I came across this new system optimization software aimed at reducing the boot time of a Windows computer.
It first needs to add itself to the boot sequence in order to analyse how long each application take to launch at boot.

If you're an exclusive Firefox user like me, and also happen to own an IP camera (Foscam or other brand), you may also find IP Cam PTZ 1.2 (by DRZ400S) interesting. 
It is not yet listed in the Firefox Add-ons browser, but it can be downloaded here.

I don't consider myself very knowledgeable on Blogger stuff, with my first blog not yet six months old, I'm still a newbie. But I certainly learned a lot because of all the problems I had so far, and in particular this week.  

I hope this short story of my recent misadventures with Blogger will help some of you: 

I must have been on another planet, but I read only this month that Google Pages would come to an end this month, and that's where I stored my shared files! This started a cascade of consequences for me.

First: Until now, I was using Google Pages as a convenient free storage for my few files and had to look for a alternative.
I wanted to avoid as much as possible a host like filefactory.com but instead a storage giving direct access with no waiting time to the files. As I only have a handful of small files, I tried free websites like Weebly and Jimdo. One was constantly nagging me with "Website not published" even though I made it public and published several times, and the other one gave me dns errors on the early stage of the registration.
Then I came accross DriveHQ.com which free membership comes with 1GB storage. They also have a client application that allows to drag and drop files from a local PC to their server: very convenient. See a review here. There's a drawback though, only a limited quantity of bytes can be downloaded monthly.

Second: I had to change all the references to the old file server (geekandfun.googlepages.com) by the url of the new one (www.drivehq.com/file/.../PublicFolder). That part was simply done by exporting the whole blog from the settings > blog tools, then performing a full search/replace for one string to the other using Notepad++.

Third: The fun really began here: Re-importing the blog turned into a silent disaster.
Silent, because, at first, everything looked fine, but once I started to click on the links in the Recent Comments section, it lead to a 404 error! Then I realized that, upon importing the posts, blogger had renamed all my posts with a numeric suffix at the end, so a page like:
"war-of-clones.html"
was now named:
"war-of-clones21.html"

So all the local links in my blog were now wrong!
From my researches, what happens is that old deleted posts are still in blogger index, and the new one are automatically renamed. I tried leaving the new posts for a day, hopping that they would be re-indexed and the re-importing would allow to recover the original names, but it can take days before a re-indexing occurs, so I had to take a more drastic measure.

Fourth: I went to Blogger dashboard and imported both blog backup and template into a brand new blog. Then I had to re-assign the domain gadgetvictims.com from http://gadgethell.blogspot.com to http://geekandfun.blogspot.com.
Apparently, this "new" blog is in the process of being indexed right now, and everything came back to almost normal. Some links will be invalid though as Blogger still found the way to rename some posts like "wireless-pan-tilt-ip-camera.html" into "foscam-wireless-pan-tilt-ip-camera.html" but that's the price to pay to keep the readers comments safe. If you don't find a page after clicking on a link, just use the tag sphere or labels below each post to narrow down to that article, everything is still there!

I just hope that I won't have to find another file host any time soon!

...in other words, what are the absolutely necessary applications that you should install first on a fresh OS, or better, merge in your installation "master" (using nlite, vlite, PE Builder, ...) ?

Here's my top-10 list:

There is one gaming area where computers still beats the dedicated game consoles hands down: Flight Simulators.

Times have been tough for Flight Simulator makers. The first noticeable disaster was the end of the excellent Flight Unlimited series from Looking Glass Studios in 2000, then, the best Air Combat simulator for jets (IL2 still rules for WWII fighters) that was Jane's USAF showed unusable under Windows 2000, XP and above.

With Microsoft closing the ACES studio, makers of FSX, and while there's still a big enough community of contributors to keep it going for some time, I could not help wondering if any decent modern alternative existed.

But, what about freeware ?

Since developing Flight Simulators is so demanding in resources and heavy weight software companies don't have time for fun anymore, it's seems to be the end of such games...

