My wife came home from the shops the other day and she told me she spent $AU50 on paper diary inserts for 2008. This way she is able to keep her nice binder in use for another year. She uses her computer calendar for very few scheduled reminders, and I couldn’t understand why she would try to use both at the same time.

I use a computer based calendar (Outlook 2007) and find that it does everything I could want it to do. I asked her why she used both when the computer options are free and come with a number of features a paper diary can’t offer. After listing a few of the advantages, I thought it would be wise to do a bit of a comparison.

This article will look at paper diaries vs computer based calendars. I am strongly leaning towards the computer based diaries as being a better option. The only way a paper diary can win this is to bypass all the benefits and answer “I simply prefer paper diaries!”

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Spam plagues our Inbox each day. Emails advertising Rolex watches, penis enlargements, viagra and emails from Nigeria offering me vast amounts of money for doing nothing, are all very annoying, but we are able to get rid of most of them automatically.

Email servers often have spam protection built in. These cull the majority of spam, but they have to allow a fair chunk of spam through so as to not restrict legitimate emails. Sometimes if they are unsure, they may add a spam tag to the subject. It is scary looking at server stats, just how much is stopped at the server level.

In our email client we are able to setup rules to remove the majority of remaining spam from our Inbox. I regularly find myself doing this on computers where I work and have found this method to be very reliable.

This article will show you how to setup basic email rules which will check mail as it is received. The rules will look for keywords in the body and the subject of you emails to decide if they are spam or not. We are then able to move these filtered emails to a folder of our choice.

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If you’ve just bought yourself a shiny new Apple Mac computer, you’re probably wondering “How do I use it? Is it anything like Windows?” By and large, you’ll find that the Mac OS X operating system shares a lot of similarities with Windows - all the basic conventions like icons, desktop, shortcuts (Apple calls them “aliases”), windows, menus, Trash, etc. all work pretty much the same.

However, Mac OS X also has its own distinct personality quirks & features. The current version of the operating system - 10.4, also known as “Tiger” - was released in April 2005. Its stand out features are listed here:

• Spotlight
• Dock
• Sidebar
• Smart Folders
• Expose
• Dashboard

This article, which I’ll be presenting in two parts, aims to cover most of Mac OS X’s unique features & methodology, and in particular how to use them to your advantage.

Part 1 which follows will cover Spotlight, the system-wide search feature, as well as the Dock & Sidebar. Part 2 will cover Smart Folders, Exposé and Dashboard.

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If you’ve just bought yourself a shiny new Apple Mac computer, you’re probably wondering “How do I use it? Is it anything like Windows?” By and large, you’ll find that the Mac OS X operating system shares a lot of similarities with Windows - all the basic conventions like icons, desktop, shortcuts (Apple calls them “aliases”), windows, menus, Trash, etc. all work pretty much the same.

However, Mac OS X also has its own distinct personality quirks & features. The current version of the operating system - 10.4, also known as “Tiger” - was released in April 2005. Its standout features are listed here:

• Spotlight
• Dock
• Sidebar
• Smart Folders
• Expose
• Dashboard

Welcome to Part 2 of our Beginners’ guide to the Mac OS X “Tiger” operating system! In Part 1, we looked at Spotlight, the system-wide search feature, and the handy Dock and sidebar. Now we look at Smart Folders, and two pretty nifty screen features.

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There are numerous ways in which we can install programs on our devices. We hope to get most of our programs in the shape of a simple Windows installer file which makes installs straight forward and automatic. This is ideal and requires barely any input from the user. Unfortunately, some programs are not so straight forward to install.

As I have been installing a number of programs recently, I have come across many challenges and formats with each requiring their own little tweaks to get them up and running. A common reason for all the different installation methods is that the programmer has created the program but has not had the resources to package it into a nice installer.

This article will cover many methods to install programs onto your Windows Mobile Device. All you need to do is find a program to install, and then follow the corresponding instructions on this page. All are fairly straight forward once you know how to go about it, but can be a real pain if you are new to this.

While this guide is designed using Windows Mobile 5, the same methods are likely to work for other versions of Windows Mobile.

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