So you've decided you want to drop off the map and leave Big Brother behind. It's harder than ever in our always-connected world, but if you're ready to plan your big vanishing act, here are a few tips to get you started.

If this looks familiar, you're not crazy. Our guide to dropping off the map is a perennial Evil Week favorite.

Who hasn't thought about how nice it would be to start fresh somewhere new, preferably with nicer weather and cheaper drinks? Whatever your reasons for wanting to disappear—maybe you just want to get The Man off your back—with enough diligence and planning you can vanish and start anew somewhere else.

For the low down on disappearing and starting your life over, we turned to the book How to Disappear: Erase Your Digital Footprint, Leave False Trails, and Vanish without a Trace by Frank M. Ahearn and Eileen C. Horan. Frank Ahearn is the grizzled grandfather of the vanishing act. After 20 odd years working as a skip tracer—an investigator who specializes in finding people who don't want to be found—he realized he could make just as much money and incur a lot less risk helping people avoid investigators like himself. We've culled a few of Ahearn's tips below, but if you're really serious, his book is a great pocket guide to getting lost. Photo adapted from the Australia edition of How to Disappear.

How Not to Disappear

The cardinal sin in any serious disappearance is drama. You don't successfully vanish by staging an elaborate disappearing act that ultimately involves a tri-state search, police dogs, and your home town believing that you were mauled by a bear and dragged off into the dark night. Ahearn stresses the importance of disappearing in a legal fashion. You shouldn't, for example, try and secure false papers: It's a felony to use false identification, and you have no idea if the papers you secured are legitimate. (What if your new social security number belongs to a dead guy or a criminal? What if the passport you bought is bogus and now you're staring down a customs agent?). Instead, you want to obfuscate your identity in a way that it's so difficult for people to follow you that anything short of a government task force will lack for the patience or funding to keep doggedly trying to find you. Here's a little about how that might work. Photo by David McDermott.

Minimize Your Social Connections

People who hurriedly throw all their crap in a suitcase and run out the back door are the ones who fail at disappearing. Instead, one of your most important jobs, prior to your successful disappearance, is to slowly cut the fat from your social life. Stop using Facebook—ditch all social networks—maybe under the pretense that you're spending too much time online (or any other pretense that people around you will accept besides "I'm going to torch my crappy life and move to Belize").

You want to minimize the social footprint you occupy so that when suddenly you're not standing in it anymore, few people will notice or care. If you're the most prominent member of the local social scene and you vanish tomorrow, people will notice. Minimizing your virtual trail is more important than minimizing your real life trail. It takes mere minutes for an investigator to comb through social networks and search results, but hours and additional expenses to investigate on foot and by phone. Photo by Luis Perez.

The one social connection most people are unwilling to ditch is communication with their immediate family. Unless your immediate family is the reason you're pulling a vanishing act, chances are you'll still want to talk to your parents or siblings. This can the toughest communication to break, and it's where almost everyone fails. All the planning in the world is worthless if you call your relatives from your new location and a skip tracer gets her hands on the phone records. If you want to communicate with your family or best friend after you've vanished from the less desirable people in your life, then you need to figure out, well in advance, how you will do so. Never communicate with them directly from any account linked to your new life or new residence. Anonymous email accounts and prepaid phone cards and cellphones are the only way you're going to be finding out if Grandma's hip surgery went well.

Ditch the Plastic; Cash Is King

Get used to the idea of ditching the luxuries you had in your former life. Gone are the credit cards, the convenience cards and loyalty cards, even simple things like a video rental card. Pay cash for everything and don't use anything that could link your new life and your plans to your old life. Don't check out books about Chile from your local library or buy them with a credit card. Don't use a credit card or frequent flier miles to book a flight out of the country. Your goal in everything you do is to minimize the number of connections between your old life and your new life. Whenever you undertake an interaction with another person or business, ask yourself "Is this the least traceable method I could use?" Paying cash for a cup of coffee at an old coffee shop? Obscure. Paying with a credit card for a cup of coffee at an airport kiosk under the eye of four different security cameras? Not stealthy in the least. Cash is king. Photo by Andrew Magill.

