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jethro's picture

Web Roundup - cool tools and news

My browser is filling up with pages left right and centre.

30. The New Browser in Town the Google Chrome.jpg I need to reduce the number of windows open – even though I am running Google Chrome now. I have noticed it is way more stable than Firefox and leaves Internet Explorer for dead – except for a few sites that will only open properly in IE. Qantas being one of them. Actually the Qantas site works fine, but the Infotriever software uses a plugin that extracts my flight bookings and inserts them into Outlook for me. So where am I going?

First I am flying to Sydney for the day on 18th October to attend the Australian DrupalCamp. The at Christmas time I am flying to New Zealand to attend a family reunion as the resident tech geek – set up and manage a wifi network, patch PCs, probably build a new one for my folks etc. Oh and hang out with my siblings and nieces and nephews for a couple of days :)

jethro's picture

Breaking news and information

I have something like 20 or more websites open in browser that I want to be able to review or recommend. I haven’t got time so I will link them here, tag on delicious and clip into socialmedian as appropriate.

Here goes.

exclamation.thumbnail Microsoft

jethro's picture

Live Mesh as backup solution

I have written several posts about Live Mesh already. If you won’t know what it is then here is a short explanation of Live Mesh.

livemesh We have implemented Live Mesh in our organisation to provide the following solutions:

  • Synchronisation between staff members of web development files. Currently being used by 1 staff member in China and 2 in Brisbane.
  • Synchronisation of clients files between my office and theirs. Being used by one client so far.
  • Synchronisation of files between my PC and my laptop for travelling. Being used for several projects as well as access to other files.
  • Synchronisation on my PC between my virtual machine and my local  machine for software development files. This is better than using mapped network drives because the history tells me what files have been updated or added.

Amanda is currently researching the use of Live Mesh to share pictures between her work PC, her home PC and her friends PC so that they can seamlessly share hi-res photos. She will write about that soon.

However another possibility has crossed my mind and that is of using Live Mesh for simple file backup. I think this has a great potential for most of our smaller clients with one or to pcs and no backup solution, or maybe only a backup hard drive. I will be trialing this with one particular client who also has a remote access need and see how good it works. I note that PST files are excluded however but the remainder of his files should be able to be backed up online.

 

Here is some recent news about the Live Mesh capabilities and “limits”

  • Size of all contents in a single Live Folder: 10GB (of course there’s still the 5GB quota which limits how much you can synchronize with the Live Desktop)
  • Individual file size: 2GB
  • Items (file or folders) per Live Folder: 100,000
  • Members per Live Folder: 200
  • Number of Live Folders per user: 200
  • Number of devices per user: 100

The countries it is currently enabled for (English locale only) are US, Australia, New Zealand, UK, Canada, India and Ireland. So sign up quick!

jethro's picture

Mission: build a HiFi media centre PC

Objective - build a Media Centre PC that out put HD sound and video utilising the HDMI digital format. Must be able to record 2 channels simultaneously (the Olympics is coming up!)

Budget - there wasn’t one – though there's only so much you can spend doing this.

Parts

  • Zalman HD160XT Plus Home Theatre Case Black
  • Zalman 500W Noiseless Power Supply with Heatpipe
  • Zalman CNPS9500 LED CPU Heatsink
  • Intel S775 Core 2 Duo E8500 3.16GHz CPU
  • ASUS S775 P5Q Core 2 Motherboard
  • Integrated HD Sound Card
  • Integrated Gigabit Network Connection
  • DDR2 4GB Geil 800MHz Dual Channel DDR2 Kit
  • 1TB Seagate 7200rpm 32M Serial ATA HDD
  • 1TB Seagate 7200rpm 32M Serial ATA HDD
  • Pioneer BDC-S02BK Blu-Ray Reader/DVD Writer Combo
  • ASUS ATI 3850 256M PCIe HDMI Video Card
  • Hauppauge HVR-2200 Dual HDTV + Analog Tuner PCIe
  • Microsoft Media Centre Keyboard and Remote
  • Logitech Cordless Mouse
  • Powerware 5110/500VA Line Interactive UPS
  • Vista Ultimate 32 bit

Construction