Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category

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 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]

As a programmer, I sometimes find it easier to open a text editor real quick to make my changes. If you have used notepad, you can understand the frustration someone might face when trying to use it on a regular basis. To say the least, notepad leaves a lot to be desired.

I have been using Notepad2 for a while now. One of the things I love about it, is the fact it knows the syntax of many different programming formats. It knows html, xml, php, css, javascript, vbscript, perl, c++, sql, python, and many more. Most importantly, it understands pascal, which I use in my delphi applications.

If you’re not already using this great little app, you should be! It’s quick, it’s efficient, and best of all, it’s free! Go grab Notepad2 today!