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.