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Notesnook: encrypted synced notes app for Windows/iOS

imageMessing around with Notesnook for the first time. I like it a lot. Firstly, it has a FREE plan (some other systems don’t have this, I believe EVERYTHING should have at least a lame free tier for individual users). Their free tier gets you encryption, unlimited device sync (screw you, Evernote and Lastpass!), offline access, unlimited notes, and rich text editor with markdown support (screw you, StandardNotes!) and text/background color. Plus checklists, outline lists, math formulas, quotes and code blocks. Pro gets you a stack of other stuff for $50/year, which I wouldn’t use since I already have Obsidian. And yes I could use Obsidian for all of the above, but I’m looking for a cheap and easy replacement for Simplenote and this just might be it. First impression is super favorable! Windows, iOS app or web.

Oh, and you can publish a note to a publically accessible URL – either permanently, or "self destruct on first view". With the free plan! Nice!

https://notesnook.com/

System Informer: Windows Task Manager replacement

For years I’ve used a program called System Explorer on Windows as a replacement for the default task manager. Can be set to replace the default taskmgr completely and has a huge amount of features including an excellent little popup when hovering over the systray area. I never thought anything would beat it, despite it becoming abandonware years ago, but I’ve finally found a replacement which is even better. System Informerhttps://systeminformer.sourceforge.io/ – completely freeware. Looks excellent, AND it’s going to be regularly updated. It’s the evolution of a program which used to be known as Process Hacker. Does everything that System Explorer does and even more.

download 4dfe60eea2297f8e download (1)

DeepSID: New web-based C64 .SID music player

imageA brand new web-based player for .SID tunes (Commodore 64 music) was created recently by Jens-Christian Huus, also known as JCH, a very famous C64 music composer and software author. It is located at http://deepsid.chordian.net/. The emulation is quite good and the entire HVSC (release 68 at time of writing) is available for playback.

DropIt: file automation

imageFound a very cool opensource automation program. DropIt can be set up to monitor different directories on your file system. You then set up rules for different filetypes, such as moving MP3 files to a separate directory or compressing particular files into a ZIP. Then the program can automatically perform those actions periodically on files appearing in the monitored folder. This means you can just drop all your stuff into one folder and have the program automatically sort, compress, delete, move etc in the background. Also has a floating "drop icon" that you can quickly drag files to. Saves a bit of time and is completely free. x86 and x64 versions available.

DropIt

SymForm: 200Gb of distributed-computing data storage.. for free?

imageInteresting idea. Rather than a central cloud-based storage concept like Dropbox, SugarSync or Minus, SymForm turns the idea into a distributed computing solution. You get up to 200Gb for free, but in order to do that you "pledge" 80% uptime and a big chunk of your OWN HD storage space to the client. Then you become part of the cloud, hosting random highly-encrypted fragments of other peoples’ data. Sounds scary? To me, it’s not half as scary as storing your ENTIRE load of data in one location. Someone bombs Dropbox Central, your data is fried. Or, someone at Dropbox could pull a stunt like this (http://gawker.com/5637234/). These guys apparently have massive redundancy and parity copies – would take 33 failures on the network before your stored data starts to become unavailable. I’ll have to think about whether this is worth giving a shot. My decision will be wholly based on how much bandwidth it chews up.

SymForm

Everything and Locate32: high–speed file finders

imageI’ve been using a program called Locate32 both at work and home for years now. At home I have sixteen internal and external drive partitions with something like a trillion files scattered over a billion directories (rough estimate, mind you), and at work we USED to have multiple network drives that I had to search through many times a day to find a particular file. Where did I save that JPG or PDF? Which folder is Martin Galway’s “Parallax” song in again? That sort of thing.

The way Locate32 works is by periodically doing a full-drive directory scan of all of your local and network drives. You can then open its window and just start typing a partial filename (or wildcard).. it will immediately show you a list of all the files that match or contain that name in any folder on any drive that it has scanned. I can start typing “parall” and will in the blink of an eye see a list of about 12 files – parallax.sid, MartinGalway-Parallax.mp3 and so on. Incredibly useful for anyone – not just people like me who are totally unorganized but also anyone that regularly uses their computer for anything and just wants to save file finding time.

