Stephen Chinnadorai

One of the most unproductive things on your computer is to have a cluttered desktop. It makes it hard to find files you need, slows your computer down and takes up more hard disk space. Here are four ways that should help you keep your desktop clean:

Trash files when you’re done with them

This applies to anything like Disk Images on the Mac or EXE files on Windows, Zip or RAR files and MP3s that you’ve now added to your iTunes library. Once copied to your iTunes Music folder, there’s no need for the extra file on your desktop. When you download a new app, there will be files that you’ve downloaded purely for the setup —there’s no need to keep these on your desktop; just trash them.

Use shortcuts

This may not necessarily remove the amount of clutter on your desktop, but it will speed up startup times. If you have documents on your desktop, just move them to your documents folder and create a shortcut (alias on Mac OS X) on your desktop. That way: 1. There will be less hard disk space used on your desktop, decreasing startup time and 2. Once you’re done with it, you can delete it - and you’ll have a backup copy in your documents folder for future reference.

Use the “Five Folders” rule

From Chanpory Rith’s article on LifeClever, creating five folders in your documents folder for everything that would normally sit on your desktop could work. “Inbox” is for things you’ve just received — you don’t know what to do with them yet. “Actions” is for things that will take a bit of time to complete — for example, installing applications. “Incubate” is for items you’re not ready to deal with yet. “Current Projects” is for stuff you’re working on right now. “Archive” is for things you’re no longer active with, but may want to return to in the near future.

Use apps to help you

Windows has a built-in tool to clean up your desktop; it can be accessed through: Start > Control Panel > Appearance & Themes > Display Properties > Desktop > Customize Desktop > Desktop Items > Click “Clean Desktop Now”. Windows is so simple, isn’t it?

On the Mac, your application shorcuts aren’t on the desktop — so it’s less of a problem. But there are some simple apps like Quicksilver, that could speed up the process of finding folders.

If you can think up any more ways of keeping your desktop clutter-free, please leave a comment.

Personal blogging isn’t anything new; people have had blogs since the late 90’s — but only recently has it become so easy for anyone to create one. Fully dynamic blogs can be created within seconds using software like WordPress, Blogger or TypePad — all three of these offer free hosting services too.

Gary Vaynerchuk does a good job of explaining why everyone should have an online video show; I’m going to try and do the same for why everyone should have a blog.

Your blog is whatever you want it to be — but whatever it is, it’s original. Here are some reasons why everyone should have a blog:

Your online home

If anyone ever Googles your name, this will be the first result (in most cases). This means that people who know you can find you online; your blog could potentially be a meeting point for old friends.

Make your view heard

Blogging is all about your opinion, and it’s one of the best ways to get it out there. Sometimes, if people agree with your view, you’ll get a lot of publicity from social news websites like Digg linking to you — suddenly your blog becomes the centre of attention — all because of your opinion.

Unleash your creativity

Not all of us will have the opportunity to write a book — but we can all write a blog. Share your thoughts, photos, videos and more to the world. It doesn’t matter if everyone doesn’t like what you share, but out of the millions of people in the world, someone will. 

It’s the new media

Mainstream media is slowly diminishing: Newspapers are becoming blogs; TV Shows are becoming YouTube shows; Radio shows are becoming podcasts. The future is on the internet, and blogging will be even bigger than it is today — establishing a domain and blog early may help you in the future.

If you use the internet, it’s more than likely that you’re on at least one social network — for many of us, it’s more than one. These five guidelines should help you have a better presence on the internet, and allow others to find you more easily.

1. Use a consistent username

This is something I haven’t done in the past, but is essential. Having the same username means that if I know someone, e.g. “Nick”, I can easily go to twitter.com/nick, flickr.com/people/nick, etc.- without even needing to search. Using the same username also groups your accounts under a Google search for the name. I recommend using your real name, or at least some element of your name.

2. Have a memorable avatar

Sometimes people talk to me on IM and know my name — I ask them how they know, and the answer is usually: “I recognized your avatar”. Think up something original and simple; the same consistency rule applies here, too: Use the same avatar everywhere — services like Gravatar make this somewhat easier.

3. Use your real name

Using your real name on social networks will help people that know you find you, and gives a list of your online presence under a Google search for your name. When someone adds you on one social network, they might often search for you on another one — if they see your name, they will most likely add you there too.

