Tobey send me an email telling me about this days Giveaway of the Day which is Frigate3, a windows file manager that he recommended wholeheartedly. Frigate3 is a commercial program but can be downloaded freely today on the Giveaway of the Day website. The restrictions are that you do not get technical support or updates to upcoming versions.
All digital cameras that I know are using a cryptic naming convention for images taken with them. When you copy the pictures from the digital camera to your computer you will have a bunch of files on your hard drive like CIMG0001.jpg, CIMG0002.jpg and so on and it's quite hard to find out where and when the image was taken and what is shown on it.
RSS Feeds are probably the best option if you want to receive information about website updates. They arrive immediately after the webmaster has published the article on the website. There are two ways to process and view those RSS feeds. The first is to use one of the many online services that display news feeds that you add to your profile. I do use Netvibes but there is also Google Reader for that task and hundreds more.
The question on how to keep an icon from a previous application came up in my article about Imagine, a nice fast image viewer and a reader suggested the Nirsoft software Icons Extract to grab the icon from the old program and put it in a place where you can use it for the new application as well.
When you right-click a CD, DVD or removable drive and select Properties from the menu you find a Autoplay tab there that displays applications for certain media that are put into the drive. An action like playing or opening can be selected or that the user will be prompted every time a media of that type is inserted.
Just when I thought I tried them all I find another promising image viewer called Imagine deeply hidden on the Internet. Imagine is a fast image viewer, it opens and displays images faster than any image viewer that I have tested so far, at least that's my personal opinion on the matter.
The Recent Documents are a comfort function in Office 2007 products such as Word 2007 or Excel 2007 that displays the last 17 documents that you have opened in the applications. You can open that menu when you click on the big - some say huge - Office icon button on the top left corner of the screen.
When it comes to GTD I'm pretty picky about what I use. I do enjoy the simplicity of online applications like Simple GTD, but if I have a lot of very elaborate […]
Giveaways, more giveaways and even more giveaways. Seems we can expect more free software giveaways this year. It's Avira again with a promotion to test the AntiVir PersonalEdition Premium for six months with no obligations whatsoever. All you have to do is fill out a small form and they will send you a working serial number that is valid for the next six months.
I guess ourTunes is a very popular application in Universities and IT departments. It basically lets you download songs from other peoples iTunes if they are in the same network and share their itunes library. I'm not in a network and don't use iTunes at all so I can't test how effective this method is compared to using ftp, network browsing or local copies but I guess some will like it because it is easy to use.
I'm looking for a software that offers an easy way to write down notes on my desktop. I do not need a fancy tool with lots of options, just something basic that is available immediately. I used to write down notes in text documents but my desktop soon got cluttered with lots of text documents containing notes and it was obviously not the perfect method.
If you want to find out which programs have established an Internet connection on your system you can use the software Procx for that. Procx is a process and module manager much […]
Trend Micro have published another excellent article on their malware blog entitled A Tangled Web ... of Malware. It describes how hackers use popular media websites to spread malware and how their […]
Security Expert Bruce Schneier wrote a commentary on Wired yesterday where he admitted that he was using an Open Wi-Fi and that he could not see what was wrong with doing so. He refused to accept security reasons because he said that the computer had to be secured as well and that an Open Wi-Fi would essentially be the same as using Wi-Fi on airports or Internet cafes.
SAM ? What's that again ? SAM is the Security Account Manager and part of the Windows Registry. Unfortunately though it is not possible to access that part of the Registry directly even if you are logged in as an administrator. It is however possible to analyze the file sam.bak which can be found in the directory system32/config/ of your Windows installation.
I was thinking on rounding up some of the net's best freeware apps and putting them into one easily installable pack. As these things go, it seems like some clever people have […]
If you are running Windows as an administrator, it is possible to disable the task manager. This is one of the options you would get if you right click your system tray. […]
A new version of Revo Uninstaller was released this week and I decided to install it again to check on the progress of the application. Revo Uninstaller is a program uninstaller that has several interesting features that I mentioned only briefly in my last article which was published a while ago. It's main task is a replacement for the Windows uninstaller which is slow and careless when it comes to uninstalling applications.
Windows has no option to change the large desktop icons to small ones like the option that is available for folder icons. I was searching for a software called SetShellView which a friend recommended and I found out that this software was only working in Windows 2000. It allowed the user to change the large desktop icons to small icons and even to list views.
I think we can all agree on the fact that multi-monitor support in Windows is not what it could be and that Microsoft does not seem to put lots of efforts into changing this status any time soon. We have to rely on third party tools to add the functions and features that we demand from a multi-monitor environment and Multi-monitor taskbar is one of those applications.
If you do not want to download music from Bittorrent you now have an alternative that might suite you better. You can use the Bitlet Bittorrent Applet to stream the music contained in the torrent to your computer. The applet phrase hints that Java - not Javascript - is required to stream the music from torrent files to your computer.