Lie, Lie, and Lie Some More

Ahearn goes into intense detail on the topic of disinformation and its importance in disappearing. He notes that the thing skip tracers hope for most is just enough information—too little and they'll never find their prey, too much and they'll waste all their time and funding looking in the wrong places. Your goal is to create disinformation.

As you prepare to disappear, slowly but surely start fudging the information companies have on you. "Correct" the spelling of your name on file with the local utility company, tell them they have the wrong social security number and offer a correction, change your mailing address for your bills to a fake mail drop you set up through a private mailing company. If people come looking for you, you want them to waste their time looking in the wrong places. Chapters 7, 8, and 9 of Ahearn's book are all devoted entirely to disinformation, creating false leads (with examples from his work that are so clever you'll want to hire him just to see him in action), and establishing yourself securely in a new locale. Photo by Anonymous9000.

Incorporation, The Binding Glue

At this point you might be nodding your head, thinking that the plan sounds great so far, save for the one glaring detail. If you can't use anything but cash how on earth are you going to establish a new identity in your new location? Since you don't want to lead the life of an illegal alien in your new locale, you're going to need some way to have a legal presence that isn't intimately tied back to your old identity.

Creating a corporation to manage your assets is one way many people handle their affairs once they have disappeared. Your corporation, only vaguely linked to you and not in the way that is readily identifiable to skip tracers, will be the entity that leases your apartment, pays your utility bills, and otherwise delegates your money out while serving as a shield between you and those looking for you. The details of this are best discussed between you and a lawyer or after careful research into what kind of corporation (and where) would be the best fit for you. Photo by Diana.

Lastly: Don't Bother If You're Not Committed

Disappearing is not easy. You don't just fake your own death, buy some false papers in an alley from a guy with an indiscernible accent, and then retire to a life of leisure on a small island nation. Disappearing, and doing so legally and without incurring a bigger headache than the one you're running away from, takes careful planning. You need to be willing to cut contact with nearly everyone you know (if not everyone), change how you shop, and even ditch your hobbies. Disappearing means beginning a game of chase with people who want to find you and being willing and strong enough to outlive them at that game. If you can't do that, you'll waste a lot of time and money trying to disappear but failing. Photo by Bohari Adventures.

Further Reading

The total planning and execution of your disappearance is well beyond the scope of this article. If you're seriously entertaining the idea of disappearing, we highly recommend checking out Ahearn's book How to Disappear: Erase Your Digital Footprint, Leave False Trails, and Vanish without a Trace. If you're serious about vanishing, it offers insights and tips you likely never even thought about. If, like most of us, you're not serious about vanishing, it's still packed with fascinating stories culled from the hundreds of clients Frank has helped vanish from their old life and start a fresh one more to their liking. Either way you'll end up a little more paranoid about your privacy and security and a lot more knowledgeable about the ways people abuse both.

Smashing the snooze button is so quaint. Modify your alarm to shut off when blasted with a phaser gun.

Watch the video above to see how Kipkay modifies his alarm clock to shut off not when the snooze button is tapped but when shot with a modified game gun. You'll need an alarm clock, a toy with sound effects to cannibalize, an old "light zapper" style game gun, and a soldering iron. Hit up the link below for step-by-step instructions.

We've shown you how to use an Arduino chip to hack a cooler and slow cook your food, now it's time to hack a slow cooker to cultivate your own delicious home made yogurt.

You can purchase yogurt machines but they're limited in function. Most of them only incubate the yogurt; you pay a premium for a machine that will also heat and sterilize. Over at Make magazine Chris Reilly decided to experiment with using an Arduino chip to control the thermostat of a slow cooker and turn it into an all-in-one yogurt making machine. Hit up the link below to see his full build guide including schematics and the fruit of his labor.

Save your money for more lenses; convert a cardboard tube and some simple parts into a lens extension tube to take macro photographs on the cheap.

You'll need a DSLR body cover, a lens socket cover, some hot glue, a lightproof tube (cardboard or metal is idea) roughly the diameter of your lens, and a dremel tool for cutting a hole in the body and socket covers. When you're done following the tutorial at the link below you'll have dirt cheap extension tube to help you snap macro photographs without shelling out for a macro lens.

