Ready to take a break from Facebook, or just want a nice local backup of all the data you've uploaded to the social network over the years?

Turns out that downloading your stuff from Facebook is a lot easier than it used to be. Even for someone like me, who's racked up a massive amount of data over the years.

As Facebook user #806469, I was among the first million people to join the service, and I've used it pretty steadily since the spring of 2004 - accumulating more and more history all the time. Perhaps most importantly, I've uploaded 4,186 photos to date, and I want to make sure I keep every one of them. Downloading all of my contacts would be nice too, though Facebook doesn't make that easy.

Backing up everything else was surprisingly straightforward, however, using Facebook's built-in archival tools. 

5 Steps To Backing Up Facebook

Step 1. Click the little gear icon in the upper right corner and navigate to Account Settings.

Step 2. Figure out what you're after. You can download the primary copy of your user data or you can choose to download an "expanded archive.. The latter is an interesting, more technical glimpse at your Facebook activity over time (shown below). Facebook has a nice guide that breaks down what you'll find where. I downloaded both, because, well, why not?

Step 3.  Input your password to start downloading a copy of your information. Amazingly, my download was only 350MB, and considering how many photos I have stored, I imagine that's on the (very) high end compared to most Facebook users.

Step 4. Pore over your data! You'll get a folder with your user name that you can explore. It has two main subfolders: html and photos. The first one - html - is where all of your archived messages, likes, wall posts and everything else shows up. In the "friends" file you might be able to find some of your Facebook friends' email addresses included to the right. There's also an html version of your photo albums in here. The second main folder is a very nicely packaged directory of all of your photos in .jpeg form. 

Step 5. If you opted to download the expanded archive, you'll have even more weird stuff to check out. Try the deleted friends folder for starters. The pokes folder is predictably also a good time stroll down memory lane. 

All told, this process is way easier than I thought it would be. And I'm still kind of amazed that the export tool hands over all of your photos in .jpeg form.

Contact Information Is The Sticking Point

Unfortunately, Facebook keeps an iron grip on the email addresses and phone numbers of your Facebook friends. Considering those would be a pretty handy way to cut out the big blue social network altogether, it makes sense from Zuckerberg's perspective, but it's still annoying. There used to be a workaround involving Yahoo Mail that's since been patched, so if you know of any good, safe and legal ways to extract your contacts from Facebook, do tell in the comments.

That's it.

Backing up your Facebook data is a good idea whether you have plans to delete your Facebook account, want to take a break or just want a little peace of mind by having all your Facebook data at hand. Best of all, a process that used to involve way more identity confirmation and often third-party browser plugins and the like is amazingly easy these days. 

Image of Facebook in browser via Shutterstock.

That 2048x1536 retina display on the new iPad is really big in pixel terms. It’s hard to find wallpapers that do it justice, since they have to be 2048x2048 squares to rotate properly. A site called 2048pixels popped up to solve this problem, and it just launched a new version that lets you customize wallpapers right from the site, even on the iPad itself. Here’s how to use it.

2048pixels is built to feel like a native iPad app (but it works great on the desktop Web, too). You can view it in both portrait and landscape orientation, and you can even flip between dark and light mode using the square button in the top right corner. It has a nice gallery of images already, and it accepts submissions, so new images will be added all the time.

The new “Homescreen FX” mode allows you to adjust the image you choose with overlaid textures, blur and pixellation effects. Here’s how to use 2048px to customize your perfect iPad wallpaper.

1. Pick your wallpaper

Flip through the pages of the gallery to find a wallpaper you like. You can also just refresh the page to see a new assortment.

2. Tap ‘fx’ in the top left corner of the wallpaper page

3. Tweak the image to your heart’s content

The editing controls have two modes, ‘Pixelate’ and ‘Blurry,’ which you can adjust independently with sliders. Each mode also has three textures that can be layered on top: ‘Lines,’ ‘Mesh’ and ‘Grains.’

4. Tap ‘Done’

If you like your creation, tap ‘Done’ to prepare it for download. If you don’t, you can just hit ‘Cancel’ and start over.

5. Download or share your wallpaper

You can save your finished wallpaper by tapping the image or the ‘Download’ button, then tap and hold on the image and select ‘Save Image.’ You can also share your wallpaper by email, Twitter, Facebook or Pinterest.

Google’s Data Liberation Front keeps adding new ways for Google users to get their personal data out of Google’s services and back into their own hands. The latest addition to Google Takeout is YouTube videos. You can now download all of the original, full-quality videos you’ve uploaded to YouTube and take them elsewhere whenever you want. Here’s how.

1. While logged in to your Google account, go to google.com/takeout.

2. Click ‘Choose services’ in the navigation bar

3. Click ‘YouTube’

Note: you can also go straight to the YouTube export page by going to https://www.google.com/takeout/#custom:youtube

After it loads, you’ll see the estimated number and size of the files.

4. Click ‘CREATE ARCHIVE’

This could take a while, so you can select ‘Email me when ready’ to get a notification.

5. When it’s all done, you’ll get a link to download the videos just the way you uploaded them.

Previously, you could download videos one at a time from your Video Manager on your YouTube account page. But Google Takeout lets you download the whole batch at once, even if it takes a (potentially long) while.

Data portability is always good, and Google has always led the way.

Anywhere in the world, the fastest way to make anything popular is to ban it. Certainly Iran, which actually is an Internet infrastructure provider and which has by far the largest Internet using population in the Middle East, undoubtably knows that. So when Iran is handed a gold mine like The Innocence of Muslims, what should it do? 

The pitiful YouTube trailer for a possibly fake film entitled The Innocence of Muslims, whose very actors are embarrassed to have been hoodwinked into participating, may have become the most popular — or at least, the most popularly viewed — bad movie not to have been lampooned by Rifftrax.  Iran is one of the video's most vocal critics, which was probably as intended.

It isn’t immediately obvious to most Americans, for whom Iran is typically portrayed as a backward country, but actually Iran is an Internet power player. Not headquarters to an Internet giant, but an actual Internet giant in itself. A 2010 estimate by China-based communications analyst Globserver states that, of Iran’s total population of nearly 77 million people, 33.2 million - about 43.2% of the population - were registered Internet users. Only 9.8 million Saudis are Internet users. More than half (52.5%) of all the Middle East’s Internet users, and 15.6% of the entire Middle East population, were customers of Iranian services in 2010.

Black Rock East

The government of Iran owns its Internet. In 2007, the country spun off its state-owned telephone service, creating a competitive market for a new breed of mobile phone carrier there, including MTN, MCI (no relation) and Zoha Kish. But for these companies to offer mobile data services with their mobile phones (which they could choose not to do... but what would be the point?) they must pay the government (through its wholly owned Internet subsidiary, TIC) a monthly percentage. In 2010, the minimum monthly payment was sealed at around $1 million.

Or, according to 2010 exchange rates, $10.2 billion rials per month. Today, however, for Iran to reap the same value from its mobile data plan resellers, it would have to charge $12.2 billion. You see, one of the unpleasant side effects of developing nuclear technology while threatening to wipe a neighboring country off the map is that the rest of the world sells off your currency. This has resulted in a dramatic devaluation of the Iranian rial. Indeed, the rial hit a historic low today. With U.S. and European sanctions against Iran’s oil exports and banking transactions having the desired effect, Iran has to make a living somehow.

