Tiny bytes of tech
Do you watch a lot of TV? If so, you might be interested in a neat little app called TV-Browser. It’s a cross-platform TV guide that can download TV programming schedules from more than 900 TV stations, including cable and satellite channels.
What’s cool is that you can setup reminders, add programs to your calendar of choice (Google Calendar, Outlook, etc), create favorites, view by genre, and even set programs to record if you have a TV tuner on your PC.
Microsoft recently released Security Essentials as a free download for Windows XP, Vista and 7. It is a free anti-virus and spyware removal program and in recent tests against other anti-virus software, it’s been rated as one of the best malware removal tools! Cool!
Anti-virus comparisons – Microsoft Security Essentials Download
Windows Live SkyDrive is a free service from Microsoft that lets you store files online, up to 25 GB. It’s quite a bit of free space and now you can access it from Windows Explorer.
SkyDrive Explorer is a free extension for Windows that lets you drag and drop files to the online drive as if it were a local drive. You can also view file information like size, create date, type, etc. Sweet!
Looking for free icons that you can use for your desktop? ICONES.PRO is a search engine for icons only. It has more than 20,000 icons indexed, so you can pretty much find anything you might need. An even though the site is not in English, you can still search for icons using regular English since the names of the icons are mostly English.
Do you have a high-priority program running on your PC or server, which if it crashes, you would want to be notified immediately? Watcher is a nifty little utility that monitor one application (the free version) and sends you an IM or a text message if the program crashes. Go to Settings.ini to enter the app you want to monitor.
Watcher via Life Rocks
Ever wished you could have quickly hide a program on your desktop for a few minutes without actually closing or shutting it down? Clicky Gone might be able to help!
It’s a cool program that basically lets you hide programs from the desktop and taskbar with a key keystrokes and clicks. It’s also portable, so you can take it to any computer and use it.
Wish you had a tool that let you choose all kinds of free software to install on your computer and it did everything for you in the background?
Ninite is an awesome app that lets you choose from a whole slew of apps and then installs all the apps in the background with default settings, so you don’t have to click Next, Next, and I Agree a hundred times! It works with Windows 7, Vista, and XP.
There are a lot of programs out there that you can use to remotely control your PC, but how about via Twitter? Using a program called TweetMyPC, you can not only shutdown and restart your PC by sending a Twitter tweet, you can also download files to your computer, lock your computer, get your IP address, and even get a screenshot of your desktop! Pretty neat!
If you have a lot of high-resolution photos, but you want to quickly resize them to a smaller size so you can share them more easily or upload them to a webpage, check out DropResize.
DropResize runs in the system tray and basically monitors a folder that you specify for new images and then automatically resizes them to whatever you height and width you prefer. It does keep the aspect ratio. As of right now, it only supports JPEG images, but the next release will support more.
folder2hyperlinks is an interesting program that basically takes a folder and creates an HTML webpage for it with hyperlinks to all the files inside that folder. You can open this HTML file in your browser and click on a file name and it will open the file in Windows! Note that you can use relative or absolute paths, so it’s great for offices where you have lots of networked drives.