Tiny bytes of tech
Ever wish you could grab a clip from a DVD movie onto your PC? Normally, you would have to rip the entire DVD to your drive and then use some cutting/editing program to grab any particular section of the DVD.
Using DVD Knife, you can simply set your start and end points and then click Save. That’s it! It’ll automatically extracting the clip into a VOB file that can later be converted into any format you like. Nice!
DVD Knife via LifeHacker
Guess what!? WindowBlinds now supports Windows 7 skinning! Sweet! This program is pretty awesome and I’ve been using it for years on my XP box. It basically lets you completely change the look of Windows, including everything from the Start button to context menus and backgrounds. It’s not free, but if you like to customize the look of Windows 7, Vista, or XP, it might be worth the $20!
If you’ve ever watched a financial TV channel like CNBC, you’ve probably noticed that little stock and news ticker at the bottom of the screen right? It’s pretty cool! It’s got all the latest news, plus you can quickly see how the Dow, S&P 500, and Nasdaq are doing.
Free Stocks Ticker is a small little Windows app that adds scrolling RSS headlines and financial quotes to the bottom of your desktop! It’s customizable and free! Way cool!
Ever forgotten your USB flash drive on someone else’s computer by accident? Once you plug it in, it’s really easy to forget to unplug it, especially since they are so small.
Pen Drive Reminder is a nifty little app that installs onto your thumb drive with the sole purpose of reminding you to take your memory stick with you once you have finished working with it. Cool!
Do you have pictures on your local computer, on Picasa, Flickr and other photo sharing sites? If so, you might find it hard to search through all your pictures at once. That’s where Ginipic can help. It’s an awesome image search app that lets you search for images from your local picture collection, from photo sharing sites, and even from image search engines like Bing, Google, and Yahoo!
Need to find a particular file on your computer? Well, if you have thousands of files, this can become a tedious task, especially if you are using Windows XP, which has horrible built-in support for search. The SearchMan is a free portable app that lets you search the contents of your entire computer super fast. It has a lot of advanced search features and is super light-weight.
If you are using Word 2007, you might be interested in a free app called AutoHistory that creates automatic backups of a Word document on every save. What’s neat is that you can restore to a previous version of the document at any time. In order to see previous versions, click on the View tab and then click Settings in the Auto History area.
Need to securely access your home computer from work? Or vice versa? Comodo EasyVPN is a free app that lets you quickly create a virtual private network (VPN) between several computers. It’s a nice free way to be able to securely remote desktop into another computer. It uses 128-bit encryption and takes a few minutes to setup!
XP Quick Fix Plus is an awesome little utility that has 40 simple and effective fixes for common Windows XP problems. Each item is arranged in a nice little push-button grid. Just press a button to fix issues like enabling the Recovery Console, enabling registry editor, restoring the Send To context menu, and fixing the problem where CDs do not Autoplay. Neat!
Ever really use the number lock, caps lock or scroll lock lights on your keyboard? I’ve probably looked at those lights a couple of times in my 15 years of playing with computers. Apparently, someone else thought that also and that’s why they came up with Network Lights.
It’s a free Windows program that turns those three lights in a network activity monitor. The lights will flicker when any kind of network traffic is detected! Neat!