And here, you have a video that’s gone viral. Hey, if ReadWriteWeb can make a killing from viral videos, why can’t Iran? And if you want to make a bad video really viral, why not follow in the footsteps of Russia, the Phillipines, Lebanon and Germany and ban access to the video - or at least publicly debate the merits of doing so?

Because you know what happens when you threaten to ban a video: Pro-free speech groups launch a public screening of the thing. Widescreen, HD, streaming Wireless-N video, probably with popcorn.

Do Not Watch This Video

It’s not like Iran’s 33.2 million netizens are all incapable of finding the allegedly blasphemous video by other means, as this Bing search using Iran as the country code clearly demonstrates.  (An independent Iranian businessperson said as much to France24 just today.) Videos housed on YouTube may still be visible in Iran through Bing, even without a visit the YouTube URL. And even if they’re not, clearly YouTube is no longer the only source.

With oil no longer viable as the country’s only lifeblood, Iran has to take advantage of what opportunities fall into its lap. Think about it, this pitiful little video could be a bandwidth bonanza! Over the weekend, Iran took the bait, banning access to both YouTube and parent Google from clients using its state-owned Internet infrastructure.

And to start the viral marketing push with a bang, what could be better than for Pres. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to embark on a world tour? In New York this week, before the United Nations, Ahmadinejad suggested to a conference of scholars and students that the nations of the world should band together in harmony to ban all content that offends religions.

Now, even more people want to see the practically unwatchable video that has caused all the hubbub.

Smaller Bang, Bigger Boom

Maybe it’s too late for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to become the next Steve Jobs, but he seems to already be adopting Apple’s basic lesson of owning the infrastructure, limiting access to the product and making the product more desirable than peace itself. Even as the country rails against the video, the rials (or more preferably, dollars) roll in from active participants in Iran's state-owned social media platform on its state-owned infrastructure.

Hey, maybe Ahmadinejad and filmmaker “Sam Bacile” could work out a little deal. "You provide the blasphemy and the white guys wearing bedsheets," the president could say, "and I’ll provide the audience." Mel Brooks couldn’t have worked out a better plot.

In this fifth and final installment of our How To Filter The Social Web series, I'm looking at a mobile service called Prismatic. It's a slick looking website and iPhone app that filters social news for you. Filtering news on mobile has traditionally been a tough nut to crack - and there's no shortage of startups that have attempted it. Feedly, My6sense, Pulse and Reeder have been some of our favorites in recent times. Unlike three of those apps, Prismatic is not available as an Android app (although that is apparently coming). Despite this drawback, Prismatic offers fresh ideas for filtering news on mobile.

The premise behind Prismatic is that you connect to one or more of your social networks, then it will create a personal newsfeed based on your interests. It's not quite as simple as that though. You first need to add your social networks and then select news sources and topics from suggestions that Prismatic makes.

You can do the initial setup in the iPhone app, but there are more options on the website - for example adding a connection to your Google Reader account. I found this rather confusing, since it wasn't clear on the mobile version that there was actually a Google Reader connection. Also the navigation took some getting used to, on both platforms. For example, you access the home screen on mobile by swiping from the right of the screen to the left. But despite these minor problems, eventually I managed to select a bunch of news sources (such as ReadWriteWeb and Wired) and topics (such as "Innovation" and "Health Care").

Let's now look at the reading and browsing experience on the iPhone app. The app presents you with a home screen that looks like this:

One of the challenges of news browsing on mobile is how to present multiple topics or folders on such a small screen. Other mobile news apps, like Feedly and My6sense, take the approach of utilizing Google Reader's folders. To its credit, Prismatic is attempting to go beyond the folder metaphor. By listing your most recent topics first - and making a 'More' button available if you want to browse more topics - it does a good job of showing you your main interests.

When you click on a topic, this is the kind of screen you see:

To read a story, click on it. Another nice touch is that within each story, there are a few relevant tweets - which you can re-tweet, favorite or reply to.

Topic discovery is also nicely done. You can find new topics via tags on stories, or by browsing "Global News" and "Suggestions" (the latter comes from your social network connections).

The Verdict On Prismatic

In June of this year, I chose Feedly as ReadWriteWeb's recommended mobile RSS Reader. But in all honesty, I haven't used Feedly much since then. That's because I generally don't do targeted browsing on my iPhone. However I sometimes do serendipitous browsing, usually on Flipboard's iPhone app when I have a few minutes to spare. In other words, I tend to use my phone for very casual browsing and not so much for digging into topics of interest.

So where do I do most of my topic browsing? On the computer, using Google Reader and some of the services I've mentioned previously in this series (Webicina, Reddit, Engagio and Bottlenose). I then either read the story on my computer, or save it to Instapaper for reading later. So while I do a fair amount of reading on my phone - usually in Instapaper - I prefer the power of my computer for targeted browsing.

I like Prismatic, it has a nifty design for mobile and the navigation is better for topics than the likes of Feedly and my6sense. But I'm skeptical that I'll find much use for it. As with the other apps in this series, check back with me in a month's time to see if I'm still using it. In the meantime, let me know your thoughts on Prismatic and how it compares to other mobile RSS readers.

Series Summary: 5 Social Media Filters To Check Out

1. Webicina (niche content example; in this case health)
2. Reddit (community topic filter)
3. Engagio (Gmail integration)
4. Bottlenose (automated topic filter)
5. Prismatic (mobile filter)

I'm on the hunt for five great tools to filter the social Web. The fourth product I'm looking at is Bottlenose, a social media dashboard that allows you to filter content by topic. For example: Andy Murray winning his first Grand Slam tennis title today.

Bottlenose was founded by well-regarded Semantic Web geek Nova Spivack. At first glance, it seems like a jumble of information: messages, links, topics, comments, streams and who knows what else. But once I got over that hurdle, Bottlenose delivered me relevant news and social media discussion about Andy Murray - and other topics of interest.

Like Engagio, which I reviewed yesterday, Bottlenose is less than a year old. It was launched last December and version 2 was released in February.

Essentially Bottlenose is a social media dashboard, allowing you to manage your Twitter, Facebook and a few other social streams. You can read and share from your Twitter and Facebook accounts using Bottlenose, much as you would do in a similar dashboard product like TweetDeck and Hootsuite. What makes Bottlenose different is that it attempts to automatically filter the information you see from your social accounts. 

Like Spivack's previous product, the knowledge management service Twine, Bottlenose uses semantic web technologies and machine learning to sort and filter information. Unfortunately Twine was plagued by usability issues, so I was curious to see whether Bottlenose would suffer the same problems.

The Murray Test

One of the trending topics in my social network when I tested Bottlenose was "Murray." I was rather hoping this would be about the talkative Flight of The Conchords manager, Murray Hewitt, but it turned out to be about British tennis player Andy Murray. He just won the US Open title, so he is understandably trending on Twitter and Facebook right now.

The default view, when you click the "Murray" tag, is a 3-column page of Andy Murray related content entitled "Now." It's a mix of news and social media information. The left-hand side of the page has a list of news articles. If you click one, the beginning of the article slides out from the right-hand side of the webpage. The middle column features trending Twitter topics related to Andy Murray. Below that is a list of the most relevant Twitter users, including the official Twitter account of the man himself: @andy_murray. The column to the right of the page features comments, mainly from Twitter in this case - but it could include Facebook and any other social network you connect.

So if you're looking for the latest news and discussion about Murray's US Open victory, then Bottlenose certainly obliges.

