I have mentioned before that I can be a bit of a closet gamer on the side, and I have even in the distant pass tried to code some basic games. Nowadays I would never have the time to sit and play games, much less sit and spend the time trying to code something.

But I have to admit that I have always had an secret ambition to create my own “empire“ type of game in Python or some other “simple” coding language. If you don’t know what game I am talking about try searching for “classic empire” on Wikipedia or Google. Empire a game I used to play for hours while working night shifts a very long time ago! Actually programming games is really quite hard and you need to be reasonable fluent in a computer language to really get going. This is something that has proved a barrier for myself and my kids.

Things are changing slightly with initiatives like Metaplace which will eventually allow for the easier building of online worlds and games. I the present the ability to create and share homemade games is being easier for Xbox 360 and Windows users with Microsoft announcing the release of a community oriented service based on a set of tools called XNA, which gives amateur game coders a framework through which it is easier to build games. The new community based service will allow people to proudly share their efforts online.

Of course if you really want to take advantage of this new initiative you will really need to get hold of a Xbox 360 if you haven’t already got one. Perhaps it is time to create an XNA version of empire!

It is seems that we are always hearing about someone important, usually in government, losing their laptop. Often that laptop had potentially been holding sensitive data about the government’s citizens or data important to the defence and security of the nation in question. We have discussed this briefly in a number of posts recently. However if people are losing the odd laptop, just think about the numbers of mobile phones, USB drives and media players like that shiny new iPod, that must also be going missing.

These gadgets are far easier to lose, and I bet it is happening in fairly significant numbers. The problem is that with the general convergence of functionality of all these devices, they all are likely to contain data, some of which may be sensitive.

So what is to be done? Well one reasonably obvious approach is to use encryption, so if you do happen lose your device, the data is still protected. If done right, some level of encryption automation can be built into your process for working with data and your gadgets. Essentially there are two approaches to this, the first through software and the second through the hardware itself. The first approach is by far the more flexible approach though generally will mean extra steps to ensure the data you are storing on your portable devices is actually protected. The second is where storage device itself has encryption built in. An example of something like this would be the Amacom Encryp2disk pictured above. This second approach limits your choice but does avoid creating extra hoops to jump through to encrypt your data.

How do you secure your data on your portable devices? If you don’t perhaps it time start thinking about it!

These days I will quite often work from home. This is not a set thing, one week I will work from home a couple of days, and then may not do so for a number of weeks. I often choose to work from home when I have something very specific that I want or need to achieve. I find working from home allows me to avoid email and constant interruptions.

But the point is I can do so simply and easily because of the availability of cheap effective functional modern computers and laptops, such as the Asus V1S Notebook or any its cousins, “always on” broadband Internet access, and the continuing leap forwards in supporting communication and collaboration hardware and software. This has meant that there is no longer an absolute need to be physically in the office every day of the week. Lots of companies now have formal home work policies and many people are starting to take advantage of them. Also for a lot of “knowledge workers” and entrepreneurs it is the only way they work.

But while computing and other related technologies enable working from home, there are a number of challenges that do need to be managed, and I would briefly characterize those as

• Providing a good office environment
• Brainstorming is a challenge
• You never get away from your work
• Lack of communication and stimulating integration

The first of these, in my experience is the critical thing to resolve, you need to find a suitable room or space which minimizes the normal distractions of the home. The others can normally be resolved either by trips to the office or meeting up with peers in some other way.

Do you have any experience of working from home? Do have any advice on technology or approaches?

All the recent talk about tablet computers and digital pens has reminded me of one particular group of software applications that works really well with these products. That group is the applications known as digital notebooks, which provide ways to collect, store and find information quickly and easily.

My particular favourite, at least on windows is an application called EverNote. I presently use the free version of this software which lets you to capture and search through notes, photos, webpage clips, images of printed and handwritten text, emails, passwords, brainstorms, sketches, …… well you get the idea!

As we mentioned above the one thing these applications really must do well is allow you to easily find things again later and I particularly like the way EverNote does this. It provides a combination of a time line ribbon strip, text search and auto and manual tagging approaches which is really quite powerful.

On the Microsoft bench there is OneNote 2007 which provides similar functionality. I have been looking at this product, as it is a possible candidate to use as a digital notebook when my laptop gets its Office 2007 upgrade. It seems functional enough, and the link with Office may make a change worthwhile.

What do you use for a digital notebook?

