Description: Docx2Rtf is a free program that can convert .DOCX and .DOTX (Word 2007 MS Word formats) as well as SXW and .ODT (OpenOffice) into the universal .RTF format that can be read and edited by any Word Processor. It also offers the ability to convert documents to .PDF and can open, view, and print all the above mentioned formats as well as PalmOS Database Documents (*.PDF) and Aportis (*.PRC) files.

The recent release of MS Office 2007 brought in a number of file formats that do not open with older versions of MS Office or other word processing programs such as the OpenOffice Writer. Most of the time users of Office 2007 send out these files to colleagues and collaborators who only afterwards discover the incompatibility. It is possible to go around this simply by saving using the old .DOC format or, if you have an older version of Office, by using the Office 2007 Compatibility Pack that Microsoft released. A program like Docx2Rtf , however, gives you the ability to free a Word 2007 document from Office and convert it altogether to .RTF, which will allow you to use any word processor program to edit and/or work with the document. You may, however, lose some formatting and or functionality in the process.

To test this program I created a .DOCX document that included tables, special characters, some bolded, italicized, and underlined text, a formatted image, an embedded Excel sheet, a numbered list, and a URL linked to a text lable. For the results (and more notes on this program) see below:

• Converted elements: transfers text, (most) special characters and images (without any effects). Bolded text transferred as such but italicized and underlined text did not. Tables (and Excel sheets) as well as numbered lists lost their formatting and their contents were simply listed in rows of text. Linked URLs not transferred. (Note: most of this loss of fidelity is due to the limitations of the RTF format itself rather than Docx2Rtf).
• Contingencies: you do not need Word 2007, OpenOffice or any other program to perform the conversions.
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Description: Launchball is a physics flash game where you solve puzzles by setting up a sequence of events to drive a ball into the goal area. The game also allows for level-construction by users as well as sharing your created levels with the player community.

This game is commissioned by the Museum of Science in London and is located on their website. All the elements in this game (e.g. batteries, fire source, water tank to generate steam, seesaws, etc.), have to be put together in a logical way such as to kick off the correct sequence of events. (Here’s an example: place a heat source by a water tank to generate steam and connect that to a steam-powered generator that produces electricity; place this generator adjacent to blocks of copper connected in a row that lead up to a fan which, once powered, will blow the stationary ball onto the goal area). The game in fact is somewhat reminiscent of the old “Incredible Machine” game which first appeared in 1992. Here are some more notes on this game.

• Playability: the game is highly playable, and very easy to learn and get into. The objective is to (a) solve the puzzles, but also (b) to get through the levels as quickly as possible. You can also request a hint for each level if you are stuck, and, if uncertain, you can get info on any object simply by hovering over it with the mouse.
• The production qualities: are in general very good even as they are kept simple. The graphics and sound are competent and deliver a very nice gaming experience.
• Play and create: this game is as much about creating and sharing your own custom levels as it is about solving the puzzles in the available levels.
• Available levels: the game has 30 pre-built levels for you to play through (aside from 6 levels intended to familiarize you with the game). There are also dozens of levels that have been created by other users that are of surprisingly high quality. The game also allows you to send/receive levels from your friends and to bookmark your favorite levels as well.
• Creating an account: you can easily create an account wihin the game by entering your email information. You will then receive an email with your own distinct code that you could enter into the game whenever you play it and retrieve your history of finished and/or created levels. Although this system works well enough, the game strangely takes a very long time to retrieve your account once you key in your code.
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Description: “Pidgin-Encryption” is a plugin for the open-source IM client Pidgin that provides for secure instant messaging sessions encrypted with the RSA protocol.

Here’s news for you: relatively speaking, your IM sessions are not secure. In an office environment your instant messages are probably fairly easily attainable by your network admin if they really wanted to see them, and there’s even software offered out there that does exactly this. The good news is that if you use Pidgin you can install this simple plugin for instant encryption of your chats. One caveat, though, is that both yourself and the person you are chatting with have to have this plugin installed (and by implication both need to be using Pidgin).

How it works:

• Download and install “Pidgin-Encryption”
• Launch Pidgin, go to Tools > Plugins from the main console and then check the box next to the “Pidgin Encryption” plugin to install it.
• Once installed, you should be able to see 2 visible changes in Pidgin as follows (a) an “enable encryption” command in the within the chat session window, and (b) a “turn autoencryption on” context menu entry for each buddy on your list (see screenshot above). Note that these options only work when the person you are chatting with also has the plugin installed.
• To invoke encrypted chat, either click on the “enable encryption” button in the chat window or turn on the autoencryption for your buddy. What’s cool is that the program will automatically detect someone who has the plugin and transmit your key to them (they will be prompted to accept). It will also save the keys for known users and warn you if the keys change.
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Description: this posting will cover three online services that provide solutions for common RSS issues, namely: filtering you RSS feeds by user-defined keyword(s), consolidating multiple feeds into one, and converting RSS feeds into email updates.

