For decades, the Russians struck fear in the hearts of other figure skaters. At the Vancouver Olympics, they’ve pretty much been striking out. Once dominant, the Russian program is now in disarray.

Steve Jobs puts on his birthday hat, Yelp gets sued, Twitter and Yahoo team up, and Internet Explorer 6 loses one more link to life support.

• IE6 Funeral
  A Denver design firm, noting that Internet Explorer 6 is due on March 1 to be dropped entirely from Google Docs, Sites, and, later that month, YouTube, holds a service for the standards-defying browser’s “demise.” We’ll assume it’s not one of those “Celebrate their life, not their death” funerals.
• Flash 10.1 Beta 3 Brings Playable HD Flash Video to Even Netbooks With Crappy Graphics
  If you’ve got a laptop or netbook with GMA or Broadcom Crystal video chips, H.264-encoded video is going to move a lot less jaggedly. [Gizmodo]
• Need a job? Learn Drupal
  Open source coding, and even volunteering, is a good way to make yourself attractive to employers. One blogger suggests content management software, and Drupal in particular, is a very hot market at the moment. [CNET News]
• Yelp Is Sued After Dispute Over a Review
  A veterinary hospital claims the review service gently suggested advertising contracts as a means of wiping away bad reviews. Here come the lawyers. [Bits Blog/NYTimes.com]
• YouTube removes original “Rickroll” video due to terms of use violation
  The source of the internet’s most universal prank was pulled down overnight, then quickly put back up, and YouTube says it was a mistake. [Neowin.net]
• Firefox: 46 features you might not know about
  If you’re a web developer, you might find something in this pile that helps your site look better without much work at all. [Mozilla Hacks]
• Yahoo strikes content-sharing partnership with Twitter
  Now you can access your tweets, update your status, and generally hook up Twitter to your Yahoo life. [DailyMe]
• Dev Channel Update
  Bug fixes, full-screen mode in Mac versions, and all kinds of little tweaks in the latest cutting-edge Chrome release. [Google Chrome Releases]
• Happy Birthday, Steve
  The big man on Apple’s campus turns 55 today. What do you get that guy for a birthday gift? [Gizmodo]

We were just writing — yet again — about EMI’s short-sighted decision to block all embedding of Ok Go’s videos (even ones that the band produced entirely on their own). This is despite the fact that it was the widespread embedding of the famed treadmill video that helped Ok Go become as well known as it has — earning EMI a lot of money. Now comes the news of a “resolution” to the issue, as EMI will allow an Ok Go video to be embedded thanks to an as-yet-unexplained “sponsorship” by State Farm. While this shows, in some way, how different business models can step in and help pay for content, it worries me that EMI now seems to think a video needs to be directly sponsored to allow for embedding. Does EMI truly not understand that embedding is what helped Ok Go become so well known? There’s no reason why they couldn’t have allowed the regular embedding to remain and still have done a sponsor deal on top of it.

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Readers offer their best tips for adding missing Firefox features to Chrome, keeping cables from slipping behind your desk, and defrosting food faster in the fridge.

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.

Use I’m Feeling Lucky in Chrome’s Address Bar

Anthony Sarkees shows us how to get I’m Feeling Lucky into Google’s address bar, à la Firefox:

I love Chrome’s speed and stability, but one thing I sorely missed from firefox was being able to just type something into the awesomebar, and have it “just show up.” If the Google pagerank is high enough, it loads the first result, skipping the results pages. So, if you type Lifehacker, it doesn’t give you a google search for lifehacker, it just loads the page.

Chrome can replicate this functionality by changing its default search to I’m Feeling Lucky. You do that by adding this entry to your search engines, and then making it the default: http://www.google.com/search?q=%s&btnI=Im+Feeling+Lucky

Use Binder Clips to Keep Unplugged Cables from Falling Away

Christian shows us a simple office hack that keeps cords organized and stable:

I keep a couple of these big paper clips attached to the back of my desk in order to hold cords and cables that I want to make sure don’t slide back behind my desk when they’re not attached to something. Since I’m frequently switching between laptops – disconnecting then reconnecting multiple cables – this technique has saved me a huge amount of time and frustration. No more grabbing at cables as they slip away behind the desk, then trying to fish them back up.

I use another one of these clips with my nightstand since I have several cables secured there, as well (phone charger, Kindle charger, and laptop cord).

Defrost Food in the Butter Compartment for Quicker Fridge Defrosting

SimonEyez shows us a quicker way to defrost food in the fridge:

Usually, when I freeze meat/vegetables, I freeze them in individual portions using ziplock bags.

To unfreeze them quickly(less than a night), I put them in the butter compartment in the refrigerator door with the setting on “Soft Butter”.

Use Your Phone to Keep Track of Credit Spending

vault14 tells us the quick and simple way that he keeps an eye on his spending:

To keep track of my credit card expenses every month, I enter how much I want to spend on credit into my phone’s calculator on the 1st of every month. Then whenever I use my credit card, I pull out my phone and subtract how much I just spent. It makes spending money on credit much more “real” and removes the abstraction inherit in credit cards.

Even if you use a service like Mint to keep track of your spending, this trick is nice because you have to actively subtract the spent funds and watch the money go away—good if, even with money-tracking services, you still have trouble reigning in spending.

American rock band Camper Van Beethoven is traveling to South by SouthWest this year without the support of a record label, so in order to raise funds, they’re selling off the right to choose the songs that go on to their setlist for the 2 shows that they’re going to play. The first 35 fans to pony up $102 get:

• A Santa Cruz Roller Derby Girl will walk/skate across the stage carrying a placard announcing your sponsorship of the song, within full view of the audience or cameras, to have the moment captured on film or video for all of eternity!
• You can have up to 4 names or one business on each placard.

Sounds like an excellent leveraging of a few of the scarcities that we’ve mentioned here before, in this case, attention, exclusivity and patronage. With the “Santa Cruz Roller Derby Girl,” CVB’s personality definitely shines through in this unique offer that should resonate nicely with their fans (in fact, I learned of this promotion via a friend sharing it through Google Buzz). So, once again, it’s great to see yet another label-free band (who once was on Virgin, years ago, actually), explore new and creative ways to give their fans a reason to buy.

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