Google Wave is an innovative new communication tool, but part of innovation is that it's not always intuitive to use. Early adopters have been jumping into Wave with little guidance on how to take advantage of all its features. I guess you could watch the 90-minute Wave video, but that's not exactly a quick-start guide.

Well, there's a saying almost as old as computers themselves, and it goes: RTFM. Read the, um, flippin' manual. Now Google Wave has a flippin' manual that you can read, but it's not from Google: it's from Lifehacker's Gina Trapani and Adam Pash. Sounds a lot better than "watch the frickin' 90-minute video," eh?

Gina and Adam's guide is quickly making the rounds on the web, being promoted by the likes of Mashable. I'd like to add Download Squad's endorsement to the list. The Complete Guide to Google Wave is a straightforward, well-organized volume that goes a long way toward demystifying a new and complex tool. It's available to read online for free, but you'll be able to buy it as a DRM-free PDF soon, and in print in January.

Still don't have Wave? Go throw your name in the hat for Download Squad's Great Google Wave Invite Giveaway.

Moneyseize is a very straightforward single-screen platformer with charming 8-bit graphics and music. The goal in Moneyseize is to, well, seize all the money.

You're in charge of the 'gentleman', and your job is to jump around in each level and collect all the gold coins. Your gentleman is attempting to build a skyscraper, and needs to collect 1000 coins to complete it. There are critters in most levels, and they also hold coins, and you must also avoid the various obstacles and hazards, like the prototypical spikes.

An interesting twist in the game is that while there are 25 coins available in each level, in many levels it is not possible to reach them all. As you progress through later levels, you can press switches that will occasionally change the layout of previous levels, making once impossible-to-reach areas reachable. Since you control which levels you visit from the map screen, the game takes on a bit of a puzzle flavor to go along with the straight platform style, which feels very reminiscent of early Mario Brothers games.

While I can't imagine actually completing MoneySeize, my building has already grown far larger than I ever intended it to get, just in testing it for this post. That's usually the sign of a good game.

Do YouTube and other Flash-based videos stutter when you view them in Firefox, but work fine in other browsers like Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Safari? This appears to be a problem that affects both the Windows and Mac versions of Firefox, and the problem (surprisingly enough) turns out not to be Flash - it's Firefox's session restore feature.

Lifehacker has a post based on information that one of their readers wrote in with. Basically, Firefox takes a snapshot of all of your open tabs every ten seconds, so that if you close your browser, you can open it to where you left off. Though you wouldn't think grabbing the plain text URL of a few webpages would be such an arduous task for the browser that it causes video to stutter, for some reason it is.

So what's the solution? Well, if you want to throw the baby out with the bath water, you can turn off the session restore feature altogether. A more sane solution is to simply lengthen the period of time between snapshots. To do this, type about:config into Firefox's address bar, then in the filter box enter browser.sessionstore.interval. The default value is 10000, which is the number of milliseconds between snapshots. Setting the number to 120000 lengthens the period to two minutes, a more reasonable but still useful period. Of course, you can set it to whatever you want, as long as you keep in mind that you're dealing with milliseconds.

I can't tell you how happy I am with this little hack - it has already prevented me from cursing Firefox a few times today.

What do massacres and bloodbaths have to do with your Gmail account? Lifehacker has discovered that they could be the key to getting rid of the pesky, hard-to-block text ads that show up next to your messages in Gmail's web interface. It turns out that advertisers don't like being associated with certain keywords, falling into categories like profanity and tragic violence. Rather than risk an amusing (at best) or offensive (at worst) ad placement, Google just doesn't display ads next to messages that have a certain density of these keywords.

Lifehacker was able to take advantage of this filtering system to create an email signature that should eliminate the ads. Rather than going the profane route, they whipped up the following innocuous statement: "I enjoy the massacre of ads. This sentence will slaughter ads without a messy bloodbath." If you can live with a violent email signature, you can probably come up with your own variation.

Since I wrote a post about ten great Firefox userscripts, I've been excited to see how user scripting is progressing for other browsers. Apparently, in the case of Chrome, it's come along far enough that Lifehacker's insanely popular Better Gmail script collection now has a Chrome version. Many Gmail addicts swear by these, so this could make the difference in choosing a browser for some.

