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If you’re heading home for the holidays and just can’t stand to be untethered from your laptop while at Grandma’s house, consider this collection of 100 Productivity Tools as your holiday present.

This collection comes from the TruckingAccident.org Blog. Truckers without question, are passionate lovers of gadgets. From GPS units for navigation, satellite radio, various calculators for measuring fuel, mileage, and freight to cameras, smartphones, laptops, wifi hookups, DVD players, radar detectors… these road warriors know all of the various productivity tools to stay connected with loved ones back home.

Today, we had a client call us and ask if we can ’save’ their website from an aggressive website designer that is holding their site hostage.  I told them yes and thought an easy solution would be to find a utility that allowed us to easily clone/grab their website.  I must say, I was surprised at the difficulty in finding a free utility to do this.

Part of the problem came from the search terms I started with.  I thought this would be called a ’site grabber’ – and many paid utilities thought the same :)  I then switched to Website Clone, but to no avail.  Finally, I that download.com called these utilities “Offline Browsers”.  Doing a quick search for Offline Browser struck gold!

A friend recently recommended: http://www.cerberusweb.com

It is a very popular (and affordable) email management solution for help desks & sales teams. It is a bit complex, so you’ll want to take a moment to review the features and consider ways to synthesize it for your business. It appears that everything is managed through email and you have certain email addresses that customers and prospects use (or that it recognizes).

There is workflow, tagging, team resolution, and an integrated knowledge base. Instead of typing an article into the knowledge base, simply answering a client’s problem would give you the ability to ‘Tag’ and file that email into the Knowledge base.

If you thought that anti-spam protection for your incoming mail would alleviate your e-mail problems forever, think again – another issue that can cause more than a few headaches are DNS BlackLists (DNSBLs), sometimes also called RBLs (Realtime Black List). DNSBLs are not a new idea, but their usage is increasing rapidly. In short, a DNSBL is an innovative use of DNS to provide access to lists of IP addresses (or other info). These lists are created on varying criteria — for example, the IP address was caught sending spam, or it’s owned by a company known for supporting/sending spam. Or perhaps the IP address hosts a mailserver not following the rules, or a web/proxy server that has been compromised in such a way that it could be used to send spam. In this way, common sources of spam can be compiled into these lists and checked by a mailserver before accepting mail. If you show up in the blacklist, your mail is rejected.

As the spam-war has escalated, DNSBLs have become a double-edged sword. They have probably saved SMTP from being utterly inundated with spam to the point that it’s useless. However, blacklists have also been forced to get increasingly aggressive. It’s not uncommon for an organization to find itself blacklisted, even if it didn’t overtly send spam (that it knows of). If your organization becomes the unlucky member of a DNSBL, you’ll find that most (if not all) of your email is rejected by the outside world because you’re now considered a spammer. The worst part is that you may have no idea why you were blacklisted and no idea how to get de-listed!

I’m now the proud owner of a 2GB USB Drive & I wanted to share a few tips/tricks I’ve learned for getting the most use from it! I want my USB to provide a self-contained computing experience that I can take with me. When I pop it in, I want everything that I’m comfortable with at my finger tips :) I’ll help you setup your USB drive to address the following needs (no order):

1. Sensitive Data Storage – Examples include financial info, passwords, etc.
2. Email Access – Allowing you to comfortably check your mail from anywhere
3. Synchronization – As storage amounts increase, more data can be backed up
4. Buddies/Contacts – Instant messaging to friends is available anywhere
5. Office & Productivity – Work on docs, spreadsheets, and presentations

CentreSource has jumped on the Blackberry bandwagon! After complaining for months that I spend too much time with email, I gave up trying to avoid the problem and simply decided to further my addiction :) We purchased three new Blackberry 8703e’s and have now started the painful process of getting them to work in our Open Source environment. That’s right, Blackberries in a world without Outlook and Exchange. The verdict? It works, but not great.

Gene McCabe, owner of FrugalReader.com, was kind enough to be a guest blogger this week. He shares his experience in working with a development firm (CentreSource) to develop the latest version of FrugalReader.com. For anyone looking to read an honest, realistic experience about Custom Web Development, I encourage you to read Gene’s commentary.

I can’t tell you how many times I will visit a website, read content that indicates it will cost me something, but try in vain to find any prices listed. This isn’t as bad for service websites where the price can vary dramatically, but now I’m even seeing it for websites that are a service unto themselves.

I just finished reading (SmartComputing) a quick blurb about a Virtual Keyboard that uses lasers and infrared to produce a fully functional ‘virtual’ keyboard. The picture was awesome and I thought it was revolutionary… but upon doing a little research, it appears that virtual keyboards like this date back to 2002 – possibly earlier.

Time Magazine listed a non-production virtual keyboard from Canesta as one of their best inventions of 2002. Interestingly enough, it appears that Canesta abandoned the idea and decided to focus on electronic image processing.

If you own a single slot CD-R, you may wonder how you’re supposed to burn copies of your disks and/or make exact images of your distributions. One popular way is to create an ‘Image’ of your CD-ROM in the format of an ISO. The ISO file is an actual image-copy of the CD-ROM – not the files itself. This may be hard to understand, but CD-ROM’s have more info associated with them other than the files that are stored on them. Special security, volume info, etc. – all stored at the low level of the CD-ROM. While all of this fascinating, it isn’t the point of my post :) If you need to burn an ISO, here is a great site that makes it super simple: Right click -> Copy Image to CD. That’s it! Thanks Alex Feinman.