Recently it came to my attention that not only can support be offered by pre-installing an application on a clients PC, but it can be customer initiated.
I tried NTRSupport and LogMeIn, both are very capable solutions. I also looked at GoToAssist as well although this seemed too expensive.
There are various advantages and disadvantages to each product, I did notice that LogMeIn was faster, slightly and can support ten customers concurrently, it also has a handy chat feature. NTRSupport are very good though and despite being minutely slower and only supporting 5 concurrent users, can be initiated from a web browser.
What it really comes down to is cost though and NTRSupport is roughly 50% cheaper than LogMeIn.
I'm still testing at the moment, so the Jury is still out....for now.
Sunday, 30 March 2008
Saturday, 15 March 2008
Wii Whiteboard and other amazing inventions
This guy is amazing, some of the techniques he has come up with for using a wiimote are outstanding, here are two Youtube videos demonstrating the techniques, my company has actually tried out the Whiteboard idea and it works really well, especially if the image is projected from behind the surface.
Monday, 11 February 2008
Flipping Windows
I had a call recetly from a friend whose young stepchildren had managed to invert the Windows XP display so that everything was upside down.
Never heard of this before, but a quick check online led to a remarkable discovery about a little known feature in Windows XP.
If you press ctrl and the up arrow it will flip the display as will ctrl and the down arrow.
The only question now is why would anyone want to do that!?!!?!?!?
Never heard of this before, but a quick check online led to a remarkable discovery about a little known feature in Windows XP.
If you press ctrl and the up arrow it will flip the display as will ctrl and the down arrow.
The only question now is why would anyone want to do that!?!!?!?!?
Thursday, 3 January 2008
Christmas and Gadgets
Sadly I didn't get any cool gadgets for christmas, luckily my father did, a Garmin nuvi 250 Sat Nav system. My previous experience with Sat Nav has been with one integrated into a PDA, using Tom Tom Navigator 6. I thought this was very good, although time to "first fix" (time to first lock on to a satellite) took a long time.
My mother comissioned me to find a suitable device for my faher on a small budget and therefore having discounted the PDA hybrid option due to price I looked at stand alone devices.
The two that stood out were Tom Tom and Garmin, others just didn't seem to cut it - on paper at least. According to reviews the Garmin had a faster time to "first fix" and the maps were more accurate it was also cheaper with full European mapping.
Having tried it myself now, I can tell you it is excellent, the mapping is clear, it is easy to use and it is fast to acquire a satellitle signal. If you need a Sat Nav device on the cheap you cant do better than this.
My mother comissioned me to find a suitable device for my faher on a small budget and therefore having discounted the PDA hybrid option due to price I looked at stand alone devices.
The two that stood out were Tom Tom and Garmin, others just didn't seem to cut it - on paper at least. According to reviews the Garmin had a faster time to "first fix" and the maps were more accurate it was also cheaper with full European mapping.
Having tried it myself now, I can tell you it is excellent, the mapping is clear, it is easy to use and it is fast to acquire a satellitle signal. If you need a Sat Nav device on the cheap you cant do better than this.
Wednesday, 19 December 2007
Games, Education and the BBC Micro
There's been a bit of fuss recently about games affecting learning. I for one am in favour of "interactive" learning, although I think arguments about online clans for games like Halo encouraging Team Building are taking it a bit too far.
I started reminiscing about the "good old days" of the BBC Micro in schools and some of the games I used to play. Younger readers may well scoff, at the 8bit power of the BBC Micro, but some of the classic games like Yellow Brick Road, Transylvanian Terror, Martello Tower....and Granny's Garden really left an impression. Mainly because you could never have enough time to finish them and the teacher dragging you off because it was end of break or something equally as annoying.
All this started me thinking, despite crap graphics, the soul of those games - and their purpose - as learning tool must still be alive somewhere. So I set out on a quest to see if they still existed and to see if they were still useful.
After hunting for literally minutes I had acquired a BBC Emulator. For the uninitiated this lets you run old images (also called ROMS) of BBC Micro software on your PC or MAC. After a lot more searching - over the next three days I managed to find ROMS of all the old games I wanted to play again. Let me tell you folks, they are all out there, and they are as good as ever.