And that's just the "Now" view. There are four other views: Stream, Paper, Pictures, Sonar. The Stream is a straight chronological list of the latest activity for the "Murray" tag; Paper is a Flipboard-like view; Pictures is...well, you can guess; Sonar is a graphical layout of keywords related to "Murray."

As well as trending topics from your own Twitter and Facebook social networks, you can see what the global trends are (click "Global Trends" in the main navigation). Say you want to see the latest news and social chatter about Mitt Romney, the Republican Presidential candidate. Clicking the "Romney" tag brings up some interesting information, both news and discussions on social media.

I also searched for several topics of interest to me personally and Bottlenose presented a lot of useful information. Note though that (at least for me) the "Save to Dashboard" link did not work.

Bottlenose has a lot of other features, which Our Jon Mitchell described in detail last December. Check out his review if you have power user tendencies.

The Verdict

So is Bottlenose easy to use? While it took a couple of minutes of clicking around for me to make sense of the homepage, after that I found it much easier to understand than Twine. My one suggestion for Bottlenose would be to find a way to make the product less forbidding on first glance. Perhaps highlight a trending topic on the homepage, which would give new users an easier entry point.

As to whether Bottlenose is useful, in my tests Bottlenose delivered a relevant mix of news and social media content about topics of interest to me. But, as with Engagio, check back with me in a month or so to see if I'm still using it. In the meantime, I recommend you give Bottlenose a try yourself and see if it meets your needs as a social media filter.

Series Summary: 5 Social Media Filters To Check Out

1. Webicina (niche content example; in this case health)
2. Reddit (community topic filter)
3. Engagio (Gmail integration)
4. Bottlenose (automated topic filter)
5. Prismatic (mobile filter)

I'm on the hunt for five great tools to filter the social Web! Last week I looked at medical news curator Webicina and topic-based news aggregator Reddit. Both of those products enabled me to filter for content. But just as we're overwhelmed with the amount of content on the social Web, we're also overwhelmed with the number of websites and apps we have to visit every day. That's where Engagio comes in. It aggregates all of your social conversations in one place. And a relatively new Engagio feature brings it to the most important place of all: your email inbox.

Engagio is a way to track many of the social discussions you have online. Every time you post an update or make a comment on a connected social service - such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, ReadWriteWeb and other blogs that use Disqus (a social blog commenting service) - the resulting conversation is stored in Engagio. Many of the most popular social media services can be hooked into Engagio, although some (like Reddit) can't.

For all its utility, I must admit that Engagio became one of many, many apps that I signed up for and used enthusiastically for a day or two... but then rarely, if ever, went back again. Ironically, it became just another Web destination to visit every day - and I had enough of those already. However, today I re-visited my Engagio account in order to research this article and happily discovered the email integration. Since I use Gmail every single day, this is a great way to entice me back!

Specifically, Engagio now offers a Chrome extension for Gmail. Actually this was released in May (our coverage), but for whatever reason I didn't test it out back then. The extension means you no longer have to go to the engagio.com website, you can use Engagio from within Gmail. Obviously you need to use both Gmail and the Google Chrome browser in order to take advantage of this feature.

Not only can you track your social conversations from within Gmail, you can also compose updates to several of your social networks - including Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Engagio is less than a year old, having first launched in a private beta last December. It launched publicly in February this year. Because Engagio is still young, it has some user interface issues to iron out - for example I had trouble filtering out Twitter re-tweets. That said, there are some nifty filtering options such as viewing direct replies only.

Give Engagio a whirl, if you're looking for an easier way to manage your online social activity. I especially recommend the Chrome extension for Gmail. Although... check back with me in a month or two to see if I'm still using it!

Series Summary: 5 Social Media Filters To Check Out

1. Webicina (niche content example; in this case health)
2. Reddit (community topic filter)
3. Engagio (Gmail integration)
4. Bottlenose (automated topic filter)
5. Prismatic (mobile filter)

This week I'm exploring tools that help filter your Social Web experience. Yesterday I checked out Webicina, a medical news curation service. Today I'm re-visiting a service that has a much broader appeal, at least in terms of topics covered: reddit. The Condé Nast owned social news aggregator has become so popular that even the President of the United States made a recent campaign stop there. Part of the reason for reddit's surge in popularity is its excellent topic filtering features.

Regardless of whether you want to participate in reddit's community, which tends to be dominated by the younger demographic, reddit's topic filtering is a great way to keep track of topics near and dear to you. Reddit's own description of itself sums it up: "reddit is a source for what's new and popular online."

Using Reddit As A News Filter

All you need to register a Reddit account is a username (that isn't already taken) and a password. There's no Facebook, Twitter or Google+ connection - you don't even need an email address to sign up.

Content-wise, reddit is based around topics. The site's FAQ explains how this works:

"Reddit is made up of hundreds of sub-communities, each focused on a specific topic. There's a reddit for science, a reddit for music, and probably a reddit for your nearest city. By default, new users are subscribed to a selection of the most popular ones, but you'll get a lot more enjoyment out of the site if you take the time to subscribe to ones that appeal to you. After doing so, the front page will change to show a customized listing tailored to your interests."
(Emphasis ours)

Specifically, when you register you're automatically subscribed to 20 of the most popular topics. But as the FAQ points out, you'll want to personalize this - which means unsubscribing to the default topics that don't interest you and searching for topics that do.

To find new topics to subscribe to, either check the sidebar of a reddit (see screenshot below, of my Technology reddit page), or use the internal search. There are also several external directories. One called metareddit is currently tracking 167,388 reddits!

The reddit frontpage will show the hottest stories from the topics you're subscribed to. You can order the news in other ways, such as chronologically or by "controversial." To manage your topics, go to the my reddits page.

Niche Topics Galore: subreddits

Reddit covers all the bases for general interest topics - such as technology, politics, baseball and so on. But where reddit really shines is in its niche topics, or "subreddits" as they are termed. For example, suggested subreddits on the Technology page include: Privacy, Renewable Energy, Kickstarter, and (one of my personal favorites) Imaginary Technology.

Although this post is focused on using reddit as a topical news filtering tool, you may get a lot of use out of reddit as a discussions forum. In the Neuro reddit, for example, the top two items currently are questions posed by people wanting information about an aspect of neuroscience. One asks, "What would you ask a world-class neuroscience researcher if you had the opportunity to talk with them for 10 minutes?" The replies vary in quality, as in any social media site, but there are often great discussions in reddit - across hundreds of topics.

If you have any tips for using reddit effectively as a news filter, please leave a comment - or create a reddit thread!

Series Summary: 5 Social Media Filters To Check Out

1. Webicina (niche content example; in this case health)
2. Reddit (community topic filter)
3. Engagio (Gmail integration)
4. Bottlenose (automated topic filter)
5. Prismatic (mobile filter)

This week I'm going to be exploring filtering tools on the Web, with a particular focus on general interest topics like health, politics and sports. The Web is often an overwhelmingly noisy environment. Even the best social media services - like Facebook, Twitter and Google+ - can quickly drown you in a deluge of real-time updates. Last week, I explained that the new generation of publishing tools is beginning to address this problem, with more topical organization and a focus on quality. But because those tools are early stage and experimental, they don't help the current consumer of Web content (which is all of us). So this week, I'm hoping to uncover some useful tools for you all to use now. I'm starting with a service that curates medical news and information from social media: Webicina.

