Tools

Exactly an year back I wrote about moving this blog from GoDaddy to Dreamhost. The story continues and this year I have moved to Media Temple (referral link).

I had considered Media Temple last year, however the site revenues weren't enough to match the rates quoted by Media Temple. Even this time around I thought a lot before choosing  Media Temple. I did see a lot of negative reviews on Media Temple but I guess you would see that for every other hosting provider.

You need to use the service to come to a conclusion and MT does have a 30 day money back guarantee option.

Why shift from Dreamhost ?

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A 16 GB iPhone just made its way to my home today all the way from an US store. Even though I had "experienced" iPhone by reading about it and by seeing tons of videos on YouTube, using it live was a totally different experience.

iPhone is an amazing, astounding, remarkable, wonderful, incredible, marvelous product from Apple!

The sad fact is that I can use this phone only for the next 20 days after which my brother would take ownership! (He is the actual owner of this phone)

Sadder is the fact that I have to return using my HTC Touch. Believe me,

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eBay Desktop, the free alternative to eBay web portal is a very good application to showcase the power of Adobe AIR. I totally fell in love with the user interface; easy to use and very fast.

One reason I prefer FeedDemon over Google reader is the pace at which I can navigate between the feeds and perform operations on the feeds/news items. Google Reader is fast but its still a long way from matching the speed of a desktop app. Its the exact difference you find even in eBay Desktop compared to its web peer.

I don't do much of shopping on eBay but definitely

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In one of my earlier post I covered some of the tools that can be used to copy songs from iPod to PC. Most of the tools available are shareware and there are very few free quality applications. Sharepod is one such quality application for iPod. It's a lightweight music management tool for iPod which you can run from within the iPod disk. This circumvents the necessity of having iTunes on every other system for managing your iPod. Below is the list of Sharepod features which might motivate you to install and use it :-) Track tag editing Video import support iPod Shuffle supportDrag and drop tracks to Explorer Completely rewritten codebase to safely ...

Many a times I have been in a situation where I need to delete a windows service and every time I end up "googling" to find the easiest/fastest way of doing this. Most of the posts in the search result talk about modifying the windows registry to delete the service, which isn't always foolproof.

The easisest way of deleting a service is by using the sc.exe command line tool. This tools comes bundled with Windows and is probably the easiest way of maintaining and administering Windows Services.

Lets take an example of a totally useless service on Windows: Windows Search Service.

The first thing to do is to get the name of the Windows Service; What is shown in

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Xobni Insight is an add-on for Microsoft Outlook that offers email management and provides instant access to the most important information in your email. Xobni also supposedly exposes the hidden social network in your email.

The add-on has several features, including fast email search, email analytics, automatic phone number discovery, threaded conversations, and more. When you click on an email in Outlook, the Xobni sidebar shows the following information

Relationship Statistics - Number of emails sent and received Contact Information (Phone number is automatically extracted from the email) Related People Threaded Conversation Shared Attachments

The "Organize" Tab displays the following information

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Synergy is an open source software lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware.

It's intended for users with multiple computers on their desk. I have a similar setup at work and till now I was struggling while switching between the desktop PC and the notebook. You could remote desktop to one of the computers, however you would loose out on using both the display units.

The official documentation for configuring Synergy isn't that straightforward. Here is how I configured Synergy between 2 computers running Windows.

Install the software ...

I have been a great fan of Newsgator products, particularly the desktop based feed reader FeedDemon ! I have been recommending the same to many of my friends.

After trying out lot of RSS readers including RSS Bandit and Google Reader, I finally found that none of them could match FeedDemon's simple yet powerful user interface and I totally loved the synchronization feature built into the application.

Along with Flickr, FeedDemon became one of the apps that I paid for !

Now Newsgator has turned most of its RSS products including FeedDemon into FREE applications.

So go ahead and grab your free copy of Feeddemon !

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Pointui (pronounced point-you-i) is a software which brings in a total new user experience on Windows Mobile 5/6 powered devices. Techcrunch notes that this software is probably more for the users who are envious of iPhone; The UI navigation does look very much on the lines of iPhone, but again iPhone is not just about the easy navigation. As we all know the basic user interface of Windows Mobile sucks big time and it hasn't improved much in Windows Mobile 6. This post by Gizmodo discusses some of the flaws in the current version mobile OS and also confirms that Microsoft will probably work on these in the future version of Windows Mobile. I have been using Pointui on ...

One of my favorite tools, Launchy just got upgraded to 2.0. As the website says, Launchy is an utility desinged to help us forget about the start menu in Windows. I have recommeneded this tool to many of my friends and  not one of them have complained about it. Its like a "must have" tool for Windows.

The new version has been completely written in QT and hence the old plug-ins and skins will no longer work. The old configuration will also be wiped with the upgrade to 2.0

The options are now merged into a single preference dialog.

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