When designing websites and application, I tend to use different set of colors to make the application look unique from others. And thats why color picker is a must tool for me. Pixie is a program that made especially for this purpose with few extra goodies. Pixie usage is very simple, run the application, point to a color and it will tell you the hex, RGB, HTML, CMYK and HSV values of that color. When you captured the desired color then you'll have to press the Pixie hot keys to copy it to clipboard.
Pixie Hot Keys Are: CTRL+ALT+C to copy HTML equivalent CTRL+ALT+X to copy it to color mixer CTRL+ALT+Z to activate the magnifier
Pixie is available as downloadable portable exe and as zip file. You can also purchase the sourcecode if you wish to.
The worst thing can happen to your computer is when its hard drive fails. Simply because all your data are stored on it and disk failure means losing all your hard work. So backup is a must not just for your office computer but also your home computer as well. You wouldn't want your years of digital memories goes away like that. And this is what Redo Backup & Recovery can do for you, to backup your whole disk and restore it in a matter of minutes. It is capable of bare-metal restore, meaning even if your hard drive melts or gets completely erased by a virus, you can have a completely-functional system back up and running in as little as 10 minutes.
When the worst disaster come, using this program will restore all your documents and settings to the exact same state they were in when the last snapshot was taken. This application is a complete recovery tool that runs outside the operating system. Its downloadable package come as ISO that you can burn in CD or removable disk. Redo will boot itself without installation needed. With Redo Backup & Recovery, you can still access and save your files on the disk even your operating system get corrupted. Other than that, it has so many tools built on it such as partition editor, file recovery, terminal emulator, web browser and a lot more.
Redo Backup & Recovery can run on Linux and Windows. Aside from being free it is opensource too.
There are couple of issues with the built-in defragmentation tool of Windows that I can think of. One is, it can only defrag the whole drive instead of a specific folder which I have mentioned on this article. Another issue is that, it eats a lot of computer resources and working on your computer while defragmenting at the same time is not advisable. This limitation is the strongest feature of Smart Defrag. The usage of this defragmentation tool is pretty similar with other defrag tools, you have to start by first by analyzing the disk before the actual defragmentation. Select the drive to defrag and hit Analyze to generate a report so you can decide what best defrag option to go for.
If you decide to use your computer while defragmenting it, then you can activate the auto pause option under Auto Defrag which pause the defrag process when the system resources go low. Or you can start Auto Defrag when the system has been idle for 5 minutes as shown below.
Another option you can make use of is the scheduled defragmentation which can run in weekly and daily basis. The result of my testing under Windows XP is pretty impressive. I was defragmenting my drive C while i'm writing this article. Smart Defrag can run on Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7.
If you prefer listening to audio over reading then this I suggest keep on reading this article. RSS feeds keep us up-to-date on what's happening in almost everything. To be informed on topics that we are interested-in we subscribe to them either by twitter, facebook or RSS feed. With Tools like BlogRadio, staying up to date had been made easier, now you can listen to these RSS feeds instead of reading them. You can choose from different male and female voices in English and Spanish language. After you convert your RSS to audio, you can listen to it virtually anywhere using your smart phone. To use BlogRadio is as easy as pie, just follow these instructions to get you started. 1. Subscribe to any RSS feed from website or blogs using the BlogRadio Desktop Manager Tool. 2. The feed will automatically be converted. 3. To listen to it, just open BlogRadio Desktop Manager and listen from there. Sync your smartphone with your PC, also using this tool.
BlogRadio is an Adobe AIR application, so it can run on Windows, Mac and Linux.
If your working on a project or document and you want to instantly grab them into your USB after you finish working then USB Grabber is the tool for you. It is an opensource utility that can grab any files in background without going through series of questions. It is more a file copier that sits on the taskbar (which you can hide easily for privacy) rather than a backup tool. To use it is simple, just copy the USB Grabber executable on your USB drive, plug the USB in any computer and run the application. From the main interface, hit the Grab button to initiate the copy process.
Before start using the app, you should set the necessary configuration. By default it will attempt to grab all files and you wouldn't want that specially if you have a pretty large disk. Personally I find this application useful if you need to grab specific file/s with similar names. On my case, I was writing a documentation for migration project so I named all my doc files to something like "TOS_MIGRATION_XXX". For USB Grabber to work, I set the "Grab files with name:" field to "TOS_MIGRATION_" which made the app copy all related documents.
