Category: Geek Software of the Week

TimeLeft is a very handy little utility. I found it while looking for a very specific solution to a silly problem. I have a little “apartment” style refrigerator in my office at work… and it doesn’t exactly cool that well… I call it my “Al Gore” refrigerator… it uses so little energy, it doesn’t even cool! Anyway, I like my drinks REALLY cold! So, I wanted to put my Diet Dr. Pepper in the freezer of the large refrigerator in our break room at work… but you don’t want to leave it is there TOO long! So, I needed a timer that would pop up on my computer and fuss at me to get my drink! Weird problem, huh? Anyway, this little freeware utility does the trick!

TimeLeft Web Site

“TimeLeft is a versatile desktop utility, which may be used as a countdown clock, reminder, clock, alarm clock, tray clock, stopwatch, timer, sticker, auction watch, work days/hours countdown clock and time synchronization utility. TimeLeft uses Winamp skins to show digits and text. The main feature of TimeLeft is a powerful customizable reminder, which can show a message, play music (any formats including mp3) or open a link, document, execute an application, turn off your monitor or shutdown your PC.”

Reminder
TimeLeft reminder can alarm you at a specific moment of time or run periodically. It can also remind you before a specified event or keep on reminding after it. Reminder can show a message, play music or open a link/document, execute an application or shutdown your PC. Numerous other options are also available.

Trayclock
Replace Windows clock with skinnable TimeLeft clock. You will not go back to the standard Windows clock.

Clock
Clock displays time in different time zones. You can also set a time display format: 12 hours, military, show date, etc. Also you can replace standard Windows clock with TimeLeft clock.

Countdown
Countdown is a small window that lives on your desktop and shows you every second left till some event.

Stopwatch
Stopwatch measures interval of time. By default stopwatch measures time interval in hours, minutes and seconds.

Timer
Timer measures a time interval and signals its end. TimeLeft will remind you not to forget about meal cooking or watered backyard while you are working on your computer

Sticker
Another TimeLeft feature is sticker – you can place an important note on your desktop. No need to stick around Post-it papers – you can organize all your notes with TimeLeft stickers.

Time Synchronization
TimeLeft is also capable of using atomic clock servers to adjust time on your computer. This feature allows you to use it as a time synchronization utility.

Auction Watch
Buying or selling anything online? You can easily watch and manage your online auctions (eBay and any other) using auction watch module.

Countdown For Web
You can place your countdown to a web-page using Export to Web module. Let all your visitors know how much time left till your special occasion!

Workdays countdown
TimeLeft countdown can track the amount of working days, hours, minutes and seconds till (or passed after) the specified event.

Floating Windows
Every instance of a countdown, clock, stopwatch, timer or sticker is a separate floating window, it can be placed anywhere on your desktop. You can make every floating window look just how you want it to look: change layout, color, font or select a Winamp skin; set semitransparent, choose size and more.

Zoom
Every floating window may have its own size. For example, if countdown text is to small for you, you can simply enlarge a countdown floating window using your mouse.

This week’s GSotW is awesome! Now you can capture images, or parts of images as icons for your desktop, edit, color, tweak, to your heart’s content! And, it is all FREE!

IcoFX Icon Editor

“IcoFX is an award winning freeware icon editor. It is an all-in-one solution for icon creation, extraction and editing. It is designed to work with Windows XP, Windows Vista and Macintosh icons supporting transparency. With a wealth of tools and more than 40 effects at your fingertips, there’s virtually no limit to the icons you can create. You can easily convert your favorite images into icons, or icons into images. IcoFX gives you the possibility to create icon libraries or change icons inside exe files. Create a favicon for your website or blog. Convert your Macintosh icons to Windows icons and vice versa. With IcoFX you can extract icons from other files, including Windows Vista and Macintosh files. You can easily work with multiple files using the batch processing capability of IcoFX.”