Well, not entirely, in Armorica one village bravely resist the Romans, and with success...(*)

A well advanced project exist (started around 1996) in the SourceForge community called FlightGear.

This ambitious open-source flight simulator wants to offer features comparable to the big ones: realistic flight dynamics, wide choice of civilian and military aircrafts, IFR, GPS support, advance weather rendering (like fog and dynamically configurable 3D clouds), various viewpoints, ATC, world scenery, aircraft carrier landing, ...

And did I say it is multi-platform ?

So start downloading it here and have fun!

---

There is also something nice cooking here: The Combat Simulator Project

Not to forget: Orbiter (space flight simulator)


Next big flying thing for game consoles: http://www.il2game.com/

Server outages like this 1st of September are rare but always bring back some fears like "what if it doesn't come back online ?", "did I loose everything this time ?", "has a hacker managed to crack my inbox ?", and while "real men don't do backup", you kind of regret that you didn't.

There are other good reasons to consider an offline backup: in case you reach the generous online storage limit, but also to store your emails with private information (memberships, passwords, ...) away from a potentially hackable place.

While the Gmail offline feature can store your content locally, it is only ment to synchronize emails (that are less than 5 years old) so you can work offline until a connection is available. If you want to delete the older emails online, they get deleted offline too upon synchronization. So you have to look elsewhere for a backup solution.

A simple and yet powerful approach exists: MailStore Home edition.
This freeware will archive emails from about any source (Outlook, Thunderbird, ...), including POP3 and IMAP services and let you store the backup on CD/DVD or USB storage afterwards. The archive can be searched and emails viewed directly from the application (which is faster than using the original client).

Adding to the product power, and to your freedom, MailStore can also re-export your backup to any of the numerous supported formats! So if Gmail had to disappear or become a payware one day (remember Yahoo POP3?) you could still re-inject your part of all your data into Outlook, Exchange, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, or another POP3/IMAP server.

The new MailStore Home v.4, features a portable version and improvements detailed here.

If you are constantly dealing with different formats of text files (txt, jsp, html, log, ...), the simple notepad.exe needs to be replaced by something more powerful,with line numbering, syntax highlighting, large file support, ...


Here is another ultimate freeware that can compete easily with many commercial equivalents.

Notepad++ is an open source text editor with features found normally in €50 software.


One of the strengths of NP++ is simply its integration into the contextual menu: by right-clicking on any sort of file, the option "edit with Notepad ++" appears, which make the editor very accessible, even for files with unknown or no extension.


Languages: HTML, XML, PHP, C++, Flash, Perl,...
Macros: the macro recorder will automate repetitive actions, like fastidious manual line formatting.
TextFX: offers a wide range of powerful functions, from tidying up an HTML page (re-indenting XML for instance), to converting EBCDIC to ASCII, or just counting words.
Plugins: allows to interface with a spell checker, a FTP server, export to a different format, ...

Give it a try, you may not need any other text editor after that!

Several Sony Ericsson GPS-enabled mobile phones come with Wayfinder as the main application. The software itself looks ok and could even (very) occasionally be used to guide you when driving. But there's a catch: after a trial period, you'll be invited to pay a yearly fee. And instead of availing for their "exclusive offer", you may prefer to buy an entry-level but decent dedicated GPS device for the same price!

However, there are free alternatives if you still wish to use your mobile phone as a PNA:

amAze is a free GPS application (ad-funded) working on most J2ME mobile phones.

An important trick to avoid expansive data traffic for streaming maps over the phone, is to use the arrows mode where only the small amount of data for the calculated route is sent to the phone. See more here.
Like Wayfinder, it also provides vocal instructions. Previous reviews of amAze highlighted the ugly interface and the slow response. All this has visibly improved now (I tried v4.5). It actually seems slightly ahead of its competitor: Nav4All . But this is open to discussion...

