With Fences you can group your files and programs to your liking. You can change the name and size of your boxes as well as hide them from the desktop completely by double clicking. Double click again to have it re-appear. If you fill up a box with files or programs a scroll bar appears for those you can’t see. So if you aren’t using a file or program often you can keep it on the desktop but not have it showing all the time. It is easy to use and in only a few minutes you can have your desktop organized and looking much less cluttered.

Check it out at http://www.stardock.com/products/fences/ and make your desktop manageable and free from clutter. It’s free for personal use!

Now that you have the program installed open it up and you should see a screen similar to this one:

Main Window of Filezilla

This may look overwhelming at first so we’ll point out some of the main features.

• The left side of the screen shows files on your computer
• The right side will show files that are on the remote server
• The bottom pane will show the files that are waiting to be transfered
• and the top pane will show a log of what has happened

If you are just needing to connect to an ftp once and either upload or download a few files, the quick connect bar at the very top will be the easiest option. If this is a site you will be connecting to frequently, you will want to add a bookmark though (more on that later).

Quick Connect

The quick connect bar is at the very top of the window and has 4 fields. One for the Host, Username, Password, and Port. In 99% of cases you can leave the port blank and it will use the default setting (21). Once you have filled in your information hit ‘quick connect’ to connect to the server. If you have the right host, username and password, you should see a list of files now show up in the right pane. If not, double check that you have entered the correct login credentials.

Connected to a server

The right side will show you the files on the server and any folders you have access to. Before downloading anything, take a look at the left side. This will show you where you are are about to download the files to. You’ll want to put the files in an easy to remember place.

Once you have everything ready to go, you can click on a folder, or file in the right pane to select it (hold down shift to select a range of folders or files). Then right click on the selected items and choose download. This will start the process of downloading all the files you have selected. If there are many large files, this may take a fair amount of time so be patient while it works through the list. In the bottom you will see a queue which shows you what file it is currently working on.

Queue Transfer Status

The process for uploading is very similar, except you choose the files from the left pane, and then right click and choose ‘upload’.

After you have finished downloading (or uploading) your files, be sure to click the ‘disconnect’ button in the top navigation bar.

Disconnect from FTP Server

Since there are quite a few steps, here’s a quick summary of what you need to do:

1. Download and install FileZilla
2. Enter the host, username, and password
3. Choose the files you wish to transfer
   • To download choose the files from the right pane, right click and choose download
   • To upload, choose the files from the left pane, right click them and choose upload
4. Wait for the files to finish transferring
5. Click the disconnect button when everything is done

That should do it for most cases. In a future post we’ll talk about setting up bookmarked sites, as well as dealing with conflicting file names. Feel free to leave a comment if you have any questions at all.

Choosing a task manager in many ways comes down to personal preference. Remember the Milk is a popular Free online task manager solution. You have to create an account and then you can log in and begin adding tasks, colour coding them, setting due dates as well as adding tasks that repeat on a regular basis. You can also make task lists under different categories such as work, home etc. and the great feature of it being online means you can access it from anywhere, your iPhone, work computer, home computer etc. The downfall for someone like myself is that I forget to sign into the program.  There is a seperate application called Remember the Task that you can download from Adobe Air which will let you have a task list that sits on your computer and you can add and remove tasks. This is helpful for those of us who don’t want to have to log into yet another application. Many people find Remember the Milk quite handy.

I use a Free (donations accepted) downloadable program called Mini-task. I find it extremely easy to use and for those of us who take satisfaction in seeing a bunch of check marks at the end of the day it turns your “done” tasks green. In Remember The Task you can only delete the task. You can easily add/remove headings (the ones in the image are just the ones that work for me) so you can customize your list into your own sections. All you have to do is right click and you can add/remove headings, add/remove tasks and you can also remove all completed tasks at the same time.  You can easily print off your tasks or even copy & paste them into an email if you want to look it up on your mobile device while your at the grocery store etc. One handy feature I’ve appreciated is the ability to drag & drop tasks between categories and re-organize them as needed.

I appreciate the simplicity of MiniTask and by using it during the past few months it kept me organized with school, our newly started business (Triple I Web Solutions) and household needs including preparing for Christmas.

However, there are always new applications being developed and I have just heard that in the last two weeks Google has added a task manager to gmail so I will be trying that out shortly… I am a big fan of Gmail and it’s Calendar system so I am eager to try the task manager out.

If you have any questions related to the above post feel free to send them to questions@theuntechblog.com We’ll try to reply to all emails received or write a blog post if there are many of the same questions popping up.