Using technology tools to make life more manageable

When travelling I don't also fancy dragging the laptop around, not even the net-book, but sometimes I could do with something physically a tad bigger than my Palm or HTC device. It doesn't need to do much, just offer a little functionality and be somewhat useful when I'm stuck in a hotel room on a rainy day or sitting on a train with hours to spare.

It would be nice if it featured a clock and alarm, could show some photos, perhaps play an audio book and the radio, allow me to read and type a few notes, surf the internet, read some news feeds, check email and a few other things on a screen I can actually read text from without crossing my eyes twice over.

So, given all the above, I got pretty excited when I first clapped eyes on the Toshiba JournE. I've been playing around with this multimedia tablet for a few days now and am already finding ways of working it into my routine. The device has a 7in touch screen with a resolution of 800x480 and runs on the Windows CE 6.0 operating system. Like I have with the Palm Pre, I will keep you updated with life on the move with the JournE.

Following on from my recent experiences with Spiceworks, I thought I would see what had been happening with PacketTrap, the network monitoring and management tool, and discovered that the PacketTrap pt360 Tool Suite Pro is available for free. PacketTrap utilises a dashboard approach with plug-in configurable widgets allowing monitoring and management of a wide array of network infrastructure from Cisco configuration, through deep network discovery, to WMI Scans and application monitoring for services such as Exchange, SQL and Active Directory.

I have talked before about finding simple ways of presenting network monitoring without all the complexity of a laptop or desktop computer, and with these two technologies perhaps some combination of multimedia tablet and dashboard based network monitoring solution might offer a fine way of keeping an eye on the day-to-day activity of the network infrastructure.