Nifty gadgets or software - what do you use?

[Panoptic Blur]

Post time-saving gadgets and software here.

I'll start.

KeePass Password Safe: this is a program that stores all your user/pass combos on your hard drive. It's much more secure than the browsers, and you only have to memorize one UPC - the one to open KeePass. It can generate random passwords with variables such as wildcards, numbers, and upper/lowercase.

I no longer store my UPCs in browsers, and although I only write down a few, most of the stuff I do online I store in KeePass. It allows you to click-and-drag any username or password into a browser field, and also for other programs that use Windows like Steam. (For some reason it doesn't work with Skype. Don't know why, but Skype as a program in general appears to behave in odd ways that most Windows programs don't.)


What else do you all use?

[Daedolon]

Assuming it's freeware, that sounds pretty good.

I'll need to meditate and post later.

[Panoptic Blur]

Yes, it's freeware and it's open source as well.

[Daedolon]

Yes I meant to write open source, NOT freeware. Had a few drinks, but thanks for the confirmation I wanted.

[Panoptic Blur]

I also use OpenOffice.org for a freeware, open source office program suite. It does word processing, spreadsheets, slide show presentations and all the stuff you expect an office PC to do.

It's basically familiar ground to anybody who has ever used Microsoft Office and the stuff that comes with it. But it's free and supported by the open source community.

It almost does all Microsoft documents properly on a 1:1 conversion basis, but not quite. I've worked with some very layout-sensitive documents, like resumes and CVs, where the exact spacing of columns, tabs, and carriage returns is important, and sometimes those have to be creatively finagled. But by and large, if you've just bought or assembled your own new computer and it doesn't come with MS Office and you don't really feel like dropping triple digits getting it (and you don't trust pirate copies enough to use them) then OpenOffice.org is a good choice.

It has no built-in "trial period deactivation" either.

[Panoptic Blur]

Browsers: I switched from MSIE to Firefox pretty early on, and then when Chrome came out, I waited until the early bugs had been ironed out, and then I gave it a try too.

Chrome runs every tab in separate memory for security purposes (meaning that a snooping process in one tab cannot collect information in another tab), so it does require a fairly robust computer to run. But if your computer is up to spec, then it's very fast to initiate and also very fast in bringing up pages - much faster in both than FF or IE.

Like FF, Chrome has a significant community of extension developers. My favorite is "Stayfocusd", which is a browser app that I use to make sure I don't over-surf recreational sites during work hours. (And sadly, Postmortem is on that list. I wouldn't get any work done otherwise...)

I still keep IE and FF on this computer in order to access some websites that don't use Chrome, but these are few and far between. Chrome is now my browser of choice.

[Daedolon]

This is basically me scratching the surface of such programs, as time has passed, I have used more few of such programs. Partly because of the bigger softwares I use have gotten better and partly because I no longer deem such features necessary.

CPUID HWMmonitor : A simple, free, program for monitoring your computers voltages and temperatures, and it seems to provide the correct results for ATI cards, which seems to be a huge problem for many other programs.

Piriform CCleaner : Not much needs to be said, I guess? It makes the deletion of temporary files, cleaning up incorrect registry entries and uninstalling programs much easier than normally.

Process Explorer : Similar to task manager, but a hell of a lot more detailed and in-depth for checking out the running processes and their hooks for any kind of information you would want to. SecuROM does not like this program in particular, but you can get around that with HideProcessExplorer (HidePE100).

Total Commander : Albeit feeling a little archaic, Total Commander works as a replacement for Windows Explorer. While it would be a much faster and lightweight replacement, I actually do not use it for that. What I do use it for, is very fast and thorough file searching on from HDDs. The program supports searching content inside files and using Regular Expressions for both file names and such content.

Notepad2 : A replacement for Notepad. What can I say? No tabs or any bullshit that make Notepad++ and other tools really heavyweight and slow to use. Notepad2 provides me with a single window program with coding syntax schemes, proper use of encoding and text functions to name a few. The sad thing is that while it's open-source, nobody bothered to port it to Mac or *NIX for that matter. Either way, literally everything code-related I do is done with this so whenever you'll get to see the new Posty, thank Notepad2.

[Daedalus]

(And sadly, Postmortem is on that list.)

Limitations on the Postmortem? Preposterous!!

[Panoptic Blur]

Daedolon, what OS are you using? I'm up to Windows 7 and they claim that file searching on the HDD got a speed boost. I recall it was dog slow on earlier OSes. Does your Total Commander program also allow for Boolean searches and extender/wildcard operands? How about "search for TERM1 within X number of words of TERM2"?

I'm interested and I'll talk to some colleagues about it.

[Dimebog]

- Total Commander to do anything with files
- Firefox to browse the web
- Pidgin to chat with friends
- Cursor Lock to lock the cursor inside a game window
- Chatzilla IRC plugin for Firefox
- FlashGot plugin for Firefox to download multimedia from the web.
- Vanilin MIDI Keyboard that emulates a MIDI keyboard via the computer keyboard.
- terminal.exe which is a Windows console I wrote as a replacement for cmd.exe
- Russian version of Media Player Classic with better MKV support
- Notepad++ for coding C2G
- DOSBox 0.74 to play DOS games
- bgb GameBoy emulator
- Wav2MP3 Wizard
- SpeedFan to measure CPU and GPU temperature

[Daedolon]

How about "search for TERM1 within X number of words of TERM2"?

You're looking for regular expressions which Total Commander handles.

[morhlis]

Oh and this nifty gadget:


So far I have converted 6 of my LPs into MP3 format! I still listen to the actual Vinyl at home. But its so awesome to finally be able to take some of the songs that are hard to get on the road with em...complete with snaps and pops.

[Umnir]

This.
I cut stuff with it.