Webicina was founded in 2008 by Bertalan Meskó, a doctor from Budapest, Hungary. He also runs the well regarded medical blog, ScienceRoll (one of my personal favorite blogs). Webicina is aimed at both medical professionals and "e-patients" (the "e" in this case stands for "empowered"). Included in Webicina is an RSS tool called PeRSSonalized Medicine, which creates personalized feeds of your favorite media sources.

Webicina covers over 100 medical topics - the latest addition being COPD, or Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. It's able to cover so many topics because it crowdsources the curation of each category.

Tracking Medical Topics With Webicina

Here's how to get started using Webicina, using my own medical interests as an example. I have diabetes type 1, so I clicked the e-patient option and sure enough diabetes is covered in Webicina.

For each topic, Webicina has curated resources in a variety of content types: news, blog, podcast, Twitter, and so on. For example, the Twitter page listed thirty leading diabetes-related Twitter accounts.

You could simply browse the Webicina topic pages, but to get the most use out of Webicina I recommend you set up at least one personalized RSS feed. Click on the "Follow this category on PeRSSonalized Medicine" button (see bottom-left in the screenshot below) and it will open up the filtering options.

Firstly, sign up for a free Webicina account. This option only seems to display when you land on the PeRSSonalized Medicine front page (one of a number of design issues I noticed in Webicina). However, it's a simple sign-up process from there, as you can register using your Facebook, Twitter or Google+ credentials.

Now it's time to create your personalized feeds. To do this, go to a category of interest and click each of the four tabs (for example, "Medical Blogs"). Click "personalize it" in each tab to select your sources. You can choose to either create four separate feeds - one for each tab, using the "follow this page" RSS button - or create a feed for the entire category by clicking "follow this category."

Since there are no descriptions of the sources, it's difficult to know which to select. Also, in a rather confusing design choice, you need to check the sources you don't want.

In the blogging tab, I decided to choose just five diabetes blogs - in order to keep the noise down. I then clicked "save settings," which displayed the five blogs I chose.

You can either use that filtered webpage as your regular checkpoint, by bookmarking it in your browser, or subscribe to an RSS feed of the page. RSS is preferable if you plan to monitor the topic regularly, since updates are sent to your RSS Reader. Unfortunately, this is where the design got awkward again. I initially clicked on the "follow this page" button and it saved the RSS file to my desktop. Not very practical. I eventually figured out that I need to right-click and save the RSS link, then copy it into my RSS Reader (I use Google Reader).

As you have seen, the trouble with Webicina is that it isn't particularly user friendly. Even a simple thing such as explaining the difference between "follow this page" and "follow this category". It may sound obvious - the former is a feed of just that page (in this case, of diabetes blogs), the latter is a feed for the whole category. But it could be explained much better by Webicina.

In conclusion, the personalization of Webicina is a little clunky and the design is, well, very web 2.0 (we're now onto 3.0 at least!). But the curation of Webicina, judging by the diabetes topic I saw, is high quality. Overall, Webicina is a useful resource for anyone who wants to track a particular medical topic.

Series Summary: 5 Social Media Filters To Check Out

1. Webicina (niche content example; in this case health)
2. Reddit (community topic filter)
3. Engagio (Gmail integration)
4. Bottlenose (automated topic filter)
5. Prismatic (mobile filter)

Instinctive Code, the workshop of longtime Mac developer and software philosopher Matt Gemmell, released an app Tuesday called Sticky Notifications.

This little gem does away with Stickies, Apple’s built-in virtual sticky note app that hasn’t been improved since the dawn of OS X, replacing it with functions that make it easy to keep track of mental notes without ever taking your hands off the keyboard. With a keystroke, it pops up a window for you to type a note to yourself. When you hit enter, the note appears as a message in Notification Center (on 10.8 Mountain Lion) or Growl (on 10.7 Lion, if you have it installed).

But instead of fading away like notifications usually do, it stays put until dismissed. So if you need to pause working on something to attend to something else, you can just throw it into a sticky notification and come back to it when you’re ready.

Here’s how to set it up and use it:

1. Choose a key command

You can summon the app by clicking on the menu bar icon, but the quickest way to launch a new note is with a key command of your choosing. I went with control-option-command-N.

After I set mine up, I asked Gemmell what he uses, and he said the same thing, so I guess I chose correctly. Also, he calls this keystroke “triple-splat-N,” which is the coolest. Matt Panzarino at The Next Web uses command-shift–1. You should use whatever is easy to type and remember.

2. Type a reminder

Reminders can have a title, subtitle and body message. The form pre-fills the title as “Reminder,” and it puts the cursor in the message field, so you can just start typing if you don’t need anything fancy.

3. Hit enter

The enter key (or clicking ‘Notify’) creates your sticky notification. It’ll just float there until you dismiss it. If you paste a URL into the message, it will be clickable, so you can open a Web page in your browser straight from the notification.

4. Manage and dismiss

You can stack up multiple notificiations, and if you open Notification Center, you’ll see the time stamp for when you created each one. Just click the button to close them and get back to work.

This clever little app has replaced some of my silliest life-hacks with something fast and effortless. I seriously used to create folders on my desktop and put reminders in the title. That was bananas. Now I’ve got a $3 solution that I’ll use all day.

Evernote is many things to many people because it’s so powerful. But for the same reason, Evernote’s purpose is vague enough that it can be hard to get started with it. First, you have to figure out what it can do for you. Here’s a guide to how to think about Evernote, so you can get better at using it.

What Is Evernote?

Evernote is an application that lets you create notes that sync between all your devices. On your desktop, all your notes are files on your computer that can be easily found using the operating system's file management features. On touchscreen devices, Evernote’s standalone app lets you view and edit all your notes as well as capture new ones using text, camera or microphone. It’s also in the browser, letting you clip things from the Web straight into your notebooks.

Evernote has amazing search powers. Not only can it find notes that contain text, it uses optical character recognition on images, so you can just take pictures of text (receipts, signs, papers, anything), and Evernote will be able to find it for you.

The free version is already pretty powerful, but for $45.00 per year, you can upload up to 1GB per month, attach up to 50MB of just about anything to an individual note, you can go back in time and view past versions of notes, search inside PDFs and more. My favorite premium feature is offline notebooks. You can access and edit notes without an Internet connection, and any changes you make will sync when you’re back online.

A “note” in Evernote can be text only, or it can include photos, audio or other attachments. Notes come with some metadata like date and time, and mobile notes also grab your precise location. You can also add metadata like the URL from which you grabbed some bit of Web content or the author of the stuff you’re saving.

Evernote allows for two levels of organization of individual notes. Notes can be grouped together inside notebooks, and notebooks can be combined into a stack.

There are also a couple of tricks. You can tag notes, which lets you create associations between notes within a notebook or in different notebooks. You can also save searches, which allows you to quickly find all notes containing multiple specific tags, or just the ones that contain a specific word or phrase.

And if the core capabilities of Evernote aren’t enough for you, there are all kinds of applications built on top of it to extend the service.

So Evernote is clearly powerful. But what can you do with it?

Evernote Is Your Digital Desk Drawer

I learned to organize a computer's storage drive based on the metaphor of a “desktop.” The digital desktop might be a foreign concept to kids who are born today, but it still applies. If the stuff on my computer is on my desktop, then Evernote is my desk drawers. It’s the place I organize and stash stuff I need so it’s out of the way but accessible any time.

