Here's a good list of free utilities. As the holidays approach, and family members ask me about computer problems, some of these will come in handy. From a suggestion on one of the Engadget podcasts (I'm finally caught up with Engadget), maybe I'll downl… more »

Voipail is taking a while to hit beta, so I downloaded SAM - the Skype Answering Machine. I haven't been able to test it yet, so I have no idea how it works, but others have said it works well. So if you want to help me out, Skype me, and leave a m… more »

I installed the MSN Messenger 7 Beta Friday night. It works very well. I like some of the new features. The most noticeable is that a contact's icon shows in the notification window when they sign on. Also, if I had a tablet, I could write my IMs rather… more »

I touched briefly earlier on the release of Vault 3.0, and I did find out that the one free user still exists. That's awesome. But even better than that is that you can host it at web host provider, such as WebHost4Life. Now, that's pretty cool… more »

I've been meaning to do this for a while, but never got around to it, so when I saw this on 4 Guys, I thought I'd just link to it. It'll save me some time. Anyway, here's a nice introduction to NAnt. There's a lot more you can do with NAnt, but this… more »

I've watched with interest some of the latest news about MCE 2005, and how it compares to TiVo. The part that doesn't quite sit right with me is the cost - a good MCE computer runs for about $1500. A TiVo runs for $500, and if you have DirecTV, even less… more »

Brad Covell, a coworker of mine, has a post about making Virtual Servers the easy way - use Ghost! Great tip, Brad. And best of all, if you have problems, he'll help you! more »

The Commerce Server team has finally released a production ready starter site. And the site seems to sell it as just that - a starter site. From what I've seen in the past (and the way it seems to come across to customers) the Retail site was pegged as a… more »

It looks like there's another solution to voicemail for Skype. According to the Geek Guy, it's still a little buggy. It's still a beta, so that's to be expected. UPDATE: David Newberger (The Geek Guy) asked me to update my link to his new blog. more »

First, NAnt has reached release candidate 1 for version .85. Here's the release notes. Quite a bit has changed! NAntContrib (NAnt's "feature pack") also hit RC1, which makes sense, since they are used in conjunction with each other. And in case this is t… more »