Protolize.org is awesome! This is the best collection of web tools I have seen yet.

This tool makes links you can put on your desktop or in your browser to open an Outlook item automatically.

If you are forced to use Outlook at work and have a ton of emails pertaining to a lot of different topics like I do, this tool is AWESOME. When I create a new folder for a work order, I add a link to the related emails in the folder, and I no longer have to spend any time digging when something new comes up.

It is totally free, but they do require an email address to send the download link to.

Mono Project

Now you can write AND run .net code on pretty much anything, for free. With Mono’s newest release, you can use Visual Basic. I’m not sure why you would want to, but you can if you feel the urge.

Quick Reference Bash

Heres a handy little list of common bash commands. It is by no means exhaustive, but it is a good link to have if you are new to finding your way around the linux command line.

Its been over a week now, and I can’t say I have missed windows at all. I started out with gnome as it installs by default, even though I’ve always preferred KDE. After a few days, I installed KDE too. I remembered instantly why I like it so much.

KDE just seems so much more “grown up” to me. Administration is a snap, and everything is right there ready to go. I also prefer a single panel, as opposed to the top and bottom panels of gnome.

I’ve tried Looking Glass, a java windows manager, but its still a bit sluggish for my taste. I have a decent machine, plenty of horsepower, but lg3d was still a little slow. Next up, I plan to give Beryl a shot. The features list is sick.

I ran into some issues with Windows Firewall (which I disabled) last night, so I trashed windows and installed Fedora Core 6. It took about an hour to get the whole thing installed (including openoffice and more development tools than I know how to use). About 15 minutes later, my browser was good to go with all the needed media plugins, and I’m back up and running.

I’ll still be using win for development at work, unless I end up taking the Java route. If that happens, I’ll request a nix rig or maybe a mac for development. Of course, streaming content to my xbox and most pc games will require a windows installation, but I can just use virtual machines for that.

Last night, I had about enough of my pc telling me what I HAD to have installed and running. Now, I’ll be the one telling my pc what it has to have…even if that means a week of downtime here and there while I figure out what the hell I did to fry my linux installation.

Over the years, I have ripped a bunch of cds to mp3. I wanted to take them to work so I could listen there, but my work pc does not have a dvd drive, and wasting cd’s for a few albums didn’t seem like the way to go. So…what to do?

Well, I decided to zip them up, dump them on my web space, and download from work. Considering the network is full of data that is actually important to the company during the work day, downloading during work hours was not prudent. Plus, bandwidth throttling at work caused a single album download to take over an hour.

Of course, the best idea would have been to use my thumb drive, but a) its only 256mb, and b) I can’t find the damn thing. So, I installed wget for windows* on my work pc, wrote a batch file for each file I wanted to download, and set them to run as scheduled tasks starting at 3am. (If I had a linux box at work, I could have just made a cron job and been done with it.) Now, I am no longer concerned with slow download speeds or clogging the network and impeding the transport of important data.

*Wget for windows is a port of a linux command by the same name. W(eb)get does just that: it gets any web accessible file from the command line, making it perfect for batching. It allows for http username/passwords, so you can password protect your directories and still schedule downloads to run whenever you want.