What's wrong with Facebook timeline?

Facebook timeline is basically a new way of displaying the information you have posted on the social networking website. Up until now only the most recent messages, comments, status changes, photos and other wall postings could be viewed. You could see the last dozen or so and then there was a link at the bottom of the page to get another dozen. It was possible to go back a week or even a month, but it wasn't practical to go back any farther and see what had been posted. Timeline lets you browse your whole Facebook history so you can view anything from any time since you joined the service. What's wrong with that?

It's actually a nice idea in theory and the timeline is able to chart and document every major event in your life and Facebook becomes a sort of digital diary. It could become a valuable resource that you could look back on in years to come. Or maybe not.

The problem is that there is too much on Facebook that in years to come you will wish wasn't there. Just think, you meet the love of your life and plan to settle down and get married. Your partner will be able to browse your Facebook timeline and see every previous partner you ever had, what you did, where you went, the fun you had and so on. We all know our husband/wife had previous relationships, but it's best not to think about them. We don't want it fully documented in photos, comments and so on for all to see on Facebook.

That's just one example, and there are many more. It's not a good idea to post comments about your employer on Facebook in case the management gets to see them and doesn't approve. If you leave a job you aren't happy with you might then be tempted to say what an awful place it was to work and how you're glad you got out. A potential employer might browse your timeline and see comments like this and they might not want to take on someone that posts negative comments about the company they work for.

And every drunken party, holiday, bad haircut or fashion faux pas will be documented and stored by Facebook for everyone to see. In a few years time you may have completely changed, especially if you are young and we all change a lot from teens to 20s. You might regret all those postings in five years time.

A story in the Telegraph reports that a survey of 4,000 Facebook members found that only 8% liked the upcoming compulsory change to the timeline view, and 51% were worried by it. People have a short time in which to delete anything they don't want made public.

I would prefer a facility to delete all postings over a certain age, such as one or two years. Facebook is useful, but I would rather it displayed current content rather than things I posted years ago that might be embarrassing today. There isn't a facility to do this and you would have to do it manually. It would be a pain if you post a lot on Facebook, but it's the only way. I think I might start having a monthly clearout session where I delete everything over two years old and keep everything current.

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Abandon MobileMe for iCloud

Apple has never been very successful with its web services, first launching iTools, then abandoning it for .Mac. This was killed off and replaced with MobileMe, which was itself ditched and replaced with iCloud. One day Apple might get it right.

All this has left me with a bit of a problem.

Many years ago I only had a Windows computer. However, I had an iPod and I ran iTunes on Windows and had an iTunes store account with Apple ID with my email address and password to log in. Music, podcasts, videos and other items could be downloaded and purchased on my Windows PC.

Then I got a Mac and naturally I signed up for MobileMe when it was launched. It gave me an additional email address, it was useful for backing up, web access to email, calendar and contacts when not on my Mac, iDisk online storage and so on.

When Apple ditched MobileMe it converted my MobileMe account to iCloud. At the same time it enabled iCloud for everyone with an Apple iTunes store account. So now I have two iCloud accounts. The one that used to be MobileMe and the one for my iTunes store account, but neither of them work perfectly.

My ex-MobileMe iCloud can't be used to buy music, download apps, videos and so on, even if they are free because there isn't an iTunes store account associated with it. My iTunes store iCloud has access to music, apps, videos, the Mac App store and more, but it won't sync contacts and calendars and mail doesn't work because there's no MobileMe email account. Even though I've got one.

The ideal solution would be to combine my Ex-MobileMe account with @me.com email address with my  iTunes store account, but this doesn't seem to be possible. Entering the MobileMe email address into the iTunes store iCloud account just comes up with an error saying that the email address is invalid because it is already in use. Yes! By Me! Why can't I use it!

The only solution that I can see is to abandon my MobileMe account, deleting it from my iPhone, deleting iCloud and adding iCloud again on my iPhone again using my iTunes store ID. Going into iCloud settings on the iPhone then shows the features that are available. Mail is not, but when it is turned on I am prompted to create a free @me.com email address. This I have now done. So I have a new @me.com email address.

In the process of deleting my old MobileMe account and changing iCloud to my iTunes store ID on my Mac I've discovered that I've wiped out all my contacts and calendars. Probably because they aren't in the new @me.com address book. Oh dear. Now I've got to figure out how to restore them.

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iBooks 2 and iBooks Author

"Apple iBooks 2.0 slam dunks the educational market." That's just one of many headlines recently praising Apple's latest launch, but is it true or are these just Apple fanatics who simply love everything that Apple does?