If your office needs a shot of something more organic than your nature desktop wallpaper, you might want to take a cue from today's featured workspace and bring outdoor elements inside.

Juan Solanoy's workspace is a fairly simply white desk in a white room. He scavenged some tree trimmings and propped them up in the corner to add an organic element to his room and serve double duty to hang some peripherals like his headphones. They break up a space that would otherwise be completely sterile (now he just needs something organic and alive and he'll have to total life on a 23rd century space station vibe down pat).

If you have a workspace of your own to show off, throw the pictures on your Flickr account and add it to the Lifehacker Workspace Show and Tell Pool. Include some details about your setup and why it works for you, and you just might see it featured on the front page of Lifehacker.

Surely your company acquired a laser cutter for more pressing matters than creating copies of wildly popular European board games. Disregard that and fire it up this weekend to craft a copy Settlers of Catan.

If you're totally unfamiliar with Settlers of Catan you're missing out. It's a European board game that set off the whole Euro-game frenzy in the United States. Over at Thingiverse, the wiki of projects and accompanying printer files for laser cutters and 3D printers, user Jmne shares an awesome laser cutter set you can use to create a Settlers of Catan play set.

You'll still needs the cards and the wooden pieces from the game (or you could make them yourself), but the laser cut set is a fantastic way to get started with the game. Hit up the link below to download the files and check out his version cut from red acrylic.

This clever HDTV mount doesn't just float your television between two Stolmen system support poles, it provides a read space for wrangling cable clutter and peripherals.

IKEAHackers reader William Davis wanted to use the Stolmen system from IKEA to build an entertainment center. The challenge? Safely mounting the HDTV. He ended up making a box-like bracket that not only accommodated the wall mount for the TV but provided extra space behind it to wrangle cables and peripherals. He essentially gets the benefit of a recessed wall cabinet without having to actually tear up his walls and install it.

Visit the link below for additional photos and installation instructions.

Automatic air fresheners practically beg to be hacked apart thanks to the servo motors and timers inside. One photography enthusiast demonstrates how to hack apart a Glade air freshener to build a remote camera trigger.

Tinkerer JCoPro pulled apart a Glade automatic air freshener to see what was inside. Once he gutted it he realized the mechanism inside could easily be repurposed as a remote camera trigger. A little hacking and a plywood bracket later, and he had a functional prototype. Hit up the link below for instructions, photos, and videos.

Android: Relax and Sleep is a free sound-generator for android phones that makes it easy to create custom sleep soundtracks.

Relax and Sleep sports dozens of tracks you can mix together to create a custom sleep soundtrack. Mix sounds like city noise, crickets, music, white noise, the sounds of fans, air conditioners, and more. You can adjust each track individually so the crickets don't overpower the thunderstorm or vice versa. Once you've mixed your perfect track, save it to one of the preset slots and then set the timer to count down to nod off time.

Relax and Sleep is free and works wherever Android does. Hit up the link be below to read more and grab a copy.

If you want to keep your workshop extra tidy (and keep dust and debris out away from your electronics if your shop is mixed-use), this DIY "Dust Sniper" dust extractor is a great way to keep things tidy and safe.

Instructables user BongoDrummer wanted a way to keep his workshop clean and keep all the dust from his woodworking projects away from his electronics projects. By aggressively reusing everything from scrap wood to plastic canisters to old vacuums he was able to build an amazing little extractor for around $30. Check out the video above to see it in action or visit the link below for the detailed build guide at Instructables.com.

If you're looking for a slick stand to showcase some of your electronics gear this DIY project turns an IKEA table into a modern looking stand with integrated wire-concealment.

IKEAHackers reader Pete wanted a cheap but attractive stand for his amplifier. With a little elbow grease (and a keyhole drill bit) he hacked together a stand that includes cable concealment in the table's leg. Hit up the link below for step by step photos of his build process.

We've shown you some great tricks for hard-boiling eggs over the years, now it's time to hone your soft-boiling skills. Check out how to soft-boil a perfect egg.

