Thinkbook by bitolithic is the killer application for iPad in my book.  It has helped me organize my notes and keep track of todo’s in a way that feels comfortable to me, mainly because it is so flexible (todo’s can be put right in the notes, yet an overall ‘Dashboard’ can be created to give a consolidated view of all of those todo’s – very neat and powerful).

Some of the main features of Thinkbook include;

• Plenty of note types: text notes, todos, questions and projects. Notebooks and pages behave like notes too so you move them around however you like using the slider.
• Use special finder notes to create dashboards. This feature is powerful, let’s you organize your todo’s basically any way you like, yet you can still get a view that consolidates them.
• The slider, a brand new way to make new notes and rearrange, move, copy and delete existing ones.
• Tag everything you can see. They’re inherited, tag a notebook with ‘work’ and every note in it will be treated as work.
• Fast search for text and tags.
• Dropbox integration. Backup and restore to Dropbox, export and import notes, pages, notebooks and projects as text, work on them on your PC, then import them back into ThinkBook.
• Easily email notes, pages or books.

The only thing missing for me is a desktop counterpart.  If bitolithic would just come up with a PC and Apple desktop version, I believe they would have a hit application on their hands. I highly recommend Thinkbook to all iPad users.

I’ve been using LastPass for months now and have to say that I really like this product.  Keeping track of a gazillion passwords across multiple browsers and multiple PC’s was impossible before LastPass. Now it’s a breeze, my laptop, home PC and work PC are all synchronized automatically and the underlying storage of the data is fully encrypted.

You’ll note from the menus displayed to the left that there are lots of options, making this a fairly rich tool.

I highly recommend LastPass.

Apparently, there are a ton of reasons one might get this error. If you google around, you will find all sorts of solutions (which may or may not work for your specific case).

I was seeing this error in Outlook 2003 (no exchange server involved) whenever I did anything with notes. Tried all the recommended solutions with no success until I came across a post here that actually worked for me!

• Tools>options>other tab, then advanced options and unselect “when viewing notes, show time and date”

Thank you so much to Microsoft for giving us one error message that applies to hundreds of possible conditions.

Seems that this problem is caused by the iPhone plug-in. Disabling the plug-in makes the problem go away. You can disable it by locating the d_iPhone .dll in the plugins folder and renaming it to d_iPhone .dll.old or simply deleting it if you prefer.

Kinda frustrating that this problem hasn’t yet been fixed.

Some googling turns up all sorts of advice, including messing with the registry, upgrading the installer to the latest version (presumably a brand new machine would have the latest version), and running msiexec.exe /unregister followed by msiexec.exe /regserver.

None of that stuff worked (no, I didn’t mess with the registry – that one didn’t ring true to me). What did work was checking the task manager (ctrl-alt-del then start the task manager) and looking for any instance of msiexec in the processes tab (click the show processes from all users button first). End process any that you find. Once all are gone, close the task manager and retry your installation.

In my case it worked. Apparently a previous run of the installer was hung up on shutdown (hence the need to end the process) so any new attempts to install were failing. No clue why the previous instance hung…. that’s for another story if I ever find out!

PDF To Word is just the solution. Online, available anywhere you can get to a web browser, free, and simple to use. Just upload the PDF file, fill in your email address, and five minutes later you will receive the converted file in your mailbox.

I’ve found reasons to use this handy tool several times and have been happy with the results each time. It also supports RTF output for those with word processors other than Word.

Now, I’m a newbie to Vista, but not to laptops. I regularly hibernated the old HP without any major issues (until it died after hibernating with a completely blown partition table, but that’s another story).

Imagine my surprise when I put the Toshiba away at night (in its’ laptop case) and wake the next day to find a very hot laptop in that case with a dead battery.

Seems that something comes on in the wee hours of the morning and wakes up the hardware, even though it is on battery power, and proceeds to run things like Windows update!  The verdict is out on exactly what is causing this (prime candidate is Windows Update itself) , but clearly in my case either Toshiba or Microsoft has dropped the ball in configuring these laptops.

No way should this behavior happen out of the box and no way any normal user should be expected to figure this one out. Poor quality control on someone’s part for sure. Since more than the Toshiba brand seem to be impacted (see article linked to above), my money is on Microsoft as the culprit. Aarrghh!

The free account works great for important files, like your Keepass wallet and things like tax returns or other important documents. The service works seamlessly in the background and supports Windows, Mac, iPad and Linux! Recommended.

Xmarks is free and works with IE, Safari, and Firefox. No reason not to give it a try, you’ll like it.