Tech @ FuryTech

I’ve been in the process of figuring out how to synchronize my two desktops and my laptops. Synching files is pretty easy, as there are many tools out there that can do that. Synching Outlook, on the other hand, took a lot more effort.

Since I didn’t want to set up an exchange server, I was stuck using a third party tool to keep things up to date. In the process of my searching I found OsaSync. It wasn’t cheap, $99 for 3 computers, but it had a trial, so I downloaded that.

Configuring it took a while, as I have a 900mb PST, and it had to index everything. However, once it was done, it seamlessly handled synchronizing all my emails, contacts, tasks, and calendar items. After the initial sync is done, it checks the other systems every 15 min or so, and updates them.

So far, it seems to be pretty bug-free, only annoying thing I’ve noticed is that it doesn’t seem to recognize a shift-delete as a real delete, and synchs the email anyway. All that means is that you have to delete the email and remove it from the deleted items rather than just shift-deleting it.

Highly recommended, you can get it here.

Probably the best part about Firefox is the extensions. There is an enourmous amount of them out there, some are useful, some are ok, and some just don’t do what they advertise.

These are the five that I use the most often.

1. Foxmarks

Foxmarks is a bookmark synchronizer that keeps your bookmarks synchronized with their server in the background. You can have multiple computers linked to your Foxmarks account, so whenever you add or remove a bookmark from one computer, it’s added or removed from all your other computers. It makes using Firefox on multiple computers a lot easier, as you always have your bookmarks with you.

2. SiteAdvisor

SiteAdvisor verifies the safety of the sites that you’re visiting. If they’re known scam sites or have downloads that have adware in them, it changes the color of it’s icon at the bottom of the screen. It also inserts an icon on all Google search results, so you can verify the safety of a link before clicking on it. It’s not always 100% accurate, but it’s nice to have one more layer of protection.

3. Adblock Plus

If you’re only going to install one extension, it should be Adblock Plus. It removes virtually all the ads from the sites you visit. If one is missed, you can just right click on it, and select adblock, and it’s gone. Webpages look nicer, load faster, and just generally work better.

4. DownThemAll

DownThemAll is the best Download Manager that I’ve used yet. It supports multiple connections to a server so you can download files faster, nice queuing options, and it can rename the files as you download them to whatever convention you specify. It also can mass-download all files that fit a specific criteria. It’s definitely recommended to anyone who downloads a large number of files.

5. PicLens

My final favorite extension doesn’t really do anything useful. But, it does make viewing pictures online much nicer. Whenever you visit a website that has PicLens support, mainly Facebook, MySpace, Picasa, Flickr, and so on, you can click the PicLens button, and have it display all the photos on the page in a 3d wall which you can pan, rotate, and zoom in and out on. It’s quite impressive, and beats viewing the images as thumbnails or one at a time.

I’ve recently done some work with a IP Camera security system. Got some Zonet cameras that work great, however the included software is pretty lame. It does great for realtime view, but the motion detection is pretty bad, and since I can’t really record all the time, I’ve been looking into alternative programs.

In the process of searching, I came across Blue Iris. It’s a program that can monitor and record up to 25 IP cameras. It was pretty cheap too, so I picked up a copy.

It installed pretty painlessly, and adding webcams was a breeze. It supports my cameras out of the box, so all I had to do was enter the IP address and the login info and I was set. It offers an insane number of options for the cameras, ranging from multiple motion detection zones to scheduled snapshots.

In addition to the camera recording support, it also offers remote uploading of the clips and a full server app, letting you view the cameras from the browser on another computer on the network or anywhere online with port forwarding. It’s quite impressive.

The only real downside with it is that it’s pretty CPU intensive, so the realtime view doesn’t work so well on the lower end systems with more than 6-7 cameras. To fully use the functionality of the program, a fast dualcore or quadcore system is highly recommended.

I’ve recently dropped using Windows Media Player 11 for my music purposes. I have a pretty large library of music, and WMP11 was just getting slower and slower, sometimes freezing for over a minute while switching songs. It was getting quite annoying to deal with.

I tried iTunes, and it just didn’t work, it was even more unstable than WMP11.

In the midst of searching for music programs, I came across MediaMonkey. It claimed to support enourmous librarys, so I downloaded it and gave it a try.

It added everything in my library without crashing, and let me bounce around between artists and albums without a bit of slowdown. I downloaded the old Winamp Last.FM plugin so I could keep using Last.FM. I also downloaded the “Now Playing” plugin for Messenger Live Plus so I could still show the current song in my status message.

It uses very little memory, rarely taking over 40mb in my experience, which beats both WMP11 and iTunes by a huge amount.

The only real downside with it is that it’s interface isn’t as clean as WMP11’s is, but that’s a pretty small complaint when one looks at all it can do.

Highly recommended, you can get it here.

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Most people find the Windows XP copy function sadly lacking. If even a single file can’t be copied, the entire operation fails. Vista fixes most problems like that, but XP users are sadly left out. There is a third-party solution. It’s called TeraCopy.

Teracopy can do everything the XP copy/move can do, and so much more. It lets you queue operations, adjust the buffers, and easily pause/resume file transfers. If it encounters an error, it pauses and lets you decide what to do, and doesn’t abort the entire operation like XP does.

In my experience, it works great with XP, but it’s somewhat quirky with Vista. It’s freeware, so it’s definitely worth checking out. If you want more features, you can get the Pro version for roughly $30 depending on exchange rates.

I recently purchased a PRS-505 Ebook reader, as I have a fairly extensive collection of ebooks off of Gutenberg, and trying to read them all on the computer is pretty annoying.

Before I got it, I took a lot of time to compare features among the various ebook readers out there. I narrowed it down to the Kindle and the Sony. The Kindle offered a full keyboard and internet browsing, however, it was significantly more, and it was a bit more unwieldly. It also made it difficult to put on third-party ebooks on it, so I ended up going with the Sony.

Having had it for a few weeks now, I can safely say it is the coolest piece of technology that I own. The screen is great, it really is like looking a piece of paper. Battery life lasts for ever, as it only really uses the battery to turn the page. It charges off of a USB port, but it has the option for an external adapter. When it’s plugged in, it shows up as a drive to windows, which makes it very easy to quickly transfer your books over. Sadly, the software that Sony provides to access their store is pretty buggy.

It supports displaying pictures in greyscale, and has a very basic mp3 player as well. It has enough onboard memory for at least 150 books. As for file formats that it supports, it does text, PDF, and Sony’s personal format. It doesn’t handle LIT files, which is too bad, as I had a lof of those. Also, keep in mind that PDF files are rendered to fit a specific size, so they don’t always look right on the reader unless you resize them or place the screen in landscape mode.

All in all, it’s a great piece of hardware, and highly recommended.

You can get it here.

If you want to play with one before buying it, Target sells them, and some of the stores have a display model.

In this column, you’ll be able to find fun links to other websites, read mini-reviews of products, and general rants. Have fun!