Tiny bytes of tech
Ever run into the situation where you have two Windows Explorer windows open so that you can copy, move, or view files? Hmmm…probably pretty often. Windows Double Explorer is a neat program that lets you manage two Windows Explorer windows in the same window! You can also drag and drop favorite folders to the toolbar for quick access. Neat!
FontPage is a cool program to view and examine all of the fonts currently installed on your system. It lets you view any typeface in bold, italic, underline and even in 3D. You can also compare two fonts to each other and preview fonts that are not yet installed on your system.
Some users like to hide their taskbar in Windows so that their programs can use the full real estate of the screen. You can always use the auto-hide feature, but I’ve never really liked that too much because I end up moving my mouse to the bottom of the screen by accident a lot! Taskbar Hider is a nifty app for Windows 7 that lets you show/hide the taskbar with a keyboard hotkey. Much easier!
Have you ever wanted to know which hotkeys were already registered by various Windows applications? Maybe you want to create a new hotkey, but aren’t sure if it’s already being used. ActiveHotkeys is a great app that will show you a list of all active or inactive global hotkeys. And it’s free!
If you’re running Windows 7 or Windows Vista, you should check out a program called T3Desk. It’s a small 3D window manager that also supports Aero Peek. It’s a great Alt-Tab replacement that lets you arrange all your windows in 3D. You can also minimize windows to thumbnails, so they are out of the way. And it’s free!
If you’re like a lot of people out there, you probably use a lot of Google services. There’s Gmail and Google Voice and Google Calendar and Google Reader and now even Google Wave. Googsystray is a free system tray app that keeps track of all the services and notifies you with alerts and messages! Nice!
Do you suspect your computer has a rootkit? If so, check out GMER. It’s a free app that detects rootkits by searching for hidden processes, threads, modules, services, files, alternate data streams, registry keys, inline hooks, and more!
Mouse Extender is a cool little app that lets you access programs, files, folders, websites, system utilities (Control Panel, Restart, Shutdown), via your mouse! Just setup a system key (alt, shift, etc) and press any mouse button to bring up a grid menu of customizable shortcuts to just about anything!
Looking for a free, open-source, and powerful web editor? If so, check out Amaya. You can use it to browse and author web pages plus it supports CSS, MathMl, SVG and XML. It’s got a very clean and easy-to-use interface and is great for simple or advanced web page editing.
Ever get a PDF file that had a bunch of text in it which you wish you could extract and paste into Word or Notepad? Unfortunately, this situation happens more often than you would think. To extract text from a PDF file, you can use a program called A-PDF Text Extractor, which is free.