Category: Geek Software of the Week

What is FREE? Enhances your on-line security? Automatically fills in forms on-line? Has one click login? Synchonizes passwords across browsers? Stores secure notes? You got it! LastPass! Check it out!

LastPass Password Manager

“It’s EASIER
Never forget a password again and log into your sites with a single mouse click.

it’s EVERYWHERE
Automatically synchronizes your data: access it from anywhere at anytime.

it’s SAFER
Protect yourself against phishing scams, online fraud, and malware.

it’s SECURE
All of your data is encrypted locally on your PC – only YOU can unlock it.

it’s FREE
No catches or gimmicks.
It’s free to use on all your computers!

it’s MULTI-PLATFORM
Using a Mac, Windows, or Linux?
LastPass works everywhere.”

LastPass won out in the BetaNews “shootout” of Password Managers!

5 password managers for storing, protecting and syncing your personal information

Their final thought on it is: “It’s cross-platform, so staying up to date wherever you are isn’t an issue. Your data is stored securely online, which might be a problem for the ultra-cautious, but for most people looking for fuss-free password management, it’s a great choice.”

Rootkits are EVIL! They allow someone to take over your system. Grrrr! But, GMER, our Geek Software of the Week, is here to help!

GMER – Rootkit Locator and Remover

“GMER is an application that detects and removes rootkits .

It scans for:

hidden processes
hidden threads
hidden modules
hidden services
hidden files
hidden Alternate Data Streams
hidden registry keys
drivers hooking SSDT
drivers hooking IDT
drivers hooking IRP calls
inline hooks”

YES! Free, Open Source, and tiny, tiny, tiny in size… but it works great! What more do you need in a FREE PDF viewer?!? Nuthin’!!!

Sumatra PDF – A Small, Free PDF Viewer for Windows

“What is Sumatra PDF?

Sumatra PDF is a slim, free, open-source PDF reader for Windows. Portable out of the box.

Why another PDF reader?

Sumatra has a minimalistic design. Simplicity has a higher priority than a lot of features.

It’s small and starts up very fast.

It’s designed for portable use: only one file so you can run it from external USB drive. Doesn’t write to registry.”

It is out, it is Final! And, to celebrate, I am granting it GSotW status! Wha hoo! Go for it, Document Foundation Team! Good job! Now, Download away!

LibreOffice 3.3 Final (Released 2011-01-25)

From the Release Announcement:

“The Document Foundation launches LibreOffice 3.3

The first stable release of the free office suite is available for download

The Internet, January 25, 2011 – The Document Foundation launches LibreOffice 3.3, the first stable release of the free office suite developed by the community. In less than four months, the number of developers hacking LibreOffice has grown from less than twenty in late September 2010, to well over one hundred today. This has allowed us to release ahead of the aggressive schedule set by the project. Not only does it ship a number of new and original features, LibreOffice 3.3 is also a significant achievement for a number of reasons:

– the developer community has been able to build their own and independent process, and get up and running in a very short time (with respect to the size of the code base and the project’s strong ambitions);

– thanks to the high number of new contributors having been attracted into the project, the source code is quickly undergoing a major clean-up to provide a better foundation for future development of LibreOffice;

– the Windows installer, which is going to impact the largest and most diverse user base, has been integrated into a single build containing all language versions, thus reducing the size for download sites from 75 to 11GB, making it easier for us to deploy new versions more rapidly and lowering the carbon footprint of the entire infrastructure.”

Every so often I do a GSotW that is just TOO good to be true! This is one of them! I used to have an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) application called “Omnipage” that was VERY expensive, but worked very well. It was version 12. The latest version for that product is now version 17. But upgrading was going to be EXPENSIVE! So, as usual, I looked for a free, and/or Open Source version! WOW! Did I find a gem! It is TOTALLY FREE, yet works great, is easy to use, and will even do OCR directly from PDFs without printing the document and then scanning it on my scanner! ZOWIE! This rocks!

FreeOCR 3.0

“FreeOCR is a Windows OCR program including the Windows compiled Tesseract free ocr engine. It includes a Windows installer and It is very simple to use and supports multi-page tiff’s, fax documents as well as most image types including compressed Tiff’s which the Tesseract engine on its own cannot read .It now has Twain scanning. It can also open PDF’s Free OCR uses the Tesseract OCR engine (see below)

Tesseract – The Tesseract free OCR engine is an open source product released by Google. It was developed at Hewlett Packard Laboratories between 1985 and 1995. In 1995 it was one of the top 3 performers at the OCR accuracy contest organized by University of Nevada in Las Vegas. The Tesseract engine source code is now maintained by Google.”

Awesome! That is the word for this software! I like being able to “see” the defrag like back in the early days of Windows, and now, even with Windows 7, I can again! Not to mention enhanced optimization!

IObit Smart Defrag

“What’s the primary cause of slow/unstable PC performance? It’s disk fragmentation. Smart Defrag helps defragment your hard drives more efficiently than any other product on the market –– free or not. This powerful, award-winning free defragmenter is 100% safe and clean with no adware, spyware, or viruses.

Key Benefits

Exceptionally Efficient Defragmentation

Smart Defrag has the world’s fastest defragmenting engine. It’s been specially designed for modern, large hard drives, so it eliminates long waiting time.

Optimize Disk Performance

Smart Defrag doesn’t just use simple defragmentation. It also streamlines your file system, places the frequently used files and directories into the fastest
area of the disk, enabling your computer to run at top speed with the most stability.

