If you’re like me, your desk is a tangle of cables amidst a swarm of hubs and docking boxes. Now Belkins has a solution for at least part of this problem.

Beginning in May, Belkin will be offering a family of desktop USB hubs, and an iPod dock, which go into that round, cable access hole that is cut into many desktops.

The “Front-Access In-Desk USB Hub” fits into a 3-inch access opening. It features a stylish, angled column of four USB ports for easy connection of your digital camera, mouse, or any other USB device.

Belkin also offers in-desk USB hubs which have the ports flush with the surface of the desk. A 3 port unit for the 2-inch access hole, and 4 ports for the 3-inch.

Finally the “In-Desk Dock for iPod” provides a convenient docking port for a wide range of iPod devices.

Each of these Docks supports USB 2, and has a suggested price of US$39.99.

Looking at the application dock just now it occurred to me that that was an interesting collection of apps. Maybe not. But for better or worse, here they are (show us yours too if you like):

Grab — We start right out with an oddball. This is the standard screen grab utility that comes with the Mac, and I basically NEVER use it. But it’s open now cause I couldn’t get any of my usual tools to grab the application dock. But Capture->”Timed Screen” did the trick. I quit it the moment after I took the shot, and probably won’t see it again for a long time.

Finder — Ah the Finder. At Merlin Mann’s suggestion, I tried Path Finder for awhile, but Finder is good enough for me. I’ve even gotten used to the left-hand-icon-sidebar of Tiger. Although I really wish we could get consistent about what a single- vs double-click does on an icon.
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Like many others, I use Skype and Call Recorder to record my podcast, Uncontrolled Airspace. They’ve been working great together for months now. I highly recommend both.

But this past week I did a stupid thing, and this morning it bit me in the butt.

Simply put, if you upgrade to Skype 2.5, make sure you’re also using the latest version of Call Recorder: 1.0.7. If you’re still using 1.0.6, like I was, then only one side of the conversation will get recorded. And you don’t want that.

For the past few days I’ve been playing around with the social site twitter.com. It’s an oddball kind of thing. The idea is to post little snippets of what you’re doing or thinking.

Then, anyone can subscribe to your “twitters” and follow what you’re up to. And you can subscribe to others’. It has hundreds (thousands?) of regular, everyday people twittering about their days. But it also has a fascinating smattering of tech celebrities.

I was turned onto to it by MacBreak Weekly regulars Merlin Mann and Leo Laporte (I’m following their twitters, sadly they’re not following mine).

There are many other tech celebs, too. There’s someone claiming to be Steve Jobs, and two people claiming to be Woz (there’s even a slight chance that one of them is real).

You can follow people’s twitters on the twitter.com website. But most people set it up to have them sent as text msgs to their phones, other mobile devices, or to their computer IM client. You can post twitters from each of those too.

The Macintosh connection here is an excellent twitter “client” called Twitterific. It’s an app that runs in the background, and pops up anytime one of your “friends” makes a comment. You can also use it to post your own twitters. It adds an item to the right side of your menubar, so you can easily open its window when the spirit moves you to tell the world that you’re headed out for a dentist appointment.

Anyway, the whole thing is oddly addictive. It’s a new way to be part of a distributed community.

If you decide to give it a try, put your twitter name in the comments, and I’ll add you to my list. And if you want to add me as a twitter friend my name is jackhodgson.