I can't remember where I first heard about David Seah's productivity tools but they have been an invaluable tool over the last year or so, especially the Day Grid Balancer. In fact I have a copy on my desk right now with my jobs for the week.

Using it at work, I'm lucky enough to have access to a good laser printer to run off my copies but if you don't, you might be interested to know that you can now buy the Emergent Task Planner in 50 sheet pads from Amazon here.

The Emergent Task Planner is a daily rather than weekly planner, which is why I've stuck with the Day Grid Balancer but if you want a way of planning and recording your day the Emergent Task Planner is worth a go. Instructions can be found here along with the PDF to download and print. This means you can try it out before buying it.

Official blog post by David here.

While researching a news story I started up my copy of the Windows 8 Consumer Preview in a virtual computer. As I haven't used it for a while, I thought I'd run Windows Update. Only I can't find it. Even worse, I really didn't know where to start.

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 We know to avoid snakes, spiders and sharks but they're not the only members of the animal kingdom that can spoil your day. Here are five animals that look cute (or odd) but should still be given a respectful berth.

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How much would you pay for a miniature coffee cup with a profile picture of your face on it? What if that mug was made using a 3D printer?

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After nearly 11 years of faithful service, my HP 930cm inkjet printer finally couldn't take it any more and stopped working. I'm genuinely sad about this as it's done me very good service and saw off newer printers that couldn't quite match it on quality. Rather than just buy another inkjet I decided to get a laser instead and this is why.

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Unless you enable the 'game' option, there's no way you can describe DCS A-10C as a game, it's a full on simulator of this very complex American attack aircraft. If you spend long enough with the manual (over an hour a day on the train say) and hang out on the DCS forum, there are some pretty amazing details to be found. Here are five of my favourites, from the sublime to the ridiculous.

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HP has announced its revamped series of Envy ultrabooks at a press conference in Shanghai and leading the new range is the flagship Spectre XT.

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