You can also use this app in a James Bond-Like mission where you have to copy the content of a target computer. There will be no popup messages, the application will copy all files secretly. Be careful not to remove the USB drive during the copy process or you'll get a corrupted data.
USB Grabber is also portable and no need for installation. It works on most Windows version. For this article, I tested it with Windows XP.
Different writing formats on document is considerably normal if your using it on non-formal means of communication such as sms messages, chats, forums and etc. For formal documents like office correspondence or corporate memo, having formats such as mixed upper and lower case, contains special characters, uneven spacing and others are generally not acceptable. If you have a similar problematic document and want it to be properly formatted then CleanHaven can help you in a big way. CleanHaven is a multi-platform program designed to clean text easily.
The application has several cleaning options such as changing the case, changing the sort order, removal of duplicate text, deletion of characters (excess returns and spaces, linefeeds, non-ASCII, tabs..) and spelling changes. CleanHaven usage is pretty simple, paste the text you want to clean into the main window. Set the actions you would like the application to do and finally hit the Clean button to start the reformatting process.
Monitoring a folder can be useful for various reasons, it can be due to security purpose or for statistical analysis. Whatever the reason may be, there are many available free software out there such as the one I mentioned on this blog entry. Another similar and better software that I found is the Watch 4 Folder 2.0. This application is portable so the hassle of installation is gone. Its usage is very straightforward, you just have to follow the 4 steps which are already lay downed on the main interface. 1. Select the folder to watch or monitor. 2. Choose the events you want to monitor. It can monitor 15 different types of events such as file creation, deletion, change, rename and etc. 3. Then specify what action should the app do if an event is encountered. It can execute a program, write a log or popup a message. 4. And then hit the "Start Monitoring" button.
Watch 4 Folder is a portable application for Windows only. I tested it on Windows XP and Windows 7.
The worst thing can happen to your computer is when its hard drive fails. Simply because all your data are stored on it and disk failure means losing all your hard work. So backup is a must not just for your office computer but also your home computer as well. You wouldn't want your years of digital memories goes away like that. And this is what Redo Backup & Recovery can do for you, to backup your whole disk and restore it in a matter of minutes. It is capable of bare-metal restore, meaning even if your hard drive melts or gets completely erased by a virus, you can have a completely-functional system back up and running in as little as 10 minutes.
There are couple of issues with the built-in defragmentation tool of Windows that I can think of. One is, it can only defrag the whole drive instead of a specific folder which I have mentioned on this article. Another issue is that, it eats a lot of computer resources and working on your computer while defragmenting at the same time is not advisable. This limitation is the strongest feature of Smart Defrag. The usage of this defragmentation tool is pretty similar with other defrag tools, you have to start by first by analyzing the disk before the actual defragmentation. Select the drive to defrag and hit Analyze to generate a report so you can decide what best defrag option to go for.
If you prefer listening to audio over reading then this I suggest keep on reading this article. RSS feeds keep us up-to-date on what's happening in almost everything. To be informed on topics that we are interested-in we subscribe to them either by twitter, facebook or RSS feed. With Tools like BlogRadio, staying up to date had been made easier, now you can listen to these RSS feeds instead of reading them. You can choose from different male and female voices in English and Spanish language. After you convert your RSS to audio, you can listen to it virtually anywhere using your smart phone.
Different writing formats on document is considerably normal if your using it on non-formal means of communication such as sms messages, chats, forums and etc. For formal documents like office correspondence or corporate memo, having formats such as mixed upper and lower case, contains special characters, uneven spacing and others are generally not acceptable. If you have a similar problematic document and want it to be properly formatted then CleanHaven can help you in a big way. CleanHaven is a multi-platform program designed to clean text easily.
Monitoring a folder can be useful for various reasons, it can be due to security purpose or for statistical analysis. Whatever the reason may be, there are many available free software out there such as the one I mentioned on this blog entry. Another similar and better software that I found is the Watch 4 Folder 2.0. This application is portable so the hassle of installation is gone. Its usage is very straightforward, you just have to follow the 4 steps which are already lay downed on the main interface.
