LogMeIn Express

It’s no secret that I love me some LogMein.  The simple, free version is excellent and I really depend on it for connecting to a few machines I have out on the Internet.  Now they’ve come out with LogMeIn Express which is a no frills screen sharing tool.   I’ve played with it a little this morning and I see huge potential for this tool.  It offers shared remote control and the ability to send files between people in the meeting.  It’s still in beta at this point but let’s hope they release this tool without a price tag.  This will even be useful as a replacement for CrossLoop since it’s download component is all browser based.  Nice work LogMeIn!  Try not to ruin it with a monthly fee! 

GoogleDNS

I've posted before about how much I like OpenDNS.   Well it seems that Google wants some of that business now so in early December they created their own public DNS servers.  Here's a nice little writeup on it.   Is this good news??! Well, as a consumer I'd say yes.  For me more is always better.  In the past I always used 4.2.2.1 (which  I think is Level 3) for DNS and had great luck with it. I know that it uses IP Anycast so it always pulls from a sever geographically close to you. I'm not sure any of the others do that but I can say that I've seen the best name resolution performance from OpenDNS...even when you use their filtering.  So now it seems that their is a host of DNS servers to choose from:

Level3 (4.2.2.1 - 4.2.2.6)

Google (8.8.4.4 & 8.8.8.8)

OpenDNS (208.67.222.222 & 208.67.220.220)

DNSAdvantage (156.154.70.1 & 156.154.71.1)

An added benefit of Google's DNS is that it responds to pings and 8.8.8.8 is an easy address to remember. :)

Here's a nice blog post from the founder of OpenDNS on Google's public DNS announcement.