To avoid a lingering cold I practice the ancient art of washing my hands with soap. Prevention is the best kind of medicine, you avoid the the illness entirely. Most people don't get sick from airborne spores, bacteria or viruses, they get sick from touching objects that have those things on them then touching their…

The functional equivalent of file on Windows system is ... wait for it ... looking at the file extension.

If your tastes run to command line use or scripting I'd recommend RmEmpty (Remove Empty Folders) from Outside The Box Software. It's freeware and it does the job you expect, removes all the empty folders in and below the directory you point it at.

Is it just me or does anyone else cringe at the thought of magnets anywhere near a computer? Hard drives are delicate things and data is precious.

I'll third the call for locate or slocate. And I'll move to pass a motion to install locate32 on everyone's Windows systems.

Two alternatives for this type of task are CloneSpy and DuFF (Duplicate File Finder). These are both Windows freeware products.

I haven't tried HandBrake yet but I will, I am always looking for the better tool for a task. I have tried most of the major rippers at one time or another but keep coming back to the combination of pgc.net (for ripping) and avi.net (for converting). They don't do everything but, and this is important, they don't…

My favorite utility of this type is Shutter. I use it on all my laptops as it can create desktop icons for common functions. Along one side of my desktop I can select from icons that allow 'Lock', 'Sleep', 'Hibernate', 'Shutdown' or 'Reboot'. When you ask it to create the icons it will create several more than what…

[snark]I make it a practice to never think for myself. Smart people have already thought of everything. This is why they get elected to high political office and make such wonderful decisions. Now let's shut down that patent office.[/snark]

It bears mentioning that putting VNC on a port that is either not encrypted or does not require authentication is equivalent to painting a target on your internet connection. No matter what port you 'hide' it on. VPN is a big favorite for attack because it is so frequently badly configured and/or out of date. Even…

@DKong:

I started out owning a cat. But it turned out that my cat owned me ...[ObReference]... and I for one welcome our cat overlords.

I get to work early. Not through any choice of my own but because somebody decided that we needed to cover hours. Guess what time my natural cycle makes me most effective. Yep, at night, between 8pm and 1am. Just about the time I need to go to sleep to get to work at 7. But, this will be temporary, thankfully.

I'll not try to quantify my skills in this arena but people do ask me for backrubs more than once. I'll keep my tips simple:

To do list != GTD

I was halfway to being upset at the Linux distribution bias when I noticed it was a Gnome applet. So now I get to be upset about the windows manager bias! :-)

It's odd but have you ever noticed that when you set your alarm for a time but are thinking to yourself you would really prefer to wake up at a later time it is almost certain you will slap the sleep bar silly attempting to wake at the later time?

I loved the idea but the implementation is a little flawed. I had a mental image from the product name that wasn't born out by the picture. After a moments reflection here's the mental DIY project I see in my minds eye.

My first impression on looking at the picture was... clutter.

The encryption that KeePass uses can be considered safe, it is AES256. However the encryption isn't the only important factor to consider in security, it's often the encryption implementation that makes software secure or insecure.