That’s still too vague. Here’s what I really do with it.

First, I created an “@Inbox” notebook. I came up with this on my own, but I vastly improved the idea with a trick I learned from Brett Kelly’s helpful e-book, Evernote Essentials: I added the @ glyph to the name. The @ symbol makes sure that the Inbox stays at the top of the notebooks in alphabetical order.

I set @Inbox as my default notebook, so when I send anything to Evernote and don’t have the time to file it, it ends up in @Inbox. This is especially crucial for quick, mobile tasks. That way, I can make a note quickly and put my phone away, and when I’m back on the desktop, I can do the organizing later.

I have created seven stacks for categories of digital stuff broad enough to cover just about everything. If I need a miscellaneous notebook for something that doesn’t fit, it goes in a stack called "Archive." In my desk metaphor, stacks are the drawers. Here are a couple examples to give you a sense of what constitutes a whole stack and what makes for a specific notebook.

My Notebook Stacks

“Archive” is a catch-all place for notes that need no other category, but I also use it for pure storage, as opposed to notes I’m changing and editing constantly.

I decided to use Evernote to archive all my Instagram photos as well as those I like. I think it’s important to have this backup, because Instagram doesn’t let you scroll all the way back in your likes history, and moreover, who knows how long Instagram will be around. Evernote shows thumbnails of images attached to notes, so this is a nice way to browse.

I recently set up IFTTT triggers to watch these two Instagram feeds and save my photos to Evernote automatically. There’s a bug on IFTTT’s side that causes these notes not to display thumbnails in Evernote, which is annoying, but IFTTT says it’s working on fixing it.

“Clips” is a stack I use for articles I've written that I want to save for posterity. The Evernote Web Clipper is pretty great about preserving the exact formatting of a Web page in an Evernote note, so I grab the posts I want to save with that. Inside the “Clips” stack, I have a notebook from every site I publish to, plus one for miscellaneous clips.

“Culture” is where I keep lists of books, images, movies and music I want to keep track of. I’m sure I’ll add more notebooks to this stack as I think of more types of media. For the most part, the notes in here are names of individual books, films, albums or whatever that I need to visit or revisit.

“Home” is a big one. I keep track of my work and finance documents here, as well as errands, recipes and manuals, people (and Evernote Hello contacts), and other various domestic things. Since some sensitive information is kept here, I take advantage of Evernote’s cool ability to encrypt highlighted text, so it asks for a password before anyone can view it. I passcode-lock sensitive PDFs before I put them in Evernote.

Finally, as I mentioned in my Uber-Geek’s Guide to Reading Online, I use Evernote to archive the Web articles I want to keep around forever. The “Library” stack contains notebooks named for the various genres of things I read. I clip articles to it in a variety of ways described in the guide. My hope is that this will let me read the digital writings I love long after their Web links break.

Tags & Saved Searches

I use tags sparingly. I don’t want to get too lost in them. I have a couple of projects that need greater organization than the two layers Evernote provides. Basically, within one notebook, I need to mark some notes as to-do and some notes as done, so I use tags for that. Another good example is “errands,” which I use for any note that contains a task I have to do, which can be in any category.

The rarest thing I need to do is save a search, but I do that sometimes. Right now, I’m preparing for Burning Man, so I saved the search for any note that is tagged Burning Man and errands, so I can quickly jump to only those tasks. When Burning Man is over, I’ll delete that search.

Extend Evernote With Other Apps

The Evernote app is good enough for most general tasks, but there are many things to capture with Evernote that are much improved by a tailor-made interface. The best example is Evernote’s own standalone moble app, Hello, which provides a quick and easy interface for remembering people you meet.

Hello guides you through entering some contact info and taking a quick picture, and then it creates a nicely formatted Evernote note in a notebook of your choice (I use one called “People” in my “Home” stack). These can even be linked to your phone’s address book through the standalone Hello app.

But third-party developers have also built some excellent Evernote integrations. Read-later apps Pocket and Instapaper let you send articles straight into Evernote. On my iPhone, I use Drafts to jot down text notes in the fastest possible way, then send them to Evernote. I also use EverClip, an iPhone app that can run in the background and pack up anything you copy to your clipboard on your phone for easy sending to Evernote.

Why Use Evernote?

The reasons to use Evernote instead of other solutions are numerous, but there are two big ones. Evernote makes a point of building client applications for every device and platform it can. So if you get used to storing things in Evernote, you don’t have to worry about switching hardware or operating systems.

But the most important reason I moved my stuff into Evernote is the company’s ambition. Evernote wants to last 100 years, and you can see that in its priorities.

It sometimes seems to work harder on its back-end service and infrastructure than on making its apps better, but that’s okay. In 20 years, I won’t care what the Evernote iPad app was like, but I will certainly care that my notes still work and look the way I intended them to. Evernote is building forward compatibility with future platforms we haven’t imagined.

Dropbox is great for cross-platform syncing, but you have to stack together your own collection of other applications for creating and editing documents in it. Google Drive has powerful Google Docs applications (on desktop and Android), and it has optical character recognition and image recognition in its search, but I don’t trust that Google will build all those capabilities for every platform, and I don’t want to be forced to use Android.

I think Evernote is the only service building exactly what I want: An outboard brain for digital information that’s built to last.

One problem that people who live online do not have is a dearth of reading material at their fingertips. This should be the most exciting era in the history of reading, yet humankind's favorite leisure activity is mired in an ever-expanding swamp of unread links, forgotten URLs, buttons and bookmarklets. So I've hacked together a half dozen tools into a method for managing reading madness. Here it is, in three easy steps. 

Step 1. Browsing

The number-one problem I didn’t know I had with online reading was keeping track of everything I started to read, whether or not I finished it. Once I started tracking every article I opened, I realized that I would never again have to endure that agonizing, fruitless search of memory for “this thing I saw online the other day.”

I track this using Reading.am. I installed the Chrome extension, and I added the bookmarklet to my mobile Safari and Chrome bookmarks. I fire off Reading.am every time I start reading something. I use Reading.am’s built-in hooks to send links to my @AblazeReads Twitter account and to Evernote. That gives me two redundant logs of my readings that are easy to find at all times via local search, browser, or Twitter client.

I don’t post everything. Like anybody, I occasionally read articles I’d be embarrassed to share (or maybe even remember), which is why those “frictionless” social reading apps on Facebook are dumb. But if I think I might possibly want to look at an article again, I click ‘Reading.’ And in case anyone else wants to sip from my reading firehose, they can do so on RSS, Twitter or Kippt, which is kind of neat.

Step 2. Reading

When and where I actually do the reading depends on what device I’m using and what time of day it is. This is where the madness starts.

Reading Immediately

Unlike every other nerd, apparently, I’m still a big RSS user. There are 100 or so sites that I read religiously, so I use the Reeder app for Google Reader whenever possible. It clears out my Google Reader queue on desktop and mobile, so things don't slip down the list and into oblivion. Almost always, these are long stories that I send immediately to Pocket, which saves them to read later. If they’re very short, I read them inside Reeder, but these days I have to remember to open them in the browser as well and hit the Reading.am button, too. Kind of a pain.

If I’m reading something immediately on the desktop, my preference is to read the article directly in the browser. Isn’t that quaint? Most websites are so horrible that the idea of reading a Web article au naturale is a funny joke. But for those cherished few publications that celebrate design, as well as most respectable personal blogs, I like to see the words displayed as their author intended them to be seen.

