Pawclock

Is your computer's clock accurate? Perhaps you just adjusted it this morning, but is it really accurate? I like to ensure that my PC's clock is accurate to the second, so that I can set my watch and other clocks outside the computer on the basis of the PC's clock. There are numerous freeware that synchronizes the computer's clock with the internet's seriously accurate atomic clock. My favorite is Pawclock, as it also features its own snazzy clock display, with different sizes, and the background changes to reflect the time of day (see below).



Pawclock's web site

Foxit PDF reader

PDF files are very nice, especially for printing manuals and such. Unfortunately Adobe's PDF reader ("Adobe Reader") is a ghastly huge lumbering program that takes ages to load, and if you have an old PC with 64 MB RAM running Win 98 (like my office computer!) it takes ages to do anything. Fortunately there is now an alternative, Foxit Reader, it opens PDF files in a jiffy without all the splash screen shenanigan of Adobe Reader. Better still, it does not require any installation, just put the one EXE file anywhere you like in your hard disk or removable drive (not floppy!) and it will work happily from there (you have to make your own shortcut though).


(click on image for full size)

Foxit Reader's web site

Mozzilla Firefox 1.5

My browser of choice. Yes, I still use IE occasionally to view the
occasional web pages that look "weird" on Firefox, but on the whole
Firefox is my Main Man when it comes to web browsing. Firefox have
numerous features, but these are my faves:

1. Tab browsing, like most people I always have multiple web pages opened, but I hate having so many browser windows opened, it's a mess, and I don't like Windows XP's "Group similar taskbar buttons" option. Tab browsing is much better, and easier to navigate (see screen shot below).
   
   
   (click on image for full size)
   



2. Firefox has a feature where you can quickly increase font size by pressing "Ctrl+" (Ctrl- decreases the font size, Ctrl0 normalize the font size). For a very short sighted fellow like myself this feature is indispensable, especially nowadays when small font sizes seem to be in vogue for web sites!



3. Extensions / Add-ons
   The optional extensions can be very useful. For example I have a an extension where I can double click on an word on a web page and get a dictionary definition, and I have another where I can view the current tab using IE within Firefox, so even less reason for launching IE!



4. Your fave search engines are already integrated on Firefox's toolbar!



5. Security is important of course, you don't want some basts hacking the hell out of your computer. So a lot of people use Firefox in order to avoid the spywares which are mainly targeted at IE (I heard there are some targeted at Firefox also, but I haven't experienced
   any). Personally I haven't suffered much from spyware because I don't click on dodgy looking web links, and of course I have an anti-spyware program installed any way (Ad-Aware).

Well, I reckon the above reasons should be enough to Get Firefox!

Magic Mail Monitor

Simply put, it checks your e-mails and makes a list of them, showing sender's name, subject line, date, time, and size of the e-mails.

I have been using this little app for 6-7 years, mainly to delete spams (junk mails) off the server before downloading my e-mails. I'm pretty sure no sane person likes to receive spams, and while there are ways of filtering them out in your e-mail app, I prefer not to download them at all, I use dial-up for my internet connection and don't want to waste time downloading crap. also, I don't trust my e-mail app junk filter, I don't want to lose real mails through the filtering process, so I find Magic Mail Monitor indispensable. The latest version is 2.94b, released March 2006.

The program doesn't require any installation, which is always a plus, you just unzip the files and put them in any folder of your choice. My only gripe is that while the program is very easy to use, the help file isn't very clear about how to start using it!

Here's a quick list of what to do the first time you launch the program:

• Click on Alias (where the red arrow is pointing in the screenshot below)
• Go to the Edit menu and select New Mailbox.
• Default selection is "Create Empty" meaning you have to put in the details of your e-mail server, password etc. The options are self explanatory.
• If you are using Outlook Express then you can choose the "Import from Outlook Express" option, as I don't use Outlook Express I haven't tried this option, but I'd imagine it to be a pretty straight forward automatic process.

Magic Mail Monitor's Web site
Download page (this may change, so if the link is broken please go to the main web site).

7-Zip - who needs Winzip?

I've loved playing around with ZIP files since the pre-windows MS Dos days, back then we used Pkzip to compress and decompress zip files.

Since the advent of the internet zip files are everywhere, and you have to know what to do with them if you like downloading stuff. (knowing how to unzip is more important than how to zip, a friend of mine only know how to extract files (unzip) from a zip file, but she has no idea how to compress her files in a zip file. )

In the early days of windows (Win 3.1) Winzip reigned supreme for handling archived files, nothing to challenge it. Nowadays there are many choices, shareware and freeware. My favorite is the freebie open source 7-Zip. It supports several types of compressed file (including RAR extraction), and even has its own compressed file type "7-z" which compresses at a higher rate than zip files (though not much use for sharing with people who don't have 7-Zip installed). For Windows 98/ME 7 zip is essential, Windows XP has its own native support of zip files, but I find 7-Zip more flexible and easier to use.



7-Zip's web site

AntiVir Personal Edition Classic

Fabulous free antivirus software, very effective at arresting those damned viruses without bothering with Miranda rights. The virus updating feature is excellent, and if you allow it to check for updates every day it updates very quickly. My only gripe is that you can't download the latest virus definition as a file so you can use it on several computers that have Antivir installed so yo don't have to do an online update on each machine. Aside from that little snag Antivir is the bee's knees!

AntiVir Personal Edition Classic's web site.

Fave freeware, Irfan View

Just to get some experience with blogging I am going to start by posting about one of my favorite things in life, freewares! Freewares are completely free software, with no strings attached, many of them are completely wonderful. I will post one or two freeware recommendations every day, hopefully you will find them useful.

Now, to start with....

Irfan view
For some reason Irfan View immediately springs to mind when I'm thinking about favorite freeware. I don't know whether that makes it my all time favorite freeware, but it must be pretty close.

Irfan View is a simple image viewing and editing program. It supports all the graphic file types you'd expect, JPG, GIF, BMP, TIFF, PCX etc., and other file types you wouldn't expect (like MP3!) It can convert between these formats with ease. It can do screen capture, rotate, resize, and crop images, generate thumbnail views, work with scanners, and has a good, flexible print option. It can do lots of other things, but I am not going to list them all or I'd be here all day. It's a prety small download too. All those features for less than 1 MB.
Irfan View's web site

Here's a wee screenshot:

More tomorrow! (probably)