It is hard to say how much impact iBooks Author will have and I think that there are some unanswered questions. One blogger talks about how expensive text books are for university courses and then goes on to say how Apple will be selling textbooks for $14.99. Can this be true?

I just can't see  publishers selling iPad versions of textbooks that normally cost $50-$100 for just $14.99, bearing in mind that Apple takes a 30% cut of that selling price. What's in it for the publishers? Of course, there are reduced costs in distributing an electronic version, but I still can't see it being worthwhile. The only way it would work is if the books were split into several volumes and students had to buy them all to get the complete book - the equivalent of the paper version. If you get the full book then surely the publisher will lose money on each sale?

One of the textbook examples listed on Apple's website is Glencoe Chemistry Matter and Change. It costs $14.99 in the iTunes store for the iPad. I Googled it and it appears to be on sale at Amazon for $90. That means the iPad version is incredibly cheap. There are links on the Amazon page to other sellers offering it for as little as $40 including shipping. However, there are used copies for around $10. Considering the size and weight of the book, I think it may be worth buying the iPad version for $5 more though. Even cheaper was a link in the Google search results to a free PDF version of the book. I don't know whether this is legal or not, and suspect it might not be.

I think it's too early to say how successful textbooks on the iPad will be. I think that publishers are probably trying a few books as an experiment to see what happens. Whether in the future all students will be buying ebooks instead of the traditional paper books for their studies remains to be seen. No matter how cheap textbooks seem, don't forget to add the cost of an iPad though. Not all families can afford to buy an iPad for each of their children. Imagine if you have three teenage kids, each wanting an iPad for their iBooks textbooks. That's a lot of money and it's beyond some families. Do you want your kids carrying around an expensive iPad? Would they get mugged on the way home and their iPad stolen? I can't see students getting mugged for their hardback copy of Glencoe Chemistry Matter and Change.

Free educational books
There is a legal source of free text books that you can read on your computer, tablet or smartphone. Take a look at Bookboon.com, a great website that has free text books written by university professors. A wide range of subjects is covered and PDFs can be downloaded and transferred to the iPad and read in iBooks.

My latest book

I bought a book this week, Tom Clancy's The Hunt For Red October. I was browsing a bookshop (one of the few left in the high street), and came across this. I recognised it because I'd seen the film and liked it and thought I'd read the book too. It was on sale for £2. The ebook from the iTunes Store is £4.99.

I have yet to read a book on my iPad, I just keep coming across paper books at great prices. I also bought The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, again it was on sale and cheaper as a paper book than an iBook in the iTunes store.

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Manage and edit photos with Zoner Photo Studio 14

I am a fan of Windows Live Photo Gallery and I think that it is a great utility for organising photos. However, it is not perfect and there are alternatives that are worthy of consideration. For example, Zoner Photo Studio 14 is an excellent tool and it offers features that aren't in the Microsoft program.

Photo Studio 14 comes in three versions and there is a free one with slightly fewer features, a $34.99 Home Edition and a $69.99 Pro Edition. I downloaded the freebie and found it to be packed with useful features. It was last updated about three months ago, so it's still fairly new.

It performs three tasks and there is an organiser/manager, a viewer and an editor. The organiser enables you to browse your photos and a folder tree is displayed in a pane on the left, and thumbnail images are displayed in a pane in the centre. You can assign keywords to photos, add titles and descriptions and everything you would expect from a photo manager.

An unusual feature is the ability to add audio notes to photos. You can assign an audio file from disk or record audio directly and attach it to a photo. Many photo managers read the GPS data embedded within photos these days, but Photo Studio also lets you set the location a photo was taken using Google Earth or view the location in Google Earth. You have to have Google Earth installed on your PC of course. You can filter your photos by location and it's possible to select a position on a Google map and then display all the photos taken within a certain distance. That's quite clever.

Another clever feature is the ability to create 3D photos. You take two photos with your camera moving the camera sideways a couple of inches - about the distance between your eyes. Photo Studio then analyses the two images and creates a 3D image from them. You view the image with those cardboard glasses with red and blue plastic lenses. It's a bit of fun.

Photo Studio will stitch together photos to create panoramic images too. You select two or more images and then start a wizard. It asks you to put them in order and then it automatically stitches them together. It's much easier than doing it manually in a photo editor.

The software enables you to view photos and it can turn them into slide shows. There are special effects when new photos appear on the screen, you can add music and more. The photo editing capabilities are excellent for a free photo manager and there is a wide range of tools and special effects. The effects include grayscale, old photograph, explosion, oil paint, waves, pencil drawing, pixelise, emboss, texture, fading borders and more. The tools include crop, morphing mesh, align horizon, red-eye reduction, clone stamp and several more. The colours, levels and colour temperature can be adjusted, there is sharpen and blur and so on.