But more often than not, Web layouts are crazy looking, so I use a browser extension to read them. I’m a Chrome and Evernote user, so I use Evernote Clearly to clean up pages for reading. It’s nice looking, and it gives you the easy option to save an article to Evernote with one click (more on that later).

Reading is usually a bit easier on mobile, where articles tend to be more legible. If they're not, I either use Safari Reader mode or the Readability mobilizer in Tweetbot, my Twitter client of choice, to clean them up.

Reading Later

Nonetheless, I do the vast majority of my reading in Pocket. It’s attractive, it has excellent sharing options, and it lets me see the material it stores without an Internet connection. I also like having that red badge on my iOS home screens nagging me to read more because I’m a masochist.

Lately, I’ve been enjoying Pocket on a Nexus 7, but I also read heavily on the iPad and iPhone. I prefer the Nexus' screen size, but I dearly love the Apple devices' retina text and superior scrolling. It’s an unfortunate tradeoff.

In rare cases, I have time to clear out my Pocket queue while I’m at my Mac, so I open the Pocket views of the articles in a bunch of tabs, read them, then delete or archive them and close the tab.

For me, saving something to Pocket is part of starting to read it, so I click the Reading.am button at the same time as I save to Pocket. This is an annoying extra step, but hopefully the services will learn to speak to each other and make that action simultaneous. By posting to Reading.am at the outset, I don’t have to think about whether or not I’ve done it when I delve into Pocket.

Step 3: Sharing & Archiving

Sharing

By posting to Reading.am, I automatically share everything I read at the outset. I figure anyone who wants the firehose will subscribe, and the rest of the Internet doesn’t want to know.

But I want to share the more remarkable reads on my personal feeds. Twitter is the main place for that, because I figure people who follow me on Twitter generally share my interests. My preferred tweet format for sharing an article is a money quote followed by the link. If there’s no quote short enough, I’ll come up with a brief summary or simply post the title.

I prefer to tweet the natural URL, so people can see what site the story is on, but if I’m sharing from Pocket, there will be a pocket.co URL.

I usually tweet great quotes I come across as I’m reading. I try to keep the noise down, but sometimes an article is so mind-blowing that I have to keep tweeting out the genius. I’ve learned to do so at a pace my followers don’t seem to mind, and I find this increases the likelihood that someone will click, read, and talk with me about it.

I only use Facebook for actual, real-life friends, so I’m much more discriminating about what I share there. Facebook article previews are pretty informative, so I try to make those posts worthwhile by adding a couple of sentences explaining why I think people should read this thing.

Archiving

If I read something particularly beautiful, funny, informative or terrifying, I want to keep it. Even if the site goes away, or the whole Web explodes and all the links break, I want to keep the treasures I've found. That’s where Evernote comes in.

I have a stack of Evernote notebooks called Library. In that stack, I maintain notebooks for a bunch of general topics that are broad enough that every article I want to keep fits in one. Evernote says it wants to last 100 years, and, perhaps at my peril, I take that promise seriously. I pay the service to have enough bandwidth and file types that I can stick just about anything in there, and I can read it all in Evernote long after the links break. Even if I lose access to the Internet, those notes will still be on my devices until those break, too.

I send articles to Evernote to archive in various ways. Sometimes I want to preserve the Web formatting, so I highlight it and use the Web Clipper on Chrome. If I’ve cleaned up the article with Clearly, clicking the elephant button sends the clean version to Evernote.

On iOS, I use a great app called EverClip that runs in the background, letting you copy text and images from any app and send them to Evernote. On the Nexus 7, I usually read in Pocket. Pocket’s Evernote sharing is also excellent, so I do that directly on iOS and Android alike.

What’s Wrong With This Picture?

Before you tell me this Jenga tower of reading services is insane, let me say: I know that. But I think there’s a kernel of something good here. I’ve gathered all the necessary pieces, they’re just spread out among too many different services. Reading online without losing your mind should be easy enough that anyone can do it.

Here’s what app makers might do to make my life, and that of dedicated readers across the globe, simpler:

1. Evernote would offer a standalone Clearly app for all platforms that syncs to an Evernote notebook and shares to Twitter, Facebook et al. Sorry, Pocket.
2. Apps that offer 'Save to Pocket/Instapaper/Readability' options would also add Clearly.
3. Reading.am would trigger automatically when Evernote Clearly is activated or when an article is saved to it.

If that happened, my entire reading flow would work like this:

1. Start reading
2. Click Reading or Clearly
3. Read
4. Share if desired
5. Move to an archive notebook in Evernote or delete

Looking at those five simple steps, reading online seems less insane and even more exciting. If they could all be accomplished in one place, without having to jump around between various tools, reading would be more fun, and that would be for the betterment of humanity.

Email addresses are the keys to the kingdom of all our personal data. It’s too bad we had to relearn this lesson last week when Wired’s Mat Honan had the crap hacked out of him. A foolproof way to limit your exposure to such attacks is to sign up to different services using as many different un-guessable email addresses as possible. On Tuesday, an app I’ve been using called Gliph made that really easy to do. Here’s how to set it up.

What Is Gliph?

Gliph is like a Guy Fawkes mask for your online identity. It’s a free app for iPhone, Android and the mobile Web. You can use it to send encrypted text messages to other Gliph users with as much or as little personal information exposed as you want. And starting today, you can also use it to send and receive email to anyone through your regular email client without ever exposing your identity or information.

Not only can you use Gliph email to sign up for other services without exposing yourself to a hacking, you can use it for Craigslist transactions or any other kind of temporary encounter where you want to exchange contact info.

You could accomplish a similar thing by setting up a bunch of new email addresses on free Web-based email services. But with Gliph, email addresses are easy to create and delete, your emails sent via your addresses all come to one location, and you don't have to log into multiple services to access different email accounts.

Step 1: Claim A Gliph

Instead of picking a user name when you sign up for Gliph, you get to create a string of three to five icons that represents you. Have fun with it!

Step 2: Create A Cloak

You get one free randomly generated email address when you sign up for Gliph. The addresses don’t have anything to do with your Gliph name; they’re something like watermelon29@cloak.gli.ph. In Gliph, you can add a note, like “signup for Dumb.ly app,” so you can remember what that email is used for.

Step 3: Email To Your Heart’s Content

You can now send cloaked email to any address. None of your information is exposed to the recipient, not even your Gliph symbols. They only see the randomly generated Gliph email address.

When the recipient replies to that address, Gliph forwards the message to the email address you used to sign up for Gliph. So if you gave Gliph a Gmail address, that’s where you’ll get the responses. If you reply from there, the message will be routed through Gliph, so it will appear to come from your cloaked address.

Make sure people on both sides check their spam filters if messages don’t appear. In our tests, Gmail allowed the messages through, but Outlook.com mail filtered them out.

Remember: Unlike Gliph-to-Gliph messages, which are encrypted and remain inside the service, the content of these emails is not secure. Not only is it exposed to the recipient, the replies are sent directly to the email address you provided to Gliph, which may not be secure, either.

Your email address, and thus your identity, will never be exposed when using cloaked email from Gliph. But you can’t assume that the words in the message will be kept private, too.

