The H-Factor

Reducing Entropy

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Recently our previous blog service (Typepad) ended their business – so, we have a new home. It will take a bit to get images back and displaying properly, but we are working on it! Final pageview count of original Typepad blog: 387,232

Using a Non-Standard Pipe Type in HydraCALC

A customer called today asking how to enter a 1″ black plastic underground pipe for the calc. This particular situation sounded unique enough that I did not tell him to add that pipe type to our database, as I would have if he expected to see this pipe type used repeatedly. I told him to…

Using the Hydratec Software Download Area

Hydratec uses ShareFile to distribute our software installs and updates. New customers, or those without access, must request access to be able to get at these downloads. Access is only available to customers with a Hydratec subscription or those on an update plan. You can access the download area and request access by picking the…

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It is possible (and quite straightforward) to access your work computer from home or a job site these days, and you don’t have to pay a monthly service to do so. What you need is a network, VPN software and Microsoft Remote Access (comes standard with Windows) and an IT person to put it all together.

With it, you can take control of your work computer from a remote site and run everything as if you had it installed on your laptop/home computer. Everything should work just fine including all Hydratec software. We made a change to our lock software a few months ago to enable our software to work remotely with the hardware lock plugged into the machine at work, so if you are on six month old software or older, you may need to download and run a current HydraCAD or HydraCALC update to get the proper files.

How it works is that you log off your work computer, but leave it on. You can turn the monitor off but no one can see what you are doing or log onto it while you are logged on. You then fire up your VPN software at home or wherever and log in as if you were sitting right in front of it.

I am aware of at least a few customers doing this as a matter of policy. If an employee is going to be working on a jobsite they just send them with a plain laptop with no Hydratec or AutoCAD on it and leave the work computer all set up back in the office. No lock or gold key to transfer and nothing to lose software wise (or security wise) if the laptop is lost or stolen.

Pretty handy.

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