• Support for Vista icon with PNG compression
• Create icons for Windows 98 / ME / 2000 / XP / Vista
• Support for Macintosh OS X icons
• Convert Macintosh icons to Windows icons
• Create icon libraries
• Create favicon for websites or blogs
• Easily convert images to icons
• Add, change or delete icons inside exe files
• Support for transparency (alpha channel)
• Batch processing for import, export and extract
• Multiple language support
• More than 40 effects + custom filter
• Resolutions up to 256×256
• Data types: 2, 16, 256, True Color, True Color + Alpha
• Extract icons from 32 bit exe and dll
• Import and export images
• Transparent, Brighten/Darken, Blur/Sharpen tools

Objectdock allows you to have an active, graphical dock like a Mac, on your PC! Check it out! There is a free version and a paid version… download it, try it… you will be impressed! Drag and drop your desktop icons to the dock, and watch them appear!

ObjectDock Website

“ObjectDockâ„¢ is a program that enables users to organize their shortcuts, programs and running tasks into an attractive and fun animated Dock. By allowing users to have more control over how they organize their desktop, users can take control of their desktop icons and shortcuts to have them be available when where and how they need them. This, all with the unique style and top-rate performance that ObjectDock is known to deliver! In constant development, ObjectDock and ObjectDock Plus are enhanced often to provide the most unique features of any stylized shortcut organizer / launcher available. New in v1.9! Cool new Stardock ReadyViewâ„¢ weather flyouts, minimize animation in Vista, smoother / quicker drawing with smoothness settings and a variety of improvements. New plus-exclusives include all new improved taskbar status area handling, special taskbar modes, and more!”

I can’t believe I haven’t already mentioned this one. If you are a Linux/Unix geek and need the command line, you will have probably used PuTTY. It is a great, free telnet/SSH client for Windows. Check it out!

PuTTY telnet/SSH Client

“PuTTY is a free implementation of Telnet and SSH for Win32 and Unix platforms, along with an xterm terminal emulator. It is written and maintained primarily by Simon Tatham. PuTTY is a client program for the SSH, Telnet and Rlogin network protocols. These protocols are all used to run a remote session on a computer, over a network. PuTTY implements the client end of that session: the end at which the session is displayed, rather than the end at which it runs. In really simple terms: you run PuTTY on a Windows machine, and tell it to connect to (for example) a Unix machine. PuTTY opens a window. Then, anything you type into that window is sent straight to the Unix machine, and everything the Unix machine sends back is displayed in the window. So you can work on the Unix machine as if you were sitting at its console, while actually sitting somewhere else.”

(I might mention… PuTTY is a small, tight single file executable program, you don;t really “install” it. You just put the executable file in a directory, like: “C:\Program Files\PuTTY” and create a shortcut to “putty.exe.” That’s it! Back to the days when programs were programs and men were men!)

A neat little utility to let you know how your system is behaving physically… is it getting too hot, is it “healthy?” Free (of course!) and very cool! (No pun intended!)

SpeedFan Web Site

“SpeedFan is a program that monitors voltages, fan speeds and temperatures in computers with hardware monitor chips. SpeedFan can even access S.M.A.R.T. info for those hard disks that support this feature and show hard disk temperatures too, if supported. SpeedFan supports SCSI disks too. SpeedFan can even change the FSB on some hardware (but this should be considered a bonus feature). At the lowest level, SpeedFan is a hardware monitor software that can access digital temperature sensors, but its main feature is that it can change fan speeds (depending on the capabilities of your sensor chip and your hardware) according to the temperatures inside your pc, thus reducing noise. Several sensors, like Winbond’s and the AS99127F support fan speed changing, as well as others from Maxim, Myson, Analog Devices, National Semiconductor and ITE, but the hardware manufacturer must have connected the relevant pins to some additional, yet trivial, circuitry. This means that if you have, say, a Winbond W83782D on a BP6 then you’re ok, but not every motherboard with such a hardware monitor chip will be able to change fan speeds. From one of the very first hardware monitor chips that could be found in standard PCs, the National Semiconductor LM75 (and all of its clones, like the Philips NE1617 and the Philips NE1618 or the Maxim MAX1617) or the Analog Devices ADM1021, such chips have been greatly improved, both in their precision and in their capabilities. Current chips can monitor fan speeds, voltages and change fan speeds by using PWMs (Pulse Width Modulation). Some chips can even be programmed to vary fan speeds without any additional software intervention. If your BIOS was programmed to setup such chips this way you can still try to use SpeedFan’s Advanced Configuration to revert to manual (software controlled) mode.”

