just an asterisk

Personally, I alternate between two states for my desktop background: 

Sometimes I keep only a solid color background – especially when I’m worried about my machine going slowly (this is, as I suspected and my research on the subject confirmed, completely a myth.  Your background doesn’t slow down your machine directly… It may however, make it harder to switch to the desktop, as your wallpaper may take a few extra seconds to load.) 

However, most of the time, I believe a good wallpaper to be the foundation of my productive workspace.  Changing my wallpaper frequently provides variation, inspiration and motivation (please don’t ruin this for me if it’s all in my head :) ).

However, finding safe wallpapers for download can be a bit tricky.  Many sites claim to provide free backgrounds but instead put all sorts of junk (some of which is very malicious) on your machine.  I prefer to avoid these, instead opting for sites like InterfaceLift.

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This post is dedicated to President Obama, who had the decency to visit Turkey on the same day as me and who closed down all the roads, sequestering me back to hotel early to finish my work and with time to write. Thanks!

I’d like to introduce you to LogMeIn Free, a product from the company LogMeIn that will change your life. There are several products out there that allow you to log into your home PC or Mac over the internet. This is called accessing a “remote desktop”. I can think of three solid reasons that you’d want to do this (or at least want to have the option of doing this): Read more »