Aug 17th, 2007 by Jared Schwager portable, thumbdrive
Portable applications can be run right from a USB drive such as a thumb drive or even an iPod. Unfortunately, not all applications can be run from a USB drive. Here’s a few great resources for portable applications. As far as I know, all the applications listed on these websites are freeware.
This website offers a great selection of software that has been optimized to run from a USB drive. This is probably the premier place to find portable applications. At this point in time, PortableApps has 40 applications listed on their website. Another great thing about PortableApps is that they have their own suite that you can download which includes a fancy “PortableApps Menu” which acts more or less like a start menu for all the programs on your drive.
This resource has a large amount of software available and has over 1,000 applications available currently. You can find a lot of software here that you may not have even heard about before. Portable Freeware Collection is a great place to find great little tools to put in your “tune-up kit” when you go over to help grandma with her computer.
This blog links to a bunch of great portable software that has been created by others. Not all the applications on Pen Drive Apps are freeware. Here you may be able to find a portable version of a program you have paid for, which can come in handy if the developer doesn’t offer a portable version. Personally, this is probably the last place I’d go for portable applications.
Aug 17th, 2007 by Jared Schwager windows vista
The first time I booted into Vista I was very disappointed by the boot screen. Luckily there’s a quick and easy way to enable a much more visually appealing boot screen in Vista called “Aurora” that is not enabled by default. Here’s what the Aurora boot screen looks like and a quick how-to on enabling it.
Firstly, open your start menu, type msconfig into the search box, and press enter. In the window that pops up, go to the “Boot” tab. Check the box next to No GUI boot and Make all boot settings permanent. If you do not check “Make all boot settings permanent”, Windows Defender will bother you each and every time you boot into Windows.
You’re done! Just restart your computer and you should see a much better-looking boot screen.
Aug 10th, 2007 by Jared Schwager email, fax, guest post
Not everyone is as sophisticated as us email readers. Believe it or not there are still people who use and actually prefer the archaic fax. So for all of you who decide you want to receive a fax without paying out to a service like eFax what are you to do? Thankfully there is a solution. Its called K7. K7 gives you the ability to receive faxes or receive voice messages in your email free of charge. While the voice mail is good, it still doesn’t come close to GrandCentral’s ability to recover incoming voice mails, however GrandCentral can’t receive faxes either.
K7 makes money from it’s banners on their website and your faxes will come in unmolested. there are no limits, or hidden charges. One other extra benefit is that if you have a fax nearby and need something scanned quickly you can scan your page in and receive it in your email. Keep in mind Fax scanners are crude at best, but if you are in a pinch it could be pretty handy.
This is a guest post by Chris Carey of Noheat.com
Aug 7th, 2007 by Jared Schwager internet explorer
Here’s just another example of how terrible Internet Explorer 6 is. Using one line of HTML code, you can crash IE6. This little gem was found by a Japanese blogger by the name of Hamachiya2. The code needed to crash IE6 is as follows:
<style>*{position:relative}</style><table><input>
Luckily this bug has been fixed in IE7. Firefox, Safari, and Opera are also all immune to this line of code. Please use this code for good and not evil!
Aug 5th, 2007 by Jared Schwager freeware
In many cases, web development can be quite costly between purchasing image editing software to FTP software. You may not know it, but there is a plethora of great free web development software. I’ve put together a list of a few of the best webdev freeware applications I could find.
If you’re looking for a great HTML editor, Bluefish is what to get. It is not only for editing HTML though. This application is capable of editing everything from PHP to Python and Javascript and even adds syntax highlighting.
Good and free image editors are hard to come by, but Paint.NET is an exception. This image editor can be classified as somewhat of a Paint Shop Pro replacement as it doesn’t have as many features as Photoshop does.
FileZilla (Windows/Linux/Mac)
If there’s one essential web development tool, it’s the FTP client. Unfortunately, good free FTP clients aren’t very common. FileZilla is both free and very easy to use. The beta version is available for all platforms, whereas the stable version is only available on Windows.
Know of any other good web development freeware? Post your favorites!
