For those of us who slave for the computer illiterate 😉 by fixing their broken computers, here is something which is quite useful.
If you can boot into windows and are able to run .exes, bluescreenview will be able to let you read all the blue screens you want. With the error codes there and not disappearing after about 2 seconds.
It also tells you what files or drivers caused the crash which is exceedingly useful when the knee jerk reaction of googling the 0x0 code fails miserably.
Overall, its a small, portable app which can often help you diagnose those pesky bsods unless its a boot problem.
Check BlueScreenView out and see if its worth keeping in that usb key.
So, this is a preview of a piece of software which I find to be absolutely ridiculous.
I had not thought that anyone had actually been able to program an algorithm to do this as well as this.
Here, we have a program which allows you to do very rough sketches of an image, say a beach with some birds, sailboats, and a newly wed couple kissing. Very rough sketch.
Well, this program takes your rough sketch and keywords for each object and runs them through image searches online and *builds a composite image of it.* In other words, it outputs a “photoshopped” image composite of what you had sketched.
All fine and good, it sounds relatively meh on paper. However take a look at these images and you will be astounded at how real the final picture seems, especially when compared to what it was extracted from.
Check out their university research page which has more ridiculous images made by Sketch2Photo, as well as the source code of the program itself!
If you live with several people or in close proximity, such as dorms, apartments, etc, you generally will encounter at some point in time the problem of someone being loud when your trying to go to sleep. It could be intentional, but most of the time, its completely unintentional and could probably be easily fixed by popping out and asking nicely. However, if its not, or if you just don’t feel like it, Sweet Dreams can gradually lower your system volume based on a schedule.
What does this mean?
Your trying to go to sleep, set Sweet Dreams to decrease the volume on your computer over the course of 30 minutes, stopping at the final volume of 5%, and tell it to shutdown afterwards. Well…that’s exactly what it will do.
It does it quite gradually, and I really did fall asleep without even noticing that it had gotten so quiet. Very useful if you have some music you can fall asleep to, but don’t feel like having to turn it off or listening to it all night.
Check it out: Sweet Dreams
GifTag is a universal wishlist. Pick stuff you want, add them to your list, share em with friends/family, and voila, they all have access to a wishlist that can contain items from any webpage.
It’s a pretty nifty app which could get very useful for those parties where you get lots of gifts. *Hint Hint.
Check it out: GifTag
Did I mention it was free?
GeeMail is a desktop client for Gmail. You know how Gmail now allows offline support? GeeMail lets you do it from your desktop, without the browser. No configuration except logging in, offline support, cross platform. It is a free Adobe Air app.
Check it out, it works pretty well, and its nice to have a separate app instead of always having a firefox or chrome window open. GeeMail
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”
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