4. Add the people that add you

That, of course, doesn’t include spammers — no one should add them. But the regular people who have added you or followed you should be added back. This might encourage a conversation, which could bring more followers/friends to you — it’s also just nice when you get an add back from someone.

5. Organize your social profiles

I use a service called ClaimID. All I do is add the links to my profiles on all of the social networks, and it creates a list. It’s useful to have a list like this, so that people can easily add you on multiple networks — plus, it’s useful to have a list yourself; I’m registered on so many websites that I sometimes forget which ones I’m on.

You’ll hear at least once in your life someone asking you “How many megapixels does your camera have?”And, of course, if your camera has less megapixels it is considered “worse” than the one with more megapixels. This isn’t the case. So many people have been fooled by the marketing of megapixels — when the truth is: Megapixels mean nothing; at least on point-and-shoot cameras.

Digital SLR cameras are another story. Usually on SLR cameras, the sensor size is large enough for the millions of pixels to actually look good, rather than distorted. This means that full-frame DSLRs, more megapixels are even more effective.

6 megapixels is the ideal resolution for compact point-and-shoots — it’s large enough for print, yet isn’t too large to cause noise. Although there are some top of the range compact cameras like Canon’s PowerShot G9, which could be an exception to this theory; they produce fine, crisp images - even at 12 megapixels.

The next time someone compares a camera purely based on megapixels, educate them that, on point-and-shoot cameras, it really doesn’t matter - and can in fact make your images look worse - whilst wasting valuable megabytes on your memory card.

In case you weren’t following the WWDC news this week, Apple came out with two major products in Monday’s keynote: MobileMe and the iPhone 3G — both of which link together. MobileMe replaces the .Mac service that Apple previously offered, and brings a range of improvements.

First off, you get 20GBs of storage “in the cloud” — this is shared between e-mail, photo galleries and iDisk backup space. The new service gives you an @me.com e-mail address, which is pretty easy to remember — but the chances of you getting your desired username@me.com are slim. MobileMe also syncs everything up between your computer(s) and iPhone; Apple call it “Exchange for the rest of us” because of this.

But is it worth paying $99 a year for this service? You could use Google’s Gmail for push e-mail to your iPhone with their free IMAP service; you could also use Google Calendar for calendars (although syncing to iPhone does not yet exist); you could use Flickr, or Google Picasa Web Gallery; DropBox is a free alternative to the iDisk.

The table below shows MobileMe and all of its main competitors:

It looks like if you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, and want to keep it in sync with your e-mail, calendar and contacts — plus benefit from 20GBs of online storage — then MobileMe may be worth the $99 price.

When Steve hits the stage on Monday, June 9th 2008, hundreds of thousands of people around the world will be awaiting the launch of a new product, or several. It’s impossible to predict what Apple does behind the scenes — rumours are about as close as the general public gets. I’m going to list the most anticipated products expected to be launched, or announced, at this year’s WWDC keynote.

1. 3G iPhone

The 3G iPhone has had so many rumours in the past months that it’s almost certain the next iPhone will be launched, or at least announced on Monday.

It’s expected to have 3G (of course), GPS, video conferencing and most of the features that people expected in the first version (copy & paste, multimedia messaging, etc.).

2. New .Mac

Let’s face it, .Mac isn’t exactly the best value service for e-mail, or backup — in fact the only good thing about it is its perfect integration with the Mac. The new .Mac service is expected to include over-the-air syncing with iPhones, and could potentially be released for Windows users too.

3. Mac OS 10.6

This very recent, last-minute rumour was unleashed into the blogosphere only yesterday, and has caused quite a disruption. TUAW broke the “news” that a new version of Mac OS X would be announced at this year’s keynote, and could be named “Snow Leopard”. It is not expected to include any major new features, but rather an upgrade focused on ”stability and security” — isn’t that what you get in software updates?

4. New Macs

The Mac Mini, MacBook Pro and Apple Cinema Displays are overdue for an update — WWDC seems like an appropriate place and time to launch some upgrades to them. The MacBook Pro would most likely include a redesign and processor speed increase, the Mac Mini may also include a redesign and spec increase.

Of course, the rumours could be entirely wrong. These are just predictions, and nothing in this article has been said by Apple themselves. The WWDC keynote starts at 10 a.m. PDT/6 p.m. GMT.