I also like how it shows the temperature in the tray when it is minimized. Very neat! Check out SpeedFan! It may be what you have been looking for to monitor your system!

Tired of MP3 files that are too loud, or have segments that are too loud? MP3Gain “normalizes” the audio in an MP3 file and “corrects” the problem! It is free, and it may just be the “trick” that you have been looking for to fix those files that that were annoyingly loud, but that you don’t want to lose!

MP3 Gain Site

“MP3Gain does not just do peak normalization, as many normalizers do. Instead, it does some statistical analysis to determine how loud the file actually sounds to the human ear.
Also, the changes MP3Gain makes are completely lossless. There is no quality lost in the change because the program adjusts the mp3 file directly, without decoding and re-encoding.”

So… you have just built a new, cool, powerful PC from scratch… aren’t you the baaaad geek!?! Now, how do you know the thing will keep running? For that matter, a friend brings you a system and says, “It occasionally goes down, it is driving me crazy!” How do you test it to find out what is happening? The answer? Run a “burn-in” tool! Something that will “exercise” all of the system components for you! This package isn’t totally free… but there is a 30 day free trial… and then, it is only $24.00!

PassMark’s BurnInTest Web Site

“PassMark BurnInTest is a software tool that allows all the major sub-systems of a computer to be simultaneously stress tested for endurance, reliability and stability.

• Assists in PC Troubleshooting and diagnostics.
• The best value professional burn-in tool on the market!
• Avoid delivering D.O.A. (Dead on Arrival) hardware to your customers.
• Dramatically reduce your burn in times with multithreaded simultaneous testing of components.
• Build your image as a supplier of quality systems.
• Avoid costly downtime, system rebuilds and lost data.
• Test the stability of a system after configuration changes or hardware upgrades (critical for overclocking).

Anyone who has used computers for any period of time will understand the importance of having a stable system. The cost of a hardware failure can be enormous. If you are lucky your data will only become inaccessible while faulty components are replaced. If you’re unlucky you can lose your files completely or have them permanently corrupted. Even if you have good backups, you can still lose days of work returning the PC to its pre-failure state. In many cases the lost data can never be replaced and businesses can be brought to their knees, with the loss of documentation, customer details and financial records.”

Rename files at once. One of the most powerful renamers. And it’s freeware. It is called 1-4a Rename! And, DEWD! It supports Star Trek Stardates! How cool is THAT?!?

Rename mp3 files. 1-4a-rename. Freeware file renamer for Windows 95/98/2000/XP

A file renamer which renames many files at once.

• Has Undo
• You can preview changes instantly, thus no danger
• Now with STAR TREK stardate/startime
• Tons of functions (see features).
• Perfect for .jpg, .mp3, digital camera files…
• Works in networks and with subdirectories (recursiverly)
• Fast! Even with many files
• It’s free

You won’t believe how useful this utility is until you use it! WOW!

Optimized for large amounts of mp3 files or jpg files or any other file type.

It is fast. It is easy.

You can do so many things with it, it’s even hard to begin to describe how cool it actually is!

Want to run the newest release of Fedora (which is Fedora 9, by the way) on your USB stick? Well, here’s the easy way to do it!

liveusb-creator

The liveusb-creator is a cross-platform tool for easily installing live operating systems on to USB flash drives.

Features

• Supports downloading various Fedora releases, including Fedora 9!
• Persistent overlay creation (only works with Fedora 9 right now). This lets you to allocate extra space on your USB stick, allowing you to save files and make modifications to your live operating system that will persist after you reboot. This essentially lets you carry your own personalized Fedora with you at all times
• SHA1 checksum verification of known releases, to ensure that you’ve downloaded the correct bits

How cool is that? And, it works for other OSes as well! Play to your heart’s content!

Want to play with the new version of Fedora? Here’s the link:

Get Fedora

This week’s GSoTW is not actually a program… it is a web site… a place where you can get almost any boot disk that you might need, no matter how old it is!

BootDisk.com

I find myself needing this one every so often… so enjoy! By the way, if you are looking for free boot disks, on the site, they are here:

Free Boot Disks