Tech

Between my job, church com­mit­ments, free­lance work, and per­sonal life (what’s left over — usu­ally con­sist­ing of a cou­ple meals a week and fix­ing fam­ily com­put­ers!), I often am forced to work on any num­ber of com­put­ers and devices.  Some of these aree a cheap Asus net­book, a work Dell lap­top, a work­horse com­puter at church, and an iPhone & Black­berry for mobile duties.  The dif­fi­cult thing about this is, I like my com­put­ers set up a cer­tain way.  I like them to look fairly sim­i­lar, have sim­i­lar soft­ware, and be able to do the work I need to do on them effi­ciently.  Over the past year or so, I’ve been using sev­eral tools to stream­line this.  Right now, thanks to all-free soft­ware, I’m able to sit at any of those com­put­ers and do 90% of the things I do from any of these places!

Drop­box.  This is an awe­some online ser­vice that sets up a shared “folder” on your com­puter that actu­ally resides on their servers.  There­fore, when you save a doc­u­ment in the Drop­box folder on your com­puter, it’s instantly and auto­mat­i­cally synced with the Drop­box server.  When you install Drop­box on your com­put­ers and mobile devices (I also have it run­ning on the iPhone & Black­berry), you can have instant access to any files you’re work­ing on.  The one down­side to this, over a flash drive, is that it’s over the inter­net, so unless you want to sit and wait for the upload/download process, it’s really best suited for small files.  Word doc­u­ments, a photo or two, and text doc­u­ments (which I use for lists and emails I’m edit­ing), are the major­ity of what I use it for, and for those things, it’s wonderful!

Filezilla.  This is an FTP pro­gram that I’ve been using for sev­eral years.  I used to use WS-FTP, and actu­ally used to pay for the yearly updates.  At one point, I had some trou­ble with WS_FTP crash­ing and so I decided to try Filezilla.  Almost imme­di­ately I real­ized it was a much bet­ter pro­gram (and it was free)!  On every machine I work on, I install Filezilla and then import an XML file that con­tains the sites I’m cur­rently work­ing with.  Every so often I import a cur­rent XML file in all of the machines so that they’re all up-to-date with my project web­sites.  Filezilla does not take up many sys­tem resources and does every­thing I need it to do, very eas­ily, so I’m happy with it.

Log­MeIn.  This site is a real God-send.  It makes log­ging into remote com­put­ers so much EASIER than try­ing to use Remote Desk­top or any other ser­vice.  I prob­a­bly have over 10 com­put­ers that it’s installed on and any time I need a file, or make a change to the machine, or any­thing else, it takes lit­er­ally <20 sec­onds to be on it.  This ser­vice is also great for work­ing over pub­lic wi-fi or a pos­si­bly inse­cure net­work with­out hav­ing to worry about your sen­si­tive data.  Let’s say you want to do some online bank­ing from Star­bucks.  Nor­mally, I’d be really hes­i­tant to do that because you don’t know how secure the con­nec­tion is, but with Log­MeIn, you can securely log into another com­puter and do your work on that machine (maybe it’s one at home or an office with a secure con­nec­tion).  The data passed between your com­puter and Log­MeIn is encrypted, so you don’t have to worry about credit card num­bers, or any other poten­tially sen­si­tive infor­ma­tion being seen by any­one else.

Xmarks.  Fire­fox is the only browser I use for sev­eral rea­sons.  First of all, it’s fast and unclut­tered, unlike IE.  Sec­ond, because of a plu­gin called Adblock that blocks hun­dreds of thou­sands of adver­tise­ments from down­load­ing and dis­play­ing on web­sites.  Third, because of Xmarks.  Xmarks is a lit­tle syn­chro­niza­tion pro­gram that syncs all your book­marks across any com­put­ers it’s installed on.  I don’t have tons of book­marks, but I have a set of ones I use a lot, and I’m really picky about orga­niz­ing them.   With Xmarks I can do that, and have them orga­nized on any com­puter I work on sim­ply by installing the pro­gram and log­ging in to my Xmarks account.  I guar­an­tee if you use more than one com­puter, you will love this program!

Ever­note.  I just started using this a cou­ple weeks ago, but so far it’s really nice to use.  I like the fact that instead of sav­ing a doc­u­ment on the machine, your only option is to “sync” — so you never for­get to sync later (which I might for­get if I was typ­ing in Word or Notepad).  It does act a lit­tle flaky some­times — have had trou­ble with cer­tain key­strokes pulling it up when I didn’t want it, but assum­ing that works out, I will prob­a­bly use it for blog and email drafts.

GIMP.  I am a Pho­to­shop user, but at some­thing like $600 for a sin­gle copy of it, I only have one copy (and it’s ancient because I got it back in my sec­ond year of col­lege).  There­fore, I only have PS run­ning on my main com­puter at church — the pow­er­house I do for any hard­core edit­ing or projects.  On every­thing else, it’s chal­leng­ing to edit images quickly, but of the avail­able options, GIMP is my favorite.  It’s slow, and it’s weird (com­pared to PS), but it does do a rea­son­able job of image editing/cropping/saving/whatever and you can’t argue with the price!  A lot of peo­ple use and like Pho­to­shop Ele­ments, but per­son­ally, I find it to be too consumer-oriented, and it takes me longer to do things in it than in Photoshop.

Google Talk.  As a long­time Gmail fan­boy, Google Talk is the best way to use Google Chat as well as get­ting new mail noti­fi­ca­tions.  When installed, Google Talk pops up a small (Out­look type) box in the cor­ner of the screen when­ever a new email comes in.  For chat duties, Google Talk (although it doesn’t han­dle video) is the nicest way to com­mu­ni­cate with the ser­vice — I don’t like being stuck in the browser.

So, there’s my list!  Any­thing I should add to it?  What free or low-cost soft­ware do you use to make your­self more productive?