Software

The Read it Later Firefox extension

Networking & Internet, Software / By /

Sometimes I just want to turn Gizmos for Geeks into a cool productivity tools blog. Fear not readers, we won’t be doing that, but there really are so many cool software & Web tools being introduced or improved all the time.

Take for example, the Read it Later Firefox extension which helps out you news and info junkies. Ok, I’m definitely one of you! Right. So the RiT extension lets you quickly mark articles/URLs for later reading, even letting you simultaneously mark a bunch of open tabs. It also lets you mark articles in your favorite news reader and even sites like Digg. Perhaps the best feature may be the ability to sync your reading list across multiple browsers/computer.

The video sums up the features nicely in 2 mins:
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Actual Window Manager for Windows

Gizmo of the Day, Software / By /

Here’s a nice productivity tool that can help you manage your chaos of open windows especially if you’re one of those folks who has tons of windows and browser tabs open (like me!).

It’s a Window Manager that has way more features than you can shake a stick at. Just for starters, you can minimize unused windows in various ways – rolling up, make semi-transparent, closing or to the tray. You can place and size windows exactly where and how you want them.
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Review: GoodSync – Backup and Sync Tool

Computers, Gizmo of the Day, Recommended, Reviews, Software / By /

Almost 3 years ago, Gizmos for Geeks reviewed GoodSync with the intent of using it to backup important data from a user’s desktop computer to USB thumb drives. Fast forward to today where hard drives have grown tremendously in size and so has data storage and you have an even tougher backup issue. For those of us who also perform a lot of work out of our own homes, backing up data is crucial and backing it up to offsite locations is just as important. I’ve personally decided to test using Amazon’s S3 service to backup my computer’s data and GoodSync has been recently updated to include S3 support. We put the latest version of GoodSync through its paces and in particular, focused on its S3 support.

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CES 2009: CMS Products shows off latest backup software: BounceBack Ultimate

CES, Computers, Software / By /

CMS Products introduced the latest version of their BounceBack product, called BounceBack Ultimate which has some very interesting new features. As a couple of sys admins, we were impressed by what BounceBack is able to do, mainly backup an entire Windows 2000/XP/Vista system to an external hard drive and then boot off of that drive without any need for the internal drive.

BounceBack can be set to run continuously and it can back up everything – files, OS files, even the BIOS. CMS has figured out how to backup even OS-level files while running. The backed-up system is bootable from that external hard drive regardless of hardware and/or BIOS.
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The Energy Detective – real-time electricity usage monitor

Gizmo of the Day, Home Automation / By /

In our time of higher energy and household costs, it’s a good idea to monitor those costs closely and see where we can cut back, not to mention that saving energy is just a good, green practice. For example, Kill-a-Watt has a number of products to directly monitor whatever is plugged into it, but how do you monitor usage in your entire house?

TED, The Energy Detective, is a real-time, electricity monitor. TED monitors your energy usage and displays the info in a simple, LCD display. It even jacks into your PC and lets you monitor historical usage with a custom software app (additional). It’s near real-time, with no more than a 2-second delay between events and reporting, and it updates every second.

So that your entire house is monitored, TED has to be installed directly into your home’s power circuits, so you’ll either need to be very familiar with electrical systems or hire an electrician for the 15 minute install. TED has a few different models. The base model (TED1000) is about $140 and the TED Model 1001 has a USB interface.

Gimme!

Price: TED 1000: $140, TED 1001: $145, TED Dynamics software: $45
(Please note prices are subject to change and the listed price is correct to the best of our knowledge at the time of posting)

New Palm OS on its way

Phones, Portable, Software / By /

Sweet. Here’s the new Linux-based Palm OS from Access (they swallowed up Palm Source). It supports Linux apps (cool) and yes, it also supports classic Palm apps too (excellent).

Screenshot makes it look nice and bright compared to the current version, but I’ll bet that looks different on a Treo/Palm.

All kinds of PDFs on framework, security and development on the Access website.

Movienizer helps you organize your movies

Software / By /

This is primarily for the movie lover who has tons of movies and needs a way to catalog and organize them, something akin what iTunes/MediaMonkey/Music Jukebox does for your music collection. Movienizer can pull down up to date movie information from the Net including cover/poster art, actor, director and assorted production info.

One nice feature that I’d like to see in the music jukebox apps as well is the ability to mark a movie as being loaned out and to whom.

Windows XP SP3 Set to be Released

Software / By /

Microsoft says the third and final service pack for the aging Windows XP will be available for download on April 29th while manufacturers and larger customers currently have SP3 in house. SP3 will include all updates released since 2004 when SP2 was released. Here are some added features in SP3:

A feature called Network Access Protection
that’s borrowed from the newer Windows Vista operating system. NAP
automatically validates a computer’s health, ensuring that it’s free of
bugs and viruses before allowing it access to a network.

Windows XP SP3 also includes improved “black hole” router
detection — a feature that automatically detects routers that are
silently discarding packets. In XP SP3, the feature is turned on by
default, according to Microsoft.

Windows XP SP3 also steals a page from Vista’s product
activation model, meaning that product keys for each copy of the
operating system don’t need to be entered during setup. The feature
should prove popular with corporate IT managers, who often need to
oversee hundreds, or even thousands, of operating system installations.

When a Microsoft spokesperson was asked for the number of fixes in XP SP3, they responded “one billion fixes” while resting the pinky finger aside the mouth.

Source: Information Week

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