Notepad is fast and that is probably the only good thing that I can say about the software that ships with Windows. It has a file size limitation and a lot of other limitations as well. Many users prefer to use so called Notepad replacements that do not have the limitations and I would like to introduce one that is called Akelpad.
Firefox Mastery published a nice article about the Firefox add-on Controle de Scripts which lets the user control Javascript events in Firefox. Instead of just disabling Javascript (default Firefox without add-ons), or enabling it on a per-site basis (NoScript) you can configure and control specific Javascripts events.
I theoretically mentioned the fact that it was possible, and in fact quite easy, to install Wikipedia locally which has several advantages but also one disadvantage. Advantages should be clear; You do not need a net connection to access the Wikipedia contents, you can distribute the solution to as many computers as you want and you can make it available in a local area network.
Kurt mentioned in Daniel's PayPal phishing article how he dealt with phishing and that got me thinking about the easiest way to defeat phishing for certain accounts. The answer is virtual mail accounts. I always thought about virtual mail accounts as a way to stop spam and find out which website or service sells your email but it can also be used to defeat phishing.
WPanorama is a standalone program and screensaver that is able to display (scrolling) panoramas on your computer screen. The images scroll either horizontally or display several images if orientated vertically. Using the software is not complicated at all. Just download and install it and run it afterwards.
About 2 days ago, I received a quite clever spam email in my Gmail account. It's still pretty new, so I do take a look when I occasionally get spam to filter […]
Not every user has the luxury of a Internet flatrate and I personally know a few who are still using time or data related accounts. I experienced this as well when I used my mobile phone to connect to the Internet during a holiday. Every byte counts sometimes and it is always a good idea to monitor the bandwidth that you are using in that time.
If you want a breakdown of the music that you favor you can use a software called WTF!? Music Info which analyzes a directory that contains music and displays a chart sorting the music by genre, artist or year. The application was designed for the Donation Coder Nany 2008 challenge and you can find additional software on the official website.
The Microsoft Office 2003 Service Pack 3 has been released a bit more than a month ago and is already beginning to cause problems for several users who applied the Service Pack. I would think that a Service Pack adds functionality and fixes security vulnerabilities. This one apparently blocks old file formats from being loaded by Microsoft Office applications.
I recently came across a download that included several cbr files and I had to put my memory to the test to remember how I would be able to view them. CBR files are Comic Book Archive files that also come as cbz and cbt files. They are actually archives, like rar, zip or tar, that have been renamed to cbr. This has the advantage that a comic book can be distributed in one file that includes all the pages as images.
Vista4Experts is a Microsoft Windows Vista tweaker that is aimed at expert users who can live without most of the functions that have been introduced in Vista. It currently features 21 settings that can either be enabled or disabled with a double-click.
System Restore is a function in Windows operating systems since Windows ME that creates so called Restore Points so that the user can bring his system back to a previous state in time. This is important when changes to the system or an attack make the system unresponsive in any way. There is however the danger that malicious files are saved during that process as well which means that they would be restored when the user wanted to revert the system to a previous state.
Xtra Windows Stability is an interesting piece of software that was mentioned in Shellcity's top 25 software of the year series. The product was especially designed to increase Windows stability by forcing important subsystems of Windows into separate processes.
Xinorbis is a interesting hard disk analyzer that compiles heaps of information about files on the hard drive and presents the results in easy to understand manner using text and charts. The analysis takes a while to complete because all files are scanned on the hard drive that you select.
Hundreds of websites have been prepared or compromised to take advantage of the Benazir Bhutto Assassination in Pakistan. Users searching for news on the assassination using search engines like Google or Yahoo might land on a website that has been specially prepared to download Javascript code that in turn downloads additional malicious software to the host PC.
Let me narrate a story to you. A story of someone who has an Gmail account and a domain registered to his name. This someone checks his Gmail account regularly and visits other sites afterwards. It is so convenient to stay logged in at Gmail in case you want to check again. Maybe Gmail is open all the time in another tab for even further comfort.
System Explorer is a mix between Process Explorer and Autoruns from Sysinternals. It reveals many information related to running processes, services and tasks and gives insight into additional system related information such as loaded drivers, open connections and Internet Explorer Add-ons like Browser Helper Objects.
I think we can all agree on the fact that the Adobe Reader is bloated if you only use it for opening PDF documents. It comes with so many plugins that the loading time is sometimes longer than the reading time of the document that you opened. I have been using a software called Adobe Reader Speedup to speed up loading times by disabling plugins that I did not need. This had the result that the Adobe Reader would open almost instantly just like his alternative Foxit PDF Reader.
Some applications have the nasty habit of bringing their program windows into focus even though they appear most of the time unwanted and in inappropriate moments. This happens from time to time when I'm reading an article on a website or in Word. The bad thing that is happening is that the focus is lost on the document that I'm currently reading even if the new window is just a small popup informing me about an update.