So, what's better about Better Gmail? You can hide the stuff you're not using, including chat and the unread spam message count. You get handy visual touches like highlighting a row when you hover over it, and showing icons for attachment types without having to open a message. You can also use labels as folders, sub-folders included. These sound like small improvements, but you'd miss them if you didn't have them. Now users of one more popular browser don't have to worry about that.

You would think that Google Chrome would be the perfect web browser for people who spend most of their day using Google applications like Gmail, Google Calendar, and GTalk. But Chrome lacks some of the features that draw many people to browsers like Firefox. So one Firefox user who uses a ton of Google services decided to mash the two together and create an alternate browser he calls FoxGLove, which you can download from Lifehacker.

The browser is based on the portable version of Firefox, which means you can run it without messing up your normal Firefox settings. You can also run it from a USB flash drive. At first glance, the browser looks a lot like Google Chrome, thanks to the ChromiFox theme. The home pages have been set to Gmail, Google Reader, and Google Docs, and there are bookmarklets that will open GTalk, Google Calendar, or Google Notes in your sidebar. But that's just the start.

FoxGLove also comes preloaded with a ton of Firefox addons that provide enhancements for Google applications. It also replaces the Firefox search bar with the Google Toolbar. And the developer even figured out how to make Google Gears portable so you can have online/offline access to web pages and applications that support Gears.

Want to tweak the heck out of your Gmail interface, but don't want to install dozens of Greasemonkey scripts one at a time? Lifehacker's Gina Trapani has whipped up an updated version of her awesome Better Gmail 2 extension for Firefox. The latest version adds support for Firefox 3, plus a few other nifty features. Here are a few of our favorites:

• HTML signatures
• Gmail Redesigned skin, which makes Gmail look more like a desktop app. An awesome desktop app.
• A few other slightly less awesome skins
• Hide Spam count
• Include icons for file attachments

Once you install Better Gmail 2, you can find the options dialog in the Firefox Tools menu. Just check the boxes next to the features you want to enable and refresh your Gmail window.

Google Reader is the RSS aggregator of choice for many a Download Squad reader, but everyone has an idea of how it could be improved in one way or another. There are some popular Greasemonkey scripts that enhance the experience, but what if these scripts could be rolled into one Firefox add-on?

Lifehacker has set out to do just that. A while back they released Better GReader, a Firefox add-on that collect some of the best Greasemonkey scripts for Google Reader. And this week they've update Better GReader with a few new skins and other tweaks. The add-on basically does three things:

1. Institutes keyboard shortcuts
   
2. Maximizes the viewing area
3. Bypasses the Google's annoying default subscription mechanism

To get the Better GReader Firefox add-in, head over to Lifehacker's site and install it. After installing the add-in, you'll see the above preference pane in your add-ons menu allowing you to customize Better GReader to your hearts content.

Ever wish you had a butler who would regularly come visit your PC and pick up after you? The clever folks over at Lifehacker have released a virtual Mr. Belvedere called, well... Belvedere. The program is basically a clone of Hazel for Mac, and lets you create rules for dealing with the files that start to clutter up your Desktop and PC folders over time.

Belvedere comes as a single executable file. No installation necessary, but you'll need to manually add a shortcut to your Windows Startup folder if you want to run the application every time Windows boots. Once its running, you'll notice an icon in your system tray. Right click and select Manage to set up rules. You can tell Belvedere to regularly scan specified folders and look for files by name, extension, size or date. Next, set a rule by telling Belvedere to delete, move, rename, copy, or open these files. That's it.

If you regularly download music, movies, images, and other media files to a central download folder, you can use Belvedere to sort these files into separate folders according to their attributes. Or if you want to delete any file in a particular folder that you haven't used in a few months, you can tell Belvedere to scan for files that haven't been modified in a while and delete them.

There's good new and bad news in the fact that Google is rolling out an updated version of Gmail. On the one hand, pages load quicker and there's an advanced contact manager. On the other hand, many of your favorite Firefox extensions for tweaking Gmail may have stopped working.

