I have just finished the resits for my finals (after failing them so impressively last time). I don’t know whether I pass until Monday, so for now I get to be geeky normal me again.

So, I would like to introduce my latest purchase, the excellent, non crashy and productivity increasing Display Fusion Pro. It‘s a multi monitor taskbar. To the vast majority of you, this will mean very little, but to those of you who use more than one screen with Windows, its a godsend.

Cool features:

• Can be arranged, sized and styled like the normal Windows taskbar.
• Automatically only shows the programs open on the relevant window, and takes them off the main taskbar.
• Allows multiple wallpapers, random changes or just a single wallpaper stretched across 57 screens (probably).
• Only £15.62

My only regret with this program is that it’s necessary. I had hoped that 10 years after XP, Microsoft would have provided better multiple monitor support out of the box. And its not like at least 357 people agree with me.

Anyway, check out the software at http://www.displayfusion.com/ – there’s a 30 day trial, so you can see that I am right, and you cannot realistically live without this software – unless Microsoft actually listen to consumers, but me and 211,416 other people think that seems unlikely.

Update

Jon Tackabury, the owner and lead developer of all the Binary Fortress software has posted a link to this on his twitter feed. Check him out at twitter.com/jtackabury.

Another update

The license agreement has been updated, with free, standard, personal pro and company pro licenses. Cheers to Jon for the free upgrade!

After a month of live beta testing, the time has come to officially launch the new version of MedRevise.co.uk to the world at large. To find out the full story, read on…

Nearly five years ago, I arrived at medical school. And I realised I needed to make some notes. But I also wanted to use my computer, and so keeping them in order was important.

And then I realised I could use a wiki. For those of you who don’t know, a wiki is “A collaborative website which can be directly edited using only a web browser, often by anyone with access to it“. So I bought a domain, www.medrevise.co.uk, which I started to use for my revision.

As time went on, there were more and more notes online, and soon I met my friend Raj, who found that note making on MedRevise was his ideal revision technique too. Over the years the site has grown, and gets quite a lot of visitors: according to our hosting stats, last month (May) we had more than 13,000 visitors, and 112,000 page views. Needless to say, that makes me feel pretty happy!

Anyway, this weekend, MedRevise Version 4.0 is launched, notable changes including:

• Appearance: A new colourful theme. My first foray into Mediawiki theming, which was a pain in the bum, but worth it in the end.
• About: A sexy new “About” page, and a few tweaks to the front page.
• Twitter: A link to our twitter feed.
• Adverts: For the first time, adverts – hopefully to pay some of the costs of the hosting, time maintaining it, etc.
• See it now, in the screenshot on the right!

So yes, some exciting changes. Find out more for yourself at http://www.medrevise.co.uk.

As you may have realised, I failed my medical finals last month, and thus my exciting summer web design to do list has dramatically altered. In fact, more than altered, I would say it’s been devastated. What once was a bright, shining list of potential future achievements has now become:

• Don’t do any fun stuff any more.
• Revise.

Since it is easy to spend a month revising without covering anything important, I have made a revision timetable, which I am sticking to (I hope). My resit exams are on the 21st and 26th June, so prayer is appreciated, as are gentle/unsolicited reminders to knuckle down and get on with it (thanks Lois!).

The timetable is below:

Please click it for a bigger version, or visit http://www.flickr.com/photos/bigonroad/4669302192/sizes/l/.

For the last year or so, I have been a member of Twitter, becoming more and more active as time goes on.

Now, I’m not going to get into the argument of whether Twitter is interesting and useful, or dull and a waste of time. Maybe one day I will, but mostly I’m enjoying using it, and that’s enough for now.

I’ve been planning a little project, over the last few months, and I think I have decided to go for it. Put simply, I want to follow the whole world on Twitter.

Obviously, that statement is a little misleading; my Mum isn’t on twitter. Nor is yours (probably). To actually follow the whole world, I would need to devote my life to creating twitter accounts for people. What I actually mean is that I want to follow one person from every single country.

Why is that hard? Well, whilst it’s not going to be that hard finding someone from America, or Wales, I suspect finding activer tweeters in the Federation of Saint Kitts and Nevis is going to be a wee bit more challenging.

So, the rules:

1. The tweeter must be a citizen of the country, tweeting from the country most of the time.
2. They should ideally tweet mostly in English, or I won’t understand a world of my feed. Obviously beggars can’t be choosers, and if I can’t find an English speaker member of Tuvalu I’m just going to have to cope with it.
3. The list of countries is taken from the Wikipedia list of sovereign states – there are 193, although there are some extra ones at the bottom of that page I will add in once I finish.
4. I‘m aiming to do about 5-10 per week. There might be one post a week, it might be every fortnight, but hopefully it’ll be about that rate.

Feel free to stay with me for the journey. The first countries I’m looking at are Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Andorra, Angola and Antigua and Barbuda, so if you have any suggestions, feel free to make them by leaving a comment below!