I bet I’m not the only one who’s using more that two PC’s. The basic example is one’s using his home PC and his machine at work. If your boss didn’t tell the sys admin to ban instant messaging apps because he was afraid that you wouldn’t work anymore, you got yourself a decent open-minded boss.
Nevertheless you might want to check your logs from time to time and of course from different locations, using different machines (you can’t remember the telephone number Eric sent you last night and you need it right away).
IM History can help you in this matter. It can build a chat history in real-time corresponding to certain IM account and let’s you access it from your browser no matter where you are. It runs on Windows Machines but also on Linux distros (no Mac support to my knowledge, yet). It can store your chats from different apps such as Skype, Yahoo! Messenger, ICQ, Windows Messenger, Miranda, QIP, Trillian, Pidgin and AIM.
Not only that your chat history will be stored online for free but on top of that you can manipulate it even better than the default archive stored by lets say Yahoo! Messenger. You can search with useful filters and organize it the way you like.
For those of you who don’t trust this practices (and on good reasons) I will search a portable app that doesn’t need to be installed and stores all your chat in an encrypted format, on your flash stick. I didn’t have any kind of problems with IM History just yet but I avoid writing sensitive information in IM apps anyway.
Take a look at their tour to make an impression before you decide to install it. Oh and don’t forget it’s all beta.
P.S. Of course Gtalk offers you all this in a minimalistic interface.
Hello there. First of all I want to thank my subscribers and all those of you who encouraged me to make some time to write again. It makes me really happy to know that my writing brought some light for some of you out there who had problems making up their minds or just needed a quick and competent suggestion.
Based on my new discoveries I will continue to share my knowledge in a form of tips and tricks, howto’s, news, scripts, reviews, tutorials and any other imaginable form.
I got a new set up (both hardware and software) since I last wrote on my blog so I have a lot of new stuff to write about. Hopefully I will afford to write one article per week.
And to finish this “come back” article I will answer the magic question: “Why ?”. Because now I am a student at The University of Oradea (Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, department of Computer Science) and in my free time I am working on a project on which I will let you know later on.
When it comes to strictly converting your audio files to different formats with different settings this neat tool will definitely do the job without requiring some particular specs. It’s small, easy to use (with both a command line interface and a guided user interface) and very user friendly.
For example I find this tool useful when I need to copy some new songs to one of my mobile phones which does not play any mp3 file with more than 128 kbps. Some mp3 files have 192, 320 so all I need to do is to load them in the program and down-sample them to 128 kbps. All this easy as pie. This app knows how to handle CD, WAV, WMA, OGG, AAC, AC3, AIFF, FLA, MP3, MP4 and some other audio formats.
Unlike many other application suites out there this one only supports audio editing so it is a lightweight app which has some disadvantages (small amount of space occupied, loads and runs very fast, simple interface and very friendly).
If you are a more experienced user there is always the possibility of using the command prompt interface for doing all your tasks in a more professional way. If you are a rookie or an avarage user the GUI is very helpful. Some other features like adding an incremental value at the end of the file name to make a difference between the files, deleting the original file after conversion, overwriting it, logging the process, etc. are also present.
So as a wrap-up this tool can be looked up as a command-line MP3 converter for your daily basics operations or a command-line audio converter for the most experienced users.
Super Flexible File Synchronizer
I recently bought a 500GB Western Digital My Book Essential Edition external hard disk and connected it to my also recently bought WL500GPv2 Asus router. I am using the external disk to back up important data from my laptop and as a streaming source for media files. Instead of manually doing all the backup myself every day I searched for an app that could do that safely in the background while I am working. So now, every hour a scheduled synchronization takes place between some directories that are on my laptop’s HDD and some directories on the external HDD.
Super Flexible File Synchronizer is by far the best solution out there. It has all the vital features included plus a whole bunch of extra ones that make it the perfect glove even for those of you who are a little bit more demanding.
Since it can be used to back up your data using protocols like FTP, SSH (SFTP), WebDAV, Amazon S3, HTTP you can use it both at work and at home, needing just an Internet connection. A basic example would be synchronizing your work directory with the one at home using a FTP server. In matter of restrictions… well there are no such things with SFFS. No matter the size of the files, how many they are or what name they have, SFFS will make everything seem easy.
For the ones who don’t want to complicate themselves so much, a friendly Wizard is available to help them create the perfect profile. A profile is more like a task or a job that defines what, when and where is being copied. However if you want to make sure you are 100% in control you can skip the Wizard GUI and do all the settings manually. I would strongly suggest that you at least have a brief look at all the options available especially if you handle important data, also if you want to make sure your files are secured you can choose to zip and encrypt them with the built-in algorithm.
The most important feature that basically boosts the level of professionalism is SmartTracking module. It detects every single aspect related to your files (directory structure, size, timestamp, etc.) and stores all the information in a database which will later serve at identifying even the smallest changes that occurred. An interesting feature that can be very useful is file versioning that, as you already might have imagined, allows you to keep different copies of a certain file. This is very useful because it may serve like an “Undo” option in case something goes wrong. You can specify which directories to be scanned for changes, you can apply a lot of filters for every aspect imaginable or you can simply use “mirror mode” and have an exact duplicate back up.
This is a great application that has so many things to offer. It really helped me a bunch and I strongly recommend it to everyone out there who wants to keep their data safe in two or more places. As far as portability, Super Flexible File Synchronizer can be used on Windows, Mac and Linux.