Solo Technology

Running around getting ready for a big family weekend. Odds are, this may be the last post for a few days.

Here’s a pile of things that folks might find interesting. I’ve had them on my “to write about” stack for overly long, so tonight we cover a lot of ground!

Gliffy still rocks my socks. Looks like I last mentioned them back in May. I’m not sure how much has changed since then, but it is definitely still very useful. I’ve spent much of this week using it for some application workflow design and am quite pleased with how simple and intuitive it is to work with.

I once wrote a post about robocopy (Shuffling and Syncing) that still seems to be in the top 10 of my high traffic articles every month. Robocopy is very powerful, very fast — and very much a command line utility, which can be a bit off-putting to some folks. Well good news, there’s a Robocopy GUI available now. One might argue that it’s an interface clearly written by a coder for other coders… but it gets the job done nicely.

Do you use Outlook for email? You might have a glance at the Microsoft Junk E-mail Reporting Tool. Send spam to Microsoft to help improve their junk mail filtering technologies. Seems like a worthwhile investment if you’ll be with Outlook for a while yet.
Speaking of Outlook and spam, the SpamBayes plugin is incredibly useful. Last mentioned it in February and it is still in daily use for my work email.

Zamzar is an impressive (and free) web based file conversion app that knows a lot of formats. Pretty cool, but I just couldn’t figure out how to focus an entire post on it…

Did you catch the Google Desktop Update back in mid-November? Big change? The sidebar isn’t nearly as obnoxious. I have hopes of finding time to install it and run it through the paces soon.

Final note, there’s an update to the Microsoft RDC client. (what’s RDC?) Basically, this brings things inline with the Vista client. I like the visual improvements (32 bit color!), but what’s really interesting is this notion of TS Remote Programs:

TS Remote Programs is a feature of Windows Server Terminal Services that lets client computers connect to a remote computer and use programs that are installed on it. For example, a workplace may have a remote computer to which employees can connect and run Microsoft Word. An administrator must first publish the programs for end-users to access them. The experience is the same as running a program that is installed on the computer.

Ok, that would be cool. Perilously close to how things work with X-Window in the *nix world, but very very cool.

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