All hail the Brighton Evening Argus which today gives one of my books a very healthy - if somewhat overdue - plug. It’s a nice piece by Georgy Edgson who styles herself as an urban avant gardener (I’m not going to disagree) and she has some flattering things to say about 101 Things To Do In A Shed. Out of all the books I’ve written, this is the one that just keeps on giving and I’m very grateful. The link will take you to the full article.

I accept that I’m a bit late to the party here but that’s only because I didn’t read the bumf properly and failed to understand that not only is Dropbox a free online backup service (up to 2GB) but you can also use it to synchronise specific folders between multiple computers. That means I don’t have to faff about e-mailing things back and forth or carrying them around on a USB stick. I just set up a Dropbox account, downloaded the software onto the PC and the MacBook, linked both to my Dropbox account and as they used to say ‘Bob’s your auntie’s live-in lover.’ I create a new folder every month and stick everything in there. At the end of the month I move everything out to its proper place, re-name the folder as the next month and start again. It’s fab.

OK, so it’s not exactly the entire world, but it’s a good start. Primary source material from most of the countries that are currently part of UNESCO has been put on the web where anyone can look at it for free. I’ve covered this in detail for a workshop that’ll appear in Computeractive magazine sometime soon. But meantime, you should check it out anyway as some of the content - especially those early maps - is amazing.

I ‘lost’ my N95 last week. Actually it fell out of my pocket while I was pretending to work in an armchair and some kind soul gathered it up, switched it off and locked it safely in their office until I could collect it the next day. In the meantime I had to call the network (3) and get them to bar the SIM card and the phone; and then re-instate them the next day when I got the phone back. It was one of the best customer service experiences of my life. I came off the phone loving 3 and everything about them - even their patchy coverage in my area. Yesterday I had to put a call into 3 to get the PAC code for a second mobile phone, used by my youngest daughter who’d already signed up to O2. They kept me on the phone for nearly half an hour, didn’t listen to me, offered me deal after deal when I’d already explained that I wasn’t interested, that it was too late, that we’d already signed a new contract with someone else. Oh and then they hung up on me. I came off the phone hating 3 and everything about them. When my current contract expires and I move on, I’ll be using one of many mobile phone deal comparison sites. I like Omio the best and you can read about that and the others in an upcoming issue of Web User.

Fed up of web sites that shout at you courtesy of banner ads, video clips, pop ups, sidebar slideshows or whatever? Try Readability, a tidy little add on that works with most popular web browsers that strips out pretty much everything apart from the actual text that you’re reading. Great for long newspaper features of the kind favoured by the Sundays. Read my workshop in Computeractive magazine.

I like simple things. A Kelly Kettle. A nice fishing rod. An old Yamaha acoustic guitar, a Fender Jazz. And I like Collagr as well. Point it to a Flickr photo stream and it’ll automatically produce a collage based on those photos.

Here’s switch. A web site that lets you keep things under your hat rather than allowing you to broadcast them to the world - a sort of anti-Twitter if you will. Penzu is a free online journal where individual notebooks (and even pages) can be shared or held privately, depending on how you set them up. Nice interface, just enough features. I like. Find out more in an upcoming issue of Computeractive.

Google's pretty good at finding most things. I find that by searching round subjects it'll usually turn up anything that's actually there to be found. People however, are a bit more hit and miss. If you're looking for an old friend or colleague or ex-band member, try one of the services that are specifically designed to search what's sometimes called the 'deep web' - those bits of the Internet that traditional search engines skim over. Try something like 123people or Yasni or Pipl. All have got something to offer and may just track down the person you've been looking for. These and other sites will appear in an article I've written for Web User.

There are a gazillion photo organizers but I've never really got on with any of them - even Picasa. I was pleased to find Pictomio though, which aside from some weird geo-taggng guff is actually rather good and certainly worth a download. It needs a decent graphics card but ran fine on a three year old Dell with an ancient NVidia inside. I've written a how to workshop on Pictomio for Computeractive magazine.

Here's a neat web site that I'm just finishing a workshop on for Computeractive magazine. It's called Screentoaster and is a web service that records what happens on your screen and then saves it as a video. You can add captions and narration and this makes it really useful for people who need to explain how software or web sites work, just the once instead of over and over again.