WinDirStat is a cute little program that is immensely useful for figuring out why your disk is full.
You can visually see each directory and sub-directory how large it is in comparison to the others and it lets you mouse around and shows you how much space this and that take up on disk.
I’ve used several backup utilities and I keep coming back to Genie-Soft‘s products. Specifically they have 2 products which I use:
Neither of these are free but they’re not expensive and their support is excellent.
They do different things. Genie Timeline does a rolling backup every time you modify a file. It sits there in the background looking for when a file changes and then saves a version in the backup. It tries to be intelligent not to just infinitely use up space, and I have to say it works pretty darn well.
Genie Backup Manager is more of a classic backup program that can be set to run in batch mode and fire off a backup on periodic intervals. It can do several types of backups such as incremental, differential, and full backups. The thing that I don’t like about these types of backups is that they can take an enormous amount of space and can be difficult to piece back together if needed and it can be difficult to find a file when you need it.
I have also used Cobian Backup which is similar to Genie Backup Manager in functionality.
The one thing that both Cobian and Genie both lack is the ability to back up only when a drive is available, for example, when you bring your laptop home, it would be nice if it would automatically see your USB or network drive and run a backup then without having to mess with it or do anything.
TortoiseSVN is a Subversion (SVN) client/server for Windows. It adds some little marks like check boxes and ! to your windows icons to show you which files are out of sync with those on the server. It adds a right-click menu to access it’s functionality. You don’t have to remember any of the svn command line parameters.
Also useful is AnkhSVN for Visual Studio which adds similar functionality to Visual Studio’s Solution Explorer. It is a drop in replacement for Microsoft’s Team Foundation Server.
WinMerge is file which will display the side-by-side differences between 2 text files. It can also help you merge them together. It’s essentially diff and merge for windows.
I use Citrix GoToMeeting for work related screen sharing. Frankly I’d rather use Teamviewer but they’ve priced me out of the market. VNC doesn’t allow you to have multi-person meetings.
– GotoMeeting is slower than TeamViewer and VNC.
– GotoMeeting’s very slow to start compared with TeamViewer
– There’s no way to create a “buddy list” in GoToMeeting like in TeamViewer.
+ About the only good thing I can say about GoToMeeting is that it supports audio by letting someone both call in on a phone line and over speaker/mic connected to a PC.
+ You can send someone a simple link to click on to join a meeting.
Teamviewer is a screen sharing application that runs on Mac, Windows, Linux and even some mobile phones.
It runs as a service against their server so you don’t have to worry about NAT. I have tried many other similar things such as Citrix, LogMeIn, and VNC (many variations). Things such as Citrix and LogMeIn are also run as a service and get around the NAT problem. VNC, you have to open ports manually in the firewall.
Teamviewer is free for non-commercial use which is cool. It’s quite expensive for commercial use, especially if you start wanting to use it for several people. The price can add up quickly to thousands of dollars. And even though the price is a one time cost, it’s not really since they do upgrades about once a year and you end up paying a substantial amount again.
I’ve long been looking for something that runs on my own server and manages a set of reverse connections for VNC so that I could connect to my own server and then into the machine of my choosing without having to worry about NAT.
Dia is a free drawing program that is sort of like Visio.
It lets you create boxes and connectors and slide things around. It’s pretty decent for creating network diagrams and flow diagrams.
FreeMind is a free “mind mapping” software. Basically it lets you create a 2-dimensional outline of bubbles connected together with lines. Pretty useful for mapping out ideas and taking notes.
BOINC (The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) is an open-source software platform for computing using volunteered resources. It permits you to donate your spare computing resources to solve scientific problems.
I’ve been donating my spare computrons to:
The PandaNet Internet Go server is both a piece of software and a server which allows people to play the game of Go against one another over the internet.