Always-on to Work Automatically

Smart Defrag works automatically and quietly in the background, so it continually and constantly keeps your computer fragment-free.

Extremely Easy to Use

Its intuitive interface makes Smart Defrag the ideal utility for complete computer novice.

Data Safe and Reliability Guaranteed

Besides, unlike other “Automated” Defragmenters, Smart Defrag does NOT constantly perform analysis and defrag, which does damage your hard drive and shorten
its life. Smart Defrag has a “Safe Intelligence” technology that can assure the health of your disk by deciding When and How to execute defragmentation.

Free Defragmenter Forever

Smart Defrag is 100% freeware. Download, use, and update it absolutely free for your personal computers, business or enterprise servers –– it won’t cost you a penny.”

This is a VERY cool SSH client, file transfer over SSH, and terminal session, all in one client! Awesome! It is my new, favorite VMware SSH tool. I used Veeam’s before this (which is still really good), but this one is better for me, as it allows me to do file transfer and terminal session with one login! No more puTTY and Veeam separately!

Bitvise Tunnelier

“Free* SSH file transfer, terminal and tunneling!

Tunnelier is our SSH and SFTP client for Windows which incorporates:

* one of the most advanced graphical SFTP clients;
* state-of-the-art terminal emulation with support for the bvterm, xterm, and vt100 protocols;
* support for corporation-wide single sign-on using SSPI (GSSAPI) Kerberos 5 and NTLM user authentication, as well as Kerberos 5 host authentication;
* support for RSA and DSA public key authentication with comprehensive user keypair management;
* powerful SSH port forwarding capabilities, including dynamic forwarding through integrated SOCKS and HTTP CONNECT proxy;
* powerful command-line parameters which make Tunnelier highly customizable and suitable for use in specific situations and controlled environments;
* an advanced, scriptable command-line SFTP client (sftpc);
* a scriptable command-line remote execution client (sexec) and a command-line terminal emulation client (stermc);
* an FTP-to-SFTP bridge allowing you to connect to an SFTP server using legacy FTP applications;
* WinSSHD remote administration features;
* single-click Remote Desktop forwarding.”

This is a really neat utility to keep your hard drive healthy! And, if you are like me, and have a ton of valuable data on your system, you NEED to be sure that your drive is in good shape! Check this out! Highly recommended!

From their site:
“Protect your hard drive from a sudden failure. Use ActiveSMART! Install ActiveSMART® to protect your PC from a possible data loss in case of an unexpected hard drive failure. Normally, the hard disk errors happen unexpectedly. How much would the hard disk information loss cost you? Does your hard drive – the heart of your PC, and storage of all your data – feel healthy? Save your system from a hard drive failure with ActiveSMART.”

ActiveSMART Hard Drive Utility

– “Feel safe with ActiveSMART protecting your hard drive
– Notebook power saving mode support. Use the same version of ActiveSMART on desktop PC and laptops!
– Detailed hard drive status reports
– Health, Performance, Free Space information for all your drives
– Hard drive Temperature monitor
– Scan for bad and unstable sectors on our hard drive
– Alerts if something wrong is about to happen with your hard drive!
– User friendly interface”

A VERY handy little piece of software, for FREE!

mp3DirectCut

“mp3DirectCut is a fast and extensive audio editor and recorder for compressed mp3. You can directly cut, copy, paste or change the volume with no need to decompress your files for audio editing. This saves encoding time and preserves the original quality, because nothing will be re-encoded. The built in recorder creates mp3 on the fly from your audio input. Using Cue sheets, pause detection or Auto cue you can easily divide long files.”

So, you have old PCs sitting around, to old, too tired, and too under-powered to do anything useful with? Is that your problem, bub? Well, now you have something you can do with them! Especially if you have an Enterprise setup with VMware View and have a need for terminals!

Thinstation is a highly specialized Linux distro that turns old computers into terminals! You can boot from a CD version, or, you can install it on the PC hard drive, but either way, you will have a great, free, client for your VMware (and many other clients) system!

Thinstation Web Site

“Thinstation is a basic and small, yet very powerful, Open Source ‘thin client’ operating system supporting all major connectivity protocols: Citrix ICA, NoMachine NX, 2X ThinClient, Microsoft Windows terminal services (RDP, via RDesktop), VMWare View Open client, Cendio ThinLinc, Tarantella, X, telnet, tn5250, VMS terminal and SSH (No special configuration of the application servers is needed to use Thinstation).

Thinstation is mainly intended for schoolroom, office, company or department use, but can be used at home (eg. for a silent PC in the bedroom that ‘runs’ XP on your workstation in the back room).

Whilst Thinstation is based on Linux, users may actually never see Linux at all. If you decide to connect directly to a Microsoft Windows, Citrix or Unix server, the user will feel that they are running directly on the server. But, you can also have a local Desktop interface (with a local Browser & other tools).

Thinstation supports a Microsoft Windows-only environment and REQUIRES NO UNIX/Linux KNOWLEDGE.

Thinstation runs on ordinary PC hardware (x86). You may either reuse older computers or save a lot of time on workstation administration. Or both! An old Pentium 100 MHz with 32 MB RAM or better can be a perfectly useful workstation. And you don’t need a hard disk – you can boot off the network and even have a silent workstation. Workstation devices (floppy/HD/CD/USB) and printers (LPT/USB) are supported.

Thinstation can be booted from network (e.g. diskless) using Etherboot/PXE or from a local floppy/CD/HD/flash-disk, and Prebuilt images and a Live CD are available. The thin client configuration can be local or centralized to simplify management.”