As you know if you've been keeping up with this blog, I've got rather into my snippets and templates for Visual Studio.

I've followed the msdn examples on how to create vsi packages manually and all is hunky dory with that, but sometimes you just want a quick knock up package and crafting xml, renaming zip files and stuff just seems like too much hassle.

If your into vsi packages check out the Visual Studio Content Installer Power Toys it makes it far easier to create packages.

And if you just want to create code snippets easily then check out the Visual Basic Snippet Editor it has a great ui for creating snippets, specifying parameters and shortcuts and even saving it all as a vsi.

I've been after a usb drive caddy for some time, wanting something I could use as an on the go backup for my laptop, bulk file shifter and just general big bit of space to chuck stuff.

Went for the Thecus Yes Nano N1050 which does all the above plus gives you this nifty on the go feature where I can plug in a little battery pack to give it some juice (4xAA's), connect my camera lead to it, press a button and it copies all the files from my camera to a new incremental folder.

I got it from Scan who had it on a bundle special along with a 100GB Samsung drive last week.  I didn't have any spare 2.5" laptop drives so thought I'd go the whole hog.

Power requirements are very low, I've plugged it into my Asus laptop, numerous pc's, my Infrant ReadyNas box and no complaints from any of them.  It comes with a lead to provide power from a second usb port if required but I think that'll remain in my bag.

The only small gotcha is that for the "on the go" copy function to work your drive must be formatted to FAT32 (I assume the controller board only talks to this format).  WindowsXP by default will not format large drives (above 32GB) to this so I found a great little utility called Fat32Format from Ridgecrop which does it for ya, and very quickly at that!

Just upgraded my home network.  I had a very nice, albeit noisy 3com 10/100 rackmount 12 port switch ticking along nicely but I'd been hankering for a gigabit switch for a while now.

Dell ran a promotion recently on their network gear and I managed to pick up a PowerConnect 2716 16 port gigabit switch for under a 100 quid. 

It's not for big business certainly, but it's rack mountable, unmanaged/web managed, supports 10/100/1000 auto switch on all ports and supports jumbo frames.  Best of all, no fans!  It just slotted in as a replacement for my 3com and I enabled jumbo frames on it, my pc and my Infrant ReadyNas and got a bit of a performance boost from it.  It's not 10 times faster like the numbers suggest.. but it was a 100 quid well spent.

Whilst I'm on a blogging roll I thought I'd mention my favourite icon editor of all time as well, Axialis Icon Workshop.

Version 6 has a truely inspired design mechanism that lets you build icons with glossy shine to em in minutes using just drag and drop.  I'd definately recommend you check it out if you have to knock up icons quickly.

If your looking for a color picker for whatever reason, web design, win forms development, graphic design then check out Visual Color Picker by Novosib Software.  It's a free utility and it has so many different ways of choosing/capturing colors you'll be spoilt for choice.

It also provides you with a simple output screen which you specify your favourite development environments color function and it'll fill it all in for you just ready to copy and paste. Whether it's rgb, cmy, comma separated, hex, you name it'll provide it.