I recently had to transfer some files totaling 249 MB with a family member who lives in phoenix and live in the Dallas Fort Worth area. so we first tried Hamachi but it ran to slow on his computer so we then tried TeamViewer which I have covered before a little but had yet to put it through its paces. The one feature I had been really wanting to try out was file transfer which I got to use for this. the files were transferred in 45 min. I have to mention that we were both on high speed connections. I also recently used another feature that allowed me to access my computer remotely with out any one at the remote computer. I was also able to run the program with out installing it on the controlling computer. the more I use and explore this program the more useful it becomes.

OK my web cam stopped working when I upgraded to Windows Vista.  And I also like using the speech recognition program that comes with vista.  So I’ve been looking around for a solution both so I came across this article the other day of any use of PlayStation two eyetoy as a web cam with I was eager to try it out is already had a PlayStation eyetoy that we never use.  So follow the instructions that was an article and lo and behold is the best web cam I’ve used so far and audio from microphone was good enough that I was able to use this this speech recognition from quite a ways with better accuracy that normally do.  So if you have an eyetoy she give this a try.  So here is a link to the site. Turn a PS2 EyeToy Camera into a High-Quality Webcam.

Ok I have had a PDA of some sort for 5 years now and a pocket PC for 3 but just recently I traded phones with my brother so now I have a windows mobile 5 phone edition. So I am using a smaller screen then I am used to and am more sensitive to the way I enter text. I have been messing with impute programs since my first PDA and have found a few alternative text entry programs.

Pcm keyboard – Pcm keyboard is a pretty cool keyboard that acts like the keyboard on the iphone and can be skinned to look like the iphone keyboard. pocketcm.com/contact.php

Touchpal- now this is my favorite so far. I love the layout of the keyboard. And how word suggestion is handled. Normally I am a slow at typing but with this keyboard I am quite a bit faster. Its free until December 8 2007.  www.cootek.com/download.html    

If you know of other software let me know.

I am obsessed with being on time and I am almost always several minutes early to everything. But I also have trouble with remembering the exact date for up coming events. I do have my windows mobile phone for myself  but I also have a need for a calendar on my computer so I use Sunbird. Now you could ask why am I using Sunbird  instead of outlook that comes with windows mobile devices or even windows calendar that’s with vista . Well you see I need to create calendars that can be printed out  and Sunbird lets me do that. You can print calendars        that just list events or a full monthly calendar. I don’t even print out the calendars anymore I print them as PDF files and email them. Sunbird is made by Mozilla the same one’s who make Firefox so you know its good. You can get it at www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/sunbird/.

I have never been a fan of paying for software when free and open source programs are available. Most people have Microsoft office or works but both can cost a lot of money well more then I am willing to pay. Any ways there are free alternatives that are in some ways better then office and  word. First if you just want a word processor then try abiword it is a great open source word processor. I found it to be fast and you can’t bear the price. Now if you are looking for a free alternative to all of the stuff Microsoft office has then open office  is for you it has everything from a power point alternative to a spreadsheet application. It is also an  open source project. The cool thing about open office is that it can open and create just about  every document format you can think of.
You can get abiword at www.abisource.com 
And you can get open office at www.openoffice.org

I like to backup every thing I keep three copies of my calendar and address book, and I used to backup my mp3 played but then I got my first iPod nano. Now with other mp3 players you can use a file explorer to copy the songs to another folder but you can’t do that with iPods. So I went in search for a solution and found iDump. iDump will find all the audio and video files on your iPods it then allows you to select the files you want to backup. It finished the backup pretty fast . You can even run it from the iPods itself . It was handy when I upgraded to the new iPods nano third generation. You can get it at codershole.com.

GOM sounds like some sort of toy you wouldn’t think is was one of the most versatile media player I know of. GOM comes with a lot of audio and video codecs already installed and if it doesn’t  have the codec it will help you find them. GOM can even play flv files. And it does this all with very little resources and best of all it’s free. You can get it at   gomplayer.com . By the way it can play files vlc can’t.

Microsoft’s disk defragmenter in windows has always been slow and is harder to use in vista. But you have to  defragment your drive any where from two weeks to once a month depending on your use. So if you are like me and don’t want to wait an hour or more for your drive to defragment use Auslogics Disk Defrag. It’s fast and best of all free. It has also been reviewed by cnet.com. You can get it at  www.auslogics.com/disk-defrag/.

Now at one time adobe dominated all thing PDF, But no more now you can make your own PDF’s and you don’t even need adobe reader. You can find a few really nice readers now like Foxit. But if you are looking for a light and fast reader get Sumatra. It is fast , uses very little resources and I think it makes PDF’s look better then other readers. You can also put it on removable storage  drive by downloading the zip file and unzipping it in the drive. You can get it at blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/index.html. If you now of other readers leave a comment.

This is a really cool program it lets you access your network over the Internet with file and printer sharing. You can disable the sharing in the setup. The computers on both sides have to have Hamachi software running on them. It is great if lets say you have family across the country but want to share your many gigs of pictures, home videos, or even the PDF files you’ve made. They can get to them as if they are on your home network. Another example it your at a wifi hotspot with your notebook and want to print something you can just connect to your network and use the shared printer. Gamers are now using it to play  multiplayer games as if they are on the same LAN because it is faster and more secure then normal online play. Those are just a few of the possibilities. If it sounds cool you can get it at  https://secure.logmein.com/products/hamachi/vpn.asp . If you have other ways of using Hamachi post a comment .