Everything is very similar in terms of primary functionality. It doesn’t have as many features, but it is able to perform something that Locate32 cannot. It uses the MFT (Master File Table) of NTFS to look up its files. Meaning it’s lightning fast with its initial scan, and then as long as you keep it running, no matter what you or your machine do, Everything instantly knows exactly which filenames are changing and which new files are appearing on your hard drive. Plus, it uses very little resources, and it also appears to have a more intelligent result sorting mechanism, but that could just be personal choice.

Everything cannot search network drives, or any non-NTFS drives, and it cannot search for text within files. Locate32 can do all of these things, so in fact Everything could be considered a “lite” version of Locate32. But it is faster with its initial drive scan and it does use less system resources. I have 12Gb of RAM so it doesn’t bother me too much anymore but still, I prefer Everything these days since I don’t need to search network drives anymore – all I look for are my locally-stored files. Got ‘em both installed so I can always load up Locate32 if I want the extended features.

Both of these programs are free and fully functional.

Everything | Locate32

Grab the latest alpha build (at time of writing) of Everything here.

SpaceSniffer: freeware disk usage utility

imageMerry Christmas everyone! I  had a fairly unconventional Christmas, spending it with my wife and kid in San Diego (Legoland!) Six hour drive from here, made tolerable by the fact that we have a pretty spacious, comfortable sedan. But I digress. Got back home and did a bit of catching up on the software review sites, and found a program called SpaceSniffer which, amazingly, has within a single hour ousted SpaceMonger as my favourite disk usage analysis tool. I say “amazingly” because I’ve been using SpaceMonger for maybe ten years or more! SpaceSniffer is very similar in functionality and I guess there’s not much separating the two, but the latter does have a bit more configurability in terms of look and feel without appearing to sacrifice speed. Also, while viewing a report of my C: drive, certain directories periodically “flickered” on the screen. I suspect that post-analysis, the program monitors the just-scanned drive and does real-time updates on its display as the contents of directories change. If so, super cool! Lastly, it has an MDI interface, which SpaceMonger does not; this allows you to open more than one window within the program showing the contents of different drives. I’m not sure how often I would use this, but if you need to you can.

SpaceSniffer uses something called “treemaps”, which is a method of visually displaying filesize using boxes of varying sizes. A readout looks a bit messy the first time you see it, but it’s really the perfect way to get an instant idea not only of the largest files on your drive, but also the directories which contain the largest (and most amount of) files. For techies, and simply those people who are anal about space usage and organization, it’s indispensible. I’ve used SpaceMonger many times at work to get a handle on drive usage on one of our big networked file servers so I can hammer people who have been storing backups and other useless crap on it “accidentally”. The program is freeware, which makes it that much more awesome.

SpaceSniffer

Thunderbird is go!

So after pretty much a single day of using Thunderbird, Mozilla’s email client, I’ve permanently switched over to using it as my main client – after being a registered user of Ritlabs’ TheBat! for at least a decade. TheBat! has been reliable through the years, but has lacked a few features that I’ve always wished it had but that were never dealbreakers to the program’s continued use. I recall testing Thunderbird quite a while ago and finding it to have a very unfinished feel to it. But just as with Firefox, it apparently just needed a couple of years to mature and include some good user-sourced feature requests. Now, it’s awesome.

One of the things I really like about it is the unified inbox. Because I have multiple email addresses, it’s very useful to have a single virtual view of all of my email account inboxes so that I can read and reply without needing to click around in a folder tree, regardless of the accounts in which new mail has arrived. In addition, Thunderbird has the ability to create virtual views based on realtime "searches". So, for example, you can have a view of all your sent items, which consists of the folders named "Sent", "Sent Items" etc from not only POP3 accounts that have been sucked down into Thunderbird already, but also online-residing folders in IMAP accounts. In practice, what with my multiple Google accounts, this program is actually now allowing me to see sent items from literally years ago that I never knew were still hanging around – giving me the chance to delete and empty trash once and for all and feeding my voracious appetite for fastidious electronic organization in the process.

The addons are another bonus. Just as with Firefox, the program interfaces to an online app store containing plenty of plugins which modify/enhance/just basically add to the user experience. Silvermel is a very appealing skin that really makes me look forwarding to using the app. Am I becoming a glam-whore lately? Probably! The app store automatically detects when addons have been updated and you can update directly from within Thunderbird.

