Readers offer their best tips for making global application shortcuts in OS X, making easy, dry-erase weekly planners, and eliminating odor from your garbage can. More

Last week we asked you to share your favorite VPN tool , then we rounded up the top five contenders for a vote . Now we're back with the results. Leading the pack was OpenVPN with 29% of the vote, followed closely by LogMeIn Hamachi (28%). Both are notable for being free although only OpenVPN is open source. In third place, the built-in Windows VPN software grabbed 19% of the vote, followed by Cisco VPN with 13% and Shrew Soft rounding out the Hive Five with 4%. Check out the full Hive Five for additional information about VPNs and contenders. As always, if you have a great idea for a Hive Five shoot us an email at tips@lifehacker.com with "Hive Five" in the subject line.

Windows/Mac/Linux: Launchy, the little application launcher that could , has introduced a Mac version with its latest beta. Bug fixes, performance overhauls, and new shortcuts and controls are also baked into this beta for every system. As the developers themselves note, "Not much else has changed" in terms of appearance or basic function for Launchy, but, then again, not a whole not necessarily needs to. Many have noted that with Windows 7's surprisingly powerful Start menu searching, Launchy has a need to differentiate itself and find other functions to justify the use of a dedicated application launcher. By improving the ease of skin creation, stabilizing the build, and improving performance, the Launchy team is hopefully clearing the way for strong plug-ins and functionality—not that Launchy can't already do quite a bit of heavy lifting . Launchy is a free download for Windows, Linux (x86 and 64-bit), and, as of this release, Mac OS X. Lifehacker East lacks a testing Mac, so if you give it a go on your system, do tell us how it's running in the comments. SourceForge.net: Topic: Launchy 2.5 Beta 2 (now for OS X too!) [Site via Source ]

It's tough to completely screw up painting a room—dump the paint on the floor maybe?—but painting a room really well isn't that easy, either. Home blog Re-Nest's guide to painting a room efficiently offers a few expert tips. Re-Nest's guide to room-painting guide covers everything from making sure to remember to remove all the fixture and switch covers before getting into painting to the importance of edging in the areas your going to paint for nice even color and clean edges. If you've helped paint a room before but never done the cutting in part, it's worth a read: Cutting In: This is the most time consuming, but most important step to ensure a good looking paint job. When using the brush we just dip it directly into the paint can rather than pouring into a separate container to minimize wasted paint, but never dip a brush more than 1/3 then length of the brush or else you'll risk ruining the brush because it will be very difficult to clean. When handling the brush, hold it as you would a pencil for maximum control. Press the brush lightly against the surface, then, as you move the brush, add just enough pressure to make the bristles fan away from the direction of your brushstroke. The bent bristles and the pressure will release a fine bead of paint that will spread perfectly along the edge you are creating. Beginning at

If you'd like to experiment with studio flash configurations but you're short on the space or money to buy heavy-duty flash stands, this video tutorial details how to make portable flash stands using lightweight tent poles. The design relies on sturdy but lightweight tent poles to provide support for your flashes and/or flashes with a soft box. The creator of the design, Peter Karlsson, put together two videos demonstrating first how the stand functions and then how it is constructed: The end product is smaller, lighter, and less expensive than a traditional light stand. It does have shortcomings, though mostly due to the lightness. You can put a flash on it, for example, but you couldn't safely put a strobe on it. It's also, as he notes in the video, a poor match for an outside shoot on a windy day. For portability and ease of packing, though, it's a great stand for flash-based photography. Homegrown Ultralight Lightstands [Svarteld Form & Foto via Hack a Day ]

Every year a few of us from Team Lifehacker descend on Austin, Texas for SXSW Interactive , a big gathering of technology geeks who get together to talk about emerging technology. (Adam and Gina are presenting a panel with MetaFilter founder Matt Haughey called Coding for Pleasure: Developing Killer Spare-Time Apps .) If you're going to be in the area, we'd love if you'd join us for io9's Time Bender party on Saturday, March 13th. You don't have to be attending SXSW to attend the get together, but you do need to RSVP. See io9 for more details .

