I mainly use Skype to chat with some friends of mine and can’t honestly say how I ended up using this voice over IP software and not some Instant Messenger. Skype does have some advantages over common Instant Messengers, you can call the “outside” world and have multi-user conferences. Me and two friends used to communicate in Skype when playing World of Warcraft and it did work quite well.

Record recording should be something build in Skype if you ask me. It’s a great way of keeping archives of phone conversations that can be useful in several situations. Unfortunately though there was not a completely free add-on that would record calls in Skype.

This has changed with the release of Call Graph. This Skype add-on records phone conversations as mp3 files. The recorded conversations can be tagged for better identification.

continue reading "Record Skype Calls"

You can enter some program names in the Windows run box and the applications are recognized and executed. This does not work with all your applications however and you would like to find out how you can add new run shortcuts so that you can run your applications using the run box and a name only.

The application that I recommend for this operation is called Short Run. When executed it lists all currently available shortcuts even those of applications that have been uninstalled from the system. As you can see in the screenshot below entries pointing to uninstalled applications are represented with a exclamation mark.

A good way to start would be to remove all invalid shortcuts from the system. Just mark the shortcuts with the left mouse button and hold the CTRL key during that time to mark all at once. Pressing DEL will remove all selected entries from the system.

continue reading "Add and Remove Run Shortcuts in Windows"

Have you ever asked yourself how much time other users are spending on your computer ? Maybe you are a parent and want to check on the computer usage of your kids, maybe you want to check on the WOW addiction of your husband or simply know if someone logged into the computer without your authorization.

Access Monitor is logging every login and logout giving administrators the chance to check the logs to see which users did use the computer. The tool has to be run on startup to log the user system access and can be password protected to make sure no one but the administrator can view the log files.

The icon can be hidden from “normal” users but the process is still visible in the task manager which means it it at least possible to see that it is running and find out what it is being used for.

continue reading "Windows Access Monitor"

Local Cooling is a software for Windows by the Uniblue Group. Everyone with either Windows XP or Windows Vista can download the application and start saving energy right now. The main interface is listing the hardware installed in your computer and the estimated power usage of each pc component. The estimated power PC usage for my computer is 153 Watts for instance with the cpu using 59 Watts alone.

Local Cooling [via Shell Extension City (You guys rock)]is not applying magic however. All it does is offer the user easy access to energy saving options that can also be accessed in Windows independently. It does however offer the user power saving modes with which he can change the mode with the click of the mouse button. Low, Medium, High and Custom power saving modes are available to choose from.

These modes change the idle time before the monitor is switched off, before hard drives spin down and the PC is shutdown. A high power saving mode turns the monitor off after 5 minutes of idle time while a low one after 15 minutes.

continue reading "Save Energy with Local Cooling"

Squash is a lightweight fast batch image resizer. I could end the article here because the previous sentenced is a good summary of what Squash is able to do. Add multiple images to Squash, select a new size for them, and click on Resize images. That’s the process in detail.

It’s possible to specify a destination directory for the resized images, add a suffix to the filename - something like thumb or small would do - and if you want to overwrite existing images in that directory.

There is no preview of the output images, no information on file size, no choice of file extension. As I said it’s lightweight and does only one thing at the moment. I still like Squash because it is easy to use, mainly because of the missing options of course.

continue reading "Squash Batch Image Resizer"