Home & Small Office Computer Guide

Well I’ve finally been able to come up for air after a long and protracted period of hard work on a number of projects for various clients.

While much of our business is handled in a home based office we also have a store-front location that’s staffed three days a week. That may sound rather unusual but it does work for us but there is one hassle and that’s keeping our files on the computer at the store in synch with the files on our computers here at home. There’s nothing worse than being at the shop and finding the file you wanted is still back on your computer.

We’ve tried a couple of options, none of which really worked for us, and we had pretty much given up on finding something that would suit our situation until today.

It seems that Microsoft have a little program in beta called FolderShare. It’s free and it’s quite a small file to download too. We’re in the process of installing it now so we’ll let you know if it works for us.

There is a growing move afoot in the computer world to use thin clients. Now don’t think that, if you’re like me and have a little bit more to cuddle, other businesses are going to start refusing to work with you. Remember, we’re talking computer talk now and thin client has nothing to do with your belt size and probably even less to do with your hat size.

No, a thin client refers to the file size of the programme that resides on your computer. If you like to use Microsoft products like Word and Excel you may have seen them described as ‘bloated’ and that’s an indication of what someone else thinks about the file size of the programme.

Well, bloated is in the eye of the beholder because if the tool works and works the way you want it to work who cares how much space it may or may not take up on your hard drive. These days the size of hard drives is increasing and their cost is coming down so bloat or not doesn’t really matter in my humble opinion.

However, if you are worried about bloat then you might be tempted to try some of those thin clients that are out there. That software is thin because most of it resides on the Internet rather than on your computer.

Now that may suit your business in some circumstances. Perhaps you or your staff travel a lot and you want to cut down on the software that has to be installed on the hard drives of the laptops that go on the road.

And then there’s the cost of licensing all that software. If you want to install Microsoft Office on several machines the price of those licenses can take your breath away and make some of the thin online clients look rather attractive. That attraction can become almost irresistible when you realize that some of those online clients are free.

However, don’t let the hype about thin versus bloat and the price tag blind you to reality.

The reality is that Internet connections can still fail, there are plenty of motels out there that still don’t give you access to a phone line for your modem and sometimes the servers where these thin clients reside are going to fail.

What do you do at times like that? Sit back and twiddle your thumbs?

Thin might be good but chubby can be better especially if productivity is an issue.

None of the Nortons products have ever been very high on the list of security software that we recommend and over the last few years Nortons products have really begun to sink to the bottom of the list. We see far too many virus riddled machines coming into our friend’s computer shop for repair that were supposed to be protected by Norton Anti-Virus for us ever to think of Nortons as anything more than a placebo.

Of course that has led to us receiving a lot of criticism for rubbishing a wonderful product and these days when the discussion turns to anti-virus software we tend to find some excuse to depart for the other end of town. It’s either that or wind up being dissed as haters by Nortons sycophants who attack us in one breathe and then wonder why their machines are running slow in the next.

So it’s nice to see a real expert who doesn’t think mucht of Norton range of products either. The Bleeding Edge is a blog written by a leading IT journalist here in Australia and here he gives yet another reason why Nortons is the becoming the joke of the computer security world.

If you haven’t tried Wikepedia before then before you do perhaps you should take heed of what the co-founder - Jimmy Wales - is now admitting.

He now freely admits that there are real quality problems with the online project.

Well I would have thought that was always going to be a very real and almost unavoidable danger.

If you don’t know about Wikepedia let me give you an analogy so that you can understand the scope of the project and the looming problems.

Think of it as an enormous online encyclopedia - with parts of it written by anyone who wants to. There doesn’t seem to be any requirement for them to have any knowledge of what they are writing about. The general idea is that someone who does know what they’re talking about will come along and correct the misinformation that others have added.

Perhaps I am being a litte unfair but it is only and analogy.

On Friday a federal court in the USA brought down a landmark ruling that could have far-reaching implications.

The Court, sitting in Chicago, found that the ancient legal doctrine of trespass applies to the interference that spyware causes to many people’s home computers.

Where a ruling like that will take us is unclear but, it seems, that common sense and the Law have joined forces for once.

I’m sure that there are a lot of people out there who have heard about Konfabulator and their widgets before. If you’re one of those people then I guess that you’ll just have to humour me because I only found out about them on Friday.

Konfabulator popped into someone’s brain back in 1998 when that person thought it would be cool to have a skinnable MP3 player. From there it was only a short step to thinking about skinning any information you wanted to see on your desktop and that is how Konfabulator came about.

Kofabulator is a fairly quick download and an easy set up and once you have it you can then go to their site for the widgets that you think you will need. A widget is a simple script that can display information on your desktop.

There are currently over 1300 widgets to choose from and they include games, dates and times, news feeds, systems utilities, webcams from around the world and a lot of other stuff too. There are even several widgets for cricket scores.

Downloading the widgets is pretty simple too and most of them are self-installing. Once they are on your machine you can have them running on your desktop continuously. They consume little in the way of resources and disappear into the background when you’re working.

