[Osiris]

Sometimes it´s the small changes that make a big difference. I´am writing a lot of articles as you all know and I find it sometimes hard to locate the cursor in my articles, especially when it is late in the evening and I´am tired. Vippy is a small utility that does only one thing: It changes the color of the cursor to red. Take a look at the image to see the difference. The great thing about vippy is that it should work in nearly all windows applications including Microsoft Word and Open Office.

As you can cleary see on the image to the left the top cursor is rather hard to locate while the red cursor in the second text is way easier to spot. After installing the only 50K freeware you see the current active cursor which is the windows default cursor. You can change this cursor into a small, medium or large custom red cursor which additionally can be displayed in bold.

I changed mine to medium and bold and it is working like a charm. The red cursor will be activated when you hover your mouse over text. Which means that the blinking cursor at the end of the current letter is still black.

I´ve tested it so far in firefox, microsoft word, opera and notepad. It did change the cursor in all programs but Opera to the red cursor. Let me know if you find this one helpful or a waste of time..

http://officeboosters.com/vippy.htm

[Osiris]

I can see the first question coming up pretty quickly. Special shortcuts, what´s that ? I had some trouble finding a heading that describes tooler and I decided to stick with the description that the author of this nice little tool used. Tooler is able to create shortcuts in three locations: desktop, startmenu, programs menu. You can create eleven different shortcuts with it that might speed up things a little bit.

You can create shortcuts to run, disable or enable screensavers, eject and close the cdrom tray, set the volume, turn of the monitor, disable mouse and keyboard, shutdown and restart your system and finally logout the current user. No one needs all of those shortcuts but some might come in handy for some of you. I especially like the shortcuts that eject and close the cdrom tray, great if you use tools that automatically eject the cdrom tray. (like nero, after burning a cd or dvd).

Tooler is freeware and only 50K in size. Just unpack it somewhere and run it. No installation, no new registry entries, great little tool.

http://www.tooler.aionel.net/

[Osiris]

Are you looking for a free lightweight alternative to Microsoft Word and Open Office ? Are you sick of endless loading times and office suits that occupy hundreds of megabytes of space on your hard drive ? AbiWord might be worth a closer look if you answered those questions with yes. What´s so different about AbiWord that I would recommend it ? There are several reasons, first it is only about five megabytes in size which is a good prerequisite for a fast loading application.

AbiWord is open source and available on many plattforms including Microsoft Windows, Linux, Mac Os, FreeBSD and others. The open source tool is able to read and write all important formats like Microsoft Word, Open Office, Word Perfect, Rich Text, web documents and more. This is ideal if you want to import files from different sources and work with them at. Plugins enhance the functionality tremendously, there are currently more than 50 free plugins and tools available as additional downloads from the AbiWord website.


http://www.abisource.com/download/

[Osiris]

When I bought my first mp3 player years ago I had to somehow transfer the music from my cd collection to my computer. I was lucky enough to find CDex pretty fast and I stick with it since then. It offers everything that I demand from an CD ripper, it´s fast, it checks CDDB for album and title information and is able to save the music in many formats including mp3 and wav. All you need is the program itself and the dll lame_enc.dll which you can download from rarewares.

You should check the options before you start your first ripping process. Select the Lame Encoder as your Encoder and define a bitrate for the mp3 files that you want to save. You need to add an email to the Remote CDDB tab if you want to use this service. This email is not checked at all, you might want to use a temporary email address. After that you put a music cd into your drive, CDex will retrieve the information but not the title and album information automatically.

You need to select CDDB and click on Read Remote CDDB. All titles and album information will be retrieved and displayed. Once this is done you extract one or all tracks of the CD as compressed audio (mp3 for instance). All titles will be saved to a dir defined in the options and you are ready to transfer the files to your mobile player.

It can´t be easier than that. Let me know if you are using a different tool.


http://sourceforge.net/projects/cdexos/

http://www.rarewares.org/mp3.html

[Osiris]

Most people use easy to remember passwords that are as easy to brute force. The name of your wife, your birthday, a combination of personal data or simple words like password or god. This might be convenient and nice as long as no one tries to break into your account. When this is happening you will quickly realize that insecure passwords are a big security thread.

Password Generator (click here for a windows version) makes sure that the password that is generated will be hard to brute force and impossible to guess because it is not related to your personal life in any way. The entire process takes place in three steps. The first step involves choosing a password size ranging from 32bit to 2048bit which influences the password length. The author suggests using 40-72 bits for normal security and 90-128 bits for high security.

72 bits for instance means a password with 12 chars, 1024 bits would mean a password with unbelievable 171 chars. After choosing the password size you have to type some random keys (longer for greater sizes) which are used to compute a password. The last step displays the password. The default encoding is base64, you can also opt for hexadecimal or pass phrases which influence the length of the password.

You might have a problem remembering the password and I suggest you use a program that saves the password safely. I wrote a little article about a secure password manager pins which you might want to try.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pwgen/

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pwgen-win/

[Osiris]

You are leaving traces on the computer you are working with unless you are using a live cd or software that runs from an usb stick. Traces are everywhere and it´s rather hard to clean every possible trace by hand. Disk Cleaner is a nice little freeware application that helps you in this task.

Once installed it scans your computer for items in temporary folders, browser cache and recent documents for instance. Almost thirty locations, each showing the number of files and the complete size of all those files. I think it´s interesting that the program lists all three browsers that I use (opera, firefox and ie) each with separate entries for disk cache, cookies, history and more.

Cleaning is easy as well. Mark the locations that you want cleaned and select clean afterwards. If a path is cleaned it will disappear from the disk cleaner listing and reappear again if new files are discovered. Nice little tool with great impact on security.

http://www.diskcleaner.nl/

[Osiris]

The multimedia player Bsplayer has been released in the new version 2.0 today. I was using previous versions of bsplayer and was really satisfied with it. It had some minor problems and I made the switch to VLC media player and plan on using that one even though the new version of bsplayer has been released.

The player supports most used multimedia formats like avi, mp(e)g, divx, xvid, asf, wmv and many audio formats like mp3 and wav. It supports subtitles, drag and drop, resolution changing, multipled audio streams and is able to capture frames. If you are still using media player you should try and make the switch, it´s faster and better than it.


http://www.bsplayer.org/en/bs.player/home/

[technotmuch]

Can anyone tell me how to install Flash player 9 if I dont have admin rights was able to instal google earth but I cant find a way around the admin rights. any tricks or versions of the flash player 9 that doest check for admin rights and automaticly downloads like other programs eg. Google earth

[DerekGoodson]

Can anyone please point me in a direction of good/easy backup software?

[Osiris]

Syncback SE ^^