Photos can be uploaded to Facebook, Flickr and Picasa albums, turned into slide shows, wallpaper and calendars, and more. There is too much in Photo Studio 14 to cover here and you should at least download the free version.

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Defragment your disks with UltraDefrag 5.01

Everyone knows that the files on disk drives can become fragmented or literally broken into small parts during everyday computer use. This affects Windows performance because it takes longer to access the data they contain than if the files are stored as a complete block on the disk.

Drive manufacturers have improved the performance of disks over the years and this means that less time is wasted accessing fragmented files than it used to. The large capacity of drives also helps to reduce fragmentation too because there's always lots of free space. The result is that fragmentation isn't as big an issue as it used to be, at least not on new PCs.

Not everyone has a brand new PC with the latest 2Tb disk drive or ultra fast SSD (solid state disk) though and many people struggle to keep an old computer running with limited processing power, memory and disk drive. If you are one of them, then you might be interested in UltraDefrag 5.01 disk defragmenter.

It has some useful features and the .01 in the version number means that it has had a bug fix patch - never use version v1.0 or any x.0 release of software, wait for the bug fix release.

Another useful feature is that it doesn't add any startup programs or add any services. If you are trying to speed up an old PC then adding software that is loaded on startup is counter productive.

UltraDefrag lists the disk drives and you can select one then analyse it. A disk usage map shows used and free parts of the disk, fragmented and not fragmented areas. The options are: defragment, quick optimisation, full optimisation, and optimise MFT. You can choose what to do when defragmentation is done such as shut down the PC, restart, go into standby mode and so on.

There is also an option to run UltraDefrag when the PC starts, before Windows loads, and this enables it to defragment files that are normally locked because Windows is using them.

UltraDefrag 5.01 is not the best disk defragmenter, but it is a good choice for old PCs. It is free, it requires just 1Mb of disk space and doesn't use any memory or processing time when not running. You just run it when you need it.

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PerfectDisk optimises the disk drive for performance

Over time the contents of hard disk drives become fragmented and files are literally broken into small pieces that are scattered all over the place. When they need to be accessed the drive has to perform all sorts of gymnastics in order to find and read all the pieces. This slows down disk activity.

To combat fragmentation there is a disk defragmenter built into Windows. It runs in the background at regular intervals and reduces the fragmented files by combining the parts.

Windows Disk Defragmenter is OK, but it isn't the best that is possible and there are other tools that do a better job. For example, Raxco PerfectDisk 12.5, which was recently updated. One of the ways it improves on Windows Disk Defragmenter is by offfering boot time defragging. This runs before Windows loads and therefore is able to defragment files that are normally in use and locked.

It also offers several different defragmentation methods including SMARTPlacement Classic, Classic Alternate, Performance, Performance Aggressive and Conservative. The reason for all these different methods is that files can be placed in such a way as to make them easier to access or easier to keep defragmented, to reduce wear on the disk drive components and so on. For example, frequently used files can be placed on the part of the disk that is the fastest to access. None of these options are in Windows Disk Defragmenter.

A feature called Stealth Patrol prevents fragmentation before it happens. A nice extra is the ability to specify times are days when auto-optimisation is not allowed. You can also specify that optimisation doesn't occur when certain programs run, such as a game where it might affect the play.


A new feature in PerfectDisk 12.5 is Space Management. It recovers disk space by detecting and removing duplicate files such as text documents, pictures, music, and videos. Of course, there are other utilities that can do this, but it's nice to have it built into the disk defragmenter.

PerfectDisk monitors S.M.A.R.T. that records the health of the disk drive, it has resource and CPU throttling so that the PC doesn't grind to a halt when it is running, and it works with solid state drives too - in an intelligent way because normal defragmentation methods shouldn't be used on SSDs.

I like PerfectDisk. It works well, has lots of features and is reasonably priced. I'm not sure it's worth upgrading from the previous version, but if you don't have a disk defragmenter then it is recommended.

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Help! I have over 1000 registry errors!

"Help, I have over 1,000 registry errors!" said an email I got recently. The person had been running one of those Windows cleanup tools that scan the registry for errors, scan the disk for junk files, and produce long lists of errors. These tools often say that the hundreds or even thousands of errors that are found are slowing down the computer or causing problems and it can be frightening and very worrying for many users to see all these errors on their computer.

The software being used was Auslogics BoostSpeed, and version 5.2 was released just a few weeks ago. I like this program and it contains many useful tools, but using it, and the many other registry and cleanup tools like it, can be alarming to many people. You need to know what these errors are and what they mean.

