I use several things for my phone system.  I use a combination of SIP phones and services.

I have phone service from 3 different places:

• US phone number from BinFone.com
• French and UK phone number from OVH.fr
• and a free UK phone number from sipgate.co.uk

For a US phone number, BinFone is $7.50/month plus 2¢ per minute.  That’s about as cheap as I’ve seen anywhere.   It’s pay per minute but if you are a reasonable phone talker, as in  you’re not on the phone for more than about 800 minutes a month, it really works out in the long run.

However, I have something even better…  OVH offers partially unlimited dialing to 40 countries (including the US/Canada, all of Europe, Australia and New Zealand) for €1.20/month!  The limit is a little strange.  They let you dial 99 different numbers in a month, up to 1hr per call, after that, it’s €0.02/min.  That means, if you call the same number (within these 40 countries) 200 times, but each time < 1hr, there’s no extra charge.

Lastly, because it was totally free, I have an 0845 number through sipgate.co.uk.  It is supposedly a local call from anywhere in the UK but realistically some telephone companies in the UK, and cell phones, charge more than a local call to call an 0845 number.   But there’s no charge for me to receive such calls.

I have a Siemens GigaSet A580 IP which I can program in up to 6 SIP accounts and connect an analog phone to it (which I don’t have anymore).

Though I don’t specifically need it, it’s nice to be able to have a little bit more control over things like being able to assign extensions to my phones.  For this, I would need an IP PBX like an Asterisk box running somewhere.  However, this would render my little A580 less portable.  Fortunately there are several free or inexpensive hosted IP PBX providers out there.  Currently I am using PBXes.org.  They have a free option which suites me perfectly.  Astonishingly, with their free offer, they limit calls to 1hr.  Well, with OVH and their partially limited plan of charging for calls longer than 1hr, that suits me just fine.  I rarely talk on the phone more than an hour anyway.

For my Android phone, I recently installed SipDroid.  This lets me place and receive calls on my mobile phone over SIP.  I currently use it only over the wifi.  My mobile phone provider (Orange.fr) does not like people using SIP over their internet service because it eats up too much bandwidth.  When I said I didn’t specifically need PBXes.org, this isn’t quite true.  In order to configure more than one SIP device, one needs a PBX.  So with my Gigaset and SipDroid, PBXes.org or an IP PBX is in fact needed.

I have to say this whole thing is pretty cool and has reduced my land line telephone communication costs to nearly nothing on top with making the whole thing portable.

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:

• Genie Timeline
• Genie Backup Manager

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:

• Einstein@Home
• LHC@home
• World Community Grid – these projects:
  • Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy
  • Help Conquer Cancer
  • Human Proteome Folding