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Eight Great Back-to-School iPhone Apps [Back To School]Today

If you're headed back to school this semester with an iPhone or iPod touch in your pocket, you're in luck: The iTunes App Store is filled with applications to make your life easier as a student and as the hip young college type you are. Whether you're hitting the books or the bars, keep reading for a closer look at eight of the best back-to-school iPhone and iPod touch applications. (Not headed back to school? Don't worry, we've got a few in there for you, too.)

Evernote

You already know how to expand your brain with Evernote, and the Evernote iPhone app is a must-have element in that setup. You can capture and tag photos, text notes, and audio notes, as well as search and access any other note you've captured with Evernote. It's always in sync with all of the rest of your notes, so whether you want to quickly check your class notes on the go or need to snap a picture of a handout to and send

Battle of the Must-Have Firefox Extensions [Lifehacker Faceoff]Today

Mozilla Labs crowned their picks of best new and updated Firefox 3 extensions in a recent contest, but what about best extensions of all time? Last year we ran down our must-have Firefox extensions, but it's time for a refresh, this time with a little help from my friends. Yesterday I polled over 4,000 of my closest and most personal internet buddies about what extensions they absolutely must have installed to work comfortably in their favorite browser. Almost 100 responses later, we've got a solid list of the essentials. Check out the top candidates and cast your vote for your most essential extension.

Note: This list is skewed heavily toward web developer-type tools, because apparently mostly web developers follow me. Also, this poll contains only the extensions that got more than 5 mentions—dozens more got only 1 or 2 votes.

Gawker Media polls require Javascript; if you're viewing this in an RSS reader, click through to view in your Javascript-enabled web browser.

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HashTab Verifies the Integrity of Your Downloads [Featured Windows Download]Today

Windows only: If you download a lot of applications from the internet, chances are you've seen an MD5 hash next to the download link. This unique hash is used to verify the integrity of your download, ensuring that the file you got is in fact the file you were supposed to get. HashTab is a simple utility that adds a new tab to the Properties window of Windows Explorer that displays the file hashes for that file in several commonly used hash formats. To verify the authenticity of a download, then, you would just right-click the downloaded file, select Properties, and then compare the file hash in the new File Hashes tab to the hash posted on the download page. HashTab also compares files on your desktop to help you determine whether or not the files are identical. It's probably not for everyone, but if you do a lot of downloading and are interested in verifying the authenticity of those files, HashTab is a simple solution.

HashTab [via Shell Extension City]

UNetbootin Creates USB-Bootable Linux the Easy Way [Featured Download]Today

Windows and Linux only: Free bootable image creator UNetbootin automates the downloading, imaging, and installing of Linux distributions onto USB thumb drives, creating a persistent, boot-anywhere desktop. We've previously featured rather involved guides to putting Linux on a flash drive, but UNetbootin does it all for you, from downloading the right ISO to setting up a USB stick as a bootable Linux drive. It can also convert almost any bootable ISO, so if you've got an old, smaller thumb drive not seeing much use these days, you can use UNetbootin to install a partition editor, a file-recovering live CD, or the Windows password-cracking Ophcrack. UNetbootin is a free download for Windows XP and higher and Linux systems.

UNetbootin [via Tombuntu]

Hive Five Winner for Best FTP Client: FileZilla [Hive Five Followup]Today

Open-source FTP client FileZilla takes home the top spot in last week's Hive Five Best FTP Clients poll with an overwhelming 52% of the vote. The rest of the field was split up relatively evenly between 8% and 11%. That's good votin'.