If I don't want to pay for a professional software, I try to find it's freeware counterpart. It was quite a challenge 10 years ago, when a free software would often be ugly, unstable, limited and poorly maintained, but this has changed, in great part thanks to the excellent Sourceforge community. Now there are many professional-grade open-source applications available and it became impossible for me to do without some of them.

To start my own best-of collection, the first application that comes to my mind is Ant Movie Catalog. While apparently not part of the Sourceforge listing, it's an good example of freeware that outperform by far any payware I know of.

It evolved to cover now every important aspects of a good media database: Easy and complete interface, powerful import/export functionality, powerfull scripts (constently updated but you can create yours) that allow you to grab the DVD cover and information from various specialised web sites, loan management (very important!), and last but not least,a highly configurable print-out interface.

Also, have a look at the other less popular software from the same author.

As a big part of my job is to make technical procedures as clear as possible for non technical people, a vital tool that I extensively use to achieve this is the screen capture utility, and, to a smaller extend, the screen recorder.

I adopted Gadwin PrintScreen. It's a closed-source freeware, but I yet have to find a matching open-source offering together the features that I required:
- substitute to the PrintScreen key
- ability to save automatically a region screenshot in clipboard as well as file without prompt.
- delayed capture
- ability to capture the mouse pointer
- jpeg support
- automatic naming
- lightweight (3.5 MB)
- fast to load and run

Open-Source alternative:
Greenshot (no delayed capture and pointer capture in v0.7, but does everything else!)

Screen Recording
At times, I need to produce a screen recording video as a software bug evidence for instance, or as a tutorial complement. The open-source CamStudio gives a very complete set of features to produce video recording in AVI of Flash along with captions and audio comment if needed.

Continuing on my best-of collection of freeware (although not open-source in this particular case) outperforming their professional counterpart, here is one that, for a good part, made me come back from the Windows Mobile to the Sony Ericsson world: myPhoneExplorer

I started around 2005 with a very ambitious phone manager called floAt's Mobile Agent (aka FMA), but its development suddenly stopped around 2007 while myPhoneExplorer was already becoming increasingly popular.

Much lighter to install than the official Sony Ericsson PC Suite, myPhoneExplorer actually provides a lot more functionalities.

It gives the total control over any Sony Ericsson phone: contacts, calendar and notes can be synchronized with either PhoneExplorer only, Google, Thunderbird, Outlook, and any iCal compliant source. Additionally, photos can be synchronized too, and more recently (since v.1.7), any files on the phone, which comes handy, if like me, you use the phone as a flash drive to bring back home files downloaded elsewhere. The Phone keypad function allows to control the phone navigation from the computer as well as taking screen shots from within any phone application.

The developers are very active and updates are constently published with new and improved functionalities.

Are you nostalgic of the time when it was possible to reboot your personal computer by gently hitting the desk with your fist (Sinclair ZX81) ? Have you been the proud owner of the first 16-bit computer out-performed by all the 8-bit competition (TI99/4A) ? Did you drill holes into your 45 min tapes to use them in the revolutionary tape streamer of the ColecoVision ADAM ?

I was looking for a simple way to create a nice map of my network at home. While not so big, it grew fast with the addition of various wifi-enabled devices in the last years.

A colleague brought my attention to a freeware called Network Notepad.

I initially overlooked it as being too basic, but it turned out to be actually exactly what I needed: not too big (about 3 MB), not too simple either.

This tool allows you to create an interactive map of your network elements: it is possible to access the network elements (ftp, telnet, http, ...) by selecting their corresponding icon. You can also define custom actions (like launching the CDP Tool).













The icon library may seem somewhat incomplete but, once you discover how simple it is to create your own, this little tool really starts to stand out of the crowd.

All you have to do is to open the object libraries window,
go to File menu > New, and paste pictures of your choice into the empty library space. The object library allows to resize the elements to a proportion suitable for use in a diagram.










Nice alternative:
Draw Anywhere is a Flash based web application to achieve a static diagram. There's is no installation, and the free registration is optional. It also allows you to add your own images.