Blissfully let society pass you by, while you concentrate on more important things

Social networking is close to mandatory nowadays – if you don’t check your facebook account for a couple of weeks, you’ll find your new pokes and requests met with stony silences by shunned friends … Twitter bills itself as the modern antidote to information overload, but if you fail to update your status at least daily, you’ll find your Mom, your best friend, and your supervisor all calling your phone asking what you’re up to. It’s enough to make you become a hermit mountain recluse, isn’t it?! If only I could afford a mountain retreat…

We’ve recently found a couple of new services that make the pervasion of social media a little easier to deal with – Nutshell Mail is extremely popular and well regarded, and Fuser is older, and works on the same principle but is often blocked by company firewalls as an evil, personal service.

All your social networking updates in a you-know-what

Nutshell Mail can consolidate updates and information from many popular social networking sites, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Myspace and Twitter, and also has the capacity to consolidate mail from more email accounts than any rational person needs.

It will collect all of this information and deliver it to you at times you specify, rather than when everybody else is doing their thing on the web. Slackers.

Some of the email providers and networks from which Nutshell Mail can collect - click the pic for the full list.

You can access the service through your most commonly used inbox, which, incidentally, can be your work email address. Nutshell Mail updates are not blocked by company firewalls, and you don’t need to log into a web service to get them.

However, you will have to write down those witty replies that come to mind when you read people’s status for later – you can’t reply through the service! We’d have to write about that aspect in our blog on how to waste time, for people that have too much J

Fuser was recently relaunched, and includes several new features and benefits. Fuser also aggregates all the biggies – most major email providers, Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, etc. The performance of the old version was reportedly sluggish, but has been improved. The navigation for Fuser is simple (saves you time on learning the new software …!), with a logo and account name in a panel at the top left of screen.

Fuser screenshot

You can choose not to receive mail from some accounts and not others, as well as choosing the types of updates you receive for each service (for example, status updates but not comments on facebook). And for those crazy people who actually think the Gmail display is more intuitive than Outlook (I love the service, but I’d happily throttle the designer!), it retains the display features of Gmail.

What your computer looks like at bootup

Isn’t it funny how technology gets us so far … yet in some ways, we are really just back where we were fifty years ago?

Computers can be a lot like cars. When you first get them, they start up fine – just a light touch of the key, and they roar into life, ready to do your bidding. This startup process will slow down a little each week or month, though, until eventually you are holding your key on for twenty seconds at a time while your computer goes ‘eh-heh-heh-heh … eh-heh-heh-heh’! This is especially embarrassing when it happens in the shopping center carpark .

Anyhoo, what do you do about it? The fact that there are multiple files all calling for the same portions of hard disk space at the same time spells trouble for computer startups – in comes Startup Delayer to the rescue. I have it on good authority … from the blog owner (!), that this is an excellent tool. It is freeware, and only takes up 979kb.

Startup Delayer screenshot

You simply check either your MSconfig file, or your startup folder in Vista or XP to see which programs are set to run on startup. Often you’ll have antivirus software, java, the internet, Skype, and various knicks and knacks that came with your computer. If you’ve been saving time by setting programs you frequently use to run at startup, you can choose to load these before all those non-essentials that like to think they’re king of the OS.

You simply stagger the programs you have starting up when your computer does, so that the system is less taxed, and you can start working on things sooner … rather than finishing off your ninth sonata while your computer is stopping, blinking, stopping, resetting the desktop, and blinking some more.

To check what programs you have running through MSconfig, you’ll need instructions specific to your version of Windows. Netsquirrel has clear, precise instructions for all versions for checking and changing your msconfig file.

If you find you have a hundred programs that you never use running at startup, you can go one better than simply staggering them, and get rid of the sorry things altogether. I know from experience, that if you have an Acer laptop, you’ve probably got a Video Conference manager, Arcade Delux, E-Audio Management, Gamezone and Gridvista installed. You probably use 0% of these, give or take 0%. Vista4Beginners tells you how to get rid of them.