My new best friend — AutoHotkey

June 18, 2009 By Leave a Comment

autohotkey-logoWhen you’re like me, a natural time waster, you need to be as productive as possible when you are working. That’s why I have recently learned to love AutoHotkey, a free Windows download that allows you to automate repitive actions, create hotkey and scripts and at its most basic is really easy to use.

Some of AutHotkey’s key features include (their words):

  • Automate almost anything by sending keystrokes and mouse clicks. You can write a mouse or keyboard macro by hand or use the macro recorder.
  • Create hotkeys for keyboard, joystick, and mouse. Virtually any key, button, or combination can become a hotkey.
  • Expand abbreviations as you type them. For example, typing “btw” can automatically produce “by the way”.
  • Remap keys and buttons on your keyboard, joystick, and mouse.
  • Convert any script into an EXE file that can be run on computers that don’t have AutoHotkey installed.

The basic idea is you create text file scripts with small coded fragments that can replace text as you write, perform simple actions or perform more complicated actions.  The script needs to run once to be put into memory and then each time you need it, it’ll be there.

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Filed Under: freeware, Productivity, Windows Tagged With: , , , ,

Get an Amazingly Fast Windows Image Viewer

November 4, 2008 By Leave a Comment

faststone_logo

Working forever, as it seems, in tech marketing, I feel like I’ve spent my career (an exaggeration) looking at image files like jpegs, sorting them, looking at them again — just trying to find the right image for the story I was trying to tell.

I’ve used tons (an exaggeration) of Windows image viewers.

I’m always on the lookout for new viewers, here’s one and I like very much.  FastStone MaxView really is one of the fastest Windows Image Viewers I’ve ever used and fast is important when you’re flipping through large clip art collections or all of your digital pictures.

MaxViewer is free for non-commercial use — $19.95 for commercial use.

MaxViewer has more to recommend it besides just fast viewing.  Here’s a partial Feature List from the FastStone site:

  • Full screen viewer with Select – Zoom support
  • Clear and customizable magnifier
  • View detailed image information including EXIF metadata
  • Slideshow with 150+ transitional effects and MP3/WAV/MIDI/WMA background music support
  • Lossless JPEG rotation and crop
  • Internal editor that adds texts, arrowed-lines, highlights to images
  • Undo, Redo and Mouse Wheel support
  • Common image formats support, including loading of JPEG, JPEG2000, GIF, BMP, PNG, PCX, TIFF, WMF, ICO, CUR, TGA and saving to JPEG, JPEG2000, TIFF, GIF, PCX, BMP, PNG, TGA
  • Digital camera RAW formats support, including CRW, CR2, NEF, PEF, RAF, MRW, ORF and DNG

Download FastStone MaxView [via lifehacker]

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Filed Under: Digital Pictures, freeware, Windows Tagged With: , ,

Need a way to keep your passwords secure?

October 29, 2008 By 2 Comments

keepass_logo I’ve managed network security startups several times.  What the experience taught me was how basically insecure and haphazard most people are about their computers and accounts.

I’m not usually much better, but I think we can agree that the yellow sticky with your account password stuck to your computer monitor is not a good idea.

Still, the question of how much security is the right amount persists.  I hate to think how many accounts I have between websites, computers, email accounts, networks and homebanking.  Ideally each of these accounts would have its own username and password.  How to keep track of all those passwords, how to keep track?

Enter KeePass, an open source, encrypted password password manager for Windows.

You can enter and organize all of your passwords by categories and subcategories and secure the entire database with a master password.  A nice feature allows you to copy your usernames and passwords to you clipboard so that they can be pasted into the application requesting them.

As you become a fan of KeePass, you’ll find there are a slew of plugins to extend the function and integrate KeePass

Download KeePass [via portablefreeware.com]

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Filed Under: Security, Utilities, Windows Tagged With: , , , , ,

Quick Windows File Viewer with Benefits — IrfanView

September 22, 2008 By Leave a Comment

irfanview-logo

Sometimes you just need a quick way to view an image and make a couple of adjustments.  At times like these you don’t need Adobe Photoshop, and since you probably don’t even want to keep the image when you’re finished, you probably don’t want to put it in your Picasa collection.

For quick image viewing and adjustments, you can’t beat IrfanView.  IrfanView is a free Windows file viewer that is very fast and comes with a boatload of features.  Some fairly advanced like the ability to use Photoshop filters.  Most important though is IrfanView is very fast to open a picture, crop it, resize and save it again.

Some of our favorite features

  • Many supported file formats (click here the list of formats)
  • Thumbnail/preview option
  • Paint option – to draw lines, circles, arrows, straighten image etc.
  • Slideshow (save slideshow as EXE/SCR or burn it to CD)
  • Fast directory view (moving through directory)
  • Batch conversion (with image processing)
  • File search
  • Email option
  • Multimedia player
  • Print option
  • Change color depth
  • Scan (batch scan) support
  • Cut/crop
  • Effects (Sharpen, Blur, Adobe 8BF, Filter Factory, Filters Unlimited, etc.)

Download IrfanView

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Filed Under: Digital Pictures, freeware, Technology, Windows Tagged With: , , ,

Clean your new computer or an old one – The PC Decrapifier

September 16, 2008 By 1 Comment

I hate the applications that have been pre-installed on my computer.

I recently bought a new PC.  That means even before I start installing the applications I really need, there are a boatload of trial applications installed.  Most are a result of marketing agreements between the various software publishers and the manufacturer of your new computer. Many give you something like a 60-day free trial, on the 60th day the nagging begins to buy a paid license.

To me, the most notorious offender is Symantec’s Norton Security Suite, which does a fine job for the 60-day trial period, but is relatively expensive (especially when AVG is such a good free alternative) and becomes very persistent and annoying in its nagging.

pc-decrap-logo PC-Decrapifier is a free utility that gives you a chance to delete all the applications on your Windows PC that you didn’t ask for, and are just going to, at best, take up disk space and, at worst, run in the background and make your computer operate slower.

If you’re running PC-Decrapifier on a computer that you’ve already installed applications, you’re given the opportunity to take a snapshot which you can return to after cleaning, if the results are not to your liking.

Download PC-Decrapifier [Via downloadsquad]

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Filed Under: Desktop applications, Technology, Utilities, Windows Tagged With: , , , ,
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