Having been inspired by Lifehacker’s workspace show and tell, I’ve decided to organise my workspace a bit.

I have a quite deep, wooden desk with drawers which tend to fill with clutter. I’ve decided to feed a powerstrip through the back of one of the drawers so I can plug in two usb hubs and my MacBook power cable there, out of the way. I’ve also managed to organise a system for filing my papers (I hate paper, it should always be on screen and searchable!) loosely based on the GTD (Getting Things Done) meme.

One thing I’ve done is to mount a powerstrip to the back of the desk, so I lose some of the trailing cables. It still amazes me, though, how many wires a single office space can generate! There’s still a cluttered feeling to the desk, and there’s nothing on it aside from computing paraphanelia.

I’m planning to put some shelves behind the monitor—the desk is very deep—on which to place external hard-drive and other necessities. I’d like to hide the cables behind it somehow, so they aren’t trailing in any way. I’ve bundled all the cabling with wire ties, and fed most leads through the monitor back, creating a funnel. The overall appearance, though, is still a bit too ad-hoc or rustic or… I don’t know.

What do you think? What would you do with this desk space?

On Engadget, I noticed a post about much-rumoured "Google Phone". Apparently, they have it on good authority that the people over at Google are working on their own Mobile OS. The interesting bit, though, is that Google has been working very closely with Apple on the iPhone project. If they launch their own Google Phone (gPhone, Googlephone, whatever…) they will be in direct competition.

What I wonder, however, is whether Google and Apple are playing even closer together. Imagine two companies more able to launch intuitive products and acquire companies and methods in order to put them to better use within a larger structure. Google, recently, has been launching its Web Office while hoovering up smaller developers to bring in the very best of web-based and hybrid (web/desktop) applications. What does Google need next?

Brilliant hardware. Who builds better hardware than Apple?

This is only a guess, but what happens if Google and Apple work closer on mobile tech? Instead of direct competition (which would only result in a proliferation of one-upmanship devices and platforms with little long-term customer satisfaction) a JV of some description could result in the best of breed mobile devices (and why just mobile) with a very long shelf life!

What do you reckon?