Windows tip: Whether you use them or not, many applications install superfluous entries to your Windows right-click context menu resulting in a cluttered mess. The How-To Geek weblog details how to clean up your messy Windows context menu using a variety of methods, from manual registry hacks to using the simple, previously mentioned ShellExView. If you steer clear of the right-click because it’s become such a cluttered mess, do yourself a favor by cleaning it and customizing it to fit your needs.

Web PR worker Steve Rubel has a great post at his Micro Persuasion blog detailing how he adapted Gmail to serve as his ideal start page for nearly anything he needs to get done. Lots of stuff is built into Gmail by default—like web or mail search and RSS web clips—but Rubel goes into detail on using Google Talk to update IM-friendly social services, Labs tools like Quick Links and the new gadgets to access his calendar, documents, and vital services, and start his writing in an auto-saving Gmail box, to be mailed to other writing apps. It’s a neat primer for creating a manageable, inter-connected workflow in the webapp cloud, if you’re down for that sort of thing. Got your own Gmail-centric system, or another app that’s a smarter start page? Tell us in the comments.

With CEO Jerry Yang leaving Yahoo and the company’s stock price sinking, ZDNet writer Jason Perlow get a bit nervous about the sanctity of his photos on Flickr and started looking for solutions to back them up. I backed mine up using FlickrEdit, the updated Java Web Start application formerly known as Flickr Backup, but like Perlow it didn’t quite get the whole job done. We’ve covered flickrfs, which only runs on Linux. Any readers care to recommend a way to back up a large Flickr account on Windows or Mac OS X machines?

iPhone/iPod touch only: With Mocha VNC Lite, iPhone and iPod touch users already have a tool for connecting remotely to their desktops, but what about those who like to get things done over a command line? Free iPhone app TouchTerm provides SSH-encrypted terminal access to any Linux, OS X, or even Windows system running a server, making mobile rebooting or service starting over Wi-Fi or EDGE/3G connections possible. The app supports landscape mode, a must for serious two-thumb typing, can save connections for easy access. The $11.99 pro version adds advanced gesture and copy/paste support, amongst other features, but the basic free edition can get the job done. TouchTerm is a free download for iPhones and iPod touch models running the 2.0 firmware only.

The search-by-voice iPhone app we heard about on Friday may not have shown up as planned, but it is now available from the iTunes App Store. The iTunes page itself doesn’t show the app as updated, but download and sync it anyway, and you’ll notice a shiny new Google Mobile on your iPhone complete with voice-recognition. I’ve just started playing with it, but my initial one-word review: Amazing!