IT’S OFFICIAL..ish! You can now access your Windows Live Hotmail emails for free through POP3 (previously this was only for users who paid for Hotmail Plus). This means you no longer have to use Windows Live Mail or Outlook combined with the Live Connector. Microsoft is slowly rolling this out to all users, so if it’s not working for you just yet, hold tight.

To start you off; here’s details on how to set it up on your iPhone or iPod touch. If you’d just like the settings, they’re after the jump at the bottom of this post.
Hotmail on the iPhone
Tap ‘Settings’.
Tap ‘Mail, Contacts, Calendars’
Tap ‘Add Account’, followed by ‘Other’
Fill out your name, hotmail email address, hotmail password, and a description (I just called mine Hotmail)
Tap ‘Save’ in the top right corner, and wait a couple of seconds.
After it’s loaded, tap the ‘POP’ tab.

Now, under ‘Incoming Mail Server’ set the host name to pop3.live.com, your username is your *full* hotmail email address (eg, yournamehere@live.com) and password is your hotmail password.

Outgoing Mail Server details are the same, except enter smtp.live.com for the host name.

Enjoy!

If you’d like to use this in another mail client, here are the POP3 server details:

Incoming Mail Server

Incoming Mail Server: pop3.live.com
User Name: yourusername@hotmail.com
Password: yourpassword

Outgoing Mail Server

Outgoing Mail Server: smtp.live.com
User Name: yourusername@hotmail.com
Password: yourpassword

(If your client prompts you in regards to SSL, make sure that that SSL is ON)

Zach Klein via Flickr

SOCIAL MEDIA and networking services can be extremely useful and rewarding, but with the sheer number that exist on the web today, it can be quite overwhelming for all but the most ardent of social media enthusiasts. Whether you’re a fan of these services for personal use, such as keeping in touch with friends, or you’re using them as marketing tools for your business, it’s important to have a clear understanding of which services you’re using, how you’re using them, and your reasons for using them at all, otherwise you might be spending far more time than you need to duplicating content over multiple services, or sifting through information that really has no benefit to you anyway.

If you’re feeling a bit swamped by information overload, or just want to know how to manage all incoming and outgoing social media activity, read on ‘cause I have a five step guide to keep your sanity in check.

1. Simplify

The World Wide Web is a pretty big place. There are thousands of social networks out there spanning hundreds of different services, but the trick is to only use the ones that offer you value. Choose your social networking services carefully, and use them for dedicated purposes. For example, use Flickr for all of your photos, Facebook for keeping in touch with friends, Twitter for microblogging, LinkedIn for professional contacts, Last.fm for your music activity, Delicious for your bookmarks, and so on.

The simpler you make things, the easier it will be to keep track of activity later, because you’ll know exactly what you’re using each service for and the type of activity from your contacts that you’ll find on each service. Some services, or contacts within services will overlap, and that’s fine, just be aware of which ones these are so that you know to double up content, or filter out content later. If you’re worried that content on one service will be missed by contacts on a different service, fear not! Publishing content onto multiple services at once generally isn’t that much of a problem, but more on that later.

2. Aggregate

Just like you would use an RSS reader to collect and read website feeds, it can be helpful to organise social media activity, too. Even if you simplify things, you may find you still have a lot of activity to keep track of. The best way to do this is with a social aggregation application. I use Friendfeed which is a pretty powerful and useful web service in its own right. Its primary purpose is to mash together all the activity of your contacts over several different social networking services, and it has support for quite a few of them.

If your contacts also have Friendfeed accounts, subscribing to them is easy. However, a powerful feature of Friendfeed is the ability to create ‘imaginary friends’ which are basically people you want to keep track of on Friendfeed who do not have a Friendfeed account.

My main reason for liking Friendfeed is the way it helps to cut down information overload. You can can group people together and decide whether you would like their activity to show up within your home feed. You can also choose to filter activity based on certain criteria. For example, you can hide all Twitter comments from a certain individual only, or everyone you’re subscribed to. Later, if you decide you want to read the content you hid, it’s only a click away.

Friendfeed’s secondary purpose is to create a social network of its own, but as far as I’m concerned that only complicates matters. The best place to have a conversation around a piece of web content is at the source, so moving a conversation to a new location – in this case, on Friendfeed – is just bad organisation and management, in my opinion. Unfortunately, not everyone agrees with this mentality, which breaks up the conversation into several different areas on the web. On the other hand, this isn’t a feature you need to use, so personally I just ignore it and use Friendfeed for aggregation only.

There are other web-based alternatives to Friendfeed such as Socialthing, Profilactic, and Iminta, or desktop applications like Eventbox.

3. Segregate

Social media apps are great, but unless you use them as part of your job, they can be distracting and a major time-suck. They can threaten to take over your work space on your digital desktop, and not to mention easily pull you out of ‘the zone’.

The trick is to keep them separate from your work. If they’re hidden away, they’re less tempting to constantly look at. The way I do this is with an application called Fluid for Mac OS X (an alternative is Prism, available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux). It stops your web browser from becoming over-populated by tabs for social networking websites by allowing you to turn these websites into desktop applications of their own. They can then run completely within their own windows on your computer, and can be opened and closed just like regular desktop apps.

