Ditto

Alas, poor Yankee Clipper! I knew him, Horatio.

Just a quick post to let you — my readers (all three or four of you) — know that Ditto is now the only clipboard extender for me.

It does everything that YC did and more, including my most-used:

• Paste Plain Text Only
• Edit Clip
• Named Paste – great for those oft-used phrases like your signature
• File Copies – that’s right, it remembers more than just text and images

But wait, there’s more. It can do cool things like transferring clips (including files) to other Ditto users over the network. Oh for some Ditto-using friends hey?

The only minor limitation I’ve found with it so far is that searches only work with the first 500 characters of clips, ie if you’re searching for a phrase that starts at character 501 of a clip, that clip won’t be listed in the search results. But you can increase this number in the options and I’ve set mine to 2000.

Enough already; start using Ditto. And transfer some clips around your network… just because you can.

TrueCrypt

Data loss sucks, but I reckon data theft would suck a whole lot more. Think of someone going through all of your e-stuff (cheesy, yes). All those photos, personal emails, appeals against conviction, … err… I mean… apples… against… convection… currents… reports… for… science class… and stuff. <phew!>

Sure, a home computer isn’t too likely to go AWOL along with your … unusual science reports? But a notebook computer, or a nice compact USB flash drive on the other hand; well, wouldn’t you prefer that the new “owner” of your device ended up with a big fat unusable file instead of your whole unencrypted personal life?

Enter TrueCrypt. It has the magical ability to turn a big fat file into a virtual drive. You point it at your big fat file, type in the password, and you end up with G: drive, which stands for “Good luck getting my files out of this, suckers!” You could of course select another drive letter if you could come up with an equally witty mnemonic.

In my TrueCrypt drive I keep my Thunderbird Portable, KeePass databases, PDA backups, CV, job apps, and of course fruit-in-thermal-flows experiment reports. It’s so easy to use – I just save all of my personal stuff to my X: drive.

And back to the USB flash drive thing, a couple of clicks of the “Traveller Disk Setup” wizard and you’re good to go on any computer you can get Administrator access to (just the once).

TrueCrypt supports several encryption algorithms, but after several painstaking minutes of research I chose TwoFish and Whirlpool as the hash algorithm solely because they both had (somewhat obscure) links to water.

OK, enough unencrypted chit chat; go and get TrueCrypt.

Sysinternals Process Explorer

Some blogs go over six months between posts, but not this one. No siree Bob.

You probably don’t use Windows’ inbuilt Task Manager all that much, and I reckon it’s because it’s not Sysinternals Process Explorer. I’m right, aren’t I?

There’s a good reason this little beauty comes with the option “Replace Task Manager” and that’s because it really can. No, should; and now that Microsoft have taken it under their wing (/site) maybe one day it will.

My favourite feature, and the one that most people would use if nothing else, is its “Find Handle or DLL” function, which, to the less technical amongst us, translates to “Tell me which program I need to close so I can delete this file that Windows says is in use.” And for the really brave, why close the program when you can just close the handle? Although some handles are best left alone, eg those held by csrss.exe alone, unless you’re particularly fond of the dreaded blue screen of death.

Some other reasons I’ve replaced my task manager include:

• CPU history in Tray Icon: really helpful for keeping an eye on how busy the CPU is, and which process is the culprit (just hover over the icon)
• Tree view: handy for finding out which process launched another process, or for killing a tree of processes
• Command line / image path: shows the full path (rather than just the file name) and any parameters used to start it
• Restart process: great for killing and restarting a process in one fell swoop
• New, deleted colour highlighting: helps you notice what just started or stopped

Isn’t it about time you “Replace[d your] Task Manager”?

KeePass – forget (or don’t) your passwords

I’ve discovered that the problem with starting a blog is that you’re expected to post to it. Crazy eh? The lesson is that you should always read the fine print.

My excuse for not posting for a long time is: I’ve got a very busy social life and I don’t have time to post.

No?

Ermm…

How about: I forgot my password?

Pfft! Not likely! Not when I have KeePass for Windows and for Pocket PC!

I reckon its slogan should be: “Remember one password, forget the rest.“

I’ve had a play with Password Safe and SplashId which also run on Windows and Windows Mobile but KeePass won by a mile. The simple reason? [Ctrl] + [Alt] + [A] baby! It’s the keypress that means you’ll never have to type a password ever again.* Press those three magical keys together and KeePass springs into action and types your userid and password for you, as well as other keystrokes if you like, be it to a webpage or a Windows program.

It can also generate random passwords for you (you do use different passwords for each website don’t you? Don’t you?), let you use a key-file (extra security which saves you from someone knowing/stealing/guessing/brute-forcing your master password), and can even keep your password from ending up in Yankee Clipper‘s history.

It has many more cool features but I have to get back to that busy social life of mine** so I’ll let you discover them for yourself. Do yourself a favour and use it. Maybe even install it tp your USB flash drive (preferably not the same one as your key-file). Then sit back, relax, and forget your passwords!