After getting too excited about having found Transylvanian terror, I decided to try the games out on my 3 year old son, he was a good test as he hasn't learnt to be put off by crap graphics on games yet. We started with Granny's Garden and he is really into it now and wants to play it all the time (and is learning lots!).
So for any parents out there, or those who need a brush up on their basic skills, or even a Retro enthusiast, this is where to go. I'm sure there are newer equally exciting things out there but the teletext graphics and lack of mouse really absorb you into the games.
Have Fun!
I started reminiscing about the "good old days" of the BBC Micro in schools and some of the games I used to play. Younger readers may well scoff, at the 8bit power of the BBC Micro, but some of the classic games like Yellow Brick Road, Transylvanian Terror, Martello Tower....and Granny's Garden really left an impression. Mainly because you could never have enough time to finish them and the teacher dragging you off because it was end of break or something equally as annoying.
All this started me thinking, despite crap graphics, the soul of those games - and their purpose - as learning tool must still be alive somewhere. So I set out on a quest to see if they still existed and to see if they were still useful.
After hunting for literally minutes I had acquired a BBC Emulator. For the uninitiated this lets you run old images (also called ROMS) of BBC Micro software on your PC or MAC. After a lot more searching - over the next three days I managed to find ROMS of all the old games I wanted to play again. Let me tell you folks, they are all out there, and they are as good as ever.
After getting too excited about having found Transylvanian terror, I decided to try the games out on my 3 year old son, he was a good test as he hasn't learnt to be put off by crap graphics on games yet. We started with Granny's Garden and he is really into it now and wants to play it all the time (and is learning lots!).
So for any parents out there, or those who need a brush up on their basic skills, or even a Retro enthusiast, this is where to go. I'm sure there are newer equally exciting things out there but the teletext graphics and lack of mouse really absorb you into the games.
Have Fun!
Tuesday, 27 November 2007
MAC vs Ebay
Fair play to Ebay, if you have a surplus of anything, you can whack it on there for a fee and hopefully it will sell. If you have a lot to sell, Ebay provides you with a Turbo Lister tool for free, not the greatest piece of software ever written, but once you get used to it, it works. Or at least it does if you use Windows. Ebay refuses to provide a version of the software for MAC users. Hope however is not lost as there are two commercial solutions - GarageSale and iSale - I tried iSale and it is awesome, they link with iPhoto, iSale tells you the cost before you upload the auction, you can even schedule the upload. It doesn't cost too much either, not as good as free but miles better than Ebays Turbo Lister. If you have a MAC and you don't know what to use, try this, it is worth it. If someone knows of a free alternative however, let me know.
Sunday, 21 October 2007
Windows v MAC (Part 2)
My honeymoon period with the MAC is officially over as I have used it extensively enough to find out it's ins and outs.
What do I think of it for the everyday?
It's better than Windows in one key area - productivity. Since owning the MAC, all work I have done at home has been infinitely more productive than it ever was using a PC. My MACBook hasn't crashed, frozen, stopped when loading an application. It just works, it's quicker booting and shutting down and applications seem to be more intuitive.
I have used Office 2004 for most of my work and it is - in my opinion - better and easier to use than any version of Office on the PC prior to 2007. My company uses and trains people in Microsoft Office rather than any other solution as it really is a standard - admittedly OpenOffice and NEOOffice it's MAC equivalent are mighty close, and iWork 08 is also very good (Keynote thrashes Powerpoint for effectiveness of presentations - and porting files from one system to another was effortless.
The MACBook keyboard also deserves a special mention, this is outstanding, there are less keys than a Windows keyboard and there are gaps between them, at first sight you think WTF, yet it is actually easier to use and nowhere near as cramped as a PC keyboard.
Managing multiple Windows is also better as hitting F9 expands your desktop and shows you all the windows at once and you can click the one you are after. Again this is far superior to Windows.
