDel::Send .
#IfWinActive

If you're new to AutoHotkey, Lifehacker's beginner's guide is a good place to start.

Photo by Tony Cuozzo.

Turn a Roll of Packing Tape Into a Smartphone Stand

Atlas Mugs shares yet another smartphone stand:

The best DIY cellphone stand, IMO, is the plastic core of a roll of mailing tape (Duck, 3M, etc.)

Balanced, perfect viewing angle, open at both ends for cables, wide enough for a phone case, and open enough to still use the screen. Obviously I can't take a pic of it holding my phone, but the photo shows how it works. Super handy.

Sometimes, the best life hacks are the really janky ones.

Gmail launched a new feature today called "Quick Actions," which recognize certain types of messages and help you take action on items immediately.

For example, if your friend sends you a Google Calendar invitation, you can RSVP right from your inbox by clicking the RSVP button. It'll also recognize if you ate at a restaurant and ask you to rate it or—even cooler—show you all your flight information at the top of the message if it detects a confirmation email.

Check out the full post at Google's blog for more info. You should see these buttons roll out over the next few week, with more actions to come.

Take Action Right From the Inbox | Official Gmail Blog

When you're buying a new pair of headphones, you have a lot of considerations to make—one of the more important (and more confusing) being the decision between open and closed. Video weblog Techquickie explains the main differences in this two minute video.

The super short version: closed headphones isolate you from the noise around you (and keep others from hearing your music), while open headphones usually produce better sound—but at the expense of sound passing through the cups. Which kind you want depends on where you're using them, and how much you need to isolate your music from the world (and vice-versa).

Like all their videos, Techquickie has put together a great little explainer for those uninitiated. Headphone experts won't find anything new here (in fact, we've talked about most of this before in our headphone buying guide), but it's perfect for sending along to your friends that might be interested in buying a new set of cans.

Open Vs Closed Headphones as Fast as Possible | Techquickie

Today Google unveiled Google Play Music All Access, a subscription music and internet radio service that opens the door to millions of tracks, all intermingled with the music you already own. Sounds great, and the price is competitive, but should you ditch your current streaming service for it? Let's take a look.

What Google Music All Access Has to Offer

Google Play Music All Access is a subscription music service that opens the door to the 20 million songs that Google Play Music has to offer for a monthly fee. You can listen to or download (for offline playback) any of the millions of songs available at Google Play, get recommendations of artists to listen to or purchase based on the music you own and the music you've already listened to, and create internet radio stations based on any song anywhere at Google Play. If you really love something you hear, buy it from Google Play to own it, free and clear, with no DRM.

What makes All Access really special is its approach to streaming radio. The songs you hear are personalized, meaning they're added to your playlist based on their similarity to the artist or song you used to start the station. That's normal, but what's really special is that you can peek at the songs coming up in the playlist, and swipe away any that you already know you'd rather not hear. You can even drag and drop songs in the playlist to reorder them. If you just want to lean back and enjoy the music, you can do that too—but if a song comes up that you don't like, you can skip as many times as you like. You're not restricted to a certain number of skips per day or hour, or a certain number of hours of streaming, all of which is unusual for a streaming radio app, and what makes All Access unique.

All Access also comes with the features you may already enjoy in Google Music, including storage space for 20,000 of your own songs, which you can still upload, manage, download, and add to playlists along with anything else you find at Google Play. You can still stream anywhere you go, and make the music your own by buying it and storing it in the cloud.

Features: Google Rocks Radio, Other Services Have Bigger Libraries

There's a reason why Google made sure to put All Access' radio features front and center during the demo. The radio features are by far the most unique, especially compared to other streaming music services like Spotify, Rdio, Pandora, and Grooveshark. The ability to reorder radio tracks on the fly and skip as many as times as you want, whenever you want are features you won't get in any other service (with the exception of Grooveshark, which allows you to edit station queues on the fly).

However, All Access's streaming radio features are only available with a paid monthly subscription. If you're using Google Music for free, you don't get any streaming radio—not just ad-supported radio, or feature-limited radio, you get no radio at all. You also don't get the ability to listen to anything in Google Music's 20 million song catalog without purchasing it outright first. By contrast, at least Spotify and Pandora have radio features available for free.