We've shown you how to use your oven to hard-boil eggs, how to use the crack and blow method to de-shell them, and even how to incorporate them into your diet in an effort to eat your way to high energy work day. Now we're sharing technique courtesy of TheKitchn to help you perfectly soft-boil them:

1. Fill a saucepan about halfway with water and bring it to a boil.

2. Decrease the temperature so that the water reduces to a rapid simmer and gently lower the eggs into the water one at a time.

3. Cook the eggs for 5-7 minutes: 5 minutes for a yolk that is still runny and 7 minutes for a yolk that is barely set.
4. Drain the eggs and run them under cold tap water for 30-60 seconds.

5. To eat, use a knife or egg-cutter to take the cap off the tip of the egg and eat it straight from the shell, preferably with plenty of toast for dipping. More firmly-cooked eggs can be cracked (carefully!) and peeled like a hardboiled egg. All soft-boiled eggs should be cooked to order and eaten immediately.

Hit up the link below for additional tips on preparing the eggs, including some helpful tricks from their kitchen-minded commenters.

Quitting a job and transitioning to a new one is a serious career move. Keep the bridge to your job open and operational with these quitting time tips.

Compared to any other transitional stage in your career, quitting time is the one filled with the most landmines. Unlike when you start working at a company, a time when you're fresh and full of energy and new ideas, quitting time often comes when you're burned out and ready to snap. Check out the following tips to make sure you leave your current job gracefully and impress your new employer in the process.

Quit Before You Explode

The best way to leave a job is on a good note. If you're unhappy with your job right now it's time to either start building an exit strategy or start working to improve things where you are. Don't simmer until you're acting out at work, doing your job half-assed, and otherwise passive aggressively trying to stick it to your boss. It will ruin whatever relationship you had with your boss and coworkers. Quit before people want you to get the hell out. Photo by mansee.

It Isn't All About You

The first rule of quitting is that it isn't all about you. You might hate your boss. You might even hate a few of your coworkers. Dislike for said boss, coworkers, or even the company at large is no reason to be a jerk for the duration of your notice, to sabotage your coworkers projects, or to otherwise be a thorn in your employer's side. Now isn't the time to throw a fit and pull and Office Space on the fax machine.

Give Ample Notice

When you leave a company you're creating a vacuum, however big or small, and your boss and coworkers are going to have to work around that. Don't make life harder on everyone else in the office. They're just as stressed and overworked as you are. Give your boss ample notice that you're leaving. Two weeks is pretty standard and a bare minimum. If you work in a specialized industry where it'll be hard to find a replacement giving a month or longer might be appropriate. Photo by djayo.

Not only does giving your current employer ample notice help smooth your exit it also makes you look good in the eyes of your future employer. When you accept your new job you can be clear that your start date is dependent on giving your old employer adequate notice; your new employer wants to see that you can leave your old job gracefully.

Be Clear and Honest on Your Motivation for Leaving

Being honest doesn't mean responding to your boss's inquiry "Smith, why are you leaving us?" with "because you're an ass face" but it does mean being polite and forthright. It means not playing any sneaky games with your employer even if your time with them is coming to an end. Keep things polite and simple. "I've received an offer with another company sir; I feel there is more room for me to grow there and a more flexible schedule to spend time with my family." is a direct and honest response. Never outline your reason for leaving in the context of what your boss or company isn't and instead outline it in terms of what it is that you need: a place to grow, more flexible hours, a chance to take a stab at your dream of doing something different.

Write a Professional Resignation Letter

A good resignation letter is as important as a good résumé. Put as much effort into leaving your company as you did trying to get in. Resignation letters should always be positive. It doesn't matter if your boss is a hooker-slaying embezzler that is out to ruin your life. Keep things polite and leave on a positive note.

At minimum your resignation letter should include a polite thank you for the opportunities you had at the company and a firm date for your departure from the company.

If you're leaving the company on good terms and/or you want to leave gracefully, you should also include an offer to help ease your transition out of the company (training a replacement, for example). You should also consider including a reason if you're resigning on good terms, such as you're leaving to spend more time with your family or pursue your dream of teaching English as a Second Language in rural Japan.

