One of the programs I use a lot is a little app called Maxivista, its got several features of particular merit, the ability to use another laptop/desktop as an extended display for your main computer and in another mode use the same mouse and keyboard to control several computers, with monitors using the network connection for them to talk to each other. This is accomplished simply by dragging the mouse off the side of the screen at which point it appears on the other computer, the keyboard follows the mouse. Its probably easiest to have a browse through the Desktop Extension and Remote Control sections of the Maxivista website to get a better idea what I’m talking about here. There’s also the obligatory open source offering called Synergy2 which sods law dictated that I would only discover after purchasing Maxivista!

Typically when I’m at my desk I have my main computer and my laptop next to it on a dock, with dual monitor on the desktop already I have a fair amount of real estate to work from (albeit not in quite the same league as Stefan Didak!). I might typically have two instances of Opera running, one on the laptop and one on the second desktop screen, using the primary screen as my working area and the other two as reference windows, the key point however is that I prefer to use the laptop in remote control mode so that I can take advantage of its processor and resources while the main computers working on other things.

Anyway, heres the point of the post (finally I know): in this sort of set-up I’ve found its useful at times to be able to “transfer” tabs, between the browser windows on the two machines and it took me a while to work out how, to be honest its really thanks to an Opera Watch post about opening tabs in firefox and ie that I got an idea for a slightly bodged but workable solution. I thought I’d share it below in case anyone else finds it useful, its nothing revolutionary but its useful all the same.

Requirements/how to:

• Two networked computers running Opera (obviously)
• For this to work both ways you will need the PsExec.exe file copied into the “c:\Windows\System32″ folder, you can the PsTools package from the sysinternals website, check against point 2 on this forum thread that everything is ready to go.
• Download this batch file (zipped), extract and open it and change all the parts marked <ike this> to the appropriate values, note that the remote computers username should be the same as the one you logon as otherwise it’ll open a fresh opera window instead of using the existing one. Save the batch file to “c:\Windows\System32″
• Drag the below Opera button to any opera panel, click and it should work!

Things to note, you will get a console window opening for a second on the source computer, without compiling everything into a binary there’s little way of totally hiding the action, also, the above button is set to also remove the tab from the source computer.

I’ve just taken the plunge and upgraded my HTC Wizard/O2 XDA MiniS to an HTC Kaiser/T-Mobile MDA Vario III.  I changed to T-mobile mainly beacuse of the ‘web n walk’ deals with their overall offer a better option than the competition, plus the added bonus that they don’t mind if the phone is used as a laptop modem (not tested yet).

There are hundreds of reviews around the web so I won’t bother doing that but will note some of my own thoughts, I find bullet point lists for this sort of thing work well:

•  The phone itself is a bit smaller than the previous one,  a testement if ever there was one to the fast moving world of modern technology, the new one packs in 3G,  GPS, faster processor and a tilting screen to boot where as the old one managed GPRS  at a push.
• The GPS is very fast to lock on, even inside buildings! It works very well with Google Maps although occasionally the software seems to forget to ask the GPS to update.  I’m awaiting a memory card before testing TomTom.
• The keyboard is actually slightly smaller than the  old one which is odd beacuse there appears to be space for it to be bigger. Its still perfectly usable although symbols have been moved around quite a bit, having had the Wizard for 23 months I was able to touchtype on it (thumbs only of course!) so this is quite an annoyance although I’m sure I’ll get used to it.
• The phone feels more solidly built, the mechanism for the tilt is metal so should be pretty hard wearing.
• The comms manager button is gone, this is a little annoying, I’m going to consider re-mapping the voice dialling button to do this. I’ve never quite understood the point in these voice dialling buttons, if I want hands free then I’ll use the button on my bluetooth headset to activate it, or else I’ll just use the keypad and dial the number normally.

The XDA Developer forums are as ever a fountain of useful knowledge for Windows Mobile smartphones and very much recommended. One of the forum members has produced a program called TrackMe, this is now being contributed to by other forums members. Its essentially a GPS Logger, it can record to either a local file or send data to a web application as a KML file.

I’m thinking of using this when I go to Cape Town in December to record my track and then use this to geotag my photos when I return. Obviously I’ll use the local file option as otherwise I’ll end up with horrendous roaming data charges! Hopefully the version with support for GPX will be released soon otherwise I’ll write a little converter myself. Then I need to tie this in with the photo exif data from my camera by matching the most recent gps log entry to the exif time stamp.

