Every now and then you come across a piece of software so simple and so brilliant that you can’t believe that nobody has come up with it before. Connectify is one such piece of software.

Picture the scenario: I’ve just moved into a new office and for some reason that nobody seems to be able to explain it’s going to take two weeks to get my broadband connected. To say that’s a pain is an understatement.

So as a temporary measure I went out and bought a PAYG 3G dongle from T-Mobile. I didn’t want any ongoing contract as once I get my broadband online I doubt I’ll use it, but at the same time I didn’t want to shell out over the top for PAYG top-up data fees. Shopping around I managed to get one from the high street for £39 with 90 days unlimited usage (although a fair usage policy still applies for obvious reasons).

Plugged it in and boom, instant internet, and with pretty good speeds too. Brilliant. However, I have three computers in my office (a Win 7 laptop, a Win 7 desktop, and an iMac), and I could really do with accessing the internet on more than one of them at once, otherwise my productivity over the next couple of weeks is going to be somewhat hampered.

I already had a fixed network between them using static IP addresses so I can access my network printer, so my thinking was that I could share the dongle-based network connection between the other computers. Hmm, nice idea on paper, but a day and a half later mucking about with ICS and Ad Hoc networking I gave up.

Then today, as I was browsing around for something else, I stumbled across Connectify, and within five minutes my problems were solved.

Connectify is an ingeniously clever piece of software which sets up an Ad Hoc network and shares your internet connection over it, all within a couple of clicks. All you need to do is install it, give it an SSID and a WPA2 password and you’ve got a wi-fi network, ready with internet access ready to share amongst whoever you choose. The very best bit about it however, is that it is free.

I installed it on my Win 7 laptop, configured the options and then turned on Airport on the iMac, and seconds later had full internet access on both machines. Simple and seamless.

Hat’s off to the guys over at Connectify. Go grab yourself a copy now.

http://www.connectify.me/

Amazingly the other day I stumbled across a webpage talking about the problems of typing a backslash character from a UK Macintosh keyboard when connected to a Windows PC via Remote Desktop Connection. This is particularly infuriating when you need to type in file paths.

The solution to this was to download and install a freeware system tray application for the Windows machine which converted the key to the left of the Z key on a Mac keyboard (which is where the backslash is on a UK PC keyboard) into a backslash.

Why is this amazing? Well the program that was available for download was written by me way back in 2005 and I’d completely forgotten about it. It seems that it is still widely in use and people are still finding it useful.

This solution works just as well if you’re running a virtual machine as well such as VirtualBox or Virtual PC – although it’s not needed if you’re running VMWare Fusion.

So I thought it was only right and proper to make it available from my own website. So here you go, you can download it below and use it to your heart’s content.

All the sparse instructions you need are in the massive 8KB ZIP file together with the executable. Enjoy.

Download Backslasher 1.0

With the release candidate of Windows 7 now available for general download and with a rumoured release date of October 23rd I thought now was a good time to start checking it out.

Now without wanting to trash a perfectly good Windows XP machine to do it, I thought I’d see if I could get the RC up and running on VMWare Fusion on one of my Macs. That way nothing gets trashed.

Then as I was downloading the RC I came across a blog post on the VMWare site with guidance on exactly how to get it up and running. Sweet.

A quick read, half a dozen clicks and bosh – ten minutes later and it was up and running like a dream.

I have to say, after the shambles they’ve made out of Vista, the first impressions are good. Even under virtualisation it runs smoothly and quickly.

Only time will tell how it holds up under serious testing, but Microsoft could finally have the XP killer they’ve been so desperately after.