Definitely in need of some support

If you’re anything like me, being a bit of a geek means that every family member treats you like their personal PC World help desk.

This remote desktop application is an excellent utility to help you take over their computer, press the necessary buttons and then retreat.

The application needs zero configuration or firewall tweaking as it does something clever with a central server. I recommend you install it on all those family and friends computers that are likely to phone!

Oh, and its completely free to use on a friends and family basis!
Oh, Oh, its cross platform, so mac and pc friendly!

Get it now: Team Viewer

Photoshop used to have problems saving ‘proper’ png files. They used to be silly large and have color-space problems. Well, it seems Photoshop is probably getting this right now but it still tends to create silly large image files which, when used in a web template, are a bit of a pain in the arse.

We found Pngcrush seemed to do a rather better job of compressing (and fixing) the PNG. You can download this from sourceforge for windows/linux  here: Pngcrush

I use a Mac, so finding it for Mac OS X isnt easy, but here isa version compiled by a colleague. Its quite an old version. pngcrush for mac os x

And heres how I use it:


unzip and move to /usr/local/bin

cd to the directory containing some PNG images.
pngcrush -rem gAMA -d fixedpngs *.png

(This command creates a directory called ‘fixedpngs’ and puts the processed png’s into it)

 

(Eddie: If you happen, like me, to be a heathen and use a windows based machine there is also awindows command prompt version of pngcrush which is very easy to use with the  command [pngcrush.exe infile.png outfile.png])

Get the software, PTHPasteBoard from PTH Consulting. Its free, although you can purchase the pro version to enable filtering.