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.

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.