Do you have a laptop or netbook? If so, then check out the following 5 free programs which might prove really useful: AutoSensitivity, Aeorfoil, Touchfreeze, Core Temp, and Prey.
Note: this is not a post of must-have general applications; for that check out my Freeware Top 30.
Check out my mini review of each of the 5 programs below. Continue reading ..
I recently had to transcribe a number of video interviews into text. This turned out to be much more of a labor intensive project than I thought, and it quickly dawned on me that the process can be vastly improved via a few technological tweaks. This posting aims to present a step by step tutorial on how to do this most effectively.
At the heart of the problem is a simple issue: the need to change focus back and forth between whatever program you are using to type the text, such as a text editor or a word processor, and the media player that you are using to play the audio or video. Transcribing, as I found out, involves a lot of stopping, backing up, typing, and then repeating over and over and over again.
This post promises the following: an easy way to stop, back-up, and type, all via keyboard shortcuts, without ever losing focus from the application you are using to type, and without having to ever take your fingers off the keyboard. All using free tools, of course. These are very simple interventions, but having used this process myself, I guarantee that your transcribing experience will pleasantly transformed, and made much much more efficient. Continue reading ..
I am always ready to try out a new launcher, probably because of the prospect of finding a new way of organizing my stuff, or hoping for a stylish new user experience, or simply for a change.
8Start certainly satisfies all of the above criteria. This launcher, in fact, has been around for years, but has only recently undergone a change that transformed and immensely improved it’s user experience: support for drag and drop to add items to the launcher.
At heart, 8Start is a variation on a tabbed launcher. it’s strength, however, lies in its extremely customizable look and feel. Not only is it skinnable, but it provides the user with a high degree of control over the layout, size of icons, whether to display a text label or not, etc, which is quite appealing. It also provides two layers of organization “categories” (e.g. tabs), and “groups” within those categories. Continue reading ..
Let’s say you’ve got a snazzy, large music collection on your hard drive at home, and that you would like to take it with you; get access to it from your computer at work, from your iPhone or Android device. And let’s say you want to do this without having to transfer and copy files around on multiple computers and devices. What to do? Get AudioGalaxy.
AudioGalaxy is a free web service with a desktop and smartphone app components, that streams your music online to any browser or to your smartphone. The only requirement is to install a desktop application on the computer you wish to stream from and, to leave that computer turned on, and if you are going to stream to your smartphone, to have a good data plan (or just use Wifi). Continue reading ..
If I’ve seen one file sharing web service in the past few months I’ve seen a about twenty. But this one stands out from the pack in several respects; most notably its (ad-free) stylishness and support for multiple platforms and devices.
Minus is a file hosting service that will let you upload and share large (or small) files online; it will let you upload as many files as you want provided that the largest individual file is a max of 50 megs (which, rumor has it, will be upped to 100 megs soon) 200 megs (as of Aug 15 2011). Files can be shared publicly or privately, and they never expire. Minus lets you share images in automatically generated galleries, and will let you and your friends follow each other, Twitter-style, to keep up with each other’s shared files.
Files can be accessed in the browser, within a desktop client, on the iPhone or any iOS, Android, and other devices. Continue reading ..
Do you ever need to split pages or sections of PDF documents, or merge several PDF files together into a single whole?
Hexonic PDF Split and Merge can do this for you, but it can also do a few more things that distinguish it from many of the free programs in this genre: e.g. adding page numbers, headers or footers, as well as changing the layout of your PDF such that it displays multiple pages on the same sheet.
This software is available free for personal, non commercial use. Continue reading ..
If you’re like most people, you like to look at a folder full of images and see thumbnail previews rather than icons. Windows explorer will provide previews for the most common image file types in thumbnail view, but not all of them, which is where this software can come in handy. Sage Thumbs can add thumbnail previews to a host of image formats, such as PSD, IFF, TGA, XCF, with support for a total of 162 image formats. Best of all, it will do this in tile view, list view, detail view, and all views, not just thumbnail view.
But Sage Thumbs also provides thumbnail previews within the right-click Windows shell extension, as well as a host of functions such as one-click image format conversions, and an informational tooltip that appears when hovering over image files with the mouse. Continue reading ..
