After Action Report Tools

One of the things I wanted to do on this blog is to create After Action Reports for some of my wargaming sessions. To do this, I needed to find a screen capture utility that will let me screenshot the game situation at various points. Ideally, I would like a tool that also lets me put arrows and other images on the screen capture. At work, we use Snag-It, which is an awesome tool and does everything I need. Unfortunately, it costs $49.95 a copy, which is more than I'm willing to spend just for screenshots and arrows.

A couple of free screenshot utilities are:

• MWSnap
• King Kong C apture
• Screen Hunter
• An extensive list of other utilities can be found here.
  

None of the above capture utilities provides captured image editing geared toward how I want it to work.

A interesting tool that supports creation of military maps with symbology is MILSketch. It supports drawing arrows on the image maps, and includes a host of military symbols. It's also free and looks to be the tool that I have been looking for. MILSketch is not an screenshot tool, so it looks like I would need a combination of MILSketch and one of the above screenhot tools to achieve the desired effects. I plan on downloading and trying out the tools in the near future and will post an evaluation...

After Action Report Tools

One of the things I wanted to do on this blog is to create After Action Reports for some of my wargaming sessions. To do this, I needed to find a screen capture utility that will let me screenshot the game situation at various points. Ideally, I would like a tool that also lets me put arrows and other images on the screen capture. At work, we use Snag-It, which is an awesome tool and does everything I need. Unfortunately, it costs $49.95 a copy, which is more than I'm willing to spend just for screenshots and arrows.

A couple of free screenshot utilities are:

• MWSnap
• King Kong C apture
• Screen Hunter
• An extensive list of other utilities can be found here.
  

None of the above capture utilities provides captured image editing geared toward how I want it to work.

A interesting tool that supports creation of military maps with symbology is MILSketch. It supports drawing arrows on the image maps, and includes a host of military symbols. It's also free and looks to be the tool that I have been looking for. MILSketch is not an screenshot tool, so it looks like I would need a combination of MILSketch and one of the above screenhot tools to achieve the desired effects. I plan on downloading and trying out the tools in the near future and will post an evaluation...

Nature Wallpapers

I love nature. I spent summers in my youth camping in northern Minnesota and Canada, and it gave me a special appreciation for wilderness. I've always wanted to return to some of the areas I visited, but that's the subject for a future blog post.

One of the ways I keep thoughts of nature fresh in my mind is by using nature backgrounds on my Windows desktop wallpaper. I had a really nice grassy field wallpaper, but it was lost when my work computer had to be re-imaged. So I recently went about searching for some new ones, and bumped into a site called WallPaperDave.com. It has a great set of free nature backgrounds.

I've already grabbed a couple and have set them as my desktop background. Nice shots by a guy with a great name....

Nature Wallpapers

I love nature. I spent summers in my youth camping in northern Minnesota and Canada, and it gave me a special appreciation for wilderness. I've always wanted to return to some of the areas I visited, but that's the subject for a future blog post.

One of the ways I keep thoughts of nature fresh in my mind is by using nature backgrounds on my Windows desktop wallpaper. I had a really nice grassy field wallpaper, but it was lost when my work computer had to be re-imaged. So I recently went about searching for some new ones, and bumped into a site called WallPaperDave.com. It has a great set of free nature backgrounds.

I've already grabbed a couple and have set them as my desktop background. Nice shots by a guy with a great name....

Free is Good……….but…..

I recently had to deal with yet another casualty resulting from the recent re-imaging of my work computer.  You see, I’m a big fan of www.giveawayoftheday.com, which is a site that offers free applications that you can install and run.  We’re not talking neutered trialware, but the full mojo apps.  The kicker is that the apps have to be installed within a 24-hour period, after which the installer no longer functions.  A great way to get applications that you would normally have to pay for.

By far, the most valuable tool I obtained from the site was the full Pro version of Evernote 2.  Evernote 2 was an amazing information collection tool, with web page capture, note taking, Outlook message importing, and a host of other really cool capabilities.  What set Evernote 2 apart from other tools (at least for me) was the blinding fast search combined with the auto-categorization of items, along with sub-categorization in search.  Hard to describe, but very powerful.  No other tool I’ve used worked as well in meeting the need to packrat information.  Evernote 2 did everything I needed, and I would have gladly paid for a license.  But when I went to download it to re-install on my system, a harsh reality came to light;  Evernote 2.2 can no longer be purchased or downloaded.  It seems the Evernote team has changed the strategic direction of the application and has moved Evernote v3 to a web-centric application model where you can access all of the information you collect from a variety of devices.  They offer a free account with a 50MB per month upload, plus downloadable desktop and iPhone clients.  Their platform support is impressive, and I think the model is one that could succeed.