Alternatively, you could create a ‘Social Networking’ application and use it solely for that purpose. One of Fluid’s plug-ins allows you to create browser windows within browser windows, which can be viewable as a sidebar or a drawer. This can be useful for keeping track of multiple sites at once.

4. Steer

So, you’ve decided which social network services you want to use, and what you will use each service for. Now you need to decide where your content goes and when. In other words, team services together and create a workflow for your content.

Perhaps you want to post an image to Flickr, and then tweet the link over Twitter. Or you want people using multiple social networks to see the YouTube video you just uploaded. Obviously there are many different ways of doing all of this, and the methods you use depend on the services you’re using and the way in which you connect to the web.

There are a few different web services that allow you to post to several social networking websites at once such as Ping.fm, HelloTxt and Tarpipe. The latter, in particular, is a great service even though it’s still in beta, because it allows you to create workflows for publishing your social media content across several different social media applications. For example, I could create a workflow that allowed me to email an image to a specific Tarpipe email address, which would then post the image to Flickr, the URL would get shortened and posted as an update on Twitter, certain people would be sent the link in an email, and the image would also be saved within Evernote. Tarpipe differs from services such as Ping.fm in that the workflows are customisable, so you can decide on the exact path that your data travels, what it contains, and where it ends up. You can do this through a drag and drop GUI that resembles pipes being linked together through the different web applications that you want to connect.

There are also quite a few apps for mobile devices, such as ShoZu and AirMe, that allow you to publish content to different social networks. I’m constantly using an iPhone app called Flickup (iTunes link) which allows me to take a photo, upload it to Flickr and send the link to Twitter. This is only one of several apps with the same or similar functionality.

The best way to steer your content is to first decide where you want your content to go, and then figure out how to get it there.

5. Disconnect

No matter how organised you might be, if you want to stay sane and healthy, you need to disconnect from your social networks for a little while. Whether that’s by pulling the plug, closing the laptop lid, or just shutting down your browser for a little while, it definitely helps. It’s easy to feel like you’re possibly missing out on important content by disconnecting yourself, but the truth is that you’re probably not, and anything important or newsworthy will probably be making the rounds when you return. Besides, if you use a social aggregator, you can check the activity history later on.

So, there’s five steps to hopefully keep you sane amongst the chaos and information overload within social media services. Do you already use any of these methods? Or do you do things differently? Let me know in the comments!

Hulu.com is a great service for watching popular TV shows and movies as they stream to your computer for free… If you live in the United States, that is. International users unfortunately don’t get a slice of the Hulu pie, and it sure is one hell of a tasty pie with shows like Fringe, The Simpsons and The Office available for viewing, plus many more.

Don’t fret just yet, though, because there is an easy way to trick Hulu into thinking your computer is connected to an ISP in the United States, and it doesn’t involve any configuration or mucking around with network settings.The solution is to install and use an application called Hotspot Shield, developed by AnchorFree Inc. Its main purpose is to protect your personal data, particularly when accessing public networks where information can be open and vulnerable to people snooping over the network. It does this by creating a virtual private network between your computer and Hotspot Shield’s internet gateway.

For international users, a fortunate side effect is that it stops Hulu from detecting that your computer actually lives outside of the United States because your IP address is hidden, so it will just let the connection through and allow you to stream content to your computer.

The Hotspot Shield website states that the software is able to run on the following operating systems:

Windows Vista
Windows XP
Windows 2000
Mac OS X (10.5 Leopard)
Mac OS X (10.4 Tiger)

While Hotspot Shield does work, there are a few issues with using this method, making it a less-than-perfect solution.

Firstly, it isn’t an application you’ll want to be running all the time as it introduces advertising (mostly in the form of banners) on web pages. However, since Hotspot Shield is free to download and use, it’s quite forgivable. Plus, it’s easy to enable and disable the app’s VPN connection as it sits in the menu bar on a Mac or the system tray on a Windows PC. If you’re watching Hulu content through another application such as Boxee, this becomes much less of a problem.

Secondly, users have reported a hidden bandwidth limit of 5 to 10 gigabytes. Obviously, this isn’t good news for streaming video content, and how this affects you depends on how much content you want to watch.

Lastly, Hotspot Shield can slow down your transfer speeds quite a bit which is also not good news for streaming video. That said, I have seen it working very well with minimal buffering time, so it likely just depends on the content you’re watching and the amount of traffic at the time.

If you choose to use Hotspot Shield to access Hulu.com or other US-only websites, keep in mind that you’re doing so at your own risk and by your own choice.

Overall, this solution isn’t a perfect one, but it works and allows those of us outside the United States to access content otherwise unavailable to us.

Google has become a verb. You know, like “I’m going to Google for chocolate cake recipes”. Google has pushed its way into mainstream conversation that even my grandparents know what Google is now. Everyone knows that you can go to google.com and search for anything your heart desires.