If you have a Windows laptop with a good sized hard disk drive like me, you may have opted for splitting your disk drive into a number of different partitions. When you partition your hard drive you are essentially creating a number of independent hard drives on your computer. So instead of a just a C: drive you can have a C: and D: drive and perhaps even more drives on your computer. These partitions act like completely separate disks but the main difference to actual separate hard disks is that partitions share their hardware (and therefore any potential failures so backup is still very important).

Now why would you want to partition your hard drive? Well there are a number of good reasons a few of which I have listed below;

- Separating and isolating specific files, to make it easier to recover or back up an important data set.
- Maintaining good computer performance, smaller file systems are generally more efficient. i.e. Having one huge C: drive will potentially slow a system down especially when full.
- For the geeks it provides the ability to have a number of different operating systems on the same computer. You could install Linux on one partition (so it doesn’t conflict with Windows) and have the choice of booting into Linux at power-up.
- Provides a high level means to organize data, you could have separate partitions dedicated to documents, music, photos, email etc.

Partitions are becoming more important as we all get larger and larger hard drives. I have a separate C: and D: drive. On the C: drive I have all the operating system files, program files etc., while on the D: drive I have all my data. One reason for this is that I can point my data backup up at just the D: drive and not include all the system files as well, making it more efficient.

So maybe you’re sold on partitions and want to create your own? Well the best program that I have found for this is the excellent and aptly named Partition Magic, which will allow you to create, merge and delete partitions to your hearts content. Always do a backup before though to be on the safe side.

I mentioned in my last post that when traveling with my laptop, I like to carry a small travel mouse. Now a mouse can be especially useful for playing games. I don’t know about you, but I don’t often have enough time on my hands to play a gams. But on the odd occasion when I am at a loose end, and the motivation to do something constructive is low, I do like to have a go at something a bit more challenging than Solitaire or Minefield.

So what is the best game for the gaming “Road Warrior”? Of course as I only have a laptop that is beginning to show its age and not being equipped with a blazing fast desktop complete with the latest video card, I will obviously not be playing the very latest first person shooter. I think the answer is probably quite personal as it will depend a little on what you want from your game. In my case I look for something that has engaging game play, requires me to think a bit, thats not too repetitive while at the same time providing a bit of action. Also as I only play now and again the game must either be short or easy to save and come back to later.

So what game is the right horse for my particular laptop? Well in my view it is Civilization IV, which will just about run on my most recent laptop. (On older laptops I still run Civilization III, which doesn’t require nearly as much graphics power). I think the beauty of “Civ” is that it gives you nearly everything on my wish list, and while you wouldn’t call it an action game there is always enough trouble with the neighbours to keep things interesting. If there is a drawback it is that the games do tend to be very long, often around 24 hours game time, which in elapsed or real time for me can be anything up to a year! Just watch it though it can be addictive and can become trapped in “just one more go” mode and before you realize it hours have passed!

So what in your opinion is the best laptop game?

In a previous post we looked at some of the productivity application suites that are currently available. Most people will need to perform the tasks that these productivity apps are designed for, writing letters, sending email, doing homework, that sort of thing. Unless you are some sort of hard core gamer that is essentially the main reason we will have purchased a computer for in the first place. Although these days they are becoming more and more important also as an essential tool for helping to manage all the digital photographs you are now taking with your digital camera and phone, but I digress.

The majority of people will purchase a copy of Microsoft Office to do these tasks and once over the initial learning curve will be more than happy with it. In the last post we looked at Microsoft Office and a number of alternatives. But is there anything else out there? Well yes, and they essentially fall into two categories. The first is free or open source applications that provide similar functionality as the applications we have already looked at. There are a number of these available of which OpenOffice is probably the best known example. Do a web search on “OpenOffice” and see what you can find

The second category is the most interesting and what I wanted to talk more about. In this category we have what is becoming known as the “Web Office” applications. These are web applications that exist on and are used via the Internet to perform similar tasks to that delivered by the big suites such as Office. Generally speaking they don’t have the same breadth and depth of functionality that see in our off line suites, but as the vast majority of people only use a fraction of the functionality of those applications, they will have all that is needed. There are now lots of these web based applications offering office type functionality, all you have to do is go find something that appeals to you and give it a go.

So what are some of the benefits of this web based approach to providing software? Well first of all you can access your data and application from any computer anywhere in the world as long as you have access to the internet, this is a big plus if you travel a lot. Secondly you don’t have to buy an expensive license for software that you only partly use, and thirdly you documents are backed up online so that you don’t have to worry about losing your data. The drawbacks are you can only work while connected to the internet, and you have to “trust” someone else with your data. Generally speaking in my view the pros outweigh the cons.

