Have you got a secret to keep?

Sometimes, everyone wants to remain anonymous. Perhaps you are researching a medical condition or using the internet for some other sensitive reason for which you require privacy. Normal internet use does not allow this – your activity and IP address is often logged by numerous groups such as your ISP and any server or service that your computer connects to. TOR is a piece of software that allows you to increase your privacy on the web through encryption and complex data routing paths. TOR allows you to browse anonymously, use instant messaging, IRC, SSH or other TCP/IP based applications in complete privacy. TOR can be downloaded from http://tor.eff.org/ for Windows, Mac, Linux or BSD.

Canvastic is the latest offering for this innovative desktop publishing solution for education.

It combines bitmap and vector graphics with text and presentation capabilities making it a choice that teachers and school technology leaders will want to evaluate for publishing projects of all kinds. Think of Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign but designed for students from Kindergarten to 8th grade. It scales itself for the user with a feature called “Grows with the user.” When activated, the student chooses from a list of preferences on launch and the program presents a customized set of tools, functions and screen arrangement. The preference sets can be tweaked to a large degree. A five year old gets a paint brush and a canvas but an eighth grader gets a full set of paint and vector tools and an un-locked interface. Schools can pilot the program for two months.

ooVoo is a video conferencing software application.

That sounds simple, and aren’t there a lot of software programs out there that can do that? Not really. ooVoo allows up to 6 people conferencing at the same time. A stand out feature that I like a lot is the crystal clear pictures (with PC that fulfills the technical requirements). No more grainy pictures and strange colors. You can use ooVoo to simply chat with friends, keep in touch with your family, or even conduct a meeting. It’s free – just grab and go. Nothing gets easier than that. And if your friends/family/colleagues don’t have ooVoo, fret not. ooVoo has this cool feature called ooVoo web calls. Basically you copy-paste a link and people clicking that link can instantly do video chat with you. No downloads at his/her side needed. Fast and easy. ooVoo is available for download for PC (Windows) version along with Mac version.

Last year I came across this software called Synkronizer 9.5. My requirement was to compare the data in two excels.

I tried to find free software but none of them were found to be helpful. Suddenly I found the link for Synkronizer 9.5 which is not free but you can try it for 30 days with full functionality. After 30 days you need to register to continue using it. The software comes in 4 different versions: Light Version, Standard Version, Premium Version and Developer Version.

The basic differences between these versions are the existence of some functionalities like “Highlighting Differences”, “Creating Difference Report”, “Navigator Toolbar”, “Access/ODBC files” and “Synkronizer VBA”. This software proved to be a very helpful to me. It’s not just a comparison tool but more than that. It has different types of settings based on your requirement to get the comparison report.

First of all, let me tell you that it is installed as an Add-In in Microsoft excel. First you click on the icon available in the “Tools” menu and then click on the icon for Synkronizer to open a wizard. The wizard asks you to choose two excel files. The first file to be chosen is called as a “Master” file and the other file to be chosen is called as “Update” file. Interesting thing I found here is that you can choose the same file as a “Master” and an “Update” file but need to choose two different sheets of the same file. You can specify the worksheets as databases also.

You can set some filters which will be used as a filter while comparing the sheets. Some of the are like “Case Sensitive”, “White space Trim”, “Ignoring Data type”, “Ignoring Constraints”, “Ignoring Formulas”. You can set for numeric tolerance in case of numbers in the data. Also the software lets you to configure the difference report after the sheets are compared. You can configure how you want the software to compare the two sheets. The most important feature of this software is Configuration. This tool compares two sheets according to your wish. Whatever you tell, it will do it. It has some default settings which can be changed as required. There are also configurations for colors. Language setting is also a good feature. You can configure the tool to compare in terms of values or formulas. This comparison tool is very easy-to use and needs no training.

It is self explanatory and I would like to refer this tool to all those who is looking for the best excel comparison tool. I actually completed a project of one month using this tool and VBA coding. Another Advanced feature that comes with the Developer version is that Synkronizer can be controlled using Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). Recurring, standardized or complex comparison processes can be automated using Synkronizer and VBA.

Little Snitch for Mac OSX Little Snitch is a network monitoring program for Mac OS X developed by Objective Development.

It’s a shareware program that lets you know when another program tries to “phone home” or access an outbound port on your computer. You can easily install the program by downloading the .dmg file then dragging it into the applications folder. While this may seem like a superfluous program to have on a Mac, it is nice to be able to decide when and how certain programs access the net. Little Snitch isn’t a firewall, instead it uses the programs name to let you know what’s happening. For example, does the realplayer really NEED to phone home? You can decide. Although malware is limited for OSX, trojans can still potentially be downloaded and installed by the user.

Little Snitch will detect the network activity and let you know so you can block it. In demo mode Little Snitch is fully functional, but only for 3 hours after start up. You can easily reset this timer (they even tell you how) so that it will run for another 3 hours after that. If you decide to purchase, it’s $24.95. Not too expensive. It’s important to keep the dmg file after downloading in case you want to uninstall. This is one of the programs you can’t just drag to the trash.

Most people come to agree that size does matter in certain aspects of life. Software is not always one of them.

I still remember my old days with assembly when software didn’t came in DVDs but fitted in a very small flash cpu. Trayconizer is a very small and very useful utility to minimize a running aplication to the system traybar. Most software I used adds a new button to the window bar and most windows skin software won’t display it correcty. Trayconizer keeps this short and simple. You only have to create a shortcut to your app and change the target. For example, say you want to run excel and minimize it to the traybar when you press minimize. Step 1: Create a shortcut to your excel file or “excel.exe”. Step 2: Edit the shortcut you’ve just created and replace the.. “c:\path\to\my\excelfile.xls” ..to.. “c:\program files\trayconizer.exe” -minimize c:\path\to\my\excelfile.xls”