I have been waiting to do this review for a few weeks now, but thought I would wait until Nick released the final version.

If you are looking for a Windows based RSS reader, you should take a look at FeedDemon 2.0.

FeedDemon leaves it’s competition in the dust. It’s user friendly interface and the ability to sync with Newsgator Online and other Newsgator products makes it the #1 RSS reader, IMHO.

With FeedDemon 2.0, Nick Bradbury takes us to a whole new level. Organizing feeds is much, much, easier with the single-level tree view as opposed to the old style dropdown lists. The choice of newspaper styles lets you change things up a bit. The watches make sure I never miss what I am looking for, and the news bins make sure I never forget to blog about the things I didn’t want to miss in the first place.

There is so much more I could mention, but honestly, I would rather spend my evening catching up on some feeds in FeedDemon, so why don’t you take a look at the release notes to see what has changed. Some would condense this down to one word, “everything”.

As a user of FeedDemon since the beginning, I believe this latest version (which is the most powerful, yet easy-to-use product I have seen) is Nick Bradbury’s finest achievement.

Technorati Tags: FeedDemon, Newsgator, Nick Bradbury, RSS

On February 17th I did a review of Notepad2, and titled the post “The Best Notepad Replacement“.

On March 15th, Craig Baker recommended TextPad.

After downloading and installing it, I must say, I am impressed. I am a “multiple tabs” person. I always have 5 to 10 apps open in Windows, and at least 15-20 tabs open in Firefox, on a slow day. Any application that allows me to have multiple tabs wins points right off the bat. Notepad2 does not (and according to it’s author, will not) support multiple documents being open at the same time.

From a functionality point of view, I didn’t notice too many things that “stood out”, except the compare files tool, which has already come in handy, as I had to find some changes which were made in a file. Textpad took care of that task within seconds of opening the two documents.

I have titled this post, “The Best Notepad Alternative” for a couple of reasons.

#1 - Textpad is not free. You can evaluate it, but then you must register it, for $30. Notepad is free, and the best replacement would also be free.

#2 - Textpad feels “geekier”. The average notepad user would probably prefer the look and feel of Notepad2.

As a code junkie, I must say that I found myself preferring to open Textpad rather than Notepad2.

If you prefer the ability to open multiple documents, and you don’t mind the small price tag, then I highly recommend Textpad. It’s a great alternative, and to some, a great replacement.

For your information:

Virus hunters have discovered a new Trojan that encrypts files on an infected computer and then demands $300 in ransom for a decryption password.

The Trojan, identified as Cryzip, uses a commercial zip library to store the victim’s documents inside a password-protected zip file and leaves step-by-step instructions on how to pay the ransom to retrieve the files.

It is not yet clear how the Trojan is being distributed, but security researchers say it was part of a small e-mail spam run that successfully evaded anti-virus scanners by staying below the radar.

While this type of attack, known as “ransomware,” is not entirely new, it points to an increasing level of sophistication among online thieves who use social engineering tactics to trick victims into installing malware, said Shane Coursen, senior technical consultant at Moscow-based anti-virus vendor Kaspersky Lab.

[Source: eweek.com]

For the past couple of years I have been testing different VPN solutions.

Each solution I tried didn’t really work well, consistently. Some had problems running smoothly under XP, others required so much configuration on the server end they weren’t worth the hassle, and others seemed to work well, but had security holes a third grader could find.

Back in December, Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte discussed Hamachi during the Security Now podcast. I decided to give it a try, and I haven’t looked back.

I now use Hamachi on all my desktop machine and my laptop, all seven servers I am responsible for monitoring, and a few other machines I need to connect too from time to time.

From the Hamachi website:

Hamachi is a UDP-based virtual private networking system. Its peers utilize the help of a 3rd node called mediation server to locate each other and to boot strap the connection between themselves. The connection itself is direct and once it’s established no traffic flows through our servers.

Hamachi is not just truly peer-to-peer, it is verifiably secure peer-to-peer.

Believe it or not, but we are able to successfully mediate p2p connections in roughly 97% of all cases we dealt with so far (few tens of thousands as of early March). This includes peers sitting behind different firewalls and/or broadband routers (aka NAT devices). It is high-tech and it is really cool

The number of users of Hamachi has doubled in the past month and they are experiencing some growing pains, but other than the occasional “restarts” the reliability of the solution is great. Best of all, Hamachi is free.

If you are looking for an easy to set up, easy to use, VPN solution, check out Hamachi. They have versions for Windows and Linux, and I hear there is a version of the Mac coming soon.

I even have Hamachi running as a service on all my machines.

[tags]Hamachi, VPN, Free[/tags]

Have you ever been working in an application and needed it to stay on top of all other windows while you were working on it? I find applications that allow the “Always On Top” feature to be much more useful than those that don’t.

They are especially helpful if you are trying to read something from one window while typing in another, or while adding numbers, or even watching the progress of one window while you are working in another.

Enter Deskpins.

Through the use of a small icon in the system tray, you can “pin” any window to the top, whenever you want.

I downloaded this app yesterday, and have already found it to be one of the most useful tools in my collection.

[tags]software, deskpins, useful apps[/tags]