Freeware | Technology Blog

Dressing your Mac up for Christmas

December 6th, 2008

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Whilst I realise this website has a Linux and Windows-focus, I am (for better or for worse) a OS X user. As Christmas approaches, houses and offices are often adorned with decorations and there is no reason a Mac can’t be too.

In Northern England, we have been ‘fortunate’ enough to have had quite a bit of snow this week. Not everyone is as lucky though, and Snowflakes is an application which ensures those at lower latitudes won’t miss out. Snowflakes allows snow to fall either on the desktop or, should you truly need reminding, in front of all windows. The speed and number of the snowflakes can be modified. It is a little distracting even behind all windows, as the snowflakes falling can be seen in the space just above the dock.

Mac users love widgets and fairy lights. Festive Lights is a widget which allows you to ‘decorate your dashboard’. Users have several options: festive lights can surround the dashboard, or only hang from the top; they are available in different colours; mistletoe can be added; and the pattern which the flashes follow can be selected.

Faroo P2P Web Search

November 6th, 2008

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The idea of Faroo is simple. Faroo uses P2P technology to crawl the World Wide Web instead of using an infrastructure with thousands of servers and worldwide datacenters. If you think about it, users are already visiting websites all the time and the basic idea is to utilize those information to build and maintain an up to date index of the World Wide Web.

Every user who is running the Faroo client contributes to the web search engine in two ways. So called words, some would say keywords, are stored on the user’s computer which are linked to websites. If another user of the system searches for those words they will be retrieved from the first user - or another user who is also hosting those words - and send to the user searching for them.

This means that every user has to contribute disk space to the Faroo project so that the words and information can be hosted. The disk space that is provided can be set in the options from 1 Gigabyte to unlimited storage space.

Move all files from subdirectories into main directory

April 7th, 2008

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When I extract multiple archives at once I use a setting that creates a directory of the same name in the main folder. This isn’t such a big problem normally if I decided to keep the extracted files in the new folder but it sometimes becomes a problem when I need all the files in one directory. Lets take the following example. I have downloaded twenty videoclips as archives and extracted them into twenty subdirectories of the download folder on my hard drive.

I used to move each file manually from the subdirectory into the main directory until I could not take it anymore and decided to search for a solution that would automatically move all files in all subdirectories of a selected folder into that folder. I did find Dir Utils, a software that can do that and much more.

Dir Utils adds six entries to the right-click menu, among them is the option called Unify which moves all files from all subdirectories (and their subdirectories..) into the main folder.

Increase Windows Stability

December 30th, 2007

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Xtra Windows Stability is an interesting piece of software that was mentioned in Shellcity’s top 25 software of the year series. The product was especially designed to increase Windows stability by forcing important subsystems of Windows into separate processes.

The user can choose to force the following subsystems into separate processes to increase the stability of your Microsoft Windows operating system: Desktop, Explorer (Folders) and IE.

All three or only some can be selected during installation and a restart is required before the changes take effect. The big question is however if the program delivers what it promises. I fired up Process Explorer from Sysinternals and checked if there would be more than one process when I opened Windows Explorer.

A new process was indeed added which means that the software is indeed dividing important subsystems into different processes which means that the chance is higher to recover the system if one subsystem fails.

Orbit Downloader

March 21st, 2007

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I never suggested a download manager before at ghacks, so here it comes, a free fast download manager that is working with all major browsers and supporting major protocols such as http, https, ftp, mms and rtsp. I have been testing Orbit Downloader in Firefox and IE and decided to use it as my main download manager. It monitors downloads automatically and starts the download immediately. If you like you can configure Orbit Downloader to monitor the clipboard as well and catch flash and streaming media files.

It adds a small icon to most video download portals in Firefox that lets you download the video that is currently played. IE users have to hover over the video to see a menu that lets them download the video. This feature is site independent which means that it should work on new sites that offer flash and streaming media files. That is not the main purpose of the download manager of course.

Taskable RSS Feeds for your System Tray

February 10th, 2007

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Taskable is a great alternative for online or offline feedreaders, it is a RSS browser that places an icon in the windows system tray making it a very effective method of displaying those feeds. I truly like the ease of use and space-saving nature of taskable, I mainly use it to display my most read feeds in the system tray and check on them periodically.

taskable