@ my wits' end

Online dictionaries are very useful tools, but WordWeb goes a step further and gives you an excellent free dictionary and thesaurus on your Desktop. It’s easier and quicker to use than online dictionaries and you don’t need an Internet connection.

You can work directly in the WordWeb window or you can highlight a word in any program, click the WordWeb icon in your system tray (or just press Ctrl and right-click a word) to access a wealth of information including definition, synonyms, and pronunciation.

It’s includes British, American, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, Irish, South African, Asian and International English dictionaries.

There’s a novel approach to free software.  You must buy the Pro version if you take more than two commercial flights per year.

From the horse’s mouth:

“This thesaurus/dictionary can be used to look up words from almost any program. In addition to displaying sense definitions and synonyms, WordWeb can find sets of related words. The database has more than 150,000 root words and 120,000 synonym sets, many proper nouns, pronunciations, and usage tags. WordWeb works off line, but when online you can also quickly view Web references such as the Wikipedia encyclopedia.”

But wait, there’s more…

If you demand even more lexical erudition than the built-in 150,000 root words, you can purchase an add-on for the Oxford Dictionary of English or Chambers English Dictionary.

Get WordWeb right here

Note

If you’re using Windows 7, you’ll need to change the Taskbar customization to show the WordWeb icon in the Notification Area.

The tiny tool of the year

If you’re even slightly addicted to news and information on the web you need Readability.

It’s a javascript “bookmarklet” which takes a cluttered page like this:

and with one click turns it into this supremely readable text:

It takes about 10 seconds to set up, it works on most pages containing articles and on any operating system. Compatible with Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Uncle Tom Cobleigh and all. All you need to do is select your text preferences on this page at arc90 Laboratory then drag the Readability link button from their page into your Favorites or Bookmarks, preferably on the toolbar.

If you wish to return to the previous cluttered version, just refresh your browser page » Ctrl+R in Firefox, F5 in Internet Explorer.

Get it here

See the 1 minute tutorial here: Shhh, I’m Trying To Read!

A companion for Evernote

Although I’ve used web-based email off and on for a few years, I didn’t appreciate the value of cloud computing until I discovered Evernote. That gem led me to investigate other cloud options: among them the excellent DropBox.

The concept is simple: imagine a folder on your computer into which you can stuff files that can be accessed from any computer in the galactic neighbourhood. As soon as any change is detected in that folder or its sub-folders, the updated file is duplicated in your account on DropBox’s website. Then it’s automatically updated on your office desk machine, your notebook computer and your home computer.

I can acomplish the same thing with Evernote, but some files—notably Word, OpenOffice, and Excel files—aren’t compatible with Evernote’s free version. Even with the Evernote Premium, Office files can’t be read in Evernote’s local client. You must locate the file in Evernote and then open it in the relevant application before you can read it, search its text or edit it. Because your files are stored in Evernote’s rather cryptic database there’s an issue with finding the file’s actual location on your hard drive if, for instance, you wish to back it up locally.

What’s more, DropBox, unlike Evernote, is fully Linux compatible. I’m hoping that will change with Evernote’s recent raising of $10,000,000 for development but we’re not there yet.

Evernote is outstanding for information which I need to be fully and instantly searchable, but DropBox is more suited for the files I wish to edit regularly.

In a nutshell

Evernote is a full fledged application which allows you to view and edit text files and to view pdf files and images from within the application. Dropbox doesn’t do any of that, it’s just an icon in your notification area which accesses your DropBox folder. That folder can be in your Documents folder or any other location your heart desires.

DropBox has a tiny footprint and its simplicity is its biggest asset.

I use Evernote to squirrel away all the random information I may need to reference later and which needs to be easily and quickly searchable. Some examples:

• image files,
• scanned magazine and newspaper articles,
• web clips,
• pdf files,
• scanned statements, bills, receipts, library slips and business cards.
• scanned copies of wills, marriage certificates and the like.

I use DropBox for working files:

• my website local files,
• my blog notes,
• my Microsoft Office files: to-do lists and inventories,
• my financial spreadsheets,
• downloaded program files,
• data files for utilities like Stickies for Windows and PhraseExpress.
• and anything else which I need to keep synchronised between my main computer, my virtual computers, my Linux test box, and my laptop.

I only use a small fraction of the 2GB of free storage available with the free DropBox account. Because it’s such a simple concept I find it very useful for my everyday files—if I need to backup large files to the cloud I can use Microsoft’s free and generous 25GB Sky Drive but that doesn’t have DropBox’s synchronisation ability.

CPU-Z is a very small free program which provides you with detailed information that you sometimes need about your computer’s CPU, motherboard and memory.

The program doesn’t install itself on Windows, so it doesn’t mess with your Windows Registry and may be run from a flash drive or floppy if required. Just unzip the files in any directory, on any drive, and run the cpuz.exe file.

Get it here:

http://www.cpuid.com/cpuz.php

Screenshots

Process Monitor is an advanced Windows tool from Microsoft which replaces the legacy Sysinternals utilities Filemon and Regmon. It’s not for the fainthearted, but if you have a reasonable understanding of Windows it can be a powerful troubleshooting and malware hunting toolkit.

You can get it here: Process Monitor v1.26.

If you suspect that you have something nasty in your PC which Task Manager doesn’t reveal and your AV and antispyware programs have missed, Process Monitor is your friend. It’s Task Manager on steroids.

If you run the program with applications open you’ll be overwhelmed very quickly by millions of events, as shown in the screenshot above. Process Monitor displays a continually increasing logfile. So close all running programs before using it in earnest. Then you can use the excellent filtering tool to exclude those processes which you know are safe or to only show specific processes.

