I have an interesting model for maintaining synchronized, versional documents of things I am working on.
On any Mac or Windows machine I own, I can edit a document and have the changes enacted on other machines connected to the internet with little to no user interaction. Furthermore, I have a 30 day cycle of redundant copies in case I accidentally delete a file or edit something I don’t want edited. Finally, I have a networked, hardware raid array which decouples some hardware risks regarding the local copies.
It isn’t like I do anything THAT interesting or mission critical. I spent a little time thinking about this problem and ways to mitigate risks. It has some tradeoffs, and most of them I’m ok with. YMMV.
Lets get on with some diagrams after the break. (more…)
Creating PDF Documents in Windows Using PDFCreator
One essential action that Windows users need is the ability to print PDF documents. Over on the Mac platform is easy to create a PDF document, this feature ships with every copy of OS X. Windows users, are not so lucky but do not fret. A free open-source program called “PDFCreator” is available for download from SourceForge.net. This program creates a new printer on your local system, which will emulate a real printer to all your Windows applications. Although I haven’t played with it in this mode, it has the ability to become a network printer and listen on a local area network for incoming print jobs.
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I frequently see other peoples computers when asked to resolve a problem or conflict. One tool I see rarely-but-wish-I-saw-more-often on these computers is a free file compression tool called 7zip. I think it is one of the best tools nobody has heard of.
You can go get it from here: http://www.7-zip.org/
For those of you whom just left on that link, I’ll wait until you return…
.
..
Your back! Good!
Here are some quick reasons why you want it
- It can compress multi-gig files / directories without slowing down (as the file size increases).
- It can handle UNIX/Linux style .gz or tar.gz or bzip files
- It can unpack RAR files
- It has a nice right-click extract feature
- Its GNU Free Software
- Its lightweight and not bloaty
- It is fast enough for me.
- With respect to free software, its stable and well rooted (good community mass, “mature” project)
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