* Not entirely true — you’ll still have to type the main KeePass one, and if you set your own password for something you’ll have to type it in to KeePass, but close enough.

** Watching The Chaser’s War On Everything.

IZArc

IZArc:

• Iz great.
• Iz my favourite compressed file archive utility.
• Iz what you should be downloading right now.

I probably don’t need to say much more than that but I’d better anyway.

I used to use ICEOWS and it was great. Working with archives as if they were just another folder felt nice, but it was missing that one little feature that WinZip provided: the ability to drag and drop a file from out of an archive (zip etc) file and onto an application. IZArc lets you do just about everything that WinZip does, and more.

It opens just about anything: 7-ZIP, A, ACE, ARC, ARJ, B64, BH, BIN, BZ2, BZA, C2D, CDI, CAB, CPIO, DEB, ENC, GCA, GZ, GZA, HA, IMG, ISO, JAR, LHA, LIB, LZH, MBF, MDF, MIM, NRG, PAK, PDI, PK3, RAR, RPM, TAR, TAZ, TBZ, TGZ, TZ, UUE, WAR, XXE, YZ1, Z, ZIP, ZOO.

I don’t even know what half of them are, but I sleep so much better knowing that I can open them. And it can create a bunch of them too: 7-ZIP, BGA, BH, BZ2, CAB, JAR, LHA, TAR, TGZ, YZ1, and, of course, everybody’s favourite: ZIP.

You can integrate it with Windows Explorer to give you right-click functions such as “Extract to…” and “Add to “. You can hook it up to your virus scanner, you can change the toolbar skin, or even create your own skins if you’re so inclined. You can make self-extracting archives (these can be quite powerful), encrypt files, repair broken archives, search in multiple archives, the list goes on! And would you believe it… it comes with a help file.

Anyway, enough already… download it and start “compress[ing] the future”, whatever the hell that means.

Launchy

My Start Menu is appalling (yes, I do need that many programs installed, thank you very much!) and I have an obsession with keyboard shortcuts. I’ll seek help one day, I promise… but not yet. Not when there are fine programs out there like Launchy!

Even if you don’t suffer from the above afflictions, I reckon most of you could type the name (or part of the name) of an application quicker than you could find its shortcut in your Start Menu. And that is why you need Launchy. Not “could benefit from” or “might be interested in” or “would probably like”… NEED.

It goes like this:

• You want to start Notepad
• You hit the hotkey (the default is Alt-Space but you can change this)
• You type some of the letters that appear in the application’s name, eg “note”, “npd”, or if you’re really keen all of the letters “notepad”
• If it doesn’t show your application, you wait a moment and then select it from the list of matches
• You press Enter
• You feel overwhelming gratitude to Shayne for recommending such a wonderful application to you

It’s so much quicker, especially for applications that you don’t run all that often – there’s no point creating a Quick Launch or Desktop shortcut for them really is there? And speaking of other directories for shortcuts, you can tell Launchy to scan any directory you like, not just those of the Start Menu.

I like Find and Run Robot (F&RR) and Colibri too, but I love Launchy. It has the configurable directories of F&RR, the non-sequential-character searching (eg “npd” for Notepad) and sexy looks of Colibri but most importantly, it has the index-at-startup style of Colibri which means results appear much quicker; and yet it starts up so much quicker than Colibri… Glen, are you listening?

Get Launchy. Righty nowy.

SnipeVille [free “eBay sniping”]

Edit 01/10/2006:

Nope, I don’t know where SnipeVille has gone either. LotSnipe AuctionStealer is about the closest I could find. It allows 3 free snipes a week and snipes in the last 10 seconds.

PS – Here’s a handy tip for infrequent WordPress users: Don’t try to delete the only comment for a posting from the Manage Posts pages. The delete link is for the posting, not the comment. Click it and you’ll have to retrieve your posting from your backups (or Google Cache) and repost it, and that would be embarrassing… or so I’ve heard.

Being an eBay noob and having repeatedly been outbid at the last minute on items which I really had my heart set on, I had a quick cry on the shoulder of Dave who mentioned that the winners might be using “eBay snipers.” So after cleaning up my streaked mascara I decided to investigate these auction sharp-shooters.

Feeling a little dirty for even considering using one, I first checked out what eBay thinks of them. OK, so eBay’s proxy system gives you a better guarantee of a win if you state your absolute maximum price, fair enough, but you lose the element of surprise because the other bidder is immediately informed of your new (automatic) bid beating theirs and this usually starts a bidding war until you’re beaten. And I’m usually too late getting to the email from eBay advising me of this. Plus, this tit-for-tat bidding pushes the price up – enter dirty feeling again.

So anyway, noticing that my morals and conscience were getting in the way I of course bound and gagged them, and got back to searching.

You’ve got pretty much two choices:

1. download a rifle (run software on your computer)
2. hire a hitman

I decided to leave it to a professional and while there are plenty of contract auction killers out there, most of them charge you for a job – be it a percentage of each successful bid or a flat time- or transaction-based fee – whereas I wanted one that wouldn’t charge me for the hit.

