PCIN.net Update

From the Globe and Mail:

Rev. Lisa Vaughan wants to say a prayer for your BlackBerry.

Or maybe your laptop or any other communication gadget you use.

Rev. Vaughan plans to hold the decidedly contemporary blessing service this Sunday at St. Timothy’s Anglican Church in Hatchet Lake, outside Halifax.

“I think they traditionally used to call it Plough Monday, where people used to bring their farming equipment and tools to the church to be blessed,” said Rev. Vaughan.

“Most of us live with our cellphones and laptops and BlackBerrys and all that kind of stuff. I mean, those are just daily tools for us.”

I was going through some old files yesterday, and I came across the receipt for a monitor, a CD burner, and some CDs that I bout on May 26, 1999 at Costco. The 19″ monitor was $300. 20 burnable CDs were $32.99, and the burner was $389.99. Wow! That was an expensive burner. Now they are less than $50. And for $300, I could get a nice big flat screen.

Total bill $831.42. Crazy!

From the New York Times:

Forget about desperate housewives. To witness true frustration, watch desperate PC users trying to type, send e-mail or work on a spreadsheet, only to be delayed by those pesky hourglass icons for seconds or even minutes until their computers finally respond.

Now Soluto, a company based in Tel Aviv, aims to help these PC owners with an unusual program intended to minimize irritating slowdowns. The software runs in the background on PCs, collecting data on delays in program responses and sending the information to company servers for analysis, said Tomer Dvir, a co-founder and the chief executive.

You may have heard of this before, but Mike Nolet posted a page where you can analyze your browser history and it tells you whether you are likely a male or a female. I just did it, and it said there was a 30% change I’m female and 70% change I’m male (which is correct).

I’ve posted before some links to sites that help you download videos from the web. Another one is Splandoo. The dropdown box lets you choose from over a dozen different video providers.

Note: The video providers are often changing their web sites, so some videos may download correctly, but others may not.

Do you have some time to kill? Do you like trivia? If so, then you should check out Sporcle. The site describes itself in this way:

Founded in early 2007, Sporcle came to life with the response to its first quiz, naming the U.S. Presidents. As avid crossword, Jeopardy! and trivia fans, we created that original quiz not only to test knowledge, but also as a way to learn a piece of information that seemed to come up again and again.

Since then, Sporcle has continued to create quizzes for entertainment, memory and diversion (don’t worry, we won’t tell your boss). You can play one of the thousands of quizzes (and increasing daily) or make your own!

One of the blogs I follow is the Workers’ Edge blog by Dennis O’Reiley of CNET News. Dennis offers “tips and tricks for the cubicle-dweller”. I don’t work in a cubicle, but I do appreciate some of the productivity software tips he gives.

A couple of the most useful Outlook tips were:

• Remove the attachments from your Outlook e-mail
• Clear duplicate files from Outlook the free and easy way

If you work in a corporate environment and have a quota on your mailbox, then both of these utilities might help you free up some space (although if you are in a corporate environment, you may need your administrator to install them for you.

I’m still a pretty big Windows XP fan. I like the look and feel of it, and it does what I need it to do with minimal interruption. However, that doesn’t mean it is perfect. Here is an older PC World article that shares a list of features that would be good to have:

Some of the coolest OS features are nowhere to be found in Windows XP or Vista. Here are 18 brilliant features that Microsoft should beg for, borrow, or steal — plus tips on how you can add many of them to your PC now.

The lists contains the following (be sure to read the article for the full details, along with suggested alternatives):

1. Expose (Available on: Mac)
2. Virtual Workspaces (Available on: Linux, PC-BSD, Mac)
3. Back to My Mac (Available on: Mac)
4. Screen Sharing (Available on: Mac)
5. Time Machine (Available on: Mac)
6. ISO Burning (Available on: Mac, Linux, PC-BSD)
7. Stickies (Available on: Mac, Linux)
8. Podcast Capture (Available on: Mac)
9. Software Repositories (Available on: Linux, PC-BSD)
10. Desktop Cube (Available on: Linux, PC-BSD)
11. Application Dock (Available on: Mac)
12. Automated Screen Shots (Available on: Mac)
13. Multitouch Trackpad Gestures (Available on: Mac)
14. Cover Flow (Available on: Mac)
15. Pre-Installed Web Server (Available in: Mac, Linux, PC-BSD)
16. POSIX Compliance (Available on: BeOS, Mac, Linux, PC-BSD)
17. Standardized Menu Ribbon (Available on: Mac)
18. Single-File Applications (Available on: Mac)

Recently at work we installed Windows 7 Professional on our first PC. The user has one piece of software that won’t run in Vista or 7, so we are using Windows XP Mode. I was logged in as administrator and had everything working fine, but when the other user logged in, the Windows XP Mode they saw wasn’t the same. For those who don’t know, Windows XP Mode is essentially just a Virtual PC installation with Windows XP configured for you. Apparently, each user gets their own instead of sharing it. Anyway, I copied the necessary files and figured out how to get it working, but it wasn’t easy. Of course it wasn’t until afterward that I found some helpful hints.

• Microsoft Answers has a nice thread that explains how to reset the Windows XP Mode password
• XP-More is a piece of software “that helps manage Windows 7 Virtual Machines (XP Mode and any other). Specifically, it makes duplication of VMs a no brainer – no more raw XML editing and manually duplicating files”

Once or twice a week when I’m at work I need to connect to my home computer to look something up. I have my router configured to let my RDP session in, but if my wife or children are using the computer, I end up kicking them off. If it’s my children, they don’t know what happened, so they login again and end up kicking me off again. The reason behind this is that Microsoft did not allow multiple/concurrent connections to the “home” versions of their products as this is something you’d need more on a server. Since the time of Windows XP, there have been ways around this. There are those who express concern that the workarounds might be against the EULA, but people still give them a try. Recently, Download Squad posted about how to get concurrent connections to work in Windows 7 Home Premium.