Although I’m a huge fan of Tom Revell’s Stickies sticky note program, I’ve also been looking for a program that consolidates notes in a panel, uses tags and lets you filter notes in and out as necessary. I’ve just done a workshop on QuotePad for Computeractive which has many of the features I’ve been looking for. Check out the piece in an upcoming issue or visit the QuotePad site to see for yourself. And while we’re here, I also like the look of Cintanotes which does many of the same things but looks - to my eyes - nicer. Still in beta though.

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.

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.

Messing about with disk partitions usually makes people a bit queasy - there’s a lot frack up and Windows doesn’t necessarily make the job very easy. This software does. It’s completely free, works with XP and Vista and lets you create, resize, copy and delete partitions quickly and easily. Until I find something better it joins my list of essential software which I’ll write about in the next entry. Meantime, keep an eye out for the issue of Computeractive that has my workshop of Partition Master.