Tiny bytes of tech
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!
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!
FotoMix is a cool little program (which is free) that lets you manipulate photos in interesting ways. For example, you can remove, add or alter background easily. You can cutout people from one photo and add them to some other scenery. It’s a nice tool to create some quick photo collages or montages.
Ever want to remap some of the keys on your keyboard? OkayKeebees is a freeware utility that lets you either always replace one key with another only when pressing a modifier key first. You can use this program to effectively move keys to the other side of the keyboard or disable keys altogether.
Windows 7 has a cool feature called Desktop Background Slideshow that automatically rotates the wallpaper on your desktop after a fixed period of time that you set.
You can get this same type of feature in Windows XP using the PowerToys Wallpaper Changer, which is part oft he Creativity Fun Pack. Just select the folder with the image and the program will automatically display a slideshow of the pictures. Neat!