The scenario – you have multiple computers sitting at your desk and you often find you need little snippets of text that are sitting on one over on another machine – an email address, your sig, a phone number, whatever. Synergy is one way to handle this – I’ve blogged about it before and it’s a fantastic, free app. But maybe you don’t want or need screen sharing, you just need the ability to paste text across machines and platforms. If you’re on a mac or win32 box, check out Crossclip, cross platform clipboard sharing utility. At $20 it’s a little steep for what it does, especially when Synergy is free, but it’s also simpler and a heck of a lot easier to get configured than Synergy is, and their plan is to add the ability to move binary data around also (ie copied gifs, jpegs and so on, which synergy can’t and probably won’t ever do). If you’re running a firewall be aware you’ll have to poke a few holes in it to get this working – there are some great pictorial tutorials on the product’s site to help with that though.

If you’ve ever encountered phpMyAdmin, the ubiquitous utility for managing your mysql databases, check out what some clever folks have done using Flash – phpFlashMyAdmin. It’s basically a riff on phpMyAdmin but with a responsive flash-based UI and the addition of a slick graphical relationship modeler/constructor. Pretty cool stuff and at $5 a bargain should you actually need such a thing.

If you do web development work, check out this firefox plugin which stitches tidy right into the browser. Nothing particularly revelatory about this but it can speed up website development workflow depending on your existing process. Free, works on platforms that firefox runs on, which means pretty much everything.

Speed up your typing on the mac with the free Textpander. Chances are pretty high that there are blocks of text you type repeatedly and frequently, say for example your name or street address. Long time Mac users may already have discovered Typeit4Me, which has been around since at least the System 8 days. If you haven’t tried it, it’s well worth a look. If you haven’t already licensed Typeit4me, Textpander is donation ware, distinguishes itself from Typeit4me with a much nicer interface for adding macros, has the ability to mix in binary data with macros (so, for example, insert your email sig and then a gif or jpg of your actual signature), and can import your existing library of typeit4me macros if you’ve decided to switch for some reason. Both programs are worth a look for those looking to speed up their text entry.

This is for geeks only, but if you’re one of those people who gets calls from friends/family/acquaintances/the guy who puts your groceries in the bag asking for help with their computer, you’ll find the Ultimate Boot CD pretty handy. It’s a bootable CD that contains a host of useful diagnostic and maintenance tools for computers. Next time you go out on a service call, bring along this cd. Free, mostly useful to windows/x86 hardware folk.

I’ve mentioned tiddlywiki, the single page javascript-based wiki engine, a number of times. If you want to experiment with a simple little wiki it’s hard to find a simpler way to do it – download, tinker with it, use the file menu to save to your local machine. It can’t get much easier. Meanwhile though folks are doing all kinds of interesting things with the basic code, including turning it into a server-based service. If you’ve played around with the basic premise but want a more robust solution with more features, check it out. It’s free, at least for now.

Of course as I’ve mentioned in the past, there are also ways to do this on your own server if you’re geeky enough to know how to do it – check the main tiddlywiki site for links to a variety of solutions.

Quicksilver has solved this problem on MacOS, but if you’re on Windows and like me have 1.6 gajillion different applications, utilities and games installed across a collection of hard drives, you probably struggle to find applications you’d like to launch and have such a proliferation of icons on your desktop that you can no longer distinguish between them. Enter Quickrun, another file launcher for Windows. It’s free, very small at ~300k, and super easy to use. Just install it then right click on the quicklaunch area to the right of your start menu and begin customizing. It’s nowhere near as elegant as Quicksilver but it gets the job done, especially if you’re partial to hierarchical file management, and you can’t beat the price.

Check out the steve’s digicams review of the Sanyo Xacti C5, a tiny solid state video camera. You can get these for just under $400 if you import them. This would be perfect for my hikes with Soolin, especially if I could find a way to head mount the thing and do a ‘First Person Hiker’ cam thing. It records for about an hour per battery charge, saves out to mpeg4, connects via USB so you can dump the video onto your computer for editing, and is tiny, it will fit in your shirt pocket. I’ve been watching this class of camera for a couple of years now. This is the first worthwhile device to come out. I’d need to get at least one spare battery and a couple of 1GB SD cards to store the video on, adding about $200 to the final cost, but for $600 I could be fully equipped to shoot a couple of hours of video while I’m out in the field. This goes onto my list of stuff I want once I can pull together the money for it.