July 2008 – Glen Sharp's Tech Blog

Timeline Software

Timeline software is beginning to emerge to help present events in time in a more interesting way similar to how Apple has implemented time machine effects for recovering backup files.

Bee Doc’s has two software versions for creating timelines with the second one including some 3D effects. The software can be used to create editable timelines that can be stored locally or posted online as a movie.

Kronomy is a beta web service for creating timelines on their site and embedding the timeline on another site. Dates are not shown horizontally on the bottom but along with the list of events. Kronomy has a nice feature of supporting interesting graphic backgrounds. By posting content to the site you are granting the site to full rights to the content. Ameans for exporting content out of Kronomy isn’t immediately apparent. You can restrict access to your timelines to people in your contact list. You can also just keep them to yourself but that kind of defeats the purpose of having them online.

Circavie is another beta web service for creating timelines. It is part of the AOL community and you can sign on using your AIM id which is a free registration. It has more flexibility in that you can display the timeline online but also embed it at another site and create an RSS feed. This site also doesn’t have an obvious way to download all your content.

While the online betas are interesting Bee Doc’s seems the best bet especially if you want to have more flexibility and control of your content.

Sweet Home 3D

Free program that has surprisingly good 2D and 3D features and is cross platform (Windows, Linux, Mac).
Beats moving the furniture around to visualize different room layouts.
http://sweethome3d.sourceforge.net/index.html

Apple’s Mac Quicktips

Apple has a series of quicktip short videos on how to take advantage of the many features available in OSX and the included software.
You can also subscribe to the podcasts if you want to be notified of and view new podcasted video tips in iTunes.
Worth checking out the short videos to see how to do more with what you might not have realized you have available.

Setting up a Virtual Network Computing (VNC) server

Way back in May 2007 there was an article on this blog on how to setup a home network for remote computer support.

If you have done that you’ll also want to install a VNC server like TightVNC which can be downloaded here

Install TightVNC using the default settings which will establish it as a service that starts automatically. You will need to assign a remote access password.

I recommend getting the VNC connection working first by having someone test it from a remote VNC client and then adding more security using Secure Shell (SSH) after you have established that basic remote access is working.

Darren Kitchen from G4 Techtv has posted an article for the full setup of bullet proof remote access that references wikipedia articles providing background on both VNC and SSH.

Once secure remote access is established it is a lot easier to provide remote tech support by being able to see what is happening and show what to do. It can also come in handy if you need to remotely access your computer yourself while on the road.