It's been sort of a slow news week and to be honest I haven't had much time to dedicate to post-writing with finals and so forth, so this will (hopefully) be a quick one about an application/website that's been around for a while but I just found out about recently.  One of the nice things about modern networked computing is the ability access machines across the network either with Remote Desktop, VNC, or whatever your preferred method of connection is.  This is all well and good when you're on the same network as the machine you want to get remote access to, but what if you aren't?  There's always the issue of being able to find your computer across the internet - especially if you're using an ISP that issues dynamic IP addresses.  It's near impossible to get a legitimate connection since every few hours or so your machine will be issued a new IP address.  So what's a geek to do?

Check out No-IP.  What they let you do is set up a completely free domain for the purpose of rerouting traffic to a computer of your choice.  All you have to do is sign up, give them the host name you'd like to use, and install their little Dynamic Update Client on your host machine (the machine you'd like to access remotely).  Then, whenever you want to remote desktop into that machine (as long as the DUC is running on it) all you have to do is set the remote address to the host name you setup at No-IP's website.  Say for instance I wanted to make a DmK host, it would be something like "dmk.no-ip.biz," and I could type that into my remote desktop client, hit connect, and bam you're connected across the internet.  There has been programs out like this for a long time but a lot of them are pay services.  This is completely free.  The only thing you really have to deal with is making sure you renew your host name with No-IP every couple months.  As a result of this being a free service you'll get an email from them occasionally saying they'll delete your host name if you aren't still using it.  All you have to do is hit a link they provide to renew your host name and you're set.

So that's it, really.  A pretty simple fix for a fairly common problem, and now I can get to my main computer that's sitting at home from anywhere.  It's available for all platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux) so you have no excuse to not give it a shot!  Thanks to Donny for giving me this info a ways back.  =)

Now Playing:
Wyclef Jean - Sweetest Girl