At the moment, because the novelty hasn’t worn off yet I’m running six widgets on one of my screens. There are

a couple of system utilities

an analog clock

an interesting little widget that shows which parts of the world are in darkeness (that might sound useless to lots of people but we work constantly with clients all round the world so it helps to know when they’re asleep)

a picture frame that cycles through any image directory I might point it to

a headline reader that shows me the latest offerings on slashdot.com

I think it’s a great idea and most people will find something useful in amongst all those widgets. Yahoo thought it was such a great idea that they bought the company.

At one time or another everyone needs to be able to grab the whole screen as an image. Of course that’s what the PrtScn key is for on the keyboard but what if you don’t want the whole screen?

Perhaps you only need a very small image from the screen or maybe you need the whole screen less the assorted tool bars, what do you use for that?

Well here is a little tool that I have found that’s invaluable for grabbing the full desktop, a fixed portion of the desktop or even a variable area of the desktop.

It’s called MWSnap and you can find it by following the link.

It’s a free download, although the author does ask for a donation, and it installs very easily and is quite simple to use.

Here is a snap I took of the whole screen Less the toolbars) on one of my computers:

and here is another using the variable size tool.

Once you have the snapshot you want you can then save it to anywhere on your computer at any quality level you need.

Because of the nature of the work I do in reviewing websites I find that I’m using this tool almost every day.

Now I know that this sounds really weird and I really shouldn’t be letting my imagination run away with me but I think my partner - the light of my life - she who brought light and happiness into my life - has some strange ability to communicate with operating systems.

Yes, I knew it! You’ve immediately consigned me to the bin marked ‘Crack Pots, Looney Tunes, and other Demented Nitwits’ - but not so. I am as perfectly insane as any other computer user but my wife does have this strange ability.

Consider the evidence - ever since the introduction of digital watches she has been unable to wear one and have it last longer than three days. Good quality or absolute crap - it doesn’t matter, they all die after about three days.

And now that strange ability to destroy things is beginning to manifest itself in her computers. She has a laptop that works fine but after she has used it for a couple of months it dies. The software corrupts and it has to be formatted and re-loaded.

And then there is her PC. Over the last couple of years, despite changes in motherboards and peripherals it too starts to die. Invariably it’s the USB ports that go first. One at a time they just stop working for no apparent reason. Anything that is plugged into those ports can be moved to my computer and it works fine but if she tries to transfer a file across the network to anything plugged into a USB port on another machine it never reaches it’s destination.

Last week it all started again and one by one her USB ports failed so tomorrow it goes back to the computer shop for another format and reload.

I guess we could live with it but the failures are happening more frequently.

And you thought I was joking - where is the them from the X Files?

I still can’t believe that something as simple as adding a dual-head graphic card to one of the computers in my office, plugging in a second monitor to that machine and moving everything from one side of the office to the other could take so much time!

These are the days of plug and play - surely the days of plug and pray have gone forever?

Alas it’s not the case. Oh the dual-head plugged in ok but when I switched the computer on it only saw one screen - a little bit of fiddling and I’ve got wallpaper on both monitors but no matter how hard I try I can’t move anything over to the second monitor … but wait … the light bulb is beginning to show some light.

Of course, I wanted the primary monitor in front of me and the only space for the secondary monitor was to the left of the primary one. So naturally, when I wanted to move something to the secondary screen I moved it to the left and nothing happened.

And just now a ray of light burst through the dark clouds of frustration and general grumpiness and I moved something to the right - away from the secondary screen … and of course it appeared.

Oh silly man that I am …

Of course, even the simple job of moving my desk from one side of the room to the other was not that simple. Cords, leads, surge protectors, phone line and all the other assorted junk takes time. But it’s done and now perhaps it’s time to sit back and blow my ears off with some Bond - played with a lot of bass.

Thank goodness Toni (my partner) doesn’t have it on her computer yet - with her six speakers and sub-woofer it’s likely to endanger the back wall of her office

Well, after a couple of days down in the salt mines working on the pilot for a major project a client wants us to undertake I’m back. That project has taught me a lot and before we get started on the full version of the project we’re going to have to upgrade two of the computers, add a fourth monitor and re-arrange the office but I’ll talk more about that another time.

One thing I noticed in those couple of days when I was almost right out of the loop is that I need an appointment calendar for the computer. Something that will pop up and remind me of things I have to do.

I think that’s a problem that many small business or home business people have. Sure you can make a note of them in your diary … but then you have to discipline yourself to keep on checking your diary.

You can write them on sticky notes … but they have a tendency to fall off wherever you stuck them and the appointment is forgotten.

If you work in front of your computer all day you can always use Outlook to remind you … that of course depends on whether you use Outlook or even want to have it installed on your computer.

If you’re one of those fiercely independent people that don’t want to use outlook then here are links to two little programmes that definitely do look interesting.

The first is AnnoMate and it describes itself as “an online personal organizer featuring calendars, contacts, photo albums, file storage, to-do lists, invitations, bookmarks, grouple sharing and more.”

It comes with a thirty day free trial and from then on it’s $3.95 a month or $29.87 a year.

The second is Rainlendar and it describes itself as “a customisable calendar that displays the current month.” Its features include the ability to synchronize between several clients, localized for multiple languages, shows an alarm when an event is due and it also includes a to-do list.

It appears to be free although a donation via Paypal is requested.

I have no affiliation with either of these products and I have not had a chance to try either of them. I simply offer them to you based on the recommendations of others that I work with.