Saturday, August 18, 2007

Post Updates..with a little help from my friends

I don't get lots of comments, but those I do are very helpful and appreciated.

Some kind commentors have given me some great tips recently and I want to highlight them:

Remote Support

In my post Remote PC Support - Revisited I considered a new crop of tools and services (mostly free) that folks can use to easily perform remote pc support of a friend or family-member's home computer.

In the end I picked ShowMyPC which I have been using heavily now to help quickly view and fix issues Dad is running into with his aging home pc system. It is fast, easy to walk the other person through over the phone to establish a connection, and very dependable.

selcuk posted a suggestion that I consider Microsoft SharedView Beta which is a Windows Live Beta product.

It allows you to create shared desktop sessions with other joined folks...kinda like a desktop conference call, including Sharing an Application or Desktop and Taking Control

System Requirements

Certainly looks like another nice solution if Windows Remote Desktop isn't an option due to Windows OS versions.

More Information on Microsoft Sharedview Beta

FAQ

Learn more

First look: Microsoft SharedView beta - Ars Technica review

Microsoft SharedView Beta - MSGoodies provides some technicals on the servers.

Uninstalling Flash

In my post of wrestling a gripping Flash file Flash9c.ocx Strangeness I mentioned that Flash installations cannot be installed via the traditional Add/Remove Programs list in Windows and takes some work to hunt down and manually remove the files.

Julie Smith left a comment informing me that Adobe DOES have an uninstaller: Flash Player Uninstaller

I haven't had time to set up a virtual machine at work and load some Flash files on it to test. So I can't say for certain what all it does or if it can handle one of it's own Flash files that got locked down with some special permissions.

While it might be good for bulk un-installs of Flash completely, that still might cause some issues for desktop application deployment teams who only want to remove the older versions of Flash, but install the latest patched versions. I suppose you could do a 1,2 punch script, uninstall everything, then reinstall the latest. Maybe that would be best.

Anyway, back to Julie...her blog the back room tech is filled with great Novell Zenworks tips and techniques as well as Windows and Firefox stuff. A scan of her categories list shows a wide breadth of topic coverage.

I've added Julie's site to my RSS feed list at home and at work.

Thanks Julie!

Space - Up Close and Magnificent

At the end of my post Visually Speaking I dropped some links to high-resolution images of the Shuttle from NASA.

RetroThing jogged my memory of an NPR story I had heard on the radio regarding a new release of super-high-resolution images from the Apollo moon landings: Retro Thing: Hi Rez Image Scans from the Apollo Moon Missions

The project is slated to take about three years. They have already scanned the 35mm images (620 shots in total), and are currently working their way through the remaining 35,000 images in the collection. So far, only a handful of example scans from the Apollo Mapping camera are offered online, offering a tantalizing taste of what is to come.

Right now there seem to be just a few overhead images of crater fields, but considering the wealth of images that were taken, I can't wait for the ones with the landers, astronauts, and images of the moonscape with earth in the background.

Apollo Photographic Support Data

--Claus

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