Intellisense for your MSSQL Query Analyzer, brought to you by red-gate. And you thought I didn’t like intellisense….

I’m not much for reviewing or recommending web applications. There are loads of sites out there for that. I don’t mind, however, mentioning apps that I’ve used for a while and continue to use regularly. Specifically, two I use every week come to mind.

I’ve recently been dabbling with a return to the gym after over a decade hiatus. I can’t stand gyms but I was able to find the closest thing to a non-gym you’ll ever find in a gym. I get bored almost instantly in a gym so I need variety but can’t justify spending cash on a personal trainer.

Enter HyperStrike. Once you’re setup in hyperstrike, you can jump in and print out your workout for the day and you’re done. It’s a low cost, free at this point, alternative to a personal trainer. I never have to think about what I’m going to do in the gym and it’s different everytime. The other major feature is that they’ve used motion video capture to make little movies of every exercise. It’s the fastest way I’ve seen to learn a new exercise properly besides a personal trainer. Books are fine but unless their flip books, this is much better.

The other app is a correspondence game app called Its Your Turn. I’ve technically been a member there since 2002, however, I only recently returned to active use. It’s a simple concept. Start a game with someone. Make your move, then go back to whatever you were doing. You’ll get an email when it’s your turn to move.

This is one of the few web apps that’s been around since pre bubble, is still going, and has hardly changed over those years. It’s a simple, ugly site that works. The haven’t messed anything up by implementing ajax, johnnie 2.0, tagging, or any other flavour of the week. I was using their free service all these years up until about a month ago when I signed up for their paid account. I admire any web app that has the patience to wait over 4 years to land my sale.

Um, I’m not sure what to say….Depending on your view of vi, this is either the most usable or unusable search engine on the net.

“Using the commands of vi to search the web.
Edit your search results like a vi document.”

Being cheap and independent, I’ve tried a lot of free conference call services. While I haven’t had to chance to run enough calls on this service to comment on the call quality, in terms of features this is the slickest service I’ve seen.

Sign up and you get a dedicated reservationless bridge for yourself that includes more base features than any service I’ve seen, including free call recording:

“LiveOffice’s FreeConferencing lets you record your conference calls at no cost. Not only is recording your conference call free, but it’s as simple as dialing the phone plus the audio file from your recorded conference is saved in MP3 format for superior audio quality and flexible playback. Your recording will be made available online within sixty minutes of your conference call concluding and will remain available for a minimum of the next thirty days.”

That’s not even the slickest feature, that title falls to their web control panel. With the control panel you can not only control your call, you can see who’s on the call and what number they called in from. No more calls filled “who just joined the call?” and “who just dropped off the call?”.

That’s not all (this is turning quickly into an infomercial), with the web control panel you can dial out to participants although there are some restrictions around the use of this feature. I believe you need five inbound calls for every one outbound call.

I’m lazy as I haven’t had a chance to explore what exactly this is yet but if you have a blackberry then check it out for yourself. For now, I’ll file it under “I’m not sure I get the point”.

As usual, I have no friends.

Via Chris

By the time I’m done this post I may need a new category. Maybe “Who Really Cares?” or “Confessions of a Dork”?

I carry a fisher bullet pen with me all the time. I’ve tried loads of different small pens over the years and the space pen is the first that’s lasted and actually usable.

For paper, I carry a few recipe cards in my back pocket as well as some of my cards. The combination means I always have paper and pen while taking up little space in my pockets because I’m not a fanny pack guy although I didn’t mind fubar.

Some call this a variation of a hipster pda. I’m not much for calling anything I do ‘hipster’.

So it’s been about a week since I started trying out KeePass and it’s done. I’m sold and now using it fulltime.

This is one of those problem spaces that I’ve kept saying ‘someone must have solved this in a decent way already’ and as confusing as it sounds it’s taken me years to find an app I’m happy with. Sure there’s proprietary apps out there but I don’t like the idea of locking my passwords up in a commercial app so finding something open source was key.

Anyway, for what it’s worth, KeePass has my endorsement. I also never thought I’d make use of features like password generation but I am. The copy to clipboard features are plain slick. While I have yet to play around with it, the auto-type feature is…well I’m out of words, is awesome still a cool word?

Jaimie recently gave Open Office a shot. My 2 cents? I’ve been using OO since back in their 0.x days, well over 4 years. More importantly I haven’t used Microsoft Office in all those years. As I work for myself I’d have to shell out the hundreds of bucks for that MS Office license to use it legitimately.

I started using OO back at MKS with the thought it’d be interesting to test out but I’d still have to use MS Office. Within a few months I realized that was the case as I never opened MS Office. I have yet to miss MS Office.

Am I the only one who’s laptop battery just plain gave up on me? I thought we were having a grand relationship. I charged it fully, let it drain fully, charged it fully, I thought I was being the ideal battery user person. I’m at the point now where my battery lasts 20 minutes on a full charge if I’m lucky. While I appreciate the emails from people concerned my battery could explode, I seriously doubt this thing has the power to light LED’s little on start a fire.

Options? Pay the man $170 for a new one, and yes in this context dell is the man. Another somewhat viable option is this generic battery for $50. It’s clunky at 3.5 lbs but has some nice features including the claim it can be charged 1000 times.

The biggest negative is that it doesn’t physically fit into the laptop so it’s far from ideal. As well, as it’s going through the laptop’s AC input, my machine won’t know when the battery’s about to die leaving me open to data loss. I can get around this by using my original fully charged battery as my failsafe. That’d give me a full 10 to 20 minutes to save my important solitaire game after the generic battery died.

It’s cumbersome but at least I could go back to working at the park the odd day.

I haven’t had the chance to test this yet but if it’s for real then I agree it is huge. The ability to actually debug JavaScript code, who’d a thought?