I recently discovered a really cool feature in Vista (I think it isn’t available quite so readily in XP), which allows you to transform your computer into a phone really easily. Of course you’ll need a bluetooth capable mobile, and a bluetooth capable computer (or an adapter), but once you hook the two together you can import, export, sync and make calls without any external software. Take a look at my screenshot tour of how to do this, basically I am making my laptop a mirror of my phone contacts and using it as a headset for the phone.

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Tags: bluetooth, headset, mobile, phone
Categories: Mobiles, Tutorials Basic, Uncategorized

Since the introduction of the Gmail Labs settings to all users sharing in emails has been much easier, and I think somewhat overlooked. There are a few things you can do to tweak your inbox to make your life a bit easier, to enable you to share videos, images and more with your friends and co-workers. Just head on down to your Gmail account, click on settings, go to the labs tab and you’ll find a load of options, here are just a few you can use which are great.

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Tags: Email, gmail, sharing
Categories: Email, Google

A new chapter in the Battlefield series is coming out soon, and there are free beta keys being handed out, so go over there this instant and get one for yourself!

The new game brings a huge change, instead of going for realism, they went for a cartoon look, which looks pretty stunning I think. Many will be deterred by this, I suspect especially hardcore gamers, but if I want realism I’ll jump down to a war zone and take a look myself. I think it’s quite unique and it makes the game more accessible to other ages and our friends of the female persuasion (I might be able to get my girlfriend to play a round with me!).

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Tags: battlefield, battlefield heroes, ea, gaming
Categories: Games

No matter what hard drive size you have, if you spend a lot of time on your computer, you will fill it up eventually. A lot of times I have 1Gb stuff which I don’t need and can safely throw out, I just never bump into these because they are outside my normal file browsing habits. If you want to save some space by deleting the larges unwanted files, or just want a cool way to visualize your hard drive, give SpaceSniffer a go.

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Tags: hard-drive, system tools
Categories: Tools, Uncategorized, software

I don’t know if you guys know about the Fon router, I have personally used one for ages. It is a community based project, the thinking is that a lot of people buy fon routers, and with the router you get a passcode. If you’re anywhere in the world and you find a Fon router, you can use that password to use it for free. People without Fon passwords can also use your Fon router for a small fee, so you can also earn from buying one.

Now, the Fon 2.0 router is out, which allows you to download to a pendrive, external hard drive, upload to Youtube, all that fun stuff, but without having your PC or laptop turned on! Just set up a Youtube upload, add some torrent files, switch off your laptop, and the download/upload goes on. There are tons of cool apps built into the firmware, as the screencast about it says, it’s like a mini linux in there.

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Tags: fon, fonera, router
Categories: Hardware, The Web

If you’re a Remember The Milk user (the best online list app) you probably spend some time entering tasks. If you’re like me, and don’t like having tabs for apps open all the time (I can just about live with Gmail), then you also need to go to the website each time. To make things easier though, you can use Launchy, an excellent application launcher, and great script from Lifehacker together for some lightning fast list creation.

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Tags: lists, remember the milk, task management
Categories: Online Services

With the well developed Google Desktop Sidebar and the Vista Sidebar, putting all your gadgets and websites on a sidebar always visible might be quite tempting and can provide loads of information like email, RSS, weather, notes etc., but do you actually use these features? Does the usefulness outweigh the memory usage?

Personally I like sidebars, but for some reason I don’t use them. I have a pretty wide screen and a system which has plenty of memory to eat, but to me the cleaner my screen, the less stuff I have to focus on, the better. I never really liked the Vista sidebar, it’s just too “big”, it looks a bit clunky sometimes, but there are some good widgets you can put in there, so it’s not all bad.

I pretty much like Google’s sidebar, and it also has some good widgets, the best feature is probably the integrated hard drive and email search, which really can be a savior sometimes. It also seems that there are better widgets for the Google Sidebar, but that might be just my perception. In my case I don’t really find the widgets so useful that I would need to see them permanently on a sidebar, what’s your take on all this, do you perhaps use another sidebar?

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Tags: Google, google sidebar, sidebar
Categories: ask the readers