FilterMyRSS.com: is a web service that can filter your RSS feeds based on keywords that you specify. Needless to say this can be extremely useful in reducing information overload by delivering only those news items that contain your keywords and thus have a high probability of being interesting and/or relevant to you.

Here’s an example: let’s say that you get the RSS feed from a popular software portal but that you are only interested in seeing news items about freeware or open source items. Assuming that the RSS entry actually include a mention of the software licensing in it (as some do not), FilterMyRSS will allow you to enter “freeware” and “open source” as filter keywords and will only deliver those news items that contain any of these keywords in the RSS entry. Very useful indeed.

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FEEDblendr.com: if you’ve ever wished that instead of your dozens of RSS feed URLs you simply had a single URL that combined all of them together then you’re in luck; FEEDblendr is a s service that can combine multiple RSS feeds into a single river-of-news type feed for you.The FEEDblendr interface is very easy to use; simply enter your RSS feeds one by one into the form. If you would rather upload an OPML file with all your feeds that is also possible. Overall a really cool and potentially useful service.

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SendMeRSS.com: what I have discovered publishing my blog is that there are certain readers who (a) want to be updated with all new published postings on the one hand, while (b) do not want to subscribe to an RSS feed or deal with the RSS world in general, or (c) simply want to be notified by email whenever there’s a new posting.If this describes you then you’ll appreciate the SendMeRSS web service. All you have to do is enter the RSS feed URL into the service, and they will send updated feeds as emails straight to your inbox. They also will let you upload an OPML file if you would like to import a number of RSS feeds at one go.

SendMeRSS also offers widgets for site/blog owners that allow visitors to request email updates straight from the site. If you’re a publisher however consider that they will not share the email addresses of your subscribers with you, which is something to keep in mind (although they will give you stats on your number of subscribers).
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Description: RunMe is a free program launcher that can dock into sides of your screen and become available on mouse-over. It is similar to the Windows’ start menu in its look and feel, in that allows for placing shortcuts in folders within folders. It supports special effects, animation, transparency, and a good number of very good looking skins.

Nothing beats a good launcher for quickly re-inventing the way you work with your computer. I did not expect much of this launcher at first but after trying it I found it to be very robust and surprisingly smart-looking. here are some notes on this program:

• Docks to the edge of your screen: and can be invosked by a mouse over. Can be placed on the left, right side, or top edges of your screen and dragged and dropped for optimum placement.
• Drag and drop: shortcuts can simply be dragged into the launcher in order to be added to the list. You can re-order items by dragging them around while pressing Shift (and, while pressing Shift, you can remove them altogether if you drag them out of the launcher).
• Eye candy: the launcher supports transparency and animation, and you can customize the way it behaves and looks in the settings (e.g. how you want it to behave when you mouse over, degree of transparency, change the color, sound if any, whether or not to display a ’tab’, glow, zoom, or bounce effects, etc.) But it also performs well in that it runs smoothly and without hiccups.
• Skins: RunMe comes with a handful of skins that mostly are very well done/good looking indeed. Download more skins here.
• Elements supported: include groups (which behave as folder), program shorcuts, links to folder, My Computer, Recycle bin, Run prompt, Control Panel, Show desktop, Restart/Shut Down/Standby, Separators, and a handful of other elements.
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Description: Chaos Wallpaper is a free program that has the dual function of shuffling your wallpaper as well as embedding RSS/ATOM feeds into your active desktop background. You can optionally use any one of the two functions or both together.

There are a number of desktop wallpaper shuffling programs around; this one, however, has the distinction of functioning as an RSS news aggregator that can interactively embed your feeds straight into your desktop. This means that your feeds will refresh periodically but also be clickable as well as scrollable using an on-screen slider on the right hand side. Here are more notes on this program.

• Image Shuffling: the program requires that you point it to a folder that contains images to shuffle, and it will go through all of these. It will also allow you to set the time in seconds to wait between images. You can set the images to be centered, stretched, or (when the RSS option is disabled) tiled.
• Usage: you can use the wallpaper shuffling function alone, the RSS embedding function alone, or both together.
• Interactivity: click on the heading of a news item to open it in your browser. You can also use the side scrollable bar to scroll down your list of feeds, but this one tends to be frustratingly sluggish and/or unresponsive at times.
• Support: can display JPG, GIF, PNG, BMP, TIF images as wallpaper and RSS 0.9x, 1.0, 2.0, and Atom 0.x feeds
• Configurability: the program is in fact highly configurable, but you will need to go in and edit CSS style sheets that it uses so you’ll need to know a little bit of HTM. By default the bottom RSS portion of the screen (around 25% or the screen area) contains the RSS feeds displayed on a white background. You can edit the rss.css stylesheet however and customize this (for example I was easily able to go in and make the background and the header bar transparent). Go here for more info.
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Description: ’Starred Items’ are a feature of Gmail and Google Reader designed to give you quick access to these items. What you might not know, however, is that it is possible to broadcast your Google Reader starred items into their own RSS feed that you can share with friends or display locally on your desktop, or even use them in a Widget within your site or blog. This posting is a step-by-step guide on how to do this.

