Once you start building up a library of music artists, actors or directors that you keep track off, its very easy to miss a release or event from them. Crap, I missed it! is a way to keep track of book authors, tv shows, albums, concerts, movies, sports, pretty much everything.
Register, add your interests and tracking, and it will notify you of anything.
It’s really quite useful. Check it out: Crap I missed it
Track this is a web-based package tracking application.
It can pretty much everything from FedEx and the usual to CEVA and Canada Post.
Register and it can send you updates through the website, email, SMS, RSS, Twitter, or Facebook. Pretty much, you can stalk your package.
It’s pretty nifty, especially when you get a few packages and its hard to keep track. I used this recently for a set of 4 different boxes, and it was pretty nifty.
Check it out: TrackThis
This is an interesting web-based application similar to builtin function in itunes, except, with larger base and hopefully better accuracy.
You upload the itunes xml database which has your music information, frequently played songs, ratings, etc and it spits out a few dozen suggestions with preview and purchase links.
Check it out, basically a better Genius, powered by 3rd party databases: “i like b-sides”
BatteryBar is one of those simple little apps which you generally forget about, but its quite useful.
Many people have laptops now, and one very important piece of equipment is the battery. Without it…it might as well be a small desktop.
While battery technology has improved, and so has the power efficiency of today’s hardware, battery life quickly drops from a reasonable 3 hours to 2, to zilch.
What BatteryBar can do is monitor the state of your battery, gives you the usual power percent, estimated life, but it also keeps historical data and allows you to see the degredation of charge. You will see the amount of charge your battery can hold decrease ever so slightly, or, if you’re not lucky, ever so quickly.
Check out this simple little program: BatteryBar, which is quite useful in determining battery life.
Those of us with webpages…*raises hand. Well, by now, if you don’t at least sometimes think of SEO or how you are presenting your webpage to search engines, you really should start thinking about it. While you can tinker around with your html and layout, maybe change your writing a little, it’s very important to be able to track this progress.
Google Analytics and other tracking systems help greatly, but none of these inform you about SEO directly. In particular, Google rankings are quite influential in the amount of traffic you get to the site.
Free Google Monitor by CleverStat allows you to save a list of urls (your websites) and have a list of keywords for each site. It will batch search your ranking for those keywords, which lets you monitor your ranking without having to google search each one and count up and down for each url and keyword.
Test out Google Monitor and see if your SEO is doing anything for you in Google’s realm.
We are in an age of information, where we have so much data, movies, music, photos, that many of us turn to DVDs and CDs to backup our data. We burn movies, copy photo collections, to DVDs in the hope that when we need them, they will be there with all our data.
However, CDs and DVDs are not a failsafe. It is very likely that with a few years, those DVDs will become unreadable, as the dyes in them degrade. By buying more reliable DVDs made by companies that use more stable dyes, and as technology moves forward, we get longer lasting DVDs.
As a secondary measure, QuickPar can create recovery volumes. QuickPar creates parity volumes which will allow you to verify and recover data if they are damaged. Since we rarely use exactly the maximum amount of data space on a DVD, you can stuff the remaining empty portion with this parity recovery data there. QuickPar will form several .par2 files which are just normally burned along with your other files.
If and when you need the files, and they are corrupt, QuickPar can open those par2 files and repair any lost data.
This is in no way a guarantee for data protection, but it is a nice feature which could save many headaches in the future.
A small tip, QuickPar only accepts files, not folders, but in a windows search window, you can search * in the folder you want and just drag the results into QuickPar.
Check out QuickPar
Windows 7 Beta has gotten alot of press time, I’ve personally played with it quite a bit, and have it on my main laptop. It was, to be honest, more stable than Vista, with the acceptable incompatible issues that should be fixed by release. But…what if you want to play with 7 but not install it on your main computer? Windows 7 can be made to allow concurrent connections, and you can use RDP to run it remotely.
Downloadsquad has a post and a link to an enabler file. Check it out if you want to play with 7 but not install it on your main computer.
Downloadsquad: Run 7 on two computers, on one install
This is a very nifty program especially for people who play around with lots of programs.
Yawffer monitors and freezes Windows processes which are resource hoggers, CPU, memory, and disk usage.
You can go in and pause a process which seems to be hogging alot of CPU, finish up work, and then resume the program. Of course, this doesn’t kill the program, it’s just on pause.
This would be pretty useful if you are multitasking, and your productivity is being hampered by another program running which you can’t really close, but would like to chill for a few minutes.
Check it out: Yawffer
As a partial reason/excuse for the low activity here these past weeks, a few of our affiliated pages have been developed and are currently in their nascent forms. We have been working on these rather hard and hope they will be become popular and useful.
Now, please keep in mind that both of these sites are for curiosity, information, and entertainment, not a license to go out and actually *do* them.
I am please to announce the beginning of the two sites: Explosiontheory.com and Explodes.us. These two sites complement each other. Explosiontheory.com has the theory, the mechanism of how explosives work, while Explodes.us provides you the stunning media, such as images and video of such explosions in action. We hope both of these sites will grow with time and become an entertaining and safe online compendium of the ever enthralling explosion.
To continue the theme…Drive Manager is another computer tool. This program gets you detailed info about your drives, HDD or optical, even USB.
It tells you the size/format/name/volume number/read write speeds, and even better, SMART info, system flags, and analyze disks. An interesting but I doubt very secure form of privacy is also included, letting you hide drives so they don’t show up in Explorer. Its a nifty little thing, which is relatively useful, but not something you would go out looking for.
Check it out, save it for just the right time to shave off a few minutes of looking for the data: Drive Manager
