Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

A couple of useful Tablet PC links for the day, along with one for Firefox.

First, if you've switched to using OneNote as your default note taking tool (and if you're using Windows and Office, why aren't you using it?), and have lots of old Journal files around, here's a simple and quick way of converting them to OneNote entries.

Second, here's an interesting looking application out of Microsoft Research. InkSeine is a pen-oriented note taking application that's being used as a UI test bed. I rather like the radial menu concept - I suspect it's one that will translate well into touch interfaces as well as working with pens.

Finally, one of my favourite Firefox extensions has just made it to the Mozilla Recommended Add-ins page. Congratulations to sethop and the rest of the folks at Interclue. A truly useful piece of code from one of my favourite places.

I'm trying out the beta of the latest version of the Flickr Uploadr, and I'm already tempted to say: "Great job, chaps". Sure, it's beta code, and there are still known bugs, but it seems to fix most of my issues with the Uploadr.

This is a complete rewrite of the old Uploadr, using a completely different set of technologies. The biggest visible change is a cross-platform UI built using Mozilla's Xulrunner. The result is an application that looks very similar to the site's recently updated web-based uploading tool, but with many more features.

My favourite feature so far has to be batch tagging, the ability to select a group of images, and quickly apply the same tags, descriptions, and titles (as well as other basic image settings). That's the big win for me - it makes uploading a day's images a lot easier, and reduces the time taken tagging. Group management has been improved too, and if an upload fails, tags and targeted groups are saved for the next attempt.

The result is a big improvement in work flow. I can get a batch of images tagged and uploaded in a few minutes, when using a mix of the old Uploadr and the web UI took at least three times as long...

Recommended.

If you're using the excellent OneNote as a notebook replacement (with, or without a Tablet PC), you'll want this free application from the folk behind the rather useful Tablet Enhancements for Outlook.

OneNote Calendar is a Ronseal application - it does exactly what it says on the tin.

It's a simple enough tool - but one that makes it easy to see your notes in a calendar view, so you can use OneNote as a To Do list or a planning application - or just to find out when you took that note. Launch the tool, find the note you want in the calendar grid, preview the note to be sure, and then open it.

Recommended.

I have a lot of bookmarks, and it's always been a pig to keep them under control. Then I found this little Windows application - it'll work with both IE and Firefox. It'll find and clear out the dead links, and it'll also keep your favicons up to date.

Quite useful indeed.

I find myself working with a lot of ISO files these days. It's an easy way for software companies to ship betas and trial code. Most of the time, though, I don't want to burn the disks to install the software. ISOs are disk images, and there are software tools to mount them as virtual drives on your PC.

Microsoft's free tool is good, as is Daemon Tools. But they don't work on Vista.

Then I came across Virtual CloneDrive. It's small, free, and works on pretty much every Windows box and version I've tried it on - including Windows Vista RC1.

Well worth downloading.

I'm still not sure what it is with the sheep...

(at least until the 6^th of September 2006)

Pop along to the Daz web site and download Bryce 5.0 from the link there. Macintosh and Windows versions are available...

It may not be the latest version, but it's still one of the best landscape generating and rendering tools around...

[Update fromautopope: "Does not run under Mac OS/X 10.4 and above".]

New PCs tend to be full of shovelware - applications and ISP trials you'll never use. You could do a vape and reinstall, but if you don't have a vanilla OS to hand you're probably stuck with a restore image that'll just put the shovelware right back again. That's where today's neat tool comes in: The PC De-Crapifier. Regularly updated, it's a one stop shop for cleaning out a new PC.

Run the script, and it'll remove most of the most common shovelware:

( see just what it kills behind here! )

Originally designed for Dell PCs (and originally called the Dell De-Crapifier), this is one for that USB key of useful tools you end up having to carry every time you go visit your relatives...

One thing missing from Skype is the ability to record calls.

As a journalist, I often need to make recordings of phone interviews - and getting them on my PC in digital format makes it easier to transcribe interviews (and hopefully soon, to search them). I have a small Sony recorder, but that uses a proprietary variant of ATRAC, and you need their software. It'll plug into a phone line, with a bit of kit from Maplin, but the recording quality, err, sucks. This device from Olympus looks good for the future, but I need something now!

Luckily, while doing some research for my Office column, I came across an Outlook plug-in called Skylook that not only integrates your Outlook address book with your Skype address book, so you can call people using Skype Out or Skype-to-Skype, but also records conversations as MP3s, ready for archiving and editing. There's even a built-in answerphone that adds calls to an Outlook folder. Microsoft may have made a splash earlier in the week with their unified messaging announcements, but Skylook's there already. Tie it in with the Skype-Salesforce.com integration and you've got a very interesting set of CRM tools...

The recording quality is good, and the size of the resulting MP3 isn't too bad either. Skylook's a rather useful piece of code. Businesses can use the recordings as part of any compliance procedure, while the rest of us can quickly turn them into podcasts (or should that be "skypecasts"?).

There's a 14 day trial, and the final registration cost isn't too bad either. A nice bit of code from our Aussie cousins...

Keeping up with the Web 2.0 hype, I downloaded the preview release of the Songbird media browser - only to discover that the icon for its installer was an egg.

Cute guys, cute.

Not sure if I can cope with an application that wants to be a black iPod Nano, though. However, I do warm to the speed it scanned through my media server...

I had a couple of hours to kill yesterday afternoon, between meetings, so I sat down in a Starbucks to do some work. Unfortunately the files I needed were on a PC at home, and working with a VPN over GPRS is tedious to say the least...

No need to worry - I'd left the PC on and running Foldershare's satellite - so I could fire up a browser session, connect to my account on their web site, and copy the files I needed onto my PC. I was able to get what I wanted written, and still have time for a venti chai latte and some lemon ginger cake...

Foldershare used to be a pay for service, but after Microsoft bought it, it switched to free. There are OS X and Windows clients, so you can copy between OSes happily - and you can have more than one PC associated to your account. You can use it to automatically sync files between machines, but I'm sticking with just using it as a low bandwidth VPN solution.

A useful widget.

...and no spyware or adware either