When I am away from the office or home I still want to be able to communicate from anywhere and these days that means from a browser. A while ago I moved both my home and work emails over to Google Mail which has allowed me to get my email from anywhere but, until recently, I hadn’t managed the same for IM.
Google Mail has had a Chat gadget on the right hand side of the workspace for as long as I can remember but as I am not a Google Talk user it was of no use to me … Read the rest
Stories that caught my eye this week – 12th October 2008:
You can see the rest of my reading list here. … Read the rest
Stories that caught my eye this week – 4th October 2008:
You can see the rest of my reading list … Read the rest
A while ago I bought this hard drive enclosure from Maplin. What I wanted was some storage that I could access across the network rather than locally via a USB cable and this seemed to fit the bill at £35. I slotted in a spare 80gb hard drive and plugged it into the router. Within a couple of minutes I had connected to it from across the network and was able to transfer files back and forwards.
The management software for the device is pretty simplistic allowing you to setup folders and privileges and not much else. However, it does … Read the rest
AppSwing have been using an online project management system FogBugz for a few months now and it’s very good. However, what makes it stand head-and-shoulders above the competition is not the functionality (which is superb and well executed) but the attitude towards support. I have emailed their help desk a few times and have always had a quick and helpful response but what got me this week was an email stating that the service would be down for maintenance. Nothing unusual in that but what WAS unusual was that they had noticed that I was in the UK and provided … Read the rest
Whether you use it as a business tool or just for a bit of fun it is slickly … Read the rest
A new search engine (do we need another one?) has opened for business today. Cuil (pronounced Cool) is brought to us by a couple of ex-Googleites. I thought that I would give it a spin. Cuil reckons that it indexes three times the pages of Google and ten times that of Windows Live Search so my hopes were high to find some new pages.
First impressions were good – it looked slick and had a nice clean interface – though not as clean as Google. The acid test though is on search ability. Initially I searched for “Neil Thompson… Read the rest
I have stated previously (here and here) that the main focus for my attention on my desktop and laptop these days is the browser as I have more and more of my key applications (email, calendar, documents etc.) in the cloud. This is all well and good but this has thrown up a number of issues namely: 15 years of working with Windows means I constantly press Alt-tab to switch applications only to find, now, that I didn’t want to do that as I wanted to remain in the browser; there is a large amount of wasted space … Read the rest
There has been a new update to the Outlook companion Xobni that adds information from LinkedIn. It can now import pictures from the business networking site and also provides (brief) details on the selected individual, typically their title and company. This clearly only works where the email address that they have corresponded with you matches the one recorded in LinkedIn, nevertheless it is still a useful addition.
The Xobni blog also suggests that future updates will provide further integration between the two services when you are logged in but stops short of saying what this will provide.… Read the rest
Microsoft has a couple of similar services that help you access your files (documents, pictures, mp3s etc). These are Skydrive (stupid name, I much preferred Windows Live Folders) which is an online document storage facility with 5gb of free space and FolderShare that allows folders between multiple machines to be synchronised. However, there is one area of clear overlap and that is in that they both allow you to share documents in a folder with multiple people – the difference being that with Skydrive they are held in the cloud and with FolderShare they are on you PC.
I have … Read the rest