Voting has started in the 2008 Weblog Awards, and two of Lifehacker's sister publications are up for the gongs, which are determined by public vote. Gizmodo is up for best ANZ blog, and Defamer is vying for best gossip blog. So what are you waiting for? Get voting!

Apple's moving iWork onto the web with iWork.com, a web-based version of their desktop office suite which will offer "transparent integration" into the desktop app.

The new release of GarageBand '09 includes "Learn to Play"—piano and guitar lessons from artists like Norah Jones, Sarah McLachlan, and Sting, Gizmodo reports from their live-blog of the Macworld keynote.

It's tucked away, but bookmarking site Del.icio.us now offers bulk tag editing (in, of course, beta) for group tagging/un-tagging and sharing/un-sharing. Helpful stuff, especially for pesky tag typos. Thanks Gergo!

Windows/Mac/Linux (Firefox): Mr. Uptime, friend to anyone who's ever waited for the Digg/Slashdot/Lifehacker Effect to abate before reaching a cool new web site, has recently updated to be Firefox 3 compatible. Not much seems entirely new with Mr. Uptime, available both at its Mozilla home and official page, but that's probably a good thing. As we noted when we last checked it out, the Firefox add-on can also monitor sites and alert you when specific text appears or disappears from a site, making it more than just a monitor of web hosting power. But next time a big, time-sensitive promotional give-away happens and you can't grab it in the first few tries, you'll be glad Mr. Uptime also does its basic function so well.

Mr. Uptime is a free download, works wherever Firefox does. Thanks, ScaryMike!

CrazyLittleFingers is a keyboard locking application. Unlike some of the previous keyboard lockers we've covered, CrazyLittleFingers corresponds the keystroke to a picture and sound related to the key. Press L and you see a picture of a lion. Press R and you see a movie of a rooster. Keys that have no symbolic link for children like the page up and page down keys produce rising and falling guitar sounds. Numbers show the number on the screen. The only caveat is that it doesn't lock the mouse. This is fine on a single monitor setup, because you can't click through the images or access the start menu so clicking wouldn't accomplish anything. On a multiple monitor setup however it only locks the primary screen, the mouse is still effective on the other screens. It would be nice if the program did a simple poll to see if other monitors were active and darkened/disabled them. Still if your toddler isn't a proficient mouse user it should work fine. CrazyLittleFingers is freeware, Windows only. Photo by John A. Ward.

Tech evangelist and Microsoft consultant Blake Handler hosts an impressively completist list of free Windows programs offered by Microsoft, dug from the trenches of Del.icio.us tags. It's a handy bookmark for Control+F hunting. [via etc.]

The good news: CNET has sources saying the three largest music labels will allow Apple to offer music downloads free of copy-protection. And the bad news might not be that bad. In exchange for the DRM-free tracks, Apple will reportedly allow labels to push three tiers of pricing. Older songs from the archives will likely get cheaper than 99 cents, songs that are newer and "midline" (i.e. not big hits) will inhabit the familiar 99 cent mark, and newer, bigger hits will fetch higher, unnamed dollar amounts.< If announced at the Macworld conference today—which our gadget-obsessed cousins at Gizmodo are, of course, covering live —there could also be over-the-air 3G downloads coming to iPhone owners, and DRM dropped from everything in the iTunes store on launch. As Greg Sandoval at CNET points out, though, that leaves a question mark on tracks already purchased through iTunes. Will variable, DRM-free pricing make you a (new or returning) iTunes customer? Tell us your take in the comments.

Windows only: Free app Install-It puts a small auto-starting application on any removable drive that makes installing applications a double-click affair. After downloading the Install-It package, you'll want to extract its files to somewhere you can reach, like your desktop, and open up the Install.ini file in your favourite text editor. This file is simply a list of program descriptions and the locations of their installer files. If you're creating a disc full of useful installers, just replace the default examples with your chosen verbiage for each app and the location/names of the setup files. You separate those two items with a comma, using slashes where necessary, and end each line with a semi-colon.

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The New York Times takes a revealing look at self-handicapping excuses—like "I barely slept the night before the test"—and why we create them, as well as the extremely unlikely chance that anyone else buys them. The short version of the research and studies cited is that we all do it, in varying amounts, to protect our fragile egos. It's a two-way victory: If you ace a project, you did great despite your car having trouble, your cat dying, being sick, and not having hardly heard the initial presentation. If not, well, hey, you know why. If you're a regular self-handicapper, though, you can grow too attached to whatever you use without knowing it, whether it's alcohol, rule-defying, sleep-deprivation, or whatever convenience you cling to. Those who study self-handicapping, though, offer a seemingly devious way to go at it another way and benefit—namely, get someone else to deliver your excuses:

In a recent study, James C. McElroy of Iowa State University and J. Michael Crant of Notre Dame had 246 adults evaluate the behaviour of characters in several workplace anecdotes. The participants' impressions of a character began to sour after the second time the person cited a handicap.

"What happens here is that if you do it often, observers attribute your performance to you, but begin to view it as part of your disposition, i.e., you're a whiner," Dr. McElroy wrote in an e-mail message. "But you can avoid this happening if someone else does the handicapping for you, and surprisingly enough, even if they do it often."

Which cliched excuses and handicapping preambles do you wish you could banish, whether in yourself or co-workers? Let's hear your take on pre-emptive defeat in the comments. Photo by pattista.