Productivity Portfolio

Part of the hassle of traveling is assembling and packing all the required items. The airlines are making this sport more expensive as you may need to pay for a second bag. Adam Pash of Lifehacker has a great summary on packing all your essential gear into one bag. Many of the tips come from OneBag.com which covers this topic extensively.

As expected, some more “gotchas” are rolling in for the latest Windows XP service pack. Last week I wrote about my issue with HP and the AMD chip. This week, Corrine at Security Garden mentioned a new item concerning Windows SP 3 and Spyware Doctor 5.5 or earlier. Unless you disable the software first, you will encounter installation problems. This is also a good time to remind people to check if their anti-virus software and spyware scanners are current and running.

If you do need to make a call to customer or technical support, Seth Godin has a very nice article on dealing with Apple Tech Support. Although written with Apple in mind, his tips are very relevant when dealing with any support personnel. Besides, I know we have some readers that run Windows on a Mac.

One area this site doesn’t focus on is digital photography. I often get questions on the topic, but it’s not one of my strengths. Fortunately, there are a lot of good resources. One such article is from Samuel Dean at Web Worker Daily who offers a nice resource piece on free digital photography and image editing resources.

This next tip might be of interest to webmasters. Amit Agarwal of Digital Inspiration has an article about testing if your web site is available from China. Hey, it’s a really big market. The article list several resources you can use. Many of these companies offer additional services that might interest site owners.

That's all for this week's web round up. If you want to know when our next article comes out, you can sign up for email updates or the RSS feed.