Happy New Year everyone! I hope you all had a great year and that your new one will be at least as great. If you didn’t have a good year, well here’s your chance to do something about it, sit down, get organized and be productive! For those of you who need to work today, I have put together a roundup of my most popular posts, happy reading.

Using Google Reader and Gmail together
Use Google Calendar to send free SMS messages
A guide to batch renaming files
Note taking made easy with Übernote
Separate work and play with user identities
How to get out of the shower without freezing

As some Google searches will prove, this has been a debate that has been going on for some time. I was actually faced with the same problem just today, and not because I wanted to write a post about it, but because I had a practical problem I needed to solve. The problem has two parts. One is solved by Picasa, the other is solved by Windows Photo Gallery. In the process, I tried to determine which is better, without success. I have developed a method though that works for me, so perhaps it has some workarounds that might for you too, read on!

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While I do like to have everything in a centralized location, for a few very distinctly drawable boundaries, I like to keep them separate. I work for an online company where I manage a lot of projects, and I also blog a lot nowadays. For me it is best and most productive if these two are separate, but this is quite hard to do totally. I have just come up with a solution using Window user identities that aims to organize me.

When I recently reinstalled Vista, I created three accounts. The one labeled “Daniel” is where I keep all my personal stuff, like photos, music and so on. The one labeled blog is where I manage everything related to my online stuff like posts, guest posts, other articles, website promotion and so on. The third is where I have all the stuff related to my dayjob.

This method has considerable advantages, but I’m sorry to say it has quite considerable disadvantages. It looks like it will work for me, but I don’t want to yell that out loud just yet. Read on to take a look at the good and the bad, and decide for yourself!

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If you’ve ever tried to scroll with your mouse but couldn’t, this small app (script) is for you. I bet everyone knows that microsecond of panic. “Oh no, my mouse isn’t working! Or maybe Windows froze? Did time itself stop???” In the end you realize that the window is just out of focus, another window has popped up somewhere which leaves you without scroll ability.

To stop this horror from happening, some clever German people have developed a script that runs in Windows to enable you to scroll the window the mouse pointer is hovering over. The only problem is that it sits in the system tray, clogging up space (see post on hiding system tray icons) and it also seems a waste to have an app for such a specific task. It could also include some other advanced mouse features and be developed into a suite of small apps.

Download PCW Hover Wheel from their website, story via gHacks

As I’ve said before, I am constantly changing how my Windows looks. This may not be the peak of productivity, but it makes me comfortable and let’s me work in an environment I like. Finding icons for my “hobby” has actually been one of the harder tasks. Yes, I know there are hundreds of sites and so on, but many of the icons look old, something from the Win 98 era.

I found a huge archive of icons at Icon Archive, and so far I haven’t seen those 256 color ones I so dread. Personally, I don’t like realistic icons either, I prefer the abstract, things that are icons, not small pictures. You can find both here types here in folders ranging from people icons to system icons.

Have a look at IconArchive to revamp your Windows

Browsing through my RSS feeds like the diligent person I am (yeah right…), I stumbled upon an awesome program called Group Shot. This cool product from Microsoft Labs takes a series of photos taken of the same people and merges them to create the perfect shot.

If you want to take a shot of two people and on one pic only one of them is smiling, and in the other, only the other person, you can use Group shot to take the smiling person from each picture and create a new pic, all smiles. This will be especially useful, now that I took bajillion pictures of my family at Christmas. I’ll be experimenting with it, but according to the post it works like a charm, with little tweaking.

Have a look at Freeware Genius, where I found it with cool picture examples and download Group Shot from Microsoft