I think the biggest thing about using the MAC for me though is that it is like a holiday, I can still go home and be enthusiastic about using the computer. I thought at first it was just because it was different from Windows, yet it turned out to be that I was actually enjoying it because it was better, everything about the MAC is better, except perhaps two things: Games and quantity of applications, the first one I realised I didn't miss at all as since having kids I have been playing consoles more, and liking them more, HALO on XBOX is far better for me on the console than on the PC, same with Half-Life 2 and if I was that desperate I would use Parallels or Crossover and run the PC version. Quantity of applications also isn't an issue really either, no there isn't as much available as with Windows and certainly not as much as Linux, yet the quality is better, so you don't need as much, for example Adium the instant messenger works with every messaging system out there including MSN and AOL. Additionally you can run a lot of Linux applications using Apples X11 interface.
The downsides to the MAC if there are any, are really issues I have with Apple. Just as with Microsoft, Apple links some of it's system in with paid content, this is truthfully less evident with Microsoft but Apple flagrantly try and make you pay roughly $80 a year to have a .Mac account, the reason for this is to allow the iLife applications to publish content seamlessly, however, and perhaps I'm just British and tight, but $80 is just too much, especially when it used to be offered free and without it, it renders iChat inoperable. The other thing is that iTunes, which I personally find a bit weird won't let you convert downloaded music to any other format that the proprietry MP4 format, on Windows and Linux there are ways around this but the MAC is short of free options and I'm not buying an iPod.
Outside of this though the MAC is great even my better half likes them now, can't say much more than that!
What do I think of it for the everyday?
It's better than Windows in one key area - productivity. Since owning the MAC, all work I have done at home has been infinitely more productive than it ever was using a PC. My MACBook hasn't crashed, frozen, stopped when loading an application. It just works, it's quicker booting and shutting down and applications seem to be more intuitive.
I have used Office 2004 for most of my work and it is - in my opinion - better and easier to use than any version of Office on the PC prior to 2007. My company uses and trains people in Microsoft Office rather than any other solution as it really is a standard - admittedly OpenOffice and NEOOffice it's MAC equivalent are mighty close, and iWork 08 is also very good (Keynote thrashes Powerpoint for effectiveness of presentations - and porting files from one system to another was effortless.
The MACBook keyboard also deserves a special mention, this is outstanding, there are less keys than a Windows keyboard and there are gaps between them, at first sight you think WTF, yet it is actually easier to use and nowhere near as cramped as a PC keyboard.
Managing multiple Windows is also better as hitting F9 expands your desktop and shows you all the windows at once and you can click the one you are after. Again this is far superior to Windows.
I think the biggest thing about using the MAC for me though is that it is like a holiday, I can still go home and be enthusiastic about using the computer. I thought at first it was just because it was different from Windows, yet it turned out to be that I was actually enjoying it because it was better, everything about the MAC is better, except perhaps two things: Games and quantity of applications, the first one I realised I didn't miss at all as since having kids I have been playing consoles more, and liking them more, HALO on XBOX is far better for me on the console than on the PC, same with Half-Life 2 and if I was that desperate I would use Parallels or Crossover and run the PC version. Quantity of applications also isn't an issue really either, no there isn't as much available as with Windows and certainly not as much as Linux, yet the quality is better, so you don't need as much, for example Adium the instant messenger works with every messaging system out there including MSN and AOL. Additionally you can run a lot of Linux applications using Apples X11 interface.
The downsides to the MAC if there are any, are really issues I have with Apple. Just as with Microsoft, Apple links some of it's system in with paid content, this is truthfully less evident with Microsoft but Apple flagrantly try and make you pay roughly $80 a year to have a .Mac account, the reason for this is to allow the iLife applications to publish content seamlessly, however, and perhaps I'm just British and tight, but $80 is just too much, especially when it used to be offered free and without it, it renders iChat inoperable. The other thing is that iTunes, which I personally find a bit weird won't let you convert downloaded music to any other format that the proprietry MP4 format, on Windows and Linux there are ways around this but the MAC is short of free options and I'm not buying an iPod.
Outside of this though the MAC is great even my better half likes them now, can't say much more than that!
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