Retrieving all mail headers from the emails that are currently stored on the mail server can be necessary for several reasons. The first is that it is possible to delete mails without having to retrieve them completely. This can come in handy if mails with huge attachments are blocking the retrieval of other emails which can be nerve wrecking especially on slower connections. Very helpful if you use your mobile phone to go online with your notebook and pay by the amount of Kilobytes that have been downloaded.

A second application would be to fight spam before it is retrieved and downloaded to a local PC. Pal Mail is a tiny secure application that can retrieve the mail headers of an unlimited number of accounts with the main option to delete mails right on the mail server. Retrieved are the mail headers and the messages but not the attachments of the mails.

Every mail can be marked for deletion which effectively deleted it from the mails server. The consequence is that your primary mail client will not retrieve the messages that have been deleted before.

continue reading "Quickly check mails without downloading them"

Depending on the task ahead I work best in complete silence, with Internet Radio or ambient sounds. It really depends on my mood and the level of concentration that is required to get the task done. Today I discovered the software Atmosphere Lite which more or less brings nature to your desktop.

The application provides different sound sets and graphics that go along well with each other to provide artificial nature right on your desktop. The lite version of the application is completely free to use and comes with ten different settings like Rainy Day, Deep Forest, Thunderstorm and Oceans Edge.

The quality of the sounds is pretty good and does not become boring or repetitive after a while. Each setting makes use of different sound samples that work well together. Samples can be added or removed during playback, like Light Wind and a Campfire to your Ocean sounds ? No problem.

continue reading "Experience nature on your desktop"

The function to undo closed tabs in Firefox comes in very handy and I make use of it regularly. That got me thinking that there has to be a similar function in Windows that allows me to undo closed folders as well. It probably happens as regularly as accidentally closing tabs in Firefox and normally means to waste ten or so seconds to open that specific folder again.

Windows does not have that function build in, that’s for sure but I was able to discover the software Folder View which, among other functions, comes with a folder history. The application basically adds another toolbar to Windows Explorer that provides fast access to selected folders on the computer’s hard drive.

This is pretty useful as well but I mainly use it because of its recent folders option that displays a list of the recently closed folders. A click on one of the folders would open the folder again making it possible to continue working with it.

continue reading "Undo Closed Folders"

Mix2Stix was primarily designed to copy random mp3 files from the hard drive to an USB stick or mp3 player to ease the pain of selecting the music manually. It provides a one click solution with a few comfort functions which I will explain later in this article. The user has to set four parameters after program start that define the process.

He has to select the folder from which the files are copied - subfolders are automatically included in the process -, a destination drive or folder, a size that should be copied and the file extension. The first two are obvious while the latter two require a short explanation. Size defines the total size of all files that are copied. If you pick for instance 1000 Megabyte as the size and mp3 as the file extension mp3 files with a total size of about 1000 Megabytes will be copied, never more than that of course to avoid the dreaded disk is full message.

The file extension can be any file extension which means you can also copy avi files, documents, images or anything else that you can think of randomly to the folder or hard drive.It is furthermore possible to add additional file extensions with the “;” separator.

continue reading "Copy random files"

I usually do not care that much about the icons on my computer. Sometimes however I encounter an icon that looks so ugly or misplaced that I have to change it. One possibility would be to use an icon editor like IcoFx to create a new icon, makes only sense if you are somewhat talented in graphic design.

IcoFx could be the icon editor of choice then for you. It can create Icons for Windows 98 to Windows Vista and Macintosh OS X computers and provides functions to convert icons from Mac to Windows (and Windows to Mac) and to extract icons from 32-bit exe and dll files. One great feature is the ability to add, change or delete icons in executables which means that you could permanently change icons of explorer.exe for instance.

The interface looks clean, crisp and is very responsive to user input. The most gorgeous feature in my opinion is the ability to create icons from images. Just select an image on your hard drive and select the color depths and size of the icon that you want to create in the first step and use the advanced import settings to pick a specific part of the image, change the resolution and transparency.

continue reading "IcoFx Icon Editor"