Prey is a great program that you can install on a laptop just in case it gets lost or stolen one day. It’s very easy to install and use.

Once you notice that your laptop is missing all you have to do is login to their website and report your laptop as missing. It will at that point start trying to contact it and get the location of it. It not only gets the location of the laptop but it also gets other information such as IP addresses, WiFi info and it will even take a picture using the laptop’s camera every 20 minutes.

The best part about Prey is that it’s free for up to 3 devices so there is no excuse to not install it on your laptop.

http://preyproject.com/

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If you are like me, you like to keep your business calendar separate from your personal calendar.  That can be easy to do if you don’t need your second calendar to be synchronized, but if you do want both calendars synchronized, this is how you do it.

This is the way I found to be able to synchronize your Exchange calendar and your Google calendar on your iPhone at the same time.

1. Set up your Exchange account on your iPhone.

This is done just like normal.  Add all of your Exchange information under mail accounts.  I choose to only sync my Mail and Calendar but you can also sync your Contacts if you want.

2. Add the Google calendar to your iPhone.

(This will work for GMail and for Google Apps for Business.)

Go to Settings.  Then to Mail, Contacts, Calendar.  Go to Add account and click on Other.  Once you are at other, click on “Add CalDAV Account.”

For server you will want to enter www.google.com.  Your username is your email address and then enter your password.  You can enter anything for Description.

If you are using GMail, you are done at this point and your second calendar should be synced.  If you are using Google Apps for Business, there is one more step.  Open the account that you created on your iPhone in Settings.  Click on the Advanced Settings for the account.  You will have to enter an Account URL which is:

https://www.google.com/calendar/dav/YOUREMAIL@DOMAIN.COM/user

Once you do this, you are finished.

If you are using a mac, you can take this one step further and do the same thing with iCal.  Open iCal, go to Preferences, click Accounts and add a CalDAV account type.  Now your Google calendar will be synced on Google, your iPhone and in iCal automatically.

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1. Google announces Google Wave
2. Google Street View Snowmobile

www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJ4pgcrJU8c

Very cool, Google is adding ski slopes to Google Maps.  You can see the slopes that they have already added here.

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1. Google announces Google Wave
2. How to synchronize an Exchange and Google Calendar to the iPhone

Spiceworks is a free piece of software I have been using for a while now that can monitor your network.  The software runs on a Windows server however you can access the website interface from anywhere.

Spiceworks allows you to create alerts on many things on your network that can email you and let you know if there are problems.  You can create alerts if a server or network device is offline.  You can also create alerts if one of your printers is getting low on toner.

Creating alerts in Spiceworks

Spiceworks also has a user portal which allows your users to be able to submit trouble tickets if they are having problems with their computers.  The user portal is totally customizable in the back end and you can add anything to it.

Manage User Portal Content in Spiceworks

Spiceworks has a great reporting tool.  You can get reports on all software installed on the computers, disk usage, RAM, CPU and more.  The reports are also customizable so you can make you own.

Spiceworks Reports

If you click on a specific device in Spiceworks, you can get all of the information on that device including, what antivirus is installed, how much free hard drive space, how much memory and a lot more.

So if you are looking for a network monitoring tool, I would definitely check out Spiceworks.

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1. Copy DVDs fast and easy with 123CopyDVD
2. Pictures from HGTV Change the World

123CopyDVD

If you are like me, you like to make backup copies of your DVDs in order to make sure nothing happens to the originals.  Unfortunately a lot of the DVD copying software that is available is buggy or doesn’t make copies of most DVDs.  I have many different pieces of software and none of them are perfect however I have found one piece of software that is close, 123CopyDVD.  I have been using this software for a few months now and haven’t had any problems.  So if you are looking for a great program to copy DVD’s, give 123CopyDVD a try.

Download a free trial from www.123copydvd.com

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1. Free network monitoring software – Spiceworks

You can save yourself a lot of time down the road by creating a signature in Outlook using a template and applying it to everyone in your company automatically using Active Directory.  Using a Windows Powershell script and Group policy, you can do just that.

1. Download the Powershell script from Microsoft’s website.

2. Open the script and edit some of the variables at the top.  Company name, domain name, etc..

3. Using Outlook, create the signature that you want everyone to share.

4. Copy the signature from %appdata%\Microsoft\Signatures to the UNC-path specified in the SigSource-variable

5. Open Company Name.rtf and Company Name.htm in Microsoft Office Word and insert these bookmarks

Mark each word, “EmailAddress”, go to “Insert”, press the “Bookmark”-button and name the bookmark “EmailAddress”. It`s important that the names of the bookmarks are “DisplayName”, “Title”, “TelephoneNumber” and “EmailAddress”.
This is because these bookmarks are replaced by the information retrieved from Active Directory for the logged-on user.

6. Deploy the script using a logon script through group policy

If you get an error like:

“File xyz.ps1 cannot be loaded because the execution of scripts is disabled on this system. Please see “get-help about_signing” for more details.”

Try running this command: Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted

Now this script only works with a few variables: Email address, display name, title and telephone number. If you want to use other variables it is pretty easy to do by adding more lines to the code.  You can get the names of the Active directory variables at this page.

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It’s taken me a while but every day I become more of a believer in SaaS (Software as a Service), at least for small businesses.

No worrying about hardware failing

If you have ever done any system admin work for small businesses, you know the worst possible thing that could ever happen is a hardware failure. Usually if you have a hardware failing on a server, you have to diagnose the problem and figure out the best way to fix this problem. Usually it takes at least a day to get the part you need. During this time your server is down and anything on it is inaccessible.

No worrying about updating software

With SaaS you don’t have to update any software. No OS updates, OS components updates or program updates to do. Not a huge deal but updates can cause problems sometimes.

Don’t have to worry about backups

I’m not saying you don’t have to do backups, I would still backup your SaaS data. However there isn’t as much of a worry for it. You don’t have to deal with real complex backups, just backup your data nightly and you are fine.

Of course SaaS doesn’t only have positives, with SaaS you have to pay monthly usually and you’re not in total control. I think that the positives outweigh the negatives, at least for me. I would much rather focus on growing rather than working on the maintenance of my systems where I would never make money.

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Here are some pictures I took today from the HGTV Change the World Start at Home event. You can find more information about this event here.

HGTV getting set up before the kick off

View from Above

St. Louis Rams cheerleaders and the band getting ready

The kickoff has started

Some of the crowd watching

Monica Pedersen with the band

Scott Mosby from Mosby Building Arts discussing the patio

Construction on the Front Porch begins

The living room is being painted

Landscaping going in

Painting the built in bookshelves

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1. Free network monitoring software – Spiceworks

Flash flood in front of the office in Kirkwood, MO

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This is something I have been putting up with forever. Firefox on OS X is just horrible. It is either using 99% CPU or else it is just running slow all together.

Yes I do use plugins however disabling them really doesn’t help. Even if it did, what would be the point? The only reason I am still using Firefox is because of the plugins.

I was happy when Mozilla released Firefox 3.5 beta, hoping that would fix the problem but no it didn’t.

I’m really hoping that either Safari or Chrome allows for plugins to be created in the future.

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