MyLaplink

I signed up yesterday for a trial version of LapLink Everywhere which apparently gives you the ability to retrieve files, emails and even remotely control your remote pc when elsewhere such as behind a corporate firewall. Sounds good but….
the service is not free (after the first 15 days), emails should really mean “outlook or outlook express”, and the remote control only gives you 1 hour a month – unlimited use is an extra $5 a month. Seems a bit much seeing as though vnc, which they actually use to provide you with remote control facilities is free. The only advantage to Laplink Everywhere is that it will work through firewalls and the traffic is encypted due to the use of SSL. I was impressed with how I could view the contents of my hard disk from work though! I think this is a similar service to gotomypc but they tend to spam their ad’s everywhere so I won’t use them out of principle. Guess I’ll have to rely on using vnc and dyndns to do this – sometime in the near future.

Outlook Web Access

Had a weird problem on a home users pc today where they couldn’t access their outlook web access. It just keeps asking for the username and password on this XP (home) machine. If we access the same url with the same username/password combo on it on any other machine then we get in ok. We can also get into other outlook web mailboxes on this affected pc. Unfortunately the mailbox we are trying to get into is the owner of the laptop! Update The problem was solved by changing the password for the user (and yes I was using the correct password as the same username/password combo worked from other machines)

Fish Cat Food

Like Kelly our animals gave us some hassles this weekend too. Although we don’t have a dog to run away, we do have three cats, and Basil (probably) decided that he didn’t want to eat the cat food we had left them, but instead he’d rather hunt out the fish food that was shrink-wrapped in plastic, inside a cardboard box, inside a carrier bag. Once he had opened it, he proceeded to pour it on the floor, eat some of it, and traipse the rest of it all over the kitchen. The smell of it was the worst though – the kitchen stunk!

Messenger Plus

Its interesting that I still get loads of flames about my comment on MessengerPlus containing Spyware. I’ve just downloaded the software for some other reasons and its interesting that the download page says “No spyware (optional Adware)” which seems a bit of a fiddle around the whole spyware/adware bundle argument. The “No” bit seems a bit misleading though.

utilitly list

Scott Hanselman has a useful list of utilities that he’s collected over the years. Some of them I have used before, some of them I have better (imho) utilities, or I’ve written my own to do a similar thing. I guess I should really write my own list. It’s certainly been something I’ve been meaning to do for yonks, with the first incarnation being “tools I use(d) to maintain and build this website.