Bookmarking sites like del.icio.us give you the ability to bookmark your favorite websites and use tagging to make it easier to find them later on. Since the bookmarks are stored on the servers at del.icio.us instead of on your local PC you can bookmark a website while you’re logged onto one PC and retrieve those bookmarks while you’re looged on at a differnet PC. For people who end up accessing the internet from a number of different PC’s (like at work, at school, and at home) using a service like del.icio.us is much easier than trying to keep your list of local bookmarks synchronized across all of your comptuers. But what if you also have a long list of RSS feeds that you want to keep tabs on across your many computers?

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CrossLoop and LogMeIn Free are free software packages which allow you to control a PC’s desktop remotely. Both work well and both are easy to install and use. There are some differences between the two, however, and it’s those differences that we’ll look at here.

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Have you ever been in a situation where you needed to remote-control someone else’s PC? Maybe you’re the family “go-to” guy when it comes to computer problems. Maybe you’re a tech-support guy in your company. Maybe you’ve been in situations where it would just be easier to show someone how to do something rather than to try to explain how to do it. There are many ways to remote-control a user’s PC but few are as simple to set up as CrossLoop and LogMeIn Free. I’ve already written an article on using LogMeIn Free so this time we’ll check out CrossLoop.

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You may have heard of MythTV, the free TiVo-like application that can handle just about all of your multimedia needs. It can record and play back TV shows, including HDTV programming. It can be used to view your pictures, your weather forecast, and your favorite RSS feeds. It can rip and play back your music CD’s and your DVD’s. It can even display the list of movies you have in your NetFlix queue.

And it only runs on Linux.

So what if you’re a Windows user who wants to find out what MythTV is all about? Up until recently your couldn’t, but now you can. Here’s how.

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Watch HDTV on your computers, not just on your TV

How many devices do you have in your house that are capable of displaying high-definition content but have no way of getting high-definition content? If you have an HD television you can use your TV’s tuner (or external cable/satellite box) to tune the HD signal. But what if you also have a computer? Or two? Or three? Those devices are probably also capable of displaying HD content but have no easy way of actually receiving HD content. So how do you get that HD content to each of them without having to buy a separate HDTV tuner card for each PC?

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When I first stumbled across the description of MojoPac on their website it seemed too good to be true. Here was a piece of software that promised to allow you to create a PC on any USB-enabled device (memory stick, USB hard drive, iPod,cell phone), install all of your applications and data onto that USB-housed PC, and be able to use that PC on any machine running Windows XP. And it could do all of this without having to install any software onto the “host” PC and without leaving any trace that it had ever been there. Based on that description I first assumed that MojoPac just another type of virtualization, like VMWare or VirtualPC. It’s not, and that’s what makes it unique.

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Trojans, spyware, viruses, keyloggers, rootkits — it’s pretty dangerous out there on the Wild Wild Web. There are countless sites out there that have the capability of installing software onto your PC without your knowledge and then stealing your data or using your PC to infect other PC’s (or both). In order to surf safely you have to make sure that you’ve taken precautions against becoming another zombie server for spyware, spam, and other unpleasantries. To combat these risks you should, at the very least, be running a firewall and a virus scanner. Even better would be to run a bowser other than Internet Explorer (I use Flock and Firefox). Want even more protection? Check out SandboxIE.

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Networked computers are great. You can share files across a network. You can print documents across a network. You can play games across a network. You can do just about everything across a network, assuming, of course, that the network is your own and is completely under your control.But what if you involve a network that’s not under your control? How easy is it to copy a file from your school or work computer to your home computer, especially if that school or work computer is behind a firewall and your home computer is behind a NAT’d router? Not very.

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