How To Get More Cloaks And Enable Attachments

Your cloaked email address will stick around, but if you want another one, all you have to do is successfully invite someone to join Gliph. That’s not just a gimmick; it’s great to have trusted friends and contacts on Gliph because that lets you communicate with them using the totally secure, encrypted messaging it offers. It’s also great for journalists and sources to protect anonymity, for example.

Once you’ve gotten five people to sign up for Gliph through your invitations, your account gains the ability to add attachments to cloaked emails sent from Gliph, even for cloaks you already had.

Iceland's nascent data center industry, powered by cheap, renewable energy, could be a growth driver in that nation's economic recovery and the cloud computing revolution. It could also save your company money.

If you're looking to host data between Europe and the U.S., it's worth taking a look at your options in Iceland.

Because of Iceland's unique climate, cooling costs are drastically lower than they are in places like New York and London. And the low cost of electricity helps push pricing down further.

Don't miss: Iceland's Cheap, Green Cloud: How a Tiny Island Could Drive Big Changes

Data Centers

The two big data centers right now are Verne Global and Thor. Both offer a range of services, including co-location. Verne is closer to the main Keflavik airport, while Thor is closer to the capital city of Reykjavik. (They're all pretty close to each other, though.)

Hosting, Cloud & IT Service Providers

Datapipe, Colt, and Opin Kerfi have announced a presence at Verne's facility. GreenQloud, a Reykjavik-based startup, is offering an suite of cloud services similar to Amazon Web Services, hosted in both Verne and Thor's facilities. Others may follow.

What kinds of services are a good bet for hosting in Iceland? The bandwidth situation is much-improved over a few years ago, but if latency is your top concern, Iceland may not be your best option. But Verne Global CTO Tate Cantrell - biased, of course! - estimates that companies could host 75% or more of their services in a facility like his, ranging from ERP and data analytics to backups.

What about taxes? Once upon a time, Iceland's nasty 25% value-added tax on servers was a big roadblock, but it's gone now.

If You Visit, Don't Miss...

One of the fringe benefits of hosting in Iceland is that you get to go there to check out your data center. Reykjavik is a neat place to visit for a couple of days, and Iceland's countryside is beautiful. (Also, everyone speaks near-perfect English.)

I recommend the Icelandair Marina hotel right next to the waterfront in downtown Reykjavik. It's brand-new and super cool. For dinner, check out Grillmarkadurinn or Tapashusid; for breakfast or lunch, Aldin; and for coffee, Kaffismidja Islands.

If you're traveling with an unlocked phone, you can get a prepaid, data-only Vodafone SIM card with 5GB of data for about $15. (Check out the mobile phone shops at the main shopping mall in Reykjavik.) If you want to rent a mi-fi device with service in Iceland, check out Tep Wireless.

And be prepared for sunlight all night long in summer and darkness almost all day in winter!

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

1. Choose which account is the “source” and which account is the “destination.”

Yes, that’s weird and confusing. The migration tool takes all your circles, connections and profile info from a “source” account and moves them to a “destination” account, replacing the info that’s there.

So if you’re moving your personal Google account - SoAndSo@gmail.com - to your Google Apps account at work - SoAndSo@yourcompany.com - remember that the Gmail account is the “source” and the yourcompany.com account is the “destination.”

2. Make sure you’ve activated Google+ on your “destination” account.

You'll need to “upgrade” the destination account to Google+ to make the transfer. If you haven’t done this, simply turn on Google+ for the destination account. You don’t have to fill in any info.

3. Log into the “source” account.

Remember: That’s the one you’re moving away from.

4. Request a transfer on Google Takeout.

Go to google.com/takeout, the portal for exporting your personal data from your account. Select the new “Circles” tool.

You’ll be asked to sign in multiple times to protect your information.

Once you get to the transfer tool, enter your destination account’s email address and sign in to that account as well.

5. Confirm the transfer.

Once you confirm, there's a seven-day waiting period before the transfer begins, during which you can cancel the transfer by clicking "Cancel transfer" at the bottom of the Google+ homepage on either account.

Once the transfer begins, it can't be cancelled or undone. You can’t use the migration tool for these accounts again for six months.

6. Put your Google+ life on hold and wait for the transfer to complete.

Google says “transfers typically take about 48 hours.” During the transfer, neither account will be able to share on Google+, add or remove people from circles, or block or ignore people. People who have either of your accounts in their circles won’t be able to add, remove, block or ignore them during the transfer.

After the Transfer

Your circles and connections, as well as your profile info, will all migrate to the new account. However, your posts and comments are not transfered, nor are the Google+ pages you manage. They’ll still exist, but they’ll be tied to the old account.

When other people visit your old account’s profile, they’ll be secretly redirected to the new one. However, you can still see both accounts depending on which one you’re logged into.

If you don’t need the old account anymore, you can downgrade it to turn off Google+.

This week, we’re asking, What is the point of Google+ Hangouts?

Who Hangs Out On Google+?

It hasn’t exactly taken over the world yet, but Google+ has become the social backbone of all Google’s services. If you “upgrade” your Google account to Google+, as more than 200 million people have, your profile becomes the way people find you in search and communicate with you across the Google-sphere.

Google wants plus.google.com to be your browser start page. If you’ve added friends and smart people to your circles, the page can be a constant source of updates and new information. Given that most people already happily find this service on Facebook, results on Google+ may vary.

But even if all your friends are Facebook loyalists, Google+ offers a killer app that makes it worth your attention. Based on YouTube’s massive infrastructure, Google built Google+ Hangouts, a virtual space that feels like a real place with real people in it whom you can easily meet face-to-face. Hangouts is one of the few Web applications that does justice to the word “social.”

How To Hang Out

A Google+ Hangout is a video chat that can host up to 10 people at a time. It appears as a live event in the Google+ stream, so people can join in if there’s room. You can also switch the Hangout into On Air mode, so anyone in the world (seriously) can watch live via YouTube, even without being on camera. Hangouts On Air are also saved as YouTube videos to watch later.

Anyone on Google+ can start a Hangout. You can post it publicly, so anyone with the link can join, and anyone following you on Google+ can see an invitation in his or her stream. You can also post the invitation to specific circles or individuals only.

You can use Hangouts just to chat with friends, family or colleagues. But it’s also really fun and not (very) creepy to just hang out with whoever’s around on Google+ sometimes.

Hangouts have more potential than text chat. There are apps to make Hangouts more amusing or collaborative. It also works great on mobile devices. With the power of Hangouts On Air, Google has been able to host vast, live media events such as a Hangout with President Obama.

We also host ReadWriteWeb Hangouts all the time. We’d love for you to join us.

Photo by Eliot Weisberg

Do you covet the new retina MacBook Pro? That screen has to be seen to be believed. With an ultra-high resolution and millions of pixels, it needs a worthy wallpaper to look as stunning as possible. Here are the best places we've found to download desktop backgrounds and other visual candy that can do justice to that 15-inch 2880-by-1800 resolution display.

Read more: Apple’s New MacBook Pro Is the Best Laptop You Can Buy - But You Probably Shouldn’t Buy One

RWW's Eliot Weisberg shares his impressions of the MacBook Pro with Retina display.

InterfaceLIFT is a long-standing wallpaper site with a great selection, and it now has retina-ready options.

WallpapersWide.com is one of the best and broadest retina wallpaper sites we've found. It has tons of categories and thousands of pages to choose from.

WallpaperFX also has a well-organized selection. Here's its 2880x1800 retina display section.

Here's an entire site dedicated to high-resolution wallpapers of varying quality.