Spotify, by comparison, also packs about 20 million songs in its catalog, and at least gives you unlimited streaming radio for free, and access to its entire catalog to play whenever you want and to use to create personalized radio stations. Even if it's jam-packed with advertisements and doesn't offer mobile or offline support, at least Spotify is giving away a little for free. You can pony up the $5/mo to ditch the ads, or the full $10/mo to ditch the ads, get mobile access, offline support, and better audio quality, but by that point the two services are starting to look really similar. Of course, Spotify doesn't let you upload your own music to the cloud, but you can sync your mobile device with your Spotify library on your computer. We also can't ignore the ecosystem around Spotify—full of shared playlists, Spotify Apps, integration with Facebook, and of course, the fact that Spotify is available outside the US, while Google Play Music is still US only.

Rdio on the other hand, also has radio features and a library of over 20 million songs. On the desktop, you can customize your radio experience and add and remove tracks from your playlist. You can create radio stations based on specific artists as long as you're paid up (otherwise they're auto generated by what you and your friends are listening to), and you can take those playlists and the "Heavy Rotation" station with on you the go. The trouble is that Rdio doesn't have a free plan to speak of. They claim to, but we've discussed how Rdio's free plan comes with mysterious caps before. Ultimately, you'll pony up $5/mo to use the web player as much as you want, or $10/mo for unlimited streaming on the web and your mobile phone. Rdio doesn't give you access to your own songs.

Pandora, for comparison, is entirely streaming radio, with no music catalog of its own and no way to play your own, personally owned music. Paying for a Pandora One subscription lets you stream as much radio as you want, but you still can't reorder tracks on the fly and you don't get unlimited skips. Still, comparing All Access to Pandora is a little unfair: Pandora is entirely an internet radio service, and while we would love to see those on-the-fly playlist tweaking options and unlimited skips in Pandora, they're probably not coming.

GrooveShark probably comes the closest to All Access, but that's because the service is completely free and uses the music uploaded by users to make its catalog (as well as the music it gets through partnerships with individual artists and small labels). It too has streaming radio on the desktop and on mobile, allows you to upload your own songs to the service for access on the go, lets you tweak streaming radio (your queue, once you start a station) to remove songs you don't want to hear and move up songs you do want, lets you build a station based on anything you find anywhere in the catalog, and more. We love GrooveShark and know you do too, but its legal issues can't be ignored.

Of course, there are more services than just these. Rhapsody, Slacker, MOG, they're all competing in the same space, even if they're somewhat smaller than the above. Still, many of them have attractive subscription services that may even beat All Access on price, but have smaller libraries, and while they all have streaming radio features, none of them have on-the-fly playlist tweaking or the ability to mingle your own music with their streaming catalog.

Price: Spotify and Rdio have Free Plans for the Desktop, All Access Costs No Matter What

Like we mentioned, Google Music All Access is entirely a paid service. It's $10/mo, but if you sign up before June 30th, you can get in at $8/mo forever, just for being an early adopter. It comes with all of the features of All Access and Google Music, from the great streaming radio and access to full tracks in Google Music's massive catalog to the cloud storage and offline syncing we already love. However, it's important to note that there's nothing about All Access that's free. Google Music is free, but All Access, and all of the music and streaming options it opens, costs money. You can, however, try it for free for 30 days.

Spotify, Rdio, Pandora, and GrooveShark on the other hand all have some free options, just to get you excited about the service and using it before you finally cave and pay for the premium features. Whether those features are no ads and unlimited streaming (Pandora) or the ability to take your music on the go on your phone (Spotify), at least you can get your feet wet with a free plan. In the case of Google Music All Access, free amounts to "upload and listen to your own music, and explore this massive catalog of music you can only listen to snippets of, but you can buy if you want."

The Bottom Line

So should you switch? If you're already paying for Spotify though, there's not much to make you move unless the internet radio features in All Access are absolutely must-haves for you. However, if you're paying for Spotify and have all of your personal music uploaded to Google Music anyway, it might make sense to switch and consolidate everything to one streaming music service that offers everything: streaming radio, tons of music, mobile apps, desktop access, and the songs you already own.

If you're not paying for anything right now, or if you're using Spotify or GrooveShark for free, you'll find that those services tend to give away a little more than Google does to free users, who won't be able to try any of All Access' great features. However, you can use Google Music's basic cloud storage and mobile streaming for free, which is a pretty big incentive—assuming it's available where you live.