The screenshot above shows the starred items from one of my Google Reader accounts displayed in an RSS widget on the desktop (using Klipfolio). It also shows what the widget will look like when you publish it on your site.

To begin with I will assume that you (a) have a Google login and (b) that you are using Google Reader to read your RSS feeds and using the ’starring’ feature to denote those RSS articles/posts that you are interested in broadcasting).

First you have to make your ’Starred Items’ list public; the steps to do this are as follows:

1. Click on the ’Settings’ link in Google Reader
2. Click on the ’Tags’ tab
3. Check the box next to “Your Starred Items”
4. In the ’Change Sharing’ dropdown, select “public” to make the Starred items public.
5. Click on the ’view public page’ to view your very own webpage where your starred items can be viewed.
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Description: Special Characters Menu is a tiny memory-resident program that can display a pop-up window of the most commonly used special characters for easy insertion into any document or text. The free program can be kicked into action whenever needed by pressing a hotkey combination.

I don’t use special characters often, but for those times that I did need them lately it rather seemed that they were buried too far away for easy access: Start menu > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Character Map. I was recently reviewing a program and wanted to find the degree (°; as in 45°) character and was surprised when I finally got the character map open that it wasn’t a straightforward, easy task to identify the proper (°) symbol from all the various other round symbols that were there. Another time I was looking for delta (?, as in the difference between two numbers) and also found it more difficult to find than it should have been. This is why this program it immediately got my attention when I found it.

If you use special characters a lot you will appreciate Special Characters Menu. By invoking its hotkey (Win+C) a window will pop up within any application that you are using that displays a good number of most frequently used special characters, including ±, ?, ?, ?, ?, ÷, ?, ?, ©, ®, ™, €, ¢, ¥, ½, ¼, ¾, ?, °, and many others (see screenshot for entire range of special characters). Here are more notes on this program:
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Description: EasyNotes is a simple hierarchical note taking program that offers a good range of functions. The open source program can be installed locally or used portably from a USB.

This a simple program that is very low on your system resources. What I like about it is (a) its straightforward, intuitive design (you can just pick it up and go), (b) the good range of features/functions that it offers (tabs and tree structure, rich text editing, and image support), and (c) the fact that it can be used from portable device. However, please note that EasyNotes does not offer many functions that other, more sophisticated (and resource intensive) programs do such as support for tables, global search/replace, spreadsheets, support for embedding multimedia objects, and macros/plugins. Here’s more info on this program:

• Tabs: you can open multiple files (each representing a file which consists of a hierarchical tree of notes) simultaneously and each one of these will be displayed in its own tab. I like having both a hierarchical structure on the left pane as well as multiple tabs both, as I find the 3-dimensional depth provides a much better way for organizing information. For example, I like to open a new note (tab) for each project that I am working on and then have all the related /information structured in the hierarchical tree on the left (as opposed to having to sort all of my information into a single, unified tree which some notes programs force you to do).
• Rich text editing: offers simple but adequate rich text editing options (edit font styles, text/background color, bulleting/numbering, indentation, alignment, even line spacing). What I especially like is that you can insert a clickable link within any string, which effectively enables you to use this program as a bookmark manager of sorts (this simple feature is something that many notes programs somehow miss - see screenshot).
• Portability: the setup file will ask whether you want a local install or portable installation.
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Description: Threatfire provides real-time protection against spyware and other malicious threats. It employs sophisticated behavior-based technology that can determine a threat based what it does within your system, and is therefore well suited for unknown or brand new "zero-day" threats. It is also low on resource consumption.

If there’s something that I am constantly on the look-out for it would be a freeware anti-spyware program that (a) is low (or medium-low) on computer resource consumption, (b) provides real-time protection, and (c) does a good job at protecting against unknown threats. From what I’ve seen and read about Threatfire, it might be just that program.

I’ve been using this program for just over a week now, running in conjunction with an anti-virus program (AVG free edition), and no other antispyware product. Aside from this period of living with and observing the program, my primary source of info comes from an excellent PCMagazine review of Threatfire and research I’ve done on this program in various other places.

The main strength of this program is its behavior-based (heuristic) detection of malware, and at that it does a better job than many signature based security programs. The difference between behavior based and signature based detection is that the former determines that a program is malicious based on observing its behavior and what it is doing within your system, making it ideal for intercepting threats that are too new or too rare to have been detected by the makers of anti-malware software. In contrast, signature-based detection is where a security program is told what to look out for through periodic updates to its database. Here are some more notes on this program:
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