When I’m in front of my laptop, I usually forget the world around. Sadly, the world around has important things that need to get done on time. Like eating medicines, turning off the washing machine or the hob, etc. The one thing I’ve been lacking on my machine was a simple alarm system. I’d like to set an alarm to remind me to do something in 5 minutes, for example. And it should be dead simple to set up. ...
I’m totally hooked to portable apps now. You don’t need admin rights to install them. You can run them off a USB stick. They won’t make your machine slower. All the reasons not to install an application vanish. PortableApps.com is a good starting point. For what it’s worth, here are my portable apps by category (most used on top). Platforms Firefox. If you’re using IE6, please die. Lack of admin access is no longer an excuse. Cygwin brings you UNIX commands to Windows. Portable Ubuntu run Ubuntu as a window in Windows. Tiny utilities ...
You can defeat most web filters by spending around 8 cents/hr 0 cents/hr on Amazon EC2. (It’s usually worth the money. It’s a fraction of the cost a phone call or a sandwich. And I usually end up wasting that money anyway on calling someone or eating my way out of the misery of corporate proxies.) Most web filters and proxies block all ports except the HTTP port (80) and the HTTPS port (443). But it’s used to carry encrypted traffic, and, as Mark explains: ...