If you already have a MacBook Pro with Retina display, you've already got these, but here are Apple's retina-sized Mountain Lion wallpapers.

Tomas Laurinavicius has a great blog post of 40 very high-resolution wallpapers to peruse.

And we found two retina-ready Flickr galleries that will probably be of interest:

• Space photos
• Marvel Vs. Capcom 3 wallpapers

And, of course, you can always search Google for Retina display MacBook Pro images.

These aren't exactly wallpaper, but we found an amazing gallery of Renaissance paintings in super-duper-high-definition that is a great way to show off the new machine's visual excellence.

Finally, check out this gorgeous, navigable 26-gigapixel image of Paris. If you go full-screen, you can grab whatever part you want for a retina background.

How To Set Your Wallpaper

Once you find a hi-res image you like, you can crop or resize it in Preview (the built-in imaging application) to 2880-by-1800 pixels. Just make sure the image you're starting with is bigger than that, because increasing the size of the image will make it look nasty on that Retina display. If you don't want to bother cropping, you can also just set larger images as "centered" when you select your wallpaper in your Desktop & Screen Saver system preferences.

It's easy to get obsessed with the super-fast, real-time cycle of online news. But don't forget that the Web is a massive treasure trove of information about any topic. With just a bit of work, you can set up tracking and get regular updates about topics you're passionate about. In this how-to article, we share our tips on topic tracking.

Google Alerts

Let's forget the 'S' word for a minute: Social. You just want to track the latest news about a specific topic, so how do you do it? Easy, you set up a Google Alert.

Go to Google News and input your search. As an example, I'll use a topic that I'm particularly interested in: finding a cure for diabetes. At the bottom of the page, you'll see a link to "Create an email alert for [...]".

Select the type of results you'd like and the email delivery frequency.

Interestingly, you can create an alert for "everything" - which includes not just Google News, but Google's all-powerful search index. However you won't see the "Create an email alert for [...]" option on Google.com, you'll have to go to Google News or another of the Google content types.

If you use an RSS Reader or personalized start page (such as Google Reader or My Yahoo!), then you can save the RSS feed for your search there. Look for the little orange RSS icon in the footer of your Google News results page.

Social Options

If you want a more social approach to topic tracking, Google+ and Twitter are your best bets.

1. Google+

Search for your topic in Google+ (Google's social network, which you get automatically with a Google account). You'll see a red button on the top-right, inviting you to "save this search."

To check on your saved search regularly, go to your Google+ homepage and select the "More" drop-down list in the sub-menu. That displays a list of your Google+ circles and saved searches.

There are some great content options with a Google+ saved search. Click on the drop-down list that by default states "Everything". You can then choose to narrow your search to Google+ posts, from your circles, and more.

The one downside to using Google+ saved searches is that you will need to remember to manually check it, because there is no notification system.

2. Twitter

You may not be aware that you can also save a search in Twitter, with or without a hashtag. Go to the Twitter homepage and enter your search query. You'll see a list of the latest tweets that may be relevant (the results are based on keywords). Note that you can also do an advanced search, for example searching for an exact phrase.

Although Twitter makes it obvious how to save your search, it's far less obvious where you find your saved search for later reference. It's not in any of the menus. You have to click inside the search box again to see your list of saved searches. This is very unintuitive, but you'll get used to it.

If you're a regular Twitter user, you probably use at least one of the various desktop or mobile clients - such as TweetDeck for desktop and the official Twitter iPhone or Android app for mobile. Most of these products enable you to access your saved searches (for example, select 'Add Column' in TweetDeck and then 'Search').

3. Facebook

You may be wondering if Facebook is of much use for tracking topics. It is, to a degree. You can search on Facebook and you may see some results from people or pages you follow, but there is no mechanism to save your search. You can also subscribe to relevant people and 'like' pages on the topic, as well as subscribe to public topical lists. For more information about using Facebook to track topics, read this separate article.

Niche Communities or Specialist Services

There are lots of smaller, niche communities where you can keep track of your topic. For example, I belong to a diabetes social network called Tu Diabetes. I can track news about potential cures there.

Probably your best bet for niche communities these days is Reddit, which has many sub-communities. For example there's one for Diabetes, which had some useful information in it when I checked today. You can then subscribe to the sub-community and check it as often as you like.

Other options include Q&A websites like Quora, bookmarking services like Delicious and specialist search or RSS Reader services like Regator.

If you have any other suggestions to track topics on the Web, please leave a comment.

Hell, there are no rules here - we’re trying to accomplish something.
- Thomas Edison

Many people consider Edison America’s greatest inventor - ever. But he never had to deal with the reams of rules and regulations today’s startups need to heed just to stay out of trouble with federal and state governments.

Red tape is likely the last thing you want to think about when you’re in the throes of a startup, but there are some things you really need to consider:

Employees

Are you providing a safe working environment for your staff? Even if you’ve only got one employee, Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) regulations require you to make sure he or she operates in safe and healthful working conditions. If you have more than 10 employees, the requirements get a little tougher: For example, you now have to maintain specific records related to injuries and illnesses. The three most important parts of OSHA rules are:

1. All employees have access to your safety records.
2. Employers must provide personal protective equipment at no cost to their employees.
3. Manufacturers and importers of hazardous materials must be evaluated, and employees kept informed about the hazards.

Chances are these regs won’t affect startups like yours, but to be sure, you can ask OSHA to stop by your offices for a free evaluation and consultation. Check with your closest OSHA regional office.

Industry

Some industries have specific regulations you also need to follow. The federal government has more than 25 regulatory agencies with rules on what you can manufacture, how you should conduct your business, how you can advertise your products or services, and more. The Consumer Product Safety Commission and the Environmental Protection Agency are just two of the agencies that may have regulations affecting your business.

State and City Licenses and Permits

Depending on your industry, you may need specific business licenses and permits from your state or city. These vary depending on your location (and the cost varies, too). Lots of startups operate virtually these days, but does your city allow people to work from home? Zoning laws are created and regulated at the municipal level, so check with your city or town to make sure it’s legit to work out of your house or apartment.

Even if you operate a solo home-based business and use a post office box as your business address, you’ll need to register a street address where the majority of the business is operated and pay the fees to that city.

IRS Regulations

Finally, you can’t forget the Internal Revenue Service. Make sure you’re in compliance with the IRS and pay the proper business and employer taxes (if you have employees), or you may have an auditor knocking on your door.

Do you operate under a calendar or fiscal-year basis? What corporate structure (S corporation, LLC, etc.) did you choose? Did you get your Tax ID number or EIN number? If this all sounds like alphabet soup, check the IRS website for more information, then turn your books over to a trusted accountant to keep you in compliance. The IRS website also offers industry-specific tax information worth checking out.

Get Help

There are plenty of places where you can get help. Start at the top. Last year, the Obama administration created Business.USA.gov, a one-stop platform that helps small businesses get access to relevant government information. Search the site’s database by industry, then click on rules and you’ll find the agency guidelines that pertain to your business.

Once you’ve gathered the information online, make an appointment with a local agency such as your industry association, your local SCORE office or your nearest Small Business Development Center (SBDC). Their experts can help you comply with any pertinent business regulations, navigate any hurdles and fill out the required paperwork.

Just don’t expect any of this work to actually help your business succeed. That’s not how it works. All you can hope for is to keep the mountains of red tape and compliance issues from causing your company to fail.