As we enter these dog days of summer, why don’t you take a break and visit some of
these interesting web sites to see if there are utilities you would like to use to
make your life a little easier.
I thank the folks at Nicom IT Solutions, particularly Barry Milne, for sharing these
with us. (The sentences in quotations following the web addresses are how the companies
describe themselves.)
www.xobni.com – “Drowning in Email? Find People,
Email & Attachments Instantly.” Xobni is “inbox” spelled backward. This
is a clever little utility you can download and plug into Outlook to help you manage
your email traffic. It keeps track of email conversations and organizes them
by person and topic. It identifies with whom you converse the most and what’s the
best time of day to find them at their computer.
www.jott.com – “Get Simple Back.” Jott is a voice-to-text
and text-to-voice service that’s useful if you’re on the road a lot. It converts your
voice into emails, text messages, reminders, lists and appointments. You simply call
a number and ask it to email a person or a group, or you can listen to email messages
or RSS feeds. The Halifax number for Jott is 482-8120.
www.xpenser.com – “The most efficient way to
manage your expenses and reports” This utility allows you to keep track of your expenses,
which you call in, and it will categorize and total them. Later you can export them
into programs like Quicken or Excel.
www.tripit.com – “Organize your travel.” Tripit
helps you manage your travel plans by accumulating other online travel services into
one. Send the booking confirmation emails to this service and it keeps track of your
itinerary. Tripit keeps track of such things as air travel, hotel, restaurants, and
car rental, and provides you with a map with directions from the airport to the hotel.
www.internetfrog.com – “Many tools for webmasters,
domain owners, network administrators, and website developers.” The “Internet Frog”
can be used to verify your internet upload and download speeds. You will need to provide
it with your IP address, which you can get by entering the command “ipconfig” at a
DOS window, or by checking your router settings.
www.readthewords.com – “All you have to
do is tell us what you want read, then sit back and listen.” If you know you will
be on the road for a long time, you can use this utility to upload a document and
convert it to an audio file that you can then load up on your MP3 player and listen
to while travelling.
www.crossloop.com – “Simple and secure screen
sharing… and a place to find trusted experts to help.” If you’re asking someone for
help with your computer, you can both visit this web site so you can allow that person
to see your screen and run some tests for you.
www.crucial.com – “The memory experts.” This
site will scan your computer, list all its components, and make suggestions for upgrades.
www.pdf995.com – “The solution for your document
publishing needs.” If you want to save reports to PDF format, you can download a print
driver from this web site. Then when you print a report from any program, choose pdf995
instead of a printer and that report will be saved as a PDF.
www.openoffice.org – “The free and open productivity
suite.” This is a freely downloadable suite of office programs for word processing,
spreadsheets, presentations, graphics and databases. It can read and save files in
Microsoft Office format.
www.ccleaner.com – “A freeware PC optimization
tool.” Download this utility to clean out unused temporary files left over by various
programs.
www.anvir.com – “High quality utility software
that gives users a full control of their computer.” If you find your computer is running
a bit slower than it should, maybe you are running some processes you don’t need and
perhaps don’t even know you have. Download Anvir Task Manager to find out all
processes that are running on your computer.
And for the baker’s dozen…
www.microsoft.com – “Your potential. Our passion.”
On the home page’s Search box, type in Powertoys and you’ll get some Windows XP utilities
written by Microsoft developers that didn’t make it into the operating system.
So there you have it. If you know of any sites you’d like to share with others, please
drop me a line! Have a great summer; I’ll be back with the heavy stuff in the fall!