The registry is basically a database that is used to store configuration settings for Windows and for the software you have installed. Errors can occur in the registry for all sorts of reasons, but many are not serious. In fact, after a clean install of Windows Auslogics BoostSpeed detected 86 problems. How can this be?

Let's take a look at an example of a common registry error. Suppose you install a program, such as a to-do list organiser, and it saves files of the type .tdo like MyTasks.tdo. A registry entry is created that associates .tdo files with the to-do list organiser. This enables you to double click the MyTasks.tdo file in an Explorer window or on the desktop to open it in the application.

Now suppose you decide you don't want the to-do list organiser any more (it may have been a freeware or shareware program you tried). You uninstall it. It's quite common for uninstallers to leave behind registry entries instead of deleting them, so suppose the association between .tdo and the organiser remains.

A registry cleanup tool will examine the association between .tdo and the organiser and realise the organiser no longer exists. It is therefore flagged as a registry error. However, you will never use .tdo files again after uninstalling the organiser and Windows will therefore never have any need to access that registry entry. Although strictly speaking it is an error, it is simply a registry entry that will never be used. This means that it is doing no harm, it is not causing any error messages, and is not slowing the computer down. It's just an unused registry entry and the registry is just a database. It's like a contact in your contact manager that has moved away, but if you never call them anyway, what does it matter?

This is just one type of error, but hopefully it illustrates the point that some types of error are not serious and Windows will run perfectly well with dozens or even hundreds of them. They are just registry entries that are no longer used. If Windows doesn't use them,what does it matter?

This isn't always the case though and some registry errors really are serious. The problem is that many registry cleanup tools do not distinguish between serious and non-serious errors. They just report the number and this can be frightening.

Should the person with 1000+ errors go ahead and let BoostSpeed (or any registry cleanup tool) fix all those problems? There's no way I'd let it or any other a program do this. They are not perfect and on rare occasions they can actually cause problems. This isn't a criticism of BoostSpeed, which I like, but of registry cleaners in general.

You should select a small number of problems and fix them. Make sure the computer is running OK by using it for a couple of days, then you can run the utility again and select a few more errors to fix. It is essential that you create backups each time so that you can undo the changes if a problem arises. Most good registry cleaners do this automatically, but it is worth checking before you use it.

The reason for fixing just a few errors is that it i easier to solve problems. If you fix 1000+ and discover that something went wrong, you don't know which of the 1000+ is the cause. Fixing a small number at a time means you can narrow down a problem to just those few errors that were fixed. You can then investigate further or undo the action without having to undo the lot.

Registry cleaners like BoostSpeed are useful, but just remember that not all registry errors that they find are serious. Fixing some registry errors has little or no effect on the stability or performance of Windows.

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Browsing one step ahead of the crowd

Web browsers are upgraded more than any other program and there seems to be a new version almost every month. It's hard to keep up with the latest developments they happen so fast and last year Firefox went from version 4 to 9, or was it 10? It was a lot of versions to be sure.

Most people use the regular version of Chrome and Firefox, but if you want cutting edge technology and want to be one step ahead of everyone else you should join the beta channel. I've been running Firefox betas for a long time and haven't had any issues with them at all, and I get the latest features before everyone else. You can get Firefox beta from here.

Once you start using the beta then updates automatically download and install just the same as the regular version, so you are always ahead of the crowd. One thing I would suggest doing though is to download and install the Add-on Compatibility Reporter extension. With the beta version of Firefox add-ons and extensions may be disabled simply because they haven't been tested and passed as OK and fit for use. Add-on Compatibility Reporter allows you to enable any auto-disabled add-ons. You can test them yourself and if they work then you can carry on using them. If there is a problem then you can disable the add-ons.

Internet Explorer beta, which is currently version 10, is available here, but it is only for Windows Developer Preview  (Windows 8 in other words).  You can download Windows 8 and install it on a PC or in VirtualBox if you really want to try IE10, but it's a shame it won't run on Windows 7.

The beta version of Chrome is available here. If you want to read all about the latest developments for the Chrome web browser you should regularly read the Google Chrome Blog and The Chromium Blog. Google offers even more and there is the standard release, a beta version, a developer version and a Canary build. The developer version or Dev Channel is updated with the latest features once or twice a week, but Canary offers almost daily builds! Download the Canary version of Chrome and it's no more than a day or so old! You don't get more bleeding edge than that! Get the developer version here and Canary here.

These are all Windows versions of Chrome, but you can get Mac and Linux versions too. All the download links are here.

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