http://desktop.google.com/features.html
http://www.ccleaner.com

Speaking of Gmail, Google Desktop and maybe Picasa; maybe you should take the time to investigate and write an article that points out the privacy issues that may be involved.

E.g. Google scans all your emails for keywords to display related ads. I don’t know how many information from Google Desktop are sent back to google or are processed by Google for whatever reason. I do know, that Picasas new faces feature gets processed by Google servers, which essentially means, Google knows about all the people you name in Picasa, maybe even their Emailadresses.

There are no known privacy data leaks with google yet, but I’m scared by the thought of how much person related information Google piles.

Here in Germany the current topic of public interest is Google Street View. Many cities and states are concerned about how to protect people’s privacy. It is demanded that Google removes any faces and on request images of houses from their raw data. Essentially it doesn’t matter what’s online for everyone to see. If Google turns bad only think about linking recognized faces from Picasa with faces on Streetview pictures, emails and desktop search keywords and you get a pretty detailed and precise profile from someon.

I’m not to suggest any conspiration theorie or scare anyone. I just want to sensitize for the potential risks of personal information in a single hand.

And while we’re on it: What about an article about GPG encrypted Emails. It’s free, pretty simple and effective, yet not useful until a majority of people use it.

But I made one simple change which has eased my mind — I just renamed the folder “File Cabinet.” After all, the files in there are searchable, just as if they were all neatly sorted into subfolders.

So now I just toss files in there (non-work-type things: articles, recipes, misc. PDFs, etc.), and they’re “filed” (at least I can pretend they are), and it doesn’t bother me any more. (I suppose I should really stop saving so many files, but it’s a hard habit to break — and I really do go into that folder to find things.)

ccleaner from http://www.ccleaner.com – Cleans up uneeded and junk files.

Clutterkiller from http://www.datagoround.com – Cleans up and organizes desktop and file system. Also has a great assortment other clutter tools.

Evernote from http://www.evernote.com – with this I save important info and emails, you can delete the original file or email once it’s stored in evernote.

To hp: I’ too am suspicious of Google Desktop &, sadly, even gmail. Instead of GD or Spotlight, I’ve installed a great open-source (=free) program called ‘Launchy’ which works just as well and isn’t linked to a mega-corp. Plus it learns your frequently used files, drives, bookmarks, & web destinations so that, eventually, you only have to type in a single letter for it to guess where you want to go. Very cool & very fast.

ps: I check lifehacker.com every day too (via RSS) and find it incredibly useful for simplifying, streamlining, and personalising my computer (not to mention my non-computer life, if there is such a thing…)

I also scan every important piece of paper (bills, correspondence, ebay…) and throw it into my dms into a simple folder structure (name of correspondent), put the date in front of the name and throw away the original paper if it is not important (for example bills, letters from someone…) and keep only the really important stuff (insurance…)

I can categorize every document again, if I need (“bills paid”, “bills unpaid” for example) and the dms makes a full text search if I can’t remember the filename.

I tried and uninstalled Google Desktop, because I don’t want to have a program on my computer from a company, which earns money with indexing foreign information.
And Google Desktop reduces the speed of every computer and I can’t exclude certain folders on my harddrive or certain emailaccounts.

For pictures I recommend iPhoto from Apple or Picasa, which allows you to name one download from the camera (e.g. “travel to Egypt”) and indexes every picture with the time when it was shot. And I can categorize every picture, if I want it.

I don’t like online-storage, because I don’t have any control what the company, which provides the storage, will do with my data in the future. Many people are way to optimistic. Every company has only one goal: Earn money. Nobody wants to make people happy, thats a lie….

As Google puts it: “Google Desktop makes searching your computer as easy as searching the web with Google. It’s a desktop search application that provides full text search over your email, files, music, photos, chats, Gmail, web pages that you’ve viewed, and more. By making your computer searchable, Desktop puts your information easily within your reach and frees you from having to manually organize your files, emails and bookmarks.” http://desktop.google.com/features.html

1. in the Finder, setup a new folder for file searches (actually, there is one already available via the Sidebar or at “~/Library/Saved Searches” (the tilde “~” in that means your user folder/directory), this is where you will setup your searches (for example all “PDF” files, or all files/folders with the Spotlight Comment “Woodworking”)
2. go through your existing folder structures to find all your files/folders that relate to each topic you want to “search” for in the future and take note of them
3. okay, now go to your Applications Folder and launch Automator; therein under Actions > Library > Files & Folders, select “Label Finder Items” and drag it into the right-hand pane of Automator (then do the same with “Set Spotlight Comments for Finder Items”). Choose a colour and add a descriptive word or short phrase into the Spotlight Comment section (make sure to have the “Append to existing comments” box checked). Now go to the File Menu and save it as a Plug-in (select Finder Plugin from the following window and give it a name). Repeat this for as many “comments” as you want; I have 8 sofar and it’s working well.
4. now, go into your selected folder (in my case, call it Woodworking) and select a file/folder, then right-click your mouse and under the Automator item, select your “Woodworking” comment action. Once the action has run (check your Menubar for it), go and get information on the file you just changed and check the Spotlight Comments, it should be updated. If it was, things are working properly, so you can now select all files and folders in that directory/folder and apply the new Automator “Woodworking” action.
4. now save the same comment; but this time as a Folder Action and attach it to the folder you want to (this will add the comment to the and file/folder dropped or added to the folder the action is attached too).

In essence, this is exactly what meta-tags are, but here, you are building the functions yourself for free (not having to buy some software that mightn’t meet your needs). It’s not for everyone and I might find I hate it in 6 weeks; but it’s fun and a start (and I have about 10 000 files to apply this too (where’s my computer “scuba” gear?!?).

This will add much more control to your Spotlight searches and I suspect the Windows Vista/XP crowd have a similar functionality that could be equally refined/tweaked.