Surfing The Web So You Don't Have To
All you need is a VNC Server running on a few machines, and this little app, and you can have a seamless desktop that cycles between all your machines. I have six machines here at the office running VNC full time (so I don’t have to hike upstairs to fool with them) as well as a couple at home, and this will make working with them VERY nice and smooth.
Credit goes to Chris for the link.
While we’re getting wireless networking, and Bluetooth will get rid of a few cables, if your office is anything like John Dvorak’s (and mine, for that matter) you have dozens of wires in your office — and you’ll never get rid of more than half of them unless they figure out a viable way to wirelessly deliver electricity.
There are lots of freely available Linux-based router/firewalls packages out there, but I’ve been trying to find one that’s not only powerful, but really easy to use. Enter Smoothwall. This software, based on what I see here, is REALLY slick, powerful, well-documented, and free. Very nicely done. I think I’ll install this on an old PC I have sitting here and run it at home.
If you’re looking to find some good tech books, this site contains links to a pile of free ones that are available around the net, sorted into categories. You are welcome to view, download and print the books for your own private use at no charge. Most of the books there are programming books, but there are some other good books there as well.
If you don’t know, Thunderbird is a stand-alone mail client, created as a redesign of the Mozilla mail component. I’m considering switching our office from using Outlook Express to Thunderbird, mostly because keeping up on the patches for OE is a pain in the butt, and OE doesn’t have built-in spam filtering .If you need more reasons, Neil has a pile of reasons why he thinks Thunderbird is superior, I still use Outlook 2002 myself, as I use its scheduling functions quite a bit, but if I didn’t need them, I’d be using Thunderbird.
But here’s the trick: Making the move from OE to Thunderbird as seamless as possible. For this, you just need to read this step-by-step guide, and a little motivation. As the article points out, if you’re using OE because you can check your Hotmail account from it (now there’s a compelling reason to keep OE — so you can download all your Hotmail spam as well as your normal spam), Hotmail Popper will allow you to access your Hotmail e-mail from any client.
If you haven’t heard the about the latest Blaster worm, you’ve been living in a hole. Thankfully, my firewall’s setup right, but the logs still show about 150 hits an hour on the affected ports.
If you’ve ever looked at your running processes in Windows (commonly known as the task list) and wondered what some obscure entry was on there, bookmark this site now. They discuss the relevence of some of those hard-to-identify .exe files, and how to turn them off, as well.
According to this list of the oldest 100, symbolics.com is the oldest .com domain name, registered all the way back in March in 1985 (I can’t currently get to their site). BBN.com is the next one on the list, over a month later. There was a total of six domains that were registered in 1985, and then a bunch of the big players hit in 1986 (Xerox, HP, Sun, Intel, IBM, GE, and AT&T, just to name a few). An interesting history lesson, indeed.
Thanks to Neil for pointing this out (and I can’t believe I didn’t see it sooner, as I’ve been checking their site daily for about a month). Trillian is a project I’ve supported since v0.5. It’s great chunk of software that allows me to get on all the IM networks in one program (see my handles here). And they’ve finally released a 2.0 Beta (for Pro members only). I’ll be installing it later, and I just hope my favorite skin decides to update to take advantage of some new features of the beta (but I can’t really talk about them too much because of an NDA imposed on beta folks). Now if I can just remember my Jabber username and password…