Plants and trees can both cool your home and help cut down on your A/C bill, all the more so if you know their optimal positioning spots. Fortunately if you don’t, Bob Vila—yes, Bob Vila—does. For those looking to optimize their energy use during the summer, southfacing trees and plants aren’t the way to go. Instead, position your greenery to the east or west of your home to block low, early, and late day sun. Decidious trees are a good bet in colder climates.

Find the nearest New York subway station with a new augmented reality app for iPhone 3GS (whoa), download a book about free digital media for free, and throw a couple coins in the bucket of your favorite Firefox extension developer. acrossair This yet-to-be-approved augmented reality iPhone 3GS application shows you where you can find the nearest subway stop in New York. Check out the video above. Oh the possibilities.

GPS Devices are the sextants of the modern age, allowing us to pinpoint our locations with accuracy and navigate without fear of getting lost. Photo by Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the BPL . This week we want to hear about what device you use to chart your travels. Whether you use the GPS chip in your cellphone or a dedicated GPS device, tell us about it in the comments below. Bonus points for sharing your reason—Easy to read screen? Portability? Soothing audio directions?—for selecting it as your primary GPS tool.

TravelWhat’s Your Preferred Holiday Transport? By Angus Kidman on July 17, 2009 at 10:00 AM Despite plane flights getting cheaper and more popular than ever, when we set off on holidays, Australians overwhelmingly want to jump in a car.Figures from Tourism Australia (note: PDF link) suggest that while air travel went up by 17% in 2008, we’re still more than three times as likely to use our own car than a plane when we head off on holidays.

As you guys know, the Underground Blog is always bustling with activity.  We may not look like much when there are thousands of blogs on the Internet, but whatever.  I know we have an audience, and real people are being helped by real people. The first secret project was revealed several months ago, and the result of that was the birth of our sister blog, “Welcome to the Other Underground.”  If you haven’t seen it, you can go to http://tug.cjb.net On that site, we have articles on topics that may not be worthy to post here on wordpress.com in fear of another suspension or worse.  I cannot risk that anymore, hence the sister blog.

There is a number of debt pay off calculator available online but this one comes directly from none other than the United States Federal Reserve. They call it the Federal Reserve’s Credit Card Repayment Calculator and it helps you quickly calculate how long you would take to pay off your credit card debt assuming that you make no more charges and you clear only the minimum dues each month. Features Quickly calculate credit card repayment time. Provided by the US Federal Reserve.

An excellent workspace is one well tuned to the needs of its occupant. Today’s featured workspace doesn’t feature an abundance of LEDs and RAID storage, but instead carefully crafted storage and stations. Lifehacker reader AAvella converted a small bedroom in her home into a very functional studio for her business, Beaded Bird Design , by making the most of the space available. The majority of her work is hands on with her computer used to manage inventory, post pictures online, etc., and her space reflects that.

Earlier this week we asked you to share your search engine of choice , and while the big winner was obvious out of the blocks, a significant amount of our readers have recently moved their search elsewhere. Google’s search hegemony held strong at a whopping 85%, but of the remaining 15%, Microsoft’s new up-and-comer Bing pulled in a respectable 11%—leaving just 4% to spread out among Yahoo (2%), Ask (comments of the original post for more about what your fellow readers are using and why.

An excellent workspace is one well tuned to the needs of its occupant. Today’s featured workspace doesn’t feature an abundance of LEDs and RAID storage, but instead carefully crafted storage and stations. Lifehacker reader AAvella converted a small bedroom in her home into a very functional studio for her business, Beaded Bird Design , by making the most of the space available. The majority of her work is hands on with her computer used to manage inventory, post pictures online, etc., and her space reflects that.