If your daily stints at the gym have you feeling virtuous, this may come as something of a downer: A session on the treadmill or stair machine won’t undo the damage caused by that sedentary day job. That’s according to recent Australian research published in the April edition of Diabetes Care, which found that sitting there, hour after hour, is bad, bad, bad on your system.

There is some glimmer of hope for the desk-bound. The same research found that those who took frequent breaks from sitting reduced their girth and their body mass indexes, and lowered glucose and triglyceride levels in their blood streams.

According to the study, it doesn’t matter how much exercise you get; unless you also break up your sitting time, your body will suffer.

On reading this research, I felt a sense of impending doom. I sit down in front of the computer and that’s it - I’m absorbed for hours. In the days when I used to do computer programming, I’d even forget about going to the loo. I’m not quite as lost to the screen these days, but sedentary is certainly an apt description of me at work.

Stretch Break 

Enter Stretch Break. Stretch Break is a program which gives you a gentle nudge every now and then, reminding you to take a break. At an interval you determine, it pops up a break reminder and, unless you tell it to leave you alone, displays a series of gentle, yoga-ish exercises you can perform at your desk.

Stretch Break is flexible. As well as determining how often it should interrupt your work, you can choose the number of stretches for each session or even choose a particular sub-set of stretches to use. The latter is particularly useful when it comes to breaking up your sedentary time: by selecting the standing stretches, you can make sure you heave your frame out of your chair whenever Stretch Break pops up. Stretch Break also displays “ergo reminders” at the end of each break, little hints that will keep your body ticking along more happily.

I’ve been using Stretch Break on and off for years. It’s currently up to version 6.2 and I think the first version I used was 2.something. My problem is that it’s hard to commit to using the program. For the first few days after I’ve installed it, I use it religiously. But then, inevitably, comes the time when it will pop up while I’m in the middle of something intense, and I’ll think “Not now!” and hit the Later button. I promise myself I’ll take a break when the next reminder appears, but I know I’m already on the slippery slope to uninstalling it.

Stretch Break tries to accommodate busy or recalcitrant users by offering to delay the session for a minute or even five minutes. Once you start hitting those Later buttons regularly, you’re probably doomed.

So I’ve decided that what I need is the gentle inducement of Stretch Break plus a goad. I think that Australian research might be just the goad I need. When Stretch Break pops up now, I think about that research and the big payoff from taking a couple of minutes away from the computer. I also don’t, necessarily, perform the stretches displayed. Instead, I’ll get up and walk around, or make a phone call and walk as I talk. Anything to get me out of the chair. This approach has worked so far.

Stretch Break costs $US44.95, so it’s not cheap, but you can download an evaluation version to see whether it works for you. There are some free reminder programs available you might prefer, or you can set any one of dozens of other programs to pop up an alert at regular intervals. But none of those gives you the thoughtful exercises and visual cues Stretch Break offers, and which really help you notice what’s happening to your body as you sit there. I think it’s worth the money.

I’ve been a fan of TinyURL for some time, and I blogged about it recently. TinyURL converts long, unmemorable web addresses into tiny web addresses. For example, TinyURL converts the address:

http://www.rosevines.org/blog/2008/1/25/troubleshooting-a-google-slow-down-makes-me-think-about-dump.html

into:

http://tinyurl.com/ytgp26

That’s much easier to type correctly into your browser and works well in email, where long addresses are often broken. The TinyURL is also permanent: once you create it, it can be used by anyone, anywhere, at any time; if you try to create a TinyURL for a previously-Tiny-ed site, you’ll be given the same shortcut URL.

The only trouble is, these short URLs are just as unmemorable as their long equivalents. If you want to return to the site, you’ll need to have stored or written down the TinyURL.

Moourl performs the same miniaturisation trick as TinyURL, but goes one better. It generates a small, randomly generated series of characters, such as:

http://moourl.com/bgw81

and it then gives you the option of assigning your own 20-character Moo address as well. So that initial long address could end up as:

http://moourl.com/blogslowdown

Now that’s short and easy to recall.

I’ve been playing around with about 40 different beta services over the past month.