Home media for the younger grouping of more technical minded people becomes a bit of a concern after a while. I’ve been considering options myself both for managing and storing digital media in a preferably protected manner as well as aquisition itself, be this via internet delivery or more traditional broadcast options (being in the UK this is DVB in my case). Firstly I’m considering what it needs to cater for. I have at home in regular use, one desktop, one laptop and an original Xbox running XBMC (Xbox Media Center), on this note I have yet to find a couch compatible media player which outdoes XBMC, especially when you consider the price (free!). I also live with others who might also wish to pull/push content at the same time so performance is a key consideration. In terms of media aquisition, bittorrent support is a definate must and expandability to cope with new delivery platforms is important. Broadcast DVB media could be aquired via this route, but my preference would be for a local receiver option.

Power consumption should also be decent, with the government busy bolstering the economy and pretending to care about the enviroment, energy prices are unlikely to fall and with multiple users and downloads to handle, the device will do considerable hours.

So from my point of view, the key points wind up being:

• Flexible (Bittorrent, perhaps DVB, DAAP?)
• Low power consumption (as low as possible)
• Expandable Storage (1Tb at least, RAID or similar redundancy a plus)

There’s an awful lot of interesting large capacity storage devices, unfortunatly most of them will not do the wide range of tasks which I would like them to perform as well as storage. Its a pity, especially with things like the Drobo around, extremly easy to use and well made, just a bummer its USB only, suitable for photographers etc (incidentally I picked up on the Drobo via Thomas Hawk). I originally thought the lack of USB was a bit short sighted of the developers but the review on ZDNet reveals a bit more about the market, turns out my needs are those of a minority (funny that). There are also things like the Buffalo Terrastation which received mixed press when it came out, or there’s the Infrant ReadyNAS devices, but they’re sort of expensive and thats without drives.

The best thing I’ve found so far as a prebuilt solution is the Bubba, runs Debian Linux as a backend, Webserver, Email, Print and file server in one as well as built in bittorrent support (although the bundled torrent handling isn’t that great so TorrentFlux might be a better alternative). And on the power front it kicks everything else into touch running on under 10W of power! On the down side it only has a single hard drive, although there are hacks to enable a second ‘internal’ hard drive so that could theoretically be either 1.5Tb or a redundant 750gb system. Kinda attractive and its not too bad on cost, it wouldn’t do the DVB side, but this could always be done by a nano-itx system as a side line. They’ve done a nice job with this device, the only major let down is the network interface which is only 100mbps.

Of course the other temptation in my head is the build the entire thing from scratch using a single nano-itx board with capacity for 4+ hard drives which would enable me to put in full DVB and streaming capability as well but at the expense of power efficiency. Decisions decisions! Not this month though, the government have stolen too much of my pay packet again! I’ll have to carry on mulling it over…

Update 04/04/08: I went for a totally different home server in the end, the Synology DS107+, click to read the results…

I’ve found a couple of apps in the last week which have in different ways changed the way I use my computer (these are Windows only, sorry others!):

Maxivista

I have three computers on my desk when I’m at home, my laptop and two desktops (one recent aquisition which I’m not entirely sure what to do with at the moment). I’m writing this on the screen connected to the second desktop, however the mouse and keyboard are connected to the first desktop. If I want to control the laptop or the other desktop I just move the mouse over from one screen to the other. Maxivista does two things, it either allows you to turn any spare PC into a second monitor for the first or to remote control the second computer by simply moving the mouse to that screen as I am at the moment.

Its easily the coolest program I’ve found this year and has changed the way I use the computers, no more messing around with KVM’s, Maxivista only needs the network connection, wireless or wired it working fine for me over both. I found this via Stefan Didak’s website, a guy who has a comupter setup which rivals anything I’ve seen anywhere else and is well worth a look at.

There is also an open source version of this called Synergy2 which will work across platforms, I discovered this after finding and purchasing Maxivista, however after both myself and Tom used it we both found it to be a bit buggy but it might work for you.

Novell Netdrive

Not as interesting as the above one but non the less very useful. Novell Netdrive can connect to HTTP and FTP servers, Webdav and iFolder’s and add these as drives in My Computer. Fairly simple in many ways but very useful for website editing etc when having multple files open simultaneously and live on the website can be useful. This is unfortunatly something which isn’t available on the Novell website for copyright reasons, but a look around on Google will find you a download site. And no, this is not the same as mapping a drive in Windows XP as was mentioned when engadget covered this a couple of years ago (yup its not a new app by any means), the functionality it offers especially for doing backups is much improved on what Windows can do on its own.

On another note I’ve removed Lifehacker from my bloglist, it got rather boring to read their ‘inside tips’ etc which I read a few hours earlier off the actual authors blog whether it be Google’s, TechCrunch or any of the many others, also incredibly annoying to find a blog which doesn’t allow people to comment unless they’re a member.