Of course you need to get a yourself a computer, something like the very popular HP Compaq nx7300 Notebook, then fire up the web browser, find your web application and off you go.

Productivity software applications! What on earth are you talking about you say. Well productivity software refers to that group of software that includes word processors, spreadsheets, calendar and email applications etc. In other words all the computer programs that are supposed to make you and perhaps your business more productive. Often of course these programs, especially to start with when you are a new user, are anything but productivity enhancers as you struggle with new concepts and a seemingly infinite number of options and features. Of course if you use these applications regularly, and many people do at work, you will eventually reach a certain level of proficiency and the application will begin to help rather than hinder your work. This learning experience unfortunately can often be a frustrating experience, and in future posts we will look how some of these productivity applications are evolving as a result of the Internet.

The godfather of productivity applications is of course Microsoft Office, which has become the de facto standard for creating documents. Office will in fact provide all that most individuals and business will ever need to write letters and do the budget, and as such is a good choice. In fact most people will assume you have Microsoft Office and will often send you documents in the formats the application creates, without checking with you first.

But are there any alternatives? Well yes, Corel WordPerfect Office provides a nice alternative. Although it is now an also ran against Office, it is just as capable and does have one nice feature which is the ability to look at the style codes in the word processor which makes it easy to troubleshoot any problems with your document. Anyone who has struggled with Microsoft Word happily changing fonts, text size and styles seemingly at random will appreciate this. A second alternative if you are a Mac home user is the Apple iWork 08, which is Apple’s equivalent to Office, and although the functionality is not on a par with Office would be more than adequate for most Mac users.

Happy productivity! If you are a student always make sure you purchase the academic or student version to save money.

Nearly everyone these days is likely to be experiencing their very own digital data explosion. Almost on a daily basis we are all creating or downloading more and more digital content, in the form of documents, digital images, mp3 files etc. This means having a suitable backup strategy is becoming extremely important to ensure you have a copy of your data in case of any unfortunate incident. Fortunately it also becoming increasingly easy to setup “fire and forget” automatic approaches to the backup challenge.

To setup an automatic backup solution, you will need two things. Firstly an external hard drive with sufficient capacity to store multiple versions of all your data, and then some software to manage the process.

Software

If you are lucky enough to have a Mac running Panther then you will already have the excellent Time Machine included with the operating system. Other wise a nice choice would be EMC Retrospect 7.5 Pro which is available for Windows or older versions of Mac OS. Another alternative for Windows would be Symantec Norton Save & Restore. All these packages provide the ability to do an automatic backup on a regular basis.

Hardware

There are plenty of options available for the external hard drive. Some suggestions would be the Iomega MiniMax External 500GB Hard Drive which also comes in a 750 GB version, or the WD My Book Pro Edition External 500GB Hard Drive. Both of these drives look good, offer a choice of USB of Firewire connectivity, and will work well with all operating systems.

Apple’s much anticipated new version of its operating system, Mac OS X v10.5 Leopard has recently been released. This of course kept the Mac faithful happy, but is it any good?

The arrival of the newest version of an operating system, or any new version of a popular project, is always something that will create a lot of discussion and interest, often generated by significant hype prior to its arrival. When the much anticipated day of release finally comes there is often a feeling of deflation, of anti-climax, of there being something missing, or … well perhaps that is just me. Sometimes the new arrival lives up to its billing and sometimes it falls short on expected functionality. On this occasion though Leopard has stepped up to the mark.

One of the most obvious changes in a new version of an operating system is often the look and feel, and Leopard is no exception. In this case delivered through some minor visual tweaks to the interface, like a much needed clean up of the window appearance and a new look dock, which are then complimented by some interesting visual functionality like Cover Flow the well known navigation tool for your iTunes music collection which makes it as an additional navigational tool within Finder, allowing you to flip through the contents of your disks with ease. The album art from iTunes being replaced by an image of the first page of any document being looked at. There some valuable new applications too, not least the new backup tool called Time Machine that is easy to use and looks great.

You can find Leopard here and there is also a family version available which would be good value for money if you have a family of Macs. If you are like me and a rely on a clapped out laptop for your computing needs I suggest you also have a look at the fabulous MacBook or MacBook Pro. Unfortunately in my case I will be just looking for now.