Introducing the best remote connection manager: mRemoteNG

I had to reimage my laptop again this week and I thought I had backed everything I needed up before I reimaged it, alas I hadn't. I forgot to backup the connections file for mRemoteNG.

I really like mRemoteNG, it is my one stop shop for remote connections, as it does pretty much every time of connection I might wish to use: RDP, SSH, VNC and more.

The key feature(s), for me, of mRemoteNG is in how it allows to classify connections in many ways to avoid working in the wrong server:

1. Servers can be grouped in directories, which allows the separation of applications in directories, so that for instance you could put all the connections to your servers for a CRM application in one directory called CRM inside the production directory.
2. Servers can appear in different tabs (Panels in mRemoteNG parlance). This feature is really useful as it allows to separate environments into different tabs, so that I'm not accidentally working in Prod when I think I'm working in dev or test.
3. Connections are named. Prepending all your connection names with a suitable prefix will help to ensure that you are working where you think you are.

An example of how things might look like in mRemoteNG, I just created a few at random server connections for the purposes of this post. 

The production servers are on their own tab, Prod, which is separated from the Dev tab, which contains the Dev servers.

The Connections and Config windows can be unpinned so that the full screen is devoted to the remote connection, which is really useful for graphical connections and it also allows Full screen if needed.

Another good feature is that the connections can be exported with or without password, which means that it is really easy to give a new employee an export of all the servers they need to use by simply exporting the connections file without passwords.

If you need to connect to many different servers and you want to be able to quickly change between them, mRemoteNG is a really good solution. The only downside I see is that it has been coded in VB.NET and I don't like VB.NET :).

Acer V273HLObmid Review

A few weeks back I finally bought a new monitor, an Acer V273HL, or Acer V273HLObmid if you believe the ebuyer website.

I was surprised by how thick it actually, this is not thin monitor. I don't have a caliper but I'd say that at its thickest is a good 9 cm, which is a lot better than a CRT, but not thin.

It comes with DVI and VGA cable, EU and UK power supply cable and a 3.5 mm headphone cable., though sadly not with an HDMI cable, which is a bit annoying.

I have full 5.1 surround sound which I only switch on when watching movies, see this, the fact that the monitor has some speakers, however puny, is a really good feature.

I have only one complain about the monitor and that is clear type does not seem to work too well, this could be because I'm a lot closer that I should to a 27" monitor or something worse, but it is not very good, however as I hardly ever use for anything other than watching videos is not a major issue. Funnily enough, I've started to notice a lot more the effects or lack thereof, of Clear Type, even on my laptop, which did not seem to bother me at all before.

The only objective measurements that I can take are related to power usage, for which I have used a Brennenstuhl PM 230 Power and Energy Monitor.

I must say I was positively surprised by the monitor's power usage, not on standby mind you.

Mode	Black background (W)	White background (W)
Standby	9.5	9.5
Minimum Brigthness	28.5	26.8
Eco	31.3	28.9
Standard	38.3	36.7
Movie	36	33.2