Chances are you have a picture on desktop as a background. Maybe even a picture related to japan and Japanese. I admit that it might look good, but you paid good money for that monitor space, don’t waste it. Look at this:
What is it you ask?
Well it is only the best use of desktop space there is,
Three RSS feeds from three major Japanese newspapers, http://mainichi.jp http://www.hokkaido-np.co.jp and http://www.asahi.com/
Two gaming related RSS feeds from http://www.kotaku.jp/ and http://www.famitsu.com/
A timer for time boxing, my email plus the AJATT twitter feed.
Oh and a clock and computer resource monitor.
The benefit is simple, rather than staring that the same image I’ve seen hundreds of times I get the latest real world and gaming news plus Japanese practice all without changing any of my habits. Even if you cannot read it all simply having it there will mean that you will have yet another place in your environment where immersion is inevitable.
Oh and the best part was how easy it was easy to do it by using the open source and pure awesome windows program RainMeter. It shouldn’t take more than an hour to set everything up. Of course if you have time to get lost in it Rainmeter also has a ton of potential for customisation. Either way http://www.customize.org/rainmeter/skins is the perfect place to start once you have basic Rainmeter installed.
Ugh, this reads way too much like a peice of marketing, msut go to show how awesome the program is right?