Above all else keep your resignation letter professional, to the point, and polite.

Keep Your Mouth Shut Until It's Quitting Time

This rule is multidimensional. You should keep your mouth shut about quitting until you've formally resigned and notified your boss and the HR department. It is horrible workplace etiquette to leave your boss to find out you're quitting from a third party. If you sit around the water cooler muttering about quitting not only do you look foolish but you lower morale for other employees and you give your boss a potential reason to can you before you make your own exit. After you've formally resigned you should also keep your mouth shut (for the most part) until you've left the company. If fellow employees have a question or two about where you're going or stop to wish you well, certainly chat with them. But don't make your last month at your old job a massive venting period. Your boss might be a monster but he's a monster that everyone else has to keep working for. Photo by Shawn Rossi.

Network but Make a Clean Break

Make sure everyone has your contact information in whatever form possible (phone number, LinkedIn profile, etc.). Your old boss and coworkers are part of your workplace pedigree and history. Unless you have an extremely compelling reason to want to fall off their radar completely it's helpful to have some way of contacting them. Maybe a year from now somebody in your department will have a question or two. Maybe after you leave a few of your coworkers will realize that it's time for them to move on too and want to catch up with you over lunch. Being around to answer the occasional question about the way you did things or point an old coworker in the right direction is just good form. You're making a clean break but you're also keeping communication open. If you start getting more than a few harried communications from past coworkers, however, it's time to remind them that you don't work there anymore.

The Ultimate Goal is Harmony

When you're weighing any decisions regarding how and when you'll leave your current employer, take a big picture look at the situation and make sure you're not missing anything. Are you giving them fair notice? Are you aware of any conflict between your new employer and your old one? (You don't want to create bad blood between two tightly enmeshed companies; you might need to do some extra smoothing over.) Photo by Steve Johnson.

Above all resist the urge, however strong, to lash out. You're leaving. You quit! You've punched your ticket and you're just waiting for the train to arrive and take you to New Job Land. You have absolutely nothing to gain by causing upset and social contacts, job references, and good will to lose by lighting the torches. Put a smile on your face and truck through the last few weeks knowing that everything you hate about your job: your boss's passive aggressive requests, his harpy of a secretary, the broken copier, your coworker that tries to dazzle you with stupid trivia, all those things will be gone. Keep calm and carry on.

You can contact Jason Fitzpatrick, the author of this post, at jason@lifehacker.com. You can also follow him on Twitter and Facebook

Minimize the visual weight of your computer monitors by setting up a background that gives the monitor the illusion of transparency.

Lifehacker reader Louish Pixel could have made his monitor background images anything at all, but he opted to make them a properly scaled photo of the room behind the monitor. In essence, when he's not working in an application that is full screen, you can see what is behind the monitor (although not in real time, obviously). The effect of the room-as-background is a sense that you can see across the room and the monitors aren't quick so monolithic and wall-like.

To set up your background like this just take a photo from the vantage point of your monitor with a neutral focal length like 50mm and then crop it so that the photo shows the room as you would see it from your desk if the monitor wasn't blocking the view.

If you have a workspace of your own to show off, throw the pictures on your Flickr account and add it to the Lifehacker Workspace Show and Tell Pool. Include some details about your setup and why it works for you, and you just might see it featured on the front page of Lifehacker.

Last week we asked you to share your favorite social media manager. We rounded up the top nominations and put them before you for a vote and now we're back to highlight the winner and runners-up.

TweetDeck led the pack with 46% of the vote, followed by Seesmic (21%) and HootSuite (15%). The votes quickly dropped off from there with Digsby (10%) and Socialite (3%) holding down the end of the curve. Check out the results in graph form by clicking on the image below:

Have an idea for the next Hive Five? Shoot us an email at tips@lifehacker.com with "Hive Five" in the subject line and we'll do our best to see that your idea gets the attention it deserves.

Today's featured workspace is a home office makeover that went from blue and cluttered to vibrant red and organized.