Windows: If you've got more than one monitor, you've probably tried fullscreening a Flash video on one monitor while working in another. The problem: Flash exits fullscreen as soon as you click on something. FlashHacker fixes this problem. A few months ago we highlighted a somewhat complicated method of tweaking Flash to fix this problem , but it hasn't been updated for a while and doesn't work with Flash 10 (the latest version of Flash). FlashHacker, on the other hand, should work like a charm on all versions of Flash. Just fire it up and click the big Hack My Flash! button. (Blogger Mike Pegg reports that he had to first click unhack and then hack, so if it's not working the first time, you may want to try that.) FlashHacker is a free download for Windows only. Any Mac or Linux users figure out how to address this issue? Let's hear about it in the comments. Thanks badgerz ! FlashHacker [jmaxxz via Mike Pegg's Blog ]

Readers offer their best tips for playing just the audio of video files on the iPhone, cushioned sleeves for external hard drives, and making sure your alarm clock wakes you up in the morning. Don't like the gallery layout? Click here to view everything on one page. About the Tips Box: 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, share it here , or email it to tips at lifehacker.com. Play Just the Audio of iPhone Video Files Photo by Dan Taylor . Rick Betita shows us how to stop the video from playing and draining battery on iPhones: One of the most annoying things about the iPhone is that you can't listen to the audio of a video file unless the video is playing. Let's say I'm watching a TEDTalk video podcast where the visuals don't add much to the content: if I lock my phone or press the home button, playback will stop (rather than continue underneath like an audio file). To get around it, I lock my phone while I'm watching the video (stopping ...

Inspiration can strike at strange times, and you don't always want to go hunting for a pen and paper to capture your idea. DIY weblog Instructables has you covered with this easy-to-build chalkboard table. The instructions don't require any super-intense DIY know-how, just some basic tools and a little elbow grease. It mainly consists of painting, gluing, and a little bit of sawing and drilling. There are quite a few materials, but nothing you shouldn't be able to find with a trip to your local Ikea and Home Depot—some board for the table, a trestle for the legs, chalkboard paint, and some aluminum extrusions for holding the chalk on the side of the table (and, of course, the usual screws and drill bits that you may or may not have lying around). The nice thing about this guide is that it's extremely detailed, with tons of pictures to go along with the process (so you don't end up asking "Why doesn't mine look like that ?). Hit the link for the full details. Chalkboard Table [Instructables]

Windows: Opera's development team has cranked out no less than four 10.5 release candidate builds in the last 25 hours. That might signal a final build due tomorrow, timed to arrive with Microsoft's mandatory browser choice screen in Europe. Opera is listed among the browsers, ranked in random order, that new editions of Windows must offer first-time installers as of March 1, after a long and drawn-out legal battle over monopoly powers in Europe. Opera's team, in the meantime, has been fixing bugs and tweaking features—like HTML5-compliant video—like a team possessed. For us in the U.S., it's just convenient to be able to try out what looks to be a near-final Opera 10.5 on our Windows system, and feel some of that notable speed boost . No Mac or Linux builds yet, but they're likely to arrive, well, at least by tomorrow. This Opera 10.5 release candidate is a free download for Windows systems only. Give a shout out to anything new you find, or features you've found improved, in the comments. Thanks for the tip, tc4001 10.50 RC4 [Opera Desktop Team]

Most smartphones have one or two great cooking apps, and while using your pocketable device to help out in the kitchen can be more convenient than finding a place for your laptop or wasting paper, smart-home blog Unplggd has a clever suggestion: Our new apartment has some pretty archaic kitchenware. So old, we can't quite figure out how to use the timer on the oven. While we could just look at the clock and determine how long something needs to be on the stovetop or in the cooker, we tend to get distracted easily and realize only too late that we've been cooking for too long. In order to keep from burning all our meals we now use an iPod Touch and a car mount. It's sort of like a tinkering third hand but for the kitchen. I particularly love the previously mentioned Epicurious app for iPhone/iPod touch, and I could absolutely see using something like this in the kitchen. Using Kensington's Car Mount as a Kitchen Aid [Unpluggd]

If you're ever on the lookout for ways to reuse and recycle—or perhaps just to drink a lot of wine—this wine-bottle garden border is a clever and attractive repurposing project. Annie and Alexis Thomas were looking for a green way to edge their gardens in an interesting and novel way. They edged their sizeable garden with 489 bottles—most collected from local restaurants and wine stores—partially buried, as the demarcation between the gardens and the foot paths that wind through them. Wine bottles are sturdy, especially the bottoms, and will last as long as they want to keep them in the garden before shipping them off to be recycled. Check out the link below—scroll down past their cool solar shower to get to the wine bottle project—for more information, or visit the via link to see more examples of wine and beer bottles being used to edge gardens. Have a recycling trick up your sleeve? Let's hear about it in the comments. Wine Bottle Garden Edging [Ready Made via Re-Nest ]