Apart from that, it’s business as usual for the program and I’d say it’s six of one, half dozen of the other versus TheBat!. The fact that I was able to import all of my emails from the other email client was a giant bonus. That was done through the use of a plugin. Betas are coming out for Thunderbird all the time, so in that sense it’s also on a slightly more frequent update schedule than TheBat!.

Anyway, that’s a wrap. Gotta go read and reply to my email.

Mozilla Thunderbird

Folder Menu: quickly jump to commonly-used system folders

imageLiking Folder Menu a lot. It’s a small, configurable app which allows you to switch to commonly-used folders in various apps. You can pop a list of folders up with the middle mouse button (for example) in a standard Windows file selection dialog. Choosing a folder will immediately change the file selector to show the contents of that folder. You can also ask the program to monitor other apps (eg Windows Explorer), or even the desktop. Using the latter functionality, you can choose a folder from the popup and you’ll instantly get an Explorer instance opening to that location. In practice it’s extremely handy for plenty of tasks which require you to browse different locations on your hard drive – saving files from a website, editing documents and plenty more.

The program also allows you to activate certain other functionality from within its popup. A nice touch, which unfortunately increases the time-to-appear by a second or so, is a "drive" menu which will show you the current free space on all your drives. You can also quickly perform tasks such as viewing recent files, restarting your PC, running miscellaneous programs or even visiting a particular website.

Completely free, x86 and x64 versions available. It has now replaced DirectFolders permanently on my system.

Folder Menu

The flip: Firefox to Chrome, and maybe TheBat! to Thunderbird?

imageI find it interesting that over the last year or two I’ve done 180° turnarounds in opinion on various things that I once thought were complete wastes of time, only to turn right back round again later on as the biggest pain points to their use disappeared. Originally I hated Firefox due to the fact that there were a few things that completely wrong with it – long loading times, unable to “open” a file directly from a webpage like Internet Explorer does, and the horrible Find bar. As addons appeared that fixed these things I warmed to it. Witness my post on the topic from 2009. Well, lately I’ve been mildly annoyed with it because quite frankly the load time is starting to piss me right off again – I have a quad core machine and ten seconds for ANY single program to load is completely unacceptable – plus the page rendering is just laggy and I have no idea why. By comparison, Google Chrome is super-fast to load (it always has been) and loading large pages and scrolling up and down, it’s just nippier than Firefox. Very noticeable. So recently, I have copied across many of my common bookmarks to Chrome and started installing some good extensions into it – now using it at home and work and quite pleased. Some things are a bit annoying but I consider the fact that it loads in the blink of an eye to offset those things. This switch may be temporary – we’ll see how long I can last without FF.

So next up, email. At work I use Pop Peeper, a freeware, lightweight mail client, to check my personal mail. It’s done the job for about 3 years but once again there are small annoyances that are causing me to think about getting rid of it. Primarily, I may get an email with HTML in it and then wish to forward that to someone, eg my wife. PP doesn’t forward anything other than plaintext. You can’t EDIT in it other than in plaintext too. You can attach files, but that’s not the point. I want inline rich text etc. Blah blah. So, yesterday at work I installed Mozilla Thunderbird, from the makers of Firefox. It’s a full email client. I looked at it a couple of years ago and hated it. I’ve used Ritlab’s TheBat! for email for something like twelve years now and have been quite happy with it. There’s really nothing wrong with the latter, but I can’t install it at work as I only have a single license. So, freeware it was. Thunderbird, too, appears to be something that Mozilla have finally gotten right. It looks good, has LOTS of options, and best of all has a feature called the Unified view which allows you to view a single global “virtual” inbox that contains emails amalgamated from all your configured accounts. This allows you to reply to emails from multiple sources without needing to flip to different accounts to do so. Just eases the administrative process. I’m liking it a lot so far.

Installed it at home last night. Installed the Bird Import and the Minimize on Start/Close/To Tray extensions. I imported ALL my emails from TheBat! quite easily. I’m going to give it a shot as my regular email client as there are already some things I like about it that are far better than TheBat! (Yes, TheBat!’s official name contains an exclamation mark)

Need to revisit stuff a little more often, methinks! Just wish I had more time. Once again, freeware for the win.

Mozilla Thunderbird

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