Lifehacker reader Ed Forero's office was too cluttered for his taste. He started with two desks (much like I had in my original home office) and found it cluttered to the point that he had to scrap the entire design and start fresh. He rearranged the entire room, hauled out the crap he didn't need, reorganized his work space, and then livened the place up with a fresh coat of paint and new artwork.

Hit up the link below to check out more photos in from his before-and-after remodel.

If you have a workspace of your own to show off, throw the pictures on your Flickr account and add it to the Lifehacker Workspace Show and Tell Pool. Include some details about your setup and why it works for you, and you just might see it featured on the front page of Lifehacker.

There's no need to pay the electric company to charge your small electronics when you've got a portable solar charger on hand. Learn how to turn some cheap solar panels and a Tupperware container into a solar charging station.

Instructables user Joshua Zimmerman shares a simple tutorial on turning a set of inexpensive solar panels, a Tupperware container, and some basic electronic parts into a simple solar charger. His tutorial demonstrates how to set up the panels to charge a set of AA batteries but you could easily adapt it to trickle charge your phone or MP3 player instead.

Hit up the link below for detailed instructions and additional photos.

When space is at a premium you have to fit your workspace in wherever you can. Today's featured workspace is tucked inside a closed turned home office.

Lifehacker reader Chelsea McGowan had an ugly closet with cruddy bi-fold doors but no home office. The obvious solution? Rip the doors off the closet and upgrade the space into a home office. She added two IKEA organizers and linked them with a custom cut piece of wood to make a DIY desk similar in design to the classic door-on-file-cabinets design. She also put in a shelf to store her books and media high up and out of the way (as well as provide a mount for her TV). No word on where her clothes went after this transformation but the former closet space is definitely being put to good use.

If you have a workspace of your own to show off, throw the pictures on your Flickr account and add it to the Lifehacker Workspace Show and Tell Pool. Include some details about your setup and why it works for you, and you just might see it featured on the front page of Lifehacker.

If you've ever looked at the analog clock on your wall and thought yourself "Needs more LEDs..." then this hack is for you. Build a digital/analog hybrid clock for swanky animated time keeping.

Electronics hobbyist Wellyb00t shares an ambitious LED clock project; you'll need quite a few LEDs, a lot of wire, and an understanding of electrical diagrams to follow along. The end product is an animated LED clock that is capable of displaying the time in numerical format, as an analog clock face, and with plenty of animations thrown in to mix things up. Hit up the link below for additional details.

On Friday we shared an infographic-style drink guide with you, now we're back to highlight an old-school blueprint you can use to build your favorite mixed drinks.

CaptainJack brought the Cocktail Blueprint to our attention, remembering it from his days in a blueprint shop back in the 1980s. We did a little digging and found a PDF version of the same cocktail blueprint he recalled. It sports over 30 recipes all rendered as though they were construction plans. Use the key on the side to decode them or, more practically, consult your bar tending book and hang the blueprint behind your home bar.

Screen printing doesn't have to be the arcane art of only t-shirt shops and design students. Follow along with this simple guide to start screen printing your own t-shirts, greeting cards, and more.

Last month Slyvia, the mini-maker from Make magazine's Sylvia's Maker Show, showed us how easy it was to mold and clone household objects. Now she's back to take the mystery out of screenprinting and show us how we can screen print everything from t-shirts to greeting cards to our own limited run prints. Watch the video above to see the process through or hit up the link below to get a list of readily available parts and a guide to getting started.

Stop logging in to each of your social networks individually and start managing them all at once with a social media manager. Here's a look at the five most popular social media managers.

Photo by spekulator.

Earlier this week we asked you to share your favorite social media management application. We've tallied up all the nominations and now we're back to highlight the top five social media managers and the features that make them great. Read on to learn more about Lifehacker readers' favorite social media managers.

Seesmic (Windows/Mac/Linux/Android/BlackBerry/iOS/Web, Free)

Seesmic started life as a social video aggregator and transformed into a social media management powerhouse. Available for nearly every operating system and mobile device under the sun, Seesmic makes it easy to keep tabs on your favorite services. All the versions of Seesmic support a core of social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, but the desktop versions really shine with support for plugins that expand the support to over 50 services. Check out the plugin marketplace to see all the different add-on services.

