Skype saved Christmas for my mom this year. With all of the kids/grandkids scattered around the country now she gets very depressed during the holidays. I got her hooked up with Skype this year and she spent a good part of Christmas day talking to grandkids and actually getting to watch them open presents. It really…

@tylerf: Same here. In my case the 64-bit version would not install on the laptop (processor is only 32-bit).

UltraMon for the dual monitor machine.

Right now with all of my work stuff running (Visual Studio, SQL Management, etc), along with Firefox, Rhapsody, Ultramon, Synergy, Security Essentials & F.lux, I am barely hitting 2gb. The only thing that ever gets me close to 4gb is Firefox bloat.

@pure241: Same here. My wife is a commercial skipping ninja, while I only remember to do it about half the time. Often she will have to remind me, or some annoying commercial (i.e. Free Credit Report) will get me fast-forwarding. #tv

I have been using the large colorful zip ties for years now. Just put one or two on either end of the handle so you can clearly see them but they don't poke you in the hand when you grab the handle.

@Jason Fitzpatrick: I'm right there with you on the 3 monitor problem. I'm currently on 2 mismatched monitors and a laptop. Luckily my 2 monitors are same height & vertical resolution, just different widths and (sigh) colors. I did just find a match for one of them on CL though... I wonder how hard it would be to…

@MrThunderfield: Seconded. I did this a couple of weeks ago using Acronis to create an image of my Vista install as a backup. The drive image takes a bit longer, but I like to keep it around for about 6 months after the fact in case I miss anything. Start to finish it was about 6 hours to backup, install OS and…

@AbsurdHero: It's not too difficult with the nVidia restricted driver & nvidia-settings, but I remember wanting to smash one monitor to solve the problem when trying to do this with ATI.

I have been using libraries to gain quick access to my current work projects while also maintaining a nice, logical file structure underneath. For example, I may have 30 project folders, but only 4 or 5 that I'm working on at any given time. Adding the current items to a library just makes it a bit more convenient to…

Nice clean space. I'm definitely going with some darker furniture colors next time around, it just looks so much cleaner.

Sounds neat, I will have to give it a try. It would be especially useful when opening links posted in blog comments without any explanation of what they are.

I rented in California for a number of years and always had renter's insurance. The first couple of places I rented actually required it, I may have never even known about it otherwise. From what I recall it was only about $200 per year, very inexpensive.

@maltese: IIRC the VPN behavior you described is actually set at the policy level on the Cisco VPN hardware, and the Cisco client would blindly obey. It's called split tunneling and is set to route all traffic through the VPN by default. Sounds to me like the Apple client overrides or ignores that policy setting.…

Feature request for new Skype investors/owners: BLOCK CONTACT REQUESTS

This would have been handy a couple of weeks ago. I used a more manual, but still reasonably easy, method found on Gizmodo to get Windows 7 loaded on my wife's Acer netbook. It worked the first time around, this just would have been a bit more convenient.

Different Server

Meh... but still good enough for my purposes.

My ability to multi-task/task-switch depends on how the information is coming at me. On-screen I can manage several different tasks without a problem. When you throw an actual human into the mix however, my focus is easily broken to the point where I can't really do much at all until I re-focus on either the person or…

I have been doing this for a while as well. I even went so far as to make a spiffy blue Chrome icon to differentiate it from normal Chrome in the quick launch bar.