When I am on the road, I use my laptop, when I am home I prefer to use my dual screen desktop. Over time this has created a little bit of a problem for me with similar but not identical sets of client files on both my laptop and my desktop. I'm not talking about code, I use SVN for synchronizing code. I'm talking about things like requirements documents, technical docs, PDFs of invoices, timesheets, and the like. These are things I could put in SVN I guess, but I would prefer not to.

So what to do? I use to copy files back and forth manually. I considered using RSync, but that requires quite a bit of fiddling to get it working. I wanted a nice native windows program that would be super easy to setup and maintain. After a little bit of searching, I found a Microsoft program called SyncToy

SyncToy may be old news for some, but I hadn't seen it before and it was the perfect answer to my needs. SyncToy will sync up files between any number of computers, handles two way and one way syncs, and also manages folder and file renames. If about 10 minutes I had it setup and syncing folders between my laptop and desktop, merging common directories and making sure all the files I needed were in both spots.

After I installed it, I found it was also handy for managing my photos. I frequently take photos on trips and offload them nightly onto my laptop using it's SD reader. By the time I get home from a trip there are a bunch of photos to move over to my long term storage location on my desktop. Sometimes I don't move them for weeks till I think of it and have time. With SyncToy I can do a one way sync from the laptop to the desktop, moving only the new photos over and leaving me with the option of deleting the pics from the laptop whenever I want.

You can run the syncs manually, or you can schedule the syncs (instructions are in the help). I'm sure I will find more uses for it over time, but it's quite a neat little app and (except for the cost of the OS it runs on) it's free!

Are you ever at an airport or a conference looking all over the place for an open outlet, but you just can't seem to find one that's open? Me too.

Problem be gone! Once I bought this little travel sized power strip I've never gotten stuck without an open outlet. I have used it in hotels for my phone recharger, where the alarm clock and table-side light often take all the open outlets next to the bed. I've also found that it's great for those airports (Baltimore for example) with loose power outlets that don't want to hold onto your plug.

The power strip folds up on itself into a pretty small compact profile and weighs next to nothing. Definitely a must have for anyone traveling alot for business.

So I was traveling outside the country recently and making any phone call using my cellphone (including checking my voicemail) is .69 cents per minute! I looked around for a solution and finally found a kinda cool service called GotVoice. This company will retrieve your voicemails from your cell phone 3 times a day and make them available to you as MP3s with an email notification when new messages arrive.

The basic service is free, and they *do* try to upsell you to a premium service with more features, but the basic service will check your voicemail three times a day automatically and more times if you do it manually via their website.

It's worked flawlessly for me so far. Anyone else using a similar service?