Digsby (Windows/Mac/Linux, Free)

Originally a multi-protocol chat client, Digsby has expanded to include additional features such as email and social network support. You can now check status updates and send your own status updates on popular social networks like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn. The InfoBox gives you updates on your friends as well as access to any invitations or announcements they send out. It's not quite the expansive dashboard provided by some of the other options in this week's Hive Five but it's more than powerful enough for many readers and it helps wrap up instant messaging, email, and social networking in one application.

TweetDeck (Windows/Mac/Linux/Android/iOS/Chrome, Free)

TweetDeck is another social media application that makes good use of a multi-column layout. You can easily customize TweetDeck to display just what you want to see including wall updates, Twitter mentions, and more. If you sign up for a free TweetDeck account you can also synchronize your settings and layout across computers. TweetDeck supports Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, Google Buzz, and more. In addition to easy cross-network updates and monitoring, TweetDeck also supports schedules updates.

Socialite (Mac, Pro: $19.95/Ad-Supported: Free)

Socialite is polished social media app for Mac OS X that comes in two flavors: free and ad-supported, or ad-free with a $19.95 license. Socialite monitors and updates Facebook, Twitter, Digg, and Flickr, as well as support for Good Reader and manual RSS entries. What Socialite lacks for in volume of supported services it makes up for with tools for organizing the flow of information across your social networks including time lines and filters to help drill down to what's important to you.

HootSuite (Web/Android/BlackBerry/iPhone, Basic: Free/Pro: $5.99 per month)

HootSuite is a social media manager oriented towards a team working with social media, featuring multiple tiers of access to the social networks (one person administrates and others can update, for example), tracking of mentions and other quantifiers, tabbed layout, WordPress support, scheduled updates, automatic updating, and more. The basic account is free and allows you to manage five social networks with a 30 day stats history. The $5.99 per month Pro account offers unlimited social networks and stats history as well as Google Analytics and Facebook Insights integration.

Note: As of publishing, our poll system isn't working. We're working to get this fixed ASAP, but in the meantime, we'll have to hold off on collecting votes. Our apologies for the inconvenience.

Have a great idea for the next Hive Five? Shoot us an email at tips@lifehacker.com with "Hive Five" in the subject line and we'll do our best to give your idea the attention it deserves.

Cardboard from shipping boxes and food products can pile up fast. This DIY holder wrangles your cardboard out of the way and keeps it neatly stacked for easy bundling.

IKEAHackers shares a reader project with an environmental slant; converting a Gom shelf into a bin to hold cardboard recyclables.

Although this hack job turns an IKEA Gom shelf into a recycling station you could easily follow their template using scrap wood (people love to hack the Gom system into other forms because many times it's cheaper to buy a few Gom shelves than to buy raw lumber at the local lumber yard). Hit up the link below for the step-by-step guide and additional photos.

If you're always on the lookout for a cheap DIY solution for propping up your phone it doesn't get much cheaper than this: a phone stand made from a free pizza box support.

Over at the gadget and accessory blog Coolest Gadgets they reviewed a plastic iPhone stand called 3Feet and compared it, off hand, to using a pizza box support as an impromptu stand. "Pizza box support?" I said, while ambling in the kitchen hoping I hadn't thrown away the box from last night's pizza. Pizza box support indeed!

I washed it off and put my phone on it. It supported the phone fine but the angle was a little steep and the leg in front blocked the screen. Three snips with a pair of needle nose pliers later and the front leg was out of the way and the back legs were short enough to adjust the screen angle. Here's a shot from the back:

It's super cheap, props my phone up great, and saved me from buying a stand or charging dock to tilt my phone to a more glance-friendly angle on my desk. The only thing I'd do differently (and I just have to wait to order another pizza to try it) is reverse the front/back orientation of the triangle. I originally thought the two legs in back would be necessary to support the phone properly but in reflection it would make more sense to have the two legs in the front to stabilize the bottom of the phone (instead of the back where one leg would be sufficient).

In a DIY dock building mood? Check out our previous article Nine DIY Docks for Your Non-iPhone for more ideas.