And so I ended up in SnipeVille. I’d choose them just for the terrible name alone. “Yep, it’s about 6km along the M25 North from LandmineShire.”

Of course, there is a teensy bit of the “you get what you pay for” factor and the closest to auction end time that it’ll bid for you is 3 seconds whereas some not-free sites allow as close as the final second. But apparently they’ve got a 99% success rate and the interface is very slick. Free, effective and attractive; what more could you want? In fact, I’ve heard people say the same thing of me. Well, the “free” bit anyway. Not the rest. Actually, come to think of it they may have used the word “cheap.” I can’t be sure. They sound so similar. Who knows?

Anyway, poor old SnipeVille was crowded out of the first page of Google’s results for “free ebay sniper” by those that only offered a free trial, so I hope this post helps someone out there.

K-Lite Mega Codec Pack

I must have a thing for freeware with a superlative in its name — I’ve already told you about UltraVNC and now I’m about to recommend K-Lite Mega Codec Pack.

It started out as a quest to find some Quicktime codecs for watching .mov files with my then-favourite video viewer, IrfanView, without having to install Quicktime. I became great friends with Quicktime Alternative and the included Media Player Classic but then after a few months I stumbled upon the great granddaddy of the Media Player Classic bundles: K-Lite Mega Codec Pack.

Oh baby! Is there a codec it doesn’t come with, or a video format it can’t play? Well, sure, maybe not Google Video (yet?) but it plays everything else I’ve ever thrown at it. It also plays Real Media (.rm) videos, DVDs and all sorts of audio files (mp3, WMA, Ogg Vorbis etc). No wonder they call it “mega.”

Since installing it on friends’ and family’s computers, I haven’t once been asked “Hey, how do I play an AVI file? Windows Media Player keeps saying something about downloading a codec but it doesn’t work. What do I do?”

Install it, watch video files, be mega.

Hey, maybe that should be a new theme for Only Tools and Horses: AWESOME freeware. Stay tuned for “Sublime Programmers Editor v7.0″, “Stupendous AntiVirus Personal Edition” and “Spectacular Firewall 2006″.

IrfanView [for everything images]

IrfanView. Enough said.

But seriously, this is my absolute favourite image viewer by a mile. It’s the Swiss army knife of image utilities. It chops, it dices, it:

• views (over one jillion formats)
• saves
• converts
• resizes
• rotates
• thumbnails [new verb, invented just now, by me]
• slideshows [ditto above], into an executable or screensaver too
• removes red-eye from photographs
• extracts: icons from executables, frames from animated gifs etc
• and so much more

As an aside, something for which I use IrfanView a lot is reducing the size of an email. Allow me to explain… no really, please do: For some reason, pasting a screen capture (good old Print-Screen button) into an email you’re composing in Lotus Notes makes for a very big email — usually about 2MB. Paste-copy that screen capture into and out-of IrfanView first and you end up with an email of about 200KB, with no loss of quality. Same goes for Lotus WordPro and its documents. Maybe it’s just a feature of Lotus products but if your email client or word-processor exhibits similar bloating, perhaps give this little trick a try.

UltraVNC

Sometimes it’s quicker to fix it yourself than talk someone through it.

“Click Start and then Run… Start… Start… The button. Bottom left of your screen… Start. Yep, that’s it, click it. Yep, that’s called the Start Menu. Now, can you see Run? Run… On the Start Menu. No, you must have clicked Search. Click Start again so the Start Menu comes back.”
And so on.

Anyway, if you have parents or technically-challenged friends who have Windows and broadband, do yourself a favour and get them to install UltraVNC. Don’t go for GoodVNC, PrettyDamnImpressiveVNC, or even SuperDuperAlleeoopaVNC, make sure you get UltraVNC.

You install the Viewer; they install the Server. Default settings are fine (no need to run it as a Windows Service) and when prompted they can set a really long hard-to-remember password because neither of you will be needing it. Oh, and while they’re setting the password, get them to enable the “Capture Alpha-Blending” option. It’ll allow you to see their tooltips, hint bubbles, etc.

If When they get in trouble:

• Start the Viewer in listen mode on your machine. You’ll need to set up port forwarding for port 5500 if you’re behind a NAT router.
• Tell them to start the UltraVNC Server. Hopefully the phonecall is limited to something like “Double-click the UltraVNC Server icon on your desktop… OK, try again but this time click it quickly twice. No no, with your left button…” but I digress.
• Tell them to right-click the tray icon and select “Add New Client”.
• Get them to enter your IP address (or dynamic DNS name) in the “Host Name” field.
• Get them to do other stuff like telling their firewall to allow the outgoing connection, etc.
• See their screen, control their keyboard and mouse, fix their problem. Well, hopefully.

I’ve just used this process to help a friend get his Apache server online again because, even though he’s not technically challenged and the dinners we get rewarded with are wonderful, it’s quicker to see it first hand and fix it yourself, and plus, you can usually get a raincheck on the meal.