Tips for good sleep

Stick to a schedule. Erratic bedtimes do not allow for your body to align to the proper circadian rhythms. Mum was right when she set a time we always had to go to sleep as kids. Also, make sure you try to keep the same schedule on weekends too, otherwise the next morning, you’d wake later and feel overly tired.

Sleep only at night. Avoid daytime sleep if possible. Daytime naps steal hours from nighttime slumber. Limit daytime sleep to 20-minute, power naps.

Exercise. It’s actually known to help you sleep better. Your body uses the sleep period to recover its muscles and joints that have been exercised. Twenty to thirty minutes of exercise every day can help you sleep, but be sure to exercise in the morning or afternoon. Exercise stimulates the body and aerobic activity before bedtime may make falling asleep more difficult.

Taking a hot shower or bath before bed helps bring on sleep because they can relax tense muscles.

Avoid eating just before bed. Avoid eat large meals or spicy foods before bedtime. Give yourself at least 2 hours from when you eat to when you sleep. This allows for digestion to happen (or at least start) well before you go to sleep so your body can rest well during the night, rather than churning away your food.

Avoid caffeine. It keeps you awake and that’s now what you want for a good nights sleep. We all know that.

Read a fiction book. It takes you to a whole new world if you really get into it. And then take some time to ponder over the book as you fall asleep. I find as I read more and more, regardless of the book, I get more tired at night and so find it easier to fall asleep. Different for others?

Have the room slightly cooler. I prefer this to a hot room. I prefer to turn off the heat and allow the coolness to circulate in and out of the windows. If I get cold, I wear warmer clothes. It also saves on the bills as you’re not going to require the heat all night long.

Sleep in silence. I find sleeping with no music or TV on more easy and restful. I guess others are different, but sleep with no distractions is best for a clearer mind.

Avoid alcohol before bedtime. It’s a depressant; although it may make it easier to fall asleep, it causes you to wake up during the night. As alcohol is digested your body goes into withdrawal from the alcohol, causing nighttime awakenings and often nightmares for some people.

Google Wave

Google Wave is an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. A wave can be both a conversation
and a document where people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

What is a wave?

A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.

A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

Google Translate

Make your website instantly available in other languages
Add Google's website translator to your webpages, and offer instant access to automatic translation of the pages. Adding the website translator is quick and easy.
Google enables you to create a translation of your website on the fly. All you have to do is add a piece of code to your html anywhere on the page. Users will be able to select the langauge of their preference and the page will immediately will be translated to the chosen language. Naturally machine made translation is not as good as if it were done by a human, but it's good enough for people who do not speak the original language of the site to be able to understand the content.
Translate words instantly from English with no clicks at all

It's free and installs in seconds

Don't bother looking up word translations one by one in webpages in English. With Google Toolbar, you just pause the pointer over an English word, and the Word Translator displays that word's meaning in your own language.

You can translate from English to Chinese (Traditional and Simplified), Japanese, Korean, French, Italian, German, and Spanish.

Google Sidewiki

As you browse the web, it's easy to forget how many people visit the same pages and look for the same information. Whether you're researching advice on heart disease prevention or looking for museums to visit in New York City, many others have done the same and could have added their knowledge along the way.

What if everyone, from a local expert to a renowned doctor, had an easy way of sharing their insights with you about any page on the web? What if you could add your own insights for others who are passing through?

Now you can. Today, we're launching Google Sidewiki, which allows you to contribute helpful information next to any webpage. Google Sidewiki appears as a browser sidebar, where you can read and write entries along the side of the page.

In developing Sidewiki, we wanted to make sure that you'll see the most relevant entries first. We worked hard from the beginning to figure out which ones should appear on top and how to best order them. So instead of displaying the most recent entries first, we rank Sidewiki entries using an algorithm that promotes the most useful, high-quality entries. It takes into account feedback from you and other users, previous entries made by the same author and many other signals we developed. If you're curious, you can read more on our Google Research Blog about the infrastructure we use for ranking all entries in real-time.

Under the hood, we have even more technology that will take your entry about the current page and show it next to webpages that contain the same snippet of text. For example, an entry on a speech by President Obama will appear on all webpages that include the same quote. We also bring in relevant posts from blogs and other sources that talk about the current page so that you can discover their insights more easily, right next to the page they refer to.

We're releasing Google Sidewiki as a feature of Google Toolbar (for Firefox and Internet Explorer) and we're working on making it available in Google Chrome and elsewhere too. We also have the first version of our API available today to let anyone work freely with the content that's created in Sidewiki.

We've been testing Sidewiki with several experts and news organizations for a while and are happy to hear their positive responses. We hope you'll try it for yourself, follow our Twitter feed, and let us know what you think!

If you're ready to start exploring the web with Google Sidewiki, visit google.com/sidewiki to download Google Toolbar with Sidewiki and contribute your own entries alongside pages on the web.

Mac OS X browsers

Safari and Firefox is the most known browsers for Mac, but there are many more out there. Give them a try and feel free to add more if I missed something?

Safari

Comes with OS X. Currently at version 4 it's one of the fastest browsers out there, which can tackle almost anything you throw at it. It syncs with your iPhone unlike other browsers.

Firefox

Firefox's advantage is the hundreds of extensions which allow you to customize your browser to your exact needs. Flash runs on FF a little slower than other browsers.

Opera

Opera is the most feature full and advanced browsers out there. It's really fast and has visual tabs, which is great if you have a large screen. If you haven't tried it yet, give it a go. You may stick with it.

Chrome

Chrome is the browser from Google and the Mac version is not very stable yet. But when it works it's really fast and has a lot of small innovative features.

Flock

Flock is a specialized social browser based on the Mozilla Gecko engine. If you're into the social media you must give this one a try.

Cruz

Cruz is another social browser which allows you to browse multiple pages in split view. You can load pages into two side windows by simply dragging the links into them. Great for wide-screens.

Camino

Camino is an OS X only web browser that tries to make the best of OS X. It's very fast and the interface is really simple and easy to use.

OmniWeb

OmniWeb has been optimized for OS X and it features a couple of cool functions not available on other browsers. It's most notable feature was the tabs with thumbnails, which is now being replicated by other browsers too.

Shiira

Shiira is a Japanese open source browser based on Webkit. It features an innovative interface and a couple of unique features. It's fun, but not ready for serious work just yet.

Sunrise

Sunrise is also based on Webkit and it's main advantage is it's speed. It has a couple of unique features. Again, good initiative, but ready for serious use.

Seamonkey

Seamonkey tries to be a full featured browsers, which does more than just web. It includes email, newsgroup client, html editor, IRC chat and development tools.

iCab

iCab is a shareware browser with features not available in other browsers. It's been around longer than most browsers, but I don't really see why would anyone pay 20 bucks for it.