Monthly Archive for October, 2006

Time Management with QuickLoggerPlus

Published on October 20, 2006 in Personal Development and Health and Tech Reviews. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .
I’m working with a Business Consultant at the moment with a view to growing the business and improving my own productivity. Time management is important to success.

One of the areas to be addressed that has cropped up is quantifying how my time is spent when I’m in the office. I’ve found it difficult to keep a running diary of all the little jobs that I do repetitively, as well handling interruptions, small tasks, etc.

A small VBScipt may be my saviour. QuickLoggerPlus allows you to assign a Keyboard Shortcut (in my case, Ctrl-T) which once pressed pops up a small box allowing you to enter the Task you are working on. This text is then time stamped and appended to a plain text file for each day. Want to know where your time went? Quickly review that file at the end of the day/week to see.

Simple – but effective. I’ll report back in the near future to pass on how effective it has been in practical use.

Internet Explorer v7

Published on October 19, 2006 in Computers and Internet. 1 Comment
I installed Microsoft Internet Explorer v7 this evening which was released after a lengthy Beta testing by Microsoft recently.
 
I’ve been a Mozilla Firefox user for quite some time now, and so IE7 does feel like a "catch up" attempt from Microsoft.
 
As someone who considers himself fairly net savvy, it’s unlikely I’ll ever see the benefit in the new Security features built into this browser. I hope I’ve seen enough phishing scams to know when to steer clear. I can see the benefit to "regular" users though – so it’s a thumbs up from that point of view.
 
There are still some sites that insist on using IE (UK Government Sites, Microsoft Sites, etc.) so the ability to use IE in a tabbed mode will be of benefit also when I’m forced to use IE in the office or on a client site.
 
I’ve yet to try the new site printing feature – but any improvements over the bloody awful way IE 6 used to print sites is to be applauded! Only today I was with a customer using IE 6 who was trying to print a page only to find the web-site content frustratingly got cut off the edge of the paper.
 
The ability to use RSS feeds is also welcome. Again, I’ve been using RSS feeds through Firefox for ages now – but plenty of people I’ve spoken to (including some IT staff) still don’t see the "point" of them. I can only assume this is because they don’t stray far from the "safety" of MS products. Perhaps when it’s coming in a Microsoft product, they’ll now open their eyes to RSS.
 
But all in all… none too exciting I’m afraid! Roll on Firefox 2.0!

Hamachi VPN

Published on October 17, 2006 in Computers and Internet. 1 Comment
I’ve been aware of Hamachi (recently acquired by LogMeIn) for some time. It is a software solution, and free, that allows you to connect multiple computers together in a Virtual Private Network like structure.

I’ve not tested Hamachi before now simply because here at Netlink Towers we run our own dedicated VPN server, and the majority of my customers also have some sort of Remote Access facilities, so there was no need for it’s features.

But I was recently on a client site for the day, wanting access to the e-mail server back at the office, but faced the problem of a flaky Internet connection. The VPN was dropping during Outlook Send/Receives, forcing me to close Outlook, re-connect the VPN, re-open Outlook and so on.

So it was Hamachi to the rescue. The original VPN connection held up long enough for me to install the Hamachi client on our File/Print Server – then on my laptop. 10 minutes later, I had a working VPN connection via Hamachi – and it seemed much more resilient to the flaky Internet connection than my "traditional" VPN client.

As for Security – well if it’s good enough for Steve Gibson, it’s good enough for me.

The always excellent LifeHacker has a good intro to Hamachi. Worth checking out.

Shozu

Published on October 16, 2006 in Computers and Internet. 0 Comments
I’ve been playing around with Shozu today. Shozu is a small application that you can download to your Mobile Phone to allow you to share Pictures and Videos taken with your Cameraphone, by sending them to sites such as Flickr or YouTube.

In my case, I wanted to send pics from my phone directly to my Flickr account.

I’m using a Sony Ericsson k700i, and after downloading the Java Applet, and checking my GPRS settings (all of which the Shozu instructions guide you through) I was able to name, tag and upload pics from my phone directly to my Flickr space! Even outside of a 3G area with a slow GPRS connection, the application uploaded pics in the background letting you get on with other things.

Flickr have always given the option to upload pics via e-mail, but the Shozu application really makes editing them simple. A thumbs up!

Click TV Show

Published on October 15, 2006 in Computers and Internet. 0 Comments
It often gets overlooked, because here in the UK it is broadcast on BBC News 24 at some very odd times, and in the rest of the world it goes out through, well, BBC World Service… but BBCs "Click" (formerly "Click Online") show is available through the BBC web-site and is excellent viewing covering Technology news, articles and web-site reviews.

This weeks show covers the slow-down in computer game sales and the reasons, the next generation of interactive computer games, as well as the usual spots. You can watch it again here.