If you find anything suspicious, search for information about it using your search engine.

Like Autoruns, which we looked at recently, this program is standalone. It doesn’t have to be installed on your PC using the Windows Installer. Just download the zipped program folder from the link above, unzip it, move the whole unzipped folder to wherever you like on your computer (or leave it in your Downloads location) and run it by double clicking on the procmon.exe file contained in the folder.

There’s an excellent Help Menu. Unless you’re an über-expert you’ll need to read it if you wish to gain the full benefit of this powerful tool.

Still in the 20th Century?

If you’re using Windows Me or 98 or older you need FileMon and RegMon instead of Process Monitor.

Does your PC take forever to start?

The tool most often recommended for zapping unnecessary startup programs is msconfig from the command line. Find out about msconfig here.

There’s an even better utility from Microsoft’s subsidiary SysInternals which you can download free of charge from here: AutoRuns for Windows. It’s a mystery to me why it’s not included as part of the standard Windows installation.

This program may be used with any version of Windows, including 64-bit editions.

This program is standalone. It doesn’t have to be installed on your PC using the Windows Installer. Just download the zipped program folder from the link above, unzip it, move the whole unzipped folder to wherever you like on your computer and run it by double clicking on the autoruns.exe file contained in the folder.

I moved the folder into my C:\Program Files folder (open Windows Explorer and Shift drag) and then created a shortcut to the autoruns.exe (Ctrl + Shift drag) file to my Desktop.

To disable an auto-start entry uncheck its check box. To delete an auto-start configuration entry use the Delete menu item or toolbar button. With the exception of items relating to your antivirus, antispyware or firewall almost all non-Microsoft startup items can be disabled resulting in faster startup and freed memory.

Select entries in the User menu to view auto-starting images for different user accounts.

The extra file autorunsc.exe is a command line version of Autoruns. Most people won’t need this. Use it, ignore it or delete it as you wish.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, favicons are the small icons which most websites use to distinguish themselves from all run-of-the-mill Internet Explorer icons which show up beside the name of the page on your browser tab or in your Favorites list.

I didn’t realize how useful favicons were until I installed Internet Explorer 7 and they all disappeared. When you have a thousand Favorites in dozens of folders, the little favicons make it easier to locate links. A long list of blue IE icons is visual overkill.

Microsoft invented the favicon but handles it poorly in Internet Explorer, they disappear when you clean out your Internet temp files or for no apparent reason at all. Firefox is better at it.

Restore your IE favicons using the free Favorg program – get it by clicking here:

It works very well with IE7, IE6 and IE5. It also lets you know which of your Favorites are dead links or have been redirected.

Theoretically, Favorg is not Vista compatible, however, it installs and runs with no problem even in 64-bit Vista.

If you wish to use the Favorg Help Menu in Vista you’ll need to download and install a Windows Help (WinHlp32.exe) file from here. Microsoft have changed the Help program for Vista.

The program is self explanatory, so you probably won’t need to go to that trouble.

Extract from FavOrg’s Help file:

What is a favicon by the way? Internet Explorer will always look for a file named favicon.ico in the root folder of any site to which you connect. For example, if you connect to:
http://www.thissite.com/programs/freeware/index.htm, the favicon URL should be http://www.thissite.com/favicon.ico. If IE finds such a file, it will download it as soon as you create a new item for this site in your favorites folder (Add to favorites… command). This icon will be assigned to the corresponding shortcut automatically. You’ll see that a favicon is sometimes not an actual icon but a bitmap (which sometimes leads to minor display problems).

So, why do we need a utility to manage these favicons? Because Internet Explorer doesn’t do its job very well. The downloaded icon file is stored as a temporary file. Which means that after a while, the favicon will disappear and your shortcut will be associated again with the standard Internet Explorer icon. This often happens after cleaning up your Temporary Internet Files folder. FavOrg will fix this problem and ensure that your favicons are made sticky. That is, once downloaded, the icon will be assigned to the shortcut permanently. FavOrg stores the favicons in a user-defined folder.

Also, for unknown reasons, Internet Explorer sometimes fails to automatically download the favicon. FavOrg will check any Internet shortcut in your favorites folder and will automatically download and install the favicon if it is present on that particular Web site.

FavOrg will also allows you to assign a custom icon to any of your Internet favorites, even if there’s no favicon downloadable from the corresponding Web site.

Finally, since FavOrg must check the validity of an Internet shortcut before trying to download the corresponding favicon (if any), this is a good opportunity to find which of your favorites links are broken. FavOrg will report dead sites, removed or moved pages and will also be able to automatically reset a link to the site’s root page (if a page has been removed) or to update a link to a page that has been relocated.

When you install a new program, one of the things you probably do is blithely click “I accept” when the End User Licence Agreement pops up.

Bad move, many of these agreements (even those from companies you thought were reputable) are draconian and you can be signing your life copyrights away when you check them off. You can also be giving them the right to bombard you with spam.

EUAlyzer checks them for you in a few seconds – tells you if the software you’re about to install displays pop-up ads, transmits personally identifiable information, uses unique identifiers to track
you…. on & on it goes.

If you can’t be bothered wading through that legalese, don’t worry about EULAs any more. This free program takes care of the problem.

http://www.javacoolsoftware.com/eulalyzer.html

The Benefits of EULAlyzer:

• Discover potentially hidden behavior about the software you’re going to install.
• Pick up on things you missed when reading license agreements.
• Keep a saved database of the license agreements you view.
• Instant results – super-fast analysis in just a second.

The free version is for home of educational use. If you’re in business you need the Pro version.