Hey, just wanted to let you all know that I’m still here and want to extend thanks to Evan for holding down the fort. For the last week (and for a few more days) I’ve been on an unexpected multicountry European business trip. I should resume my normal posting activities sometime mid week. I appreciate all your patience.

Until then here is the latest entry from me. Find it annoying when you type your Windows cursor gets in the way? Here is how to fix it!

Weighing in at only 40k in size, you can have a free program that will automatically move the Windows cursor out of the way when you type. Useful? Maybe. Good to know about? Yes!

Read More

Desktop based RSS reader NewsFire is now free. The program is regarded as being among the most aesthetically pleasing desktop RSS clients available. This comes after Newsgator announced it was giving away its RSS programs, FeedDemon and NetNewsWire for PC and Mac respectively for free in January.

The program will have no advertising, no feature restrictions and only one version available. How exactly revenue will be made with this model, if any, is yet to be seen. The program previously cost $18.99

Get The Program

For those who need to be on the bleeding edge, Microsoft has made a download of Windows XP SP3 available to the public.

According to Microsoft the update “includes all previously released updates for the operating system. This update also includes a small number of new functionalities, which do not significantly change customers’ experience with the operating system. This white paper summarizes what is new in Windows XP SP3.”

For whatever thats worth, I’m sure Microsoft servers are going to get slammed as users nab the 350+ MB file.

Read More

How many times have you fumbled to remember what file goes where in Windows or include a directory listing on a CD that you send out? Sure you can take a screenshot, open up Paint, resize the image, save it and print it. BORING!!!!

With Karen’s Directory Printer all you do is select the directory you are looking for and select the file and folder info you would like to be displayed and press print. As an added bonus you can also save the file to your disk.

The price is right, Free! Check it out.

Read More

All operating systems suffer from “unnecessary bloat” syndrome. To combat it on the Mac side there is XSlimmer, and now for Windows Vista there’s Vlite.

Vlite looks to take some of the sluggishness out of Vista by removing Vista components such as Windows Media Player, Windows Mail, Windows Photo Viewer, Wallpapers and other utilities before installation, creating a new installable image. This isn’t for the novice though since it involves some complicated procedures, but if you are slimming down your OS install, I’m assuming you aren’t a novice. Certainly worth a look – especially considering the price, Free.

Read More [via]

Neat little find for graphic designers out there. Instant Eyedropper helps identify any color that is displayed on your screen. Just left click and hold the system tray application and drag the little window over the pixel that you want pick up coloring information on.

To make things even easier Instant Eyedropper automatically takes the HTML color or RGB color and puts it into your clipboard so you can copy and paste into your application of choice. Windows Only, Free.

Read More

Have multiple PC’s and tired of making sure that they are ALWAYS up to date and spend what seems like an eternity downloading updates? Autopatcher is a utility that automates this process. All you do it download the latest Autopatcher for Vista or XP and you can install all of the latest updates on whichever PC you would like.

Autopatcher will then make all of the latest Microsoft updates portable and burnable to a DVD that you can add to your toolkit that you can even share with a friend. In addition to having all the updates in one bundled place Autopatcher also lets you customize what you want installed, you you are not stuck with Windows Media 11 if you don’t want it, or the latest version of MSN. Invaluable tool for IT people, and just plain great to have in a multiPC house.

Read More

Mozilla has made available the first beta of their popular web browser FireFox.

After 27 months of hard work the Gecko 1.9 rendering engine has been integrated, and the development team is feeling ready to share its project with the world.

Version 3 has improved security features to combat phishing and communicate with anti-virus software, as well as respecting parental-control settings such as those used by Windows Vista. Better zooming and tab controls, and tweaks such as offering to save tabs on closing and use of the Mac OS X spellchecker, are also included.

As with all beta software proceed with caution, matter of face Mozilla goes out of their way to say it is for

testing purposes only

. If you like being on the bleeding edge you can download the new version here

Read More

VMWare’s Macintosh virtualization product, Fusion has hit version 1.1. In this version you get improved speed, native support for Leopard, Experimental DirectX 9 support, and a new tool that lets you import VM’s.

New with 1.1, however, also comes a new beta application called Importer. Importer does what so many of us have been waiting for, and what Parallels has done for a long, long time: it offers an easy-to-use Mac program that lets you convert other virtual machines over to a Fusion VM. Previous to this, anyone who wanted to convert, for example, a Parallels VM over to Fusion had to go through a very long, convoluted, horrible process with a Windows-only app from VMware that didn’t work all the time (it failed for me several times, personally). This used to be a limiting factor for me to use Fusion regularly, since I wasn’t about to go through the whole song and dance of a new Windows install, but now I’m dying to try out Importer. Importer supports drag-and-drop capabilities with Parallels 2.5 or 3.0 virtual machines.

You can download version 1.1 directly from VMWare’s site.

Read More

Upset that your iPhone with all its IMAP goodness doesn’t support PUSH email? Well, thanks to some awesome hackery with a simple application you can actually trigger PUSH email support (even with SSL) on your iPhone to make it more Blackberry like.

The program is called “iMapIdle” and it simulates “Push Email” with your IMAP server. Still very beta but so far everything the developer promised works.

The program listens in the background waiting for new IMAP mail even if you are in sleep/standby mode and notifies you via a popup and/or sound. Then the program triggers “Mail” to check for email. Although this is NOT ideal, it is perfect to fill the void until Apple can actually code mail to understand IDLE.

Read More