One that’s insanely easy to use and lots of fun is Mixwit, a service which lets you create mix tapes, share them and embed them in sites. Mixwit is free (unlike the commercial Mixaloo) and draws its content from Seeqpod. The quality of content is decidedly rocky (make sure you check out the tracks you add - some of them end prematurely or won’t play at all), but the mix-creation experience is fast and pleasurable.

All you do is sign up (very fast), click the My Stuff link, and work through three steps:

1. Add music (there’s a search box built in).
2. Choose a skin for your tape - or upload your own - and tinker with the font and style.
3. Publish.

Once your mix is published, you can add it to your social networking sites or your blog, link to it or simply copy and paste a piece of code - as I did in this post - and voila!

You don’t have to use Internet Explorer just because it comes with Windows. There are much better choices available, and they’re almost all free.

I’ve added a new article called Get a better browser to the Tutorials & Guides section. It provides a roundup of Internet Explorer’s main competition.

IE 7’s daft design 

As I wrote ‘Get a better browser’, I was thinking about why I dislike Internet Explorer 7 so much. There’s no doubt it’s more secure than its predecessor, Internet Explorer 6. It also has support for tabs and other features we’ve come to expect from a good browser. And yet, I hate using it.

Why? Because it’s designed for last-generation screens. Most of us have replaced the old, almost-square screens we used to have with widescreen flat panels. Even if you haven’t made the shift to widescreen format, chances are you’re using a much larger screen than you had 5 years ago. On such a screen, Internet Explorer 7’s far-right placement of its toolbar icons makes using the browser awkward. To click the Home, Refresh or Stop buttons, for example, you have to move the mouse pointer all the way over to the right of the screen, and that can be a long trip if you have your browsre maximised on a 21- or 24-inch screen. Worse, although in IE 6 we had the power to move the toolbars around and place them where we wanted, that control has been all but eliminated in IE 7, so we’re stuck with Microsoft’s toolbar placement.

This might seem like a small thing, but if you use your browser a lot, it’s little things like this that will drive you nuts. It’s also a good indication that Microsoft’s programmers failed to think like users; if they had, IE 7 would have a very different design.

I’ve been away for a week in the wilds of Wyoming. For the trip, my suitcase was jam packed as usual, so I was delighted that instead of loading up further with a handful of books, all the reading matter I took was in my Kindle.

On the road is where the Kindle really shows its worth. It’s also where you’ll encounter its limits.

I love being able to stock it with a variety of reading matter and thus have something on hand to read no matter what my mood. Heading off on a trip that’s part holiday, part work, it’s hard to know exactly where my reading fancy will alight. With my pre-stocked Kindle, I had no worries on that front at all.

On the other hand, I’m really glad I pre-stocked my Kindle.  Once away from New Orleans, I had no luck at all with Whispernet, the Kindle’s wireless service. I couldn’t get a link in the Salt Lake City airport, nor in Billings, Montana, and certainly not in the small town in Wyoming where I ended up.

If you live in a remote area, or even a not-so-remote area, before purchasing a Kindle you might want to see whether you can get Whispernet service. Without it, the Kindle is still usable, but certainly not as convenient. You can check the wireless coverage for your area using the Kindle Coverage Tool. Note that although Amazon’s Kindle page mentions there’s no wireless coverage “for Kindle in Montana and Alaska”, it fails to mention that in many other states the coverage is close to non-existent.

Manual downloads

Fortunately, you don’t have to use Whispernet to get content onto your Kindle. Connect your Kindle to your computer via a USB cable and you can download content manually.

When you purchase a Kindle book on Amazon, you’ll receive it automatically if you’re in Whispernet territory and your wireless is turned on. If your wireless is not switched on, you’ll automatically receive the item next time you switch it on in Whispernet range. At the same time, the item you purchase is placed in your Amazon Media Library. Visit your media library, click the Downloads link and choose any of the Kindle content (books, newspapers or blogs), and you’ll see a list of your purchased titles. Click the Download To Computer button and you’ll get a copy of the Kindle item on your computer. You can then click and drag this item into your Kindle.

It’s nowhere near as slick as using Whispernet, but at least it means you can use your Kindle anywhere you have an Internet connection.