Feature-wise, Google Music All Access is on par with services like Spotify Premium, and even edges Spotify out a little bit in terms of streaming radio and cloud storage for your music. All Access is the only one fully integrated with its own music store, and the only one with cloud storage that your music purchases are automatically routed to (although you may not do much purchasing if you can just stream or sync anything in the catalog whenever you want). Price-wise, All Access is right there with Spotify and Rdio's premium plans. All three are $10/mo, and all three give you access to unlimited streaming music via the web and via mobile apps.

Ultimately, which one you choose depends mostly on how you manage your music. If you prefer cloud storage and ubiquitous streaming for everything you own and millions more songs seamlessly, all without worrying about local storage (and you use Android, and you live in the US), Google Music All Access is where it's at. If you'd rather keep your music local and only stream when you want to, or you already have a lot vested in Spotify playlists and Spotify apps, have tons of friends who use Spotify, or prefer iOS and desktop players to webapps, stick with Spotify.

Today at its I/O developer's conference, Google launched Google Play All Access, its long-anticipated subscription music service. I just spent some time exploring the on-demand catalog as well as its radio and music discovery features. The service's UI is impressively fast and fluid. Indeed, it's minimal in all the right ways. If only it wasn't so lonely in there.

It's an Add-On to Google Play Music

All Access is an add-on to the Google Music storage locker that has existed since the end of 2011. That means that you can upload the music from your computer and then complete your collection from Google Play's enormous catalog of music.

It costs the same as Spotify, Rdio, et al. Once its introductory $8 promo-pricing is gone, All Access will cost $10 per month for the entire on-demand catalog, radio, and use on mobile devices. There are no tiered plans. It's the whole shebang or nothing.

The Web UI Is Fast and Intuitive

Navigating the catalog and the app's different features couldn't be easier. The design is simple but at the same time packed with functionality. When you hover over a rectangular icon for an artist or album you're immediately presented with graphics to play the music or the familiar Google "..." button that reveals a menu with more options.

The whole interface is refreshingly intuitive. You never hit a dead-end when you're moving about different sections of the service. Every time you want the name of an artist or an album or something to be clickable, it is.

The detail pages albums are really nice example of the myriad ways All Access makes your life easier. Besides a little info about the artist, there are obvious buttons that let you launch radio based on that album or to add it to your library.

The new Google Play Music App for Android is slick too

Same deal as the browser version. No dead ends. Swiping songs you dont want to listen to out of the play queue is very satisfying.

I love that "Share YouTube Video" is an option

YouTube videos are actually my de facto vector for sharing music with friends on Facebook and Twitter. If you share a Spotify link—or a link from any walled in garden—it inevitably means that someone won't be able to enjoy it.

Google built that behavior into All Access. Instead of having to go search for a YouTube video when I want to share something, I can just click "Share YouTube Video" and a pop up will present you with links for few versions (if they're available). It's easy, and it doesn't require your friends having a Google+ account to enjoy.

I don't love that the service only gets social with Google+

Then again, All Access doesn't have very good social skills. Facebook? Nope! Twitter? Nope! A real-time feed of what all of your friends are listening to? Nopenopenope!

If you'd like, though, you can choose share on Google+ because of course you can share on Google+. It feels awfully lonesome in there.

Listen Now is a convenient way to just put something on

Part of the problem with expansive streaming music services is that sometimes it's hard to figure out what jams your want to bust. The "Listen Now" tab is Google's answer to this problem. It's designed to provide you easy access to the radio stations and artists you like—as well as those it thinks you might like based on your activity. The straightforward tile design makes it simple enough to just impulsively click something and be done with it.

Radio is solid but unremarkable

This is the oldest trick in Pandora's box: New Order is your favorite band? "Age of Consent" is your favorite song? Type it in and you'll get a playlist. The playlists I got were great on some cursory inspection. Plenty of variety and even hints of robotic taste. It's nice that you can remove songs from your radio queue if you want.

Again, it's the UI that sets radio apart from competitors. There's a lot packed into a simple interface.

Should you ditch Spotify or Rdio?

Not yet. Take advantage of the free trial first. Google Play Music All Access has amongst the smoothest designs we've seen for something with so much horsepower. Unfortunately, it doesn't come with Spotify's great social integration baked-in—and the social integration it does have is half-baked.

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