Well I ran across a reason to look for this the other day. I was downloading some stuff and ended up downloading an ISO, because I didn’t really want to go upstairs and get a CD and deal with burning one I figured I would try to virtually mount the ISO to a drive. After about 3 software attempts I found that this was the best solution.
MagicDisk allows you to mount up to 4 virtual CD drives and then you can mount the ISO to the drive letter. Very handy and super easy to use.
If you are like my wife you have 1000′s of fonts and find it really hard to compare them and try to figure out which one to choose while you are developing something. This application called NexusFont allows you to easily visually manage your fonts. It also has an install that allows you to manage and clean up the fonts you have installed on your computer. It is super lightweight and easy to use
You can never have too many fonts on hand and it doesn’t hurt especially when you are making a new header logo or something. This site has a ton of free fonts, and after you have downloaded a ton of free fonts there is an application called Windows Font Explorer to help you view your fonts
This is a great little app that can save you lots of time and frustration when restoring a computer from scratch. I just rebuilt an old laptop and spent a fair amount of time hunting around for the drivers as we lost the restore CD some time ago. This software makes a quick backup of all your drivers and then you can store that somewhere and if you need them just popin the CD and restore the old drivers!
I have been looking for this since I started playing with Linux a long time ago. This way you do not have to reboot your machine to run Linux and you can run it natively in Windows. This allows you to run your favorite Linux applications inside Windows without rebooting and it just shows up like a windows application.
Sure you can go the virtual machine route, but that is a huge pain in the butt and can take a long time to setup. This makes it so that Ubuntu runs totally separately from Windows so you can install applications and take it with you and put it in another computer with all your favorite applications ready for you to use. This is hugely helpful for things that need X-windows or any terminal output as Linux does a better job. Lifehacker has a full writeup on the application check it out to read the full article.
Download Portable Ubuntu!
So I have decided to resurrect an old laptop that I had sitting in my office for about 2 years. Well after $40 to quadruple the memory and replacing the hard drive and then re-installing XP from scratch and then all the manufacturer drivers, we finally are in business. I then plugged this into my network and our LCD TV and the stereo. So it is our own little home entertainment system for our TV. Well I decided that since this thing would be on 24/7 that I needed to do some automation to some tasks to keep it clean. Because Playon and Hulu and other web based tools like to create awesomely large temp files that just hang around if you do not delete them. Also because it is a WindowsXP machine I figured scheduling a daily reboot wasn’t a bad idea either. Well turns out these are all very simple things to automate and then schedule.
For CCleaner you just need to run it in the silent mode by creating a schedule that kicks off ‘CCleaner /AUTO’
For JKDefrag you just need to schedule to run the JKDefragCMD file
For a scheduled reboot you just need to schedule a job that kicks off ‘Shutdown.exe -r -t 00′
Lifehacker has a great article on other processes you can automate but these were the first three I went after to keep my computer clean. I scheduled CCleaner and JKDefrag on my work laptop and it really does keep things clean and moving along a whole lot better!
So last night I was bored and decided to redo my entire website (again). I just changed the theme about a week ago, but the more I dug into it the less I liked it and decided I would spend a little more time redoing my blog. After picking a theme I put it on a local copy of WordPress and started banging away. I started changing header images and fixing CSS issues with AJAX overlaps and image overlaps and fixing up a few other issues I noticed. This is usually pretty typical for themes I have found in the past. You get what you paid for and because all these themes are free I guess that would make sense.
One of my co-workers turned me onto Firebug which is a Firefox plugin that reads the CSS and breaks it out into a tree structure so you can see what is really going on behind the scenes with formatting. This application saved me probably about 2 days of frustration searching through the CSS and the PHP files trying to find the correct classes and div’s to edit to make it look how I want it to. The program allows you to edit the CSS on the spot so you can see if what you thinking works…this is great for things like spacing or overflow or text size. This application is a must have for any web developer or anyone who likes to tweak their WordPress themes to get the most out of them.
Finally an application that does everything that I want it to. I subscribe to FileHippo’s updated RSS feed so I need all the programs that are updated daily. MediaMonkey was one of them and it caught my eye that it finds and fixes missing album art. So I figured I would try it to manage my music.
Wow! Amazing application within a few hours I updated all my missing music art and also corrected a bunch of mislabeled tags, deleted some duplicate music, and leveled the volume on a few tracks. This software is amazing and is really easy to use. What would have taken me like 5 applications I can do all in one.
It also will manage my phone and iTouch. So no more working with iTunes to sync music and it is soo much easier to pick music and fill my iTouch and I can also have it automatically sync and fill based on music I listen to here and there on my PC. It also links in streaming music and a few other things amazing!
There is a paid version of the application that gives you more robust usage of ripping music and managing your large music library. The price is a modest $39.99 but so far I haven’t found a reason to upgrade past the free version. One thing I like is the super light package this all comes in <10MB This software is a must have!
This is a great freeware program and will convert all video’s between multiple formats and will automatically upload to YouTube if you want. They have a paid version of their software that will do a little higher quality if you need it. This is what I used after using DVDShrink to rip the .VOB files, then I converted the .VOB to .FLV so I could put the videos on my blog.
Have you ever needed to make a copy of a DVD and wondered how to do it? Well it is very simple. I just used this software to create a copy of our Wedding DVD so we can burn multiple copies and you can also watch the .VOB file via any media player so you do not have to worry about the DVD the software is super easy to use and creates files that can be easily burned to a DVD using NERO Burning ROM.
