Image editing applications have been coming and going on my desktop for some time now. I used to be a Photoshop user, but I decided to give free software a chance and after going through Paint.net and Gimp, I finally decided Gimp was for me. However I have since missed the intuitive menus in Photoshop and for me some of Gimp’s naming conventions are a bit weird.

You can get the best of both worlds though with a nifty addon to Gimp called Gimpshop. This reorders your menus and restructures them to resemble Photoshop’s, and very closely at that. Many items that have caused mix-ups have been changed, for example Gimp’s convolve tool has been renamed to “blur/sharpen”, something actually understandable.

Menus have been reordered to, so if you’ve grown accustomed to Photoshop, you’ll feel right at home in Gimp too. I’m sorry to say there is no Windows version yet, only Mac and Linux, but there is one on the way! If you’re a developer you can grab the source from the homepage though. I like many-many things in Gimp and I’d rather support free software which is as good as its $600 counterpart, so it’s Gimp with Gimpshop for me!

continue reading "Photoshop “skin” for Gimp"

Clean After Me is a new software by the well respected NirSoft developers. The application is as usual portable and can be executed right from its location. The main purpose of the software is to clean the system after it was used in order to protect the user’s privacy which is also the main difference to disk cleaners like Crap Cleaner or Disk Cleaner which remove temporary files as well and have to be installed on the system.

The program’s main interface provides easy access to several check-boxes divided into categories like Windows Explorer, Firefox, Windows General and Windows Advanced. It is possible to check each category which would have the effect that every item under that category would be cleaned or to check individual items instead.

The software concentrates on traces that a user leaves on a system and provides cleanup routines to delete those traces in the Registry, in logs and temporary files on the host system.

continue reading "Clean After Me"

If you are looking for a software that checks hard disks for read errors and provides a visual representation of the process you might want to take a look at Ariolic Disk Scanner. The scanner performs a read only operation on the selected hard disk and checks it for read errors in the process. Every cluster of the hard disk is represented by a square in the program’s interface.

Green squares indicate no errors while red squares point to read errors in that sector. Pretty much every drive can be scanned including hard disks, floppy disks, CD or DVDs and flash drives.

Ariolic Disk Scanner is a portable application that can be run from any location without installation. The main differences to Windows Scan Disk are the visual representation of the results, the portability of the application and no error correction.

continue reading "Scan your Hard Disk for Read Errors"

Reble is a software for Windows that is providing a group of friends access to their combined music collection over the Internet. Think of a buddy system from an Instant Messenger with the difference that everyone can share music folders from their hard disks that every other friend in the friend list can access. The system was designed to please the Music Industry because music can only be streamed but not directly downloaded. The End-User Agreement simply states “Don’t steal music”.

Have not tried it but I suppose it could be possible to grab the music right from the stream but it does not really make sense to do it that way instead of using other means like ftp.

The Reble client has a size of 13 Megabytes and users have to create an account from within the software before they can start adding their music folders and friends to it. The only other requirement is Java 6 or newer.

continue reading "Listen to your Friend’s music with Reble"

If you have a Logitech mouse you are probably also using the Logitech SetPoint software to configure the different mouse buttons. Logitech Setpoint is a huge - the setup file is over 50 Megabytes - software package that can configure Logitech Mice and keyboards. If you happen to use the Logitech SetPoint software you might have noticed that you cannot enable all options on all buttons and that some buttons cannot be configured at all.

While it is logical that the left-click or right-click button function should not be changed it is less logical why the other buttons cannot be configured freely. The program Uberoptions enables all options on all buttons in Setpoint, even the left and right mouse button can be changed if the option is selected during installation. Be warned that you could make changes that would leave your system without a left-click and right-click option.

Uberoptions overwrites some files of Logitech Setpoint to offer those additional configuration options which become active after the next start of the Logitech Setpoint software.

continue reading "Enable all options on all buttons in SetPoint"