I suppose it was when my 15-year-old cousin was using Google to do some research for a school assignment that it hit me; sure, everyone knows how to Google, but not everyone knows how to Google well. Most people will just type some keywords in the box and hit search, unaware of the fact that there are some great tips and tricks to help you find what you’re looking for more effectively.

So, I figured I’d compile a list of the different search operators and query modifiers that I find useful on an almost daily basis. I realise many of you tech-heads will already know most of these, but if you don’t, well, you’ve learned something new today.

So, without further ado…

Searching by phrase
Typing a phrase of words between quotation marks into the search box like ["add keywords here"] is extremely useful for finding a particular chain of words in a certain order, exactly how you typed it.
Examples:
“xbox 360 cheats”
“tomato soup” recipe

Include and exclude words
To ensure a word is searched for, or completely eliminated from your search, just use the + and – operators next to your keyword, like [+keyword] or [-keyword]. You can use this in combination with many keywords to get more specific results.
Examples:
party food +cake
lcd tv review -sony

Searching by file type
To search for a particular file type on the web, just type the keywords followed by [filetype:x] where ‘x’ is the file’s extension (such as pdf, doc, ppt)
Examples:
australia tax filetype:pdf
css design filetype.ppt

Synonym search
Sometimes you don’t want to be too specific in case your search won’t turn up all the results you want. For example, if you type ‘kids’, you could be missing out on results that include ‘children’. You can use the synonym search to help you with this. Simply type tilde followed by your keyword, like [~keyword].
Examples:
~cheap tickets
homes for ~pets

Search for words in the title
You can search for specific words that exist in the title of a web page by simply typing [intitle:keyword] for one word, or [allintitle: keywords] for multiple words in the search.
Examples:
australian intitle:startup
allintitle: australian technology podcast

Search for words in the URL
If you’re looking for certain words in the URL of a web page, just type [inurl:keyword] for one word, or [allinurl: keywords] for multiple words in the search.
Examples:
dog grooming inurl:australia
allinurl: tech wired australia facebook phone

Search for similar web pages
Sometimes you just want to pull up search results of sites that are similar to another site rather than anything specific. This is often handy for research, or just finding sites and services with similar features to ones that you already know of. You can do this by typing [related:www.websitehere.com] in the search.
Examples:
related:www.imdb.com
related:www.flickr.com

Word definitions
If you want to quickly look up the definition of a word or a reference, you can use [define:keyword]. It will return a definition of the word, or multiple words that you entered. Searching for a definition of multiple words will treat it like a phrase, with words in the exact order you typed them in. It also works for some abbreviations and jargon words.
Examples:
define:serendipity
define: william gibson

This is by no means a complete list of all search operators, modifiers and features. There are quite a few more, including ways to search for global weather and time, performing calculations and unit conversions, and even letting Google fill in the missing word in a phrase. You can find more of these at Google’s search features and advanced operators pages.

How do you search Google, and do you have any tips or tricks of your own that help you search the web?

So, you’ve got a shiny new iPhone or iPod touch, and you’d like to load all those shiny apps that everyone keeps talking about. But, oh noes! You don’t have a credit card, or the App you want isn’t available in your country’s store. Or, you’re sick of this week’s Free Single Of the Week. This guide will let you create a free account for any country the iTunes store runs in. Interested? Good, let’s continue!

1. First of all – select the iTunes store in which you’d like to have an account. You can use the store selector towards the bottom of the iTunes store homepage.

2. When the front page loads up for your desired country – go and click on the top app from the “Top Free App” section.

3. When the app page loads, hit the ‘Get App’ button.

4. The login prompt will appear – click on ‘Create New Account’

5. Click Continue, then tick the “I Accept” box, and click Continue again

6. Fill out your details on the next page (you’ll need a real, valid email address), and click continue

7. And now, here is where it gets interesting. If you have followed each of the previous steps, you should now have a ‘None’ option as a payment method. Select that

8. After that, fill out your details. If you don’t live in the country you’re creating the account in, make up an address. (Like say, for example, one of Apple’s Retail Store locations if they have some in that country. – http://apple.com/retail ), then click Continue

9. You will now see a message telling you to click on the confirmation link sent to the email you supplied earlier; it looks a little like this;

Then check your email inbox (or spam folder), open the email and click the confirmation link

10. iTunes will pop up, and here you’ll enter your brand new iTunes account details.

11. If all goes to plan, you will be greeted with a congratulations page.

12. You’re done! You can now download free music (namely the ‘Free Single Of The Week’), as well as some free TV shows in some stores, and all the free apps that are available to you in the App Store

Now, I have iTunes accounts for Australia, the United Kingdom, the USA, and now Canada!

Wait… why couldn’t I just create an account without going to the app store first?
If you try and create an account straight from the log on box/when you purchase some music, you will be missing the ‘None’ option from Step 7.

Can I fill out my credit card details for another country’s store?
Not unless it was issued in the country that you’re trying to add it to – iTunes will verify the location of where the card was issued. So, for example, you couldn’t use an Australian Visa card in the United States store.

Hey, I have a question that isn’t answered here….
Just leave a comment below, and I’ll try and help where I can.

- Beau