I’ve asked a lot of people the same question for the past month or so: “Which lens should I upgrade to?”. Most of them responded with the Canon 50mm f/1.8 — a fast, small and affordable lens.

This is the first prime lens I have ever used, so I felt limited to a single focal length, compared to the 18-55mm zoom lens I was previously using. For those of you that don’t know, prime lenses do not have the ability to zoom in or out – they’re fixed to a particular length, in this case: 50mm. Zoom lenses can have different ranges in focal lengths, but are often more expensive, heavier and don’t produce the same quality of image you get from a prime lens.

The 50mm prime is undoubtedly one of Canon and Nikon’s best selling lenses — the price makes it very attractive for newcomers to digital SLRs. I can definitely see why this lens has been recommended. Although I haven’t taken it out much yet, this lens is bringing sharp photos in the darkest situations; and provides beautiful blurred-out backgrounds (bokeh) on portrait photos.

I haven’t had a chance to use the 50mm f/1.4, but it is supposed to be even better than this lens. I highly recommend anyone new to SLR cameras like me to give this lens a try; especially because its cost is low for the photos you get out of it.

There’s a recent phenomenon of IPTV (Internet Protocol Television) services appearing across Europe, the USA and some other parts of the world. IPTV is intended to be the next-generation of television — delivering content to a user whenever they want it, rather than traditional schedule-based TV that we’re used to today. It sounds great — but there is one major dilemma: Internet.

As I have posted before, the world needs faster broadband. Delivering short, low-quality video clips that are compressed is no problem at the moment — but when it comes into larger, even high-definition video, most users’ internet connections will struggle.

In the UK, the current leaders appear to be ISPs: BT’s BT Vision, and Virgin’s Virgin Media — both of which are terrible services. They claim to give entirely “on demand” services; as it turns out, this isn’t the case. Both services come free or discounted when you purchase the ISP’s internet service, which is appealing to the consumer. However, both services do not work at all.

BT and Virgin have tried to combine traditional over-the-air digital TV with IPTV, and it doesn’t work. For a start, the actual set-top boxes are ugly: No thought has been put into the design, and good design is key to a good product. It’s the same story with the interfaces — BT are using Microsoft (not a good choice), and Virgin appear to be using a proprietary OS for set-top boxes. The interfaces are hard to use, and rarely do what you want them to do. Also, the quality of the streams aren’t worth watching on a TV bigger than 26 inches, in my opinion. HD streams is what the next generation of TV needs, not to go back a step in quality.

TV over the internet can work, but none of the big ISPs seem to get it. I think IPTV should be left to companies who are dedicated to changing the way we watch TV, rather than ISPs who are in the game purely for the money.

I’m a Google guy — like most of us, I have been using Google as my search engine for everything: Information, images, news, and maps; until now.

Microsoft’s previous MSN search was not impressive at all, and their new Live Search is nothing compared to Google. However, their Live Maps feature is quite an improvement over what Google is currently offering. 3-dimensional bird’s eye views are available on Microsoft’s map service. I actually found that, although the interface is not as smooth being web-based, it provided better images of my area than Google Earth.

I also noticed that Google has done a terrific job of “Street Mapping” major cities in the US, but not much else than central London is in street view in the UK. If Google can learn from Microsoft’s bird’s eye view, they would have the perfect service.

Although I still prefer Google’s interface, and compatibility with other browsers like Safari, Microsoft have done a decent job with their new maps feature. I’m still going to be using Google for everything, but I may check back to Live Maps for more detailed bird’s eye views.

At the time of writing this, Twitter is down. With over 1 million users registered, Twitter is the largest micro-blogging website, and one of the most popular social networks on the internet.

Created back in July 2006, Twitter was built without the idea of so many users for the service. Its infrastructure isn’t designed for this many people sending status updates every second.

For me at least, it appears Twitter goes down a lot. It may just be the fact that I’m in a different time zone to most Twitter users (GMT/UK Time); however, Twitter have created a global community, and need to keep that in mind when performing maintenance on their site.

Whether Twitter needs more processing power added to its service, or just a complete re-code of the way it processes updates - it needs to be done. Twitter: Your service is awesome, but nothing will stop you losing your powerful user base if this frequent downtime continues - please, fix it.