<Sidebar>  There is some chatter in online groups that one contributor to the change in their strategy is because Microsoft OneNote seems to be impinging on the same space.  I can certainly understand their concern, as Microsoft’s release of Outlook essentially killed a number of excellent PIMs available back then (e.g. Ecco Pro).  The Evernote situation has a certain sense of Deja vu about it…….</Sidebar>

I had been monitoring the release of Evernote v3 and actually had already set up an account on it.  But I had also read where the Evernote v3 client does not have the same keyword auto-categorization capability, instead relies upon tagging.  With Evernote 2, I had set up an extensive list of keyword categories and categorization rules, which I am reluctant to lose.  Well, now it seems I have no choice, but to download the Evernote v3 desktop client and see what happens when I import my Evernote v2 data file.  It’s quite unfortunate that they actually stopped selling the Evernote v2.2 client, as I will be forced to abandon Evernote if I don’t care for the new client.  That would be painful for me as I really am not looking forward to yet another tool migration, especially since I had grown fond of Evernote during the past year I have used it.

I’ll post the result of my Evernote v3 test later……

Free is Good……….but…..

I recently had to deal with yet another casualty resulting from the recent re-imaging of my work computer.  You see, I’m a big fan of www.giveawayoftheday.com, which is a site that offers free applications that you can install and run.  We’re not talking neutered trialware, but the full mojo apps.  The kicker is that the apps have to be installed within a 24-hour period, after which the installer no longer functions.  A great way to get applications that you would normally have to pay for.

By far, the most valuable tool I obtained from the site was the full Pro version of Evernote 2.  Evernote 2 was an amazing information collection tool, with web page capture, note taking, Outlook message importing, and a host of other really cool capabilities.  What set Evernote 2 apart from other tools (at least for me) was the blinding fast search combined with the auto-categorization of items, along with sub-categorization in search.  Hard to describe, but very powerful.  No other tool I’ve used worked as well in meeting the need to packrat information.  Evernote 2 did everything I needed, and I would have gladly paid for a license.  But when I went to download it to re-install on my system, a harsh reality came to light;  Evernote 2.2 can no longer be purchased or downloaded.  It seems the Evernote team has changed the strategic direction of the application and has moved Evernote v3 to a web-centric application model where you can access all of the information you collect from a variety of devices.  They offer a free account with a 50MB per month upload, plus downloadable desktop and iPhone clients.  Their platform support is impressive, and I think the model is one that could succeed.

<Sidebar>  There is some chatter in online groups that one contributor to the change in their strategy is because Microsoft OneNote seems to be impinging on the same space.  I can certainly understand their concern, as Microsoft’s release of Outlook essentially killed a number of excellent PIMs available back then (e.g. Ecco Pro).  The Evernote situation has a certain sense of Deja vu about it…….</Sidebar>

I had been monitoring the release of Evernote v3 and actually had already set up an account on it.  But I had also read where the Evernote v3 client does not have the same keyword auto-categorization capability, instead relies upon tagging.  With Evernote 2, I had set up an extensive list of keyword categories and categorization rules, which I am reluctant to lose.  Well, now it seems I have no choice, but to download the Evernote v3 desktop client and see what happens when I import my Evernote v2 data file.  It’s quite unfortunate that they actually stopped selling the Evernote v2.2 client, as I will be forced to abandon Evernote if I don’t care for the new client.  That would be painful for me as I really am not looking forward to yet another tool migration, especially since I had grown fond of Evernote during the past year I have used it.

I’ll post the result of my Evernote v3 test later……

System Rebuild – Update #1

After my recent need to reimage my work laptop due to….<ahem>…. “Help” from a desktop tech, there’s a couple of little things I’ve had to rebuild/re-add to the XP image of which one is:

ISO image mount

A lot of software I use comes in ISO image format, and not on physical media. Therefore, I a need something to mount the ISO images so they look like physical media to the computer. There may be fancier solutions, but I’m comfortable with Microsoft’s free “Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel for Windows XP ” discussed here.

<Sidebar: What’s with the name? Can it get any LOOONNGGGEEERRR or more descriptive? Good thing the author of the ISO utility didn’t work on Vista or it might be instead known as “Computer OS that took forever to release and is largely ignored but is the biggest boost to Apple since the Intel cutover”.>

Anyway, the utility doesn’t have an installer, so it’s not for the casual joe. But I think it’s simplicity is what attracts me to it. You can download it from Microsoft here.

After extracting the files by running the exe, you simply copy the VCDRom.sys file to your \winnt\system32 directory, and then run VCdControlTool.exe. I prefer to also copy the VCDControlTool.exe to the \winnt\system32 directory and then just create a shortcut to it. I then place the shortcut in the “All Users” start menu under System Utilities so it’s available to all user profiles.

One final note: the utility icon is nasty looking. To keep up appearances, I like to change the icon to something a bit more palatable, like this . I got the icon (download here) from a cool icon site at www.rw-designer.com. It has all kinds of free icons, and many of them are high quality. It’s a great site if you have an aversion to ugly icons like I do.