For a while now, personal productivity site Lifehacker has been rolling up some of the best Greasemonkey scripts for Gmail into a package called Better Gmail. And Google went ahead and broke pretty much every single one of those scripts with its new version.

Now Lifehacker has released the initial version of Better Gmail 2. It doesn't have all the features of Better Gmail 1. In fact, right now there are only about 6 options, compared with more than 25 in the old version of Better Gmail. But considering the fact that most users are just starting to see the new Gmail interface, we suspect it will take a little while before the Greasemonkey coders get around to making all of their hacks "newer version" compatible. In the meantime, Lifehacker promises to continue updating both the Better Gmail 1 and Better Gmail 2 packages until Google eliminates the "older version" option. Then all development will be on Better Gmail 2.

Lifehacker has updated their Windows Janitor script for keeping your Windows "junk drawer" clean. Most of us have a folder or two on our hard drives that are filled pretty much with things we don't need.

This could be your web browser's default download directory, which fills up with e-mail attachments, installer files, music, and videos. But whatever directory it is, odds are it's taking up more hard drive space than it should.

Windows Janitor lets you monitor a folder and regularly delete any file that hasn't been updated for more than 30 days. In principle, this should automatically clean up all the files you don't really need. But proceed with caution, because some files you download may think they haven't been modified in 30 days or more when you first get them. In other words, do not set Windows Janitor to monitor a folder if you've got files you can't afford to lose in it.

Of course, there are plenty of other ways to keep downloaded files from cluttering your hard drive. For example, you could set your desktop as your default download directory. You'll regularly be confronted with every file you've downloaded, which should serve as reminder to either file away or delete each downloaded file when you're done using it.

The system clipboard is possibly one of man's greatest inventions. Just think how often you use that little piece of functionality, and how much time it saves you every single day. But, are you using it as effectively as you could?

Lifehacker put together a list of 10 clipboard tricks you can use to increase your productivity, and amaze your friends -- ok, your friends probably won't be amazed. Still, it's a top ten worthy of a look and, you just might learn something.

Lifehacker has been on a bit of a tear lately, releasing their very own utilities as downloads, like the Better Gmail Firefox extension. This latest one is a Windows-only utility called Swept Away, which will automatically minimize running applications that are not in focus based on a timer.

The application is very reminiscent of Spirited Away for the Mac, (warning, link is not English, but the download link is easy to find on the right-hand side of the page) which is a very popular utility to hide running windows that are not actively being used.

Gmail could very well be one of the most hackable web services of all time. One only needs to check our Gmail tag to see what tools are available for enhancing one's experience, and now we have a slick new cross-platform Firefox add-on to link to from our friends at Lifehacker: Better Gmail. As its name suggests, Better Gmail rounds up a number of popular Greasemonkey scripts and other extras into a handy management UI, complete with links to homepages if you need to find out more about any of the included extras. As you can see, this add-on packs a wallop, including many of our old (and new) favorites such as the Macros script (for many more keyboard shortcuts Gmail should really have in the first place), an Unlabelled label hack and a Filter Assistant which brings that handy email client functionality of building filters from a currently selected message. Of course, one could run out and find all these scripts on their own, but Better Gmail takes the clicking out of that process and wraps all this great stuff into one handy extension, complete with the ability to disable it all in one fell swoop in case you need to get back to Gmail's basics.

Better Gmail is of course provided for free here.

Lifehacker organized a battle royale between the two common desktop drive encryption schemes available on Mac and Windows. It's a head to head that's a long time coming, although it may not be a fair fight until Leopard makes its appearance.

In one corner, the lightweight FileVault with its home directory encryption designed to keep your files reasonably safe without too much intrusion. In the other corner stands Bit Locker, the 800lb gorilla of whole drive encryption; a roach motel for data.. once it goes in, it doesn't come out (unless you have the key).

The verdict? Gina says, "I'd choose BitLocker - simply for the total-lockdown factor." Adding, "Yes, the annoying repartitioning rigamarole and cost of Vista Ultimate or Enterprise suck, but a thief ain't gonna come close to anything on that drive, no matter where it's stored, and I like it that way."