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"

It is extremely important for some businesses and individuals to have the latest weather information at hand. These weather information can be retrieved numerous way, for example by listening to Radio, watching TV or calling a weather hotline. Something that was missing in the picture was a reliable live weather forecast for computers. Most PC applications would display a weather forecast and other information on a daily basis which might be not enough for some businesses.

Weather Watcher Live tries to fill that gap by providing updated weather information throughout the day.The update interval can be anything from realtime to a period between five minutes and five hours. The interval does not only depend on your settings but also on the update frequency of the Weatherbug or local weather station.

The main window of Weather Watcher Live displays hourly forecasts, the current temperature and a wealth of other information like high and low temperatures throughout the day or the humidity level.

continue reading "Weather Watcher Live"

Lots of updates for popular applications in this week. The usual suspects have been updated, like uTorrent, Azureus, Opera or foobar that seem to be updated on a weekly schedule but also some applications that don’t get updated that often, say Azureus or Tagscanner.

A short explanation about this post for the new readers. I’m writing an article each Wednesday about last week’s software updates. Only free and Open Source software makes it into that list and if you follow it regularly you can be sure that the software on your system is up to date.

This week’s update of the week award goes to Tagscanner, one of the best automatic tagging applications. As usual, if you know of another update let me know about it.

continue reading "Software Updates Week 19"