Category: Geek Software of the Week

Do you need to make simple, straight-forward backups?

ZBack – Backup Utility

Zback – backup and synchronize tool for Windows 2000, XP, Vista, Win7, Win7 64bit, Win8, Linux (Wine).

PURPOSE

1) Synchronize files and folders, for example between hard drive and USB drive or synchronize two computers via USB drive or LAN

2) General purpose backup and restore utility with many options

FEATURES

– portable – no installation needed – just unzip to any directory on a fixed or removable drive
– there is also version with installer available from homepage
– works from USB stick, does not write to the registry
– backup/ synchronize to local drives or network computers (LAN)
– can be used as front-end for cloud backup/ synchronize/ mirror (Google Drive)
– Unicode support for foreign characters in file names
– support for files larger then 4 GB
– allows more then 260 chars in pathnames
– copy modes: update files, refresh existing files, mirror source to target, synchronize, dated backup and restore
– filter files based on extension, size, date, subdirectories, only new or existing files
– keep multiple versions of backup files
– include/ exclude specific directories
– preview and execute operation
– automatic generation of batch scripts for routine backups
– simple, manual, batch or command line operation
– single batch script may contain many backup and sync jobs
– using scripting you may backup to multiple locations or backup from multiple locations to single backup location
– scheduling for batch operation – you may set job repetition interval and auto-run when overdue
– verify copied files
– drag and drop support from Windows Explorer or third party file explorers
– small size
– personal freeware

This is an old favorite, that I “re-discovered” this week when I needed to update a lot of exact match text in a whole BUNCH of text files. Man, this thing is awesome!

FNR – Find and Replace Tool

“An open source tool to find and replace text in multiple files.

Features

• Single file download – fnr.exe (181kb)
• Replace text in multiple files using windows application or through command line
• Find Only to see where matches are found
• Case-sensitive searching
• Searching for files in one directory or recursing sub-directories
• Regular expressions
• Find and replace multi-line text
• Generate command line button to create command line text to put in batch file
• Command line help
• Unit tests of Find/Replace engine”

This is a handy little indicator of your battery state on your laptop!

BatteryInfoView

“BatteryInfoView is a small utility for laptops and netbook computers that displays the current status and information about your battery. The displayed battery information includes the battery name, manufacture name, serial number, manufacture date, power state (charging/discharging), current battery capacity, full charged capacity, voltage, charge/discharge rate, and more…

BatteryInfoView also provides a log window, which adds a new log line containing the battery status every 30 seconds or any other time interval that you choose.

System Requirements And Limitations

This utility works on any version of Windows, starting from windows 2000 and up to Windows 7.
Some information, like serial number and manufacture date is only displayed if the battery provides this information.”

This one DOES cost you a small fee, but if you have an old PC to rebuild, and you don’t have the driver disk, and don’t even know what motherboard is in the system, this is REALLY worth it! Only $29.90 for a lifetime license, or, you can buy only a month’s worth, just to build one PC for less than $7.00! Definitely worth not having to fool around discovering drivers on your own!

Driver Toolkit 8

• The Ultimate Solution for PC Drivers
• Download & Update the latest drivers for your PC
• Quick fix unknown, outdated or corrupted drivers
• Features including driver backup, restore & uninstall
• 8,000,000+ database of hardware & drivers
• Designed for Windows 8, 7, vista & xp (32 & 64-bit)

“Scan your PC Devices
DriverToolkit scans PC devices and detect the best drivers for your PC with our Superlink Driver-Match Technology.

Download Drivers
You may specify the driver package to download, or download all recommended driver packages with one-click.

Install Devices
When download is finished, just click the ‘Install’ button to start driver installation. Can’t you see? It’s quick and easy!

Download official drivers & fix driver issues.
DriverToolkit automatically delivers the latest official drivers to your PC. Searching drivers on CD or on the website is frustrating and time-consuming; Why not end all frustration right now sit back relax and watch DriverToolkit solve the painful driver issues for you. All drivers we offer are official versions or WHQL versions, you can use them without any security or compatibility concerns.

Keeping installed drivers up-to-date.
Most of the cases when hardware devices is not working or malfunctioning are caused by incorrect driver installations or outdated driver versions. DriverToolkit has more than 8,000,000 driver entities in the database, including Motherboard, Sound card, Video card, Network adaptor, Modem, Mouse, Keyboard, Scanner, Printer, and Digital devices etc. You can easily update all these drivers with DriverToolkit.

Backup your important drivers.
It’s always a wise decision to backup all important documents, emails, photos, etc. But have you ever thought about backing up your PC drivers?
It happens that for some reasons you want to reinstall your operating system and that no driver CD are available or for some devices, it can be very difficult to find the proper drivers. While using DriverToolkit you can easily make a copy of all drivers currently installed on your PC with one click.

Restore your driver backups.
No longer need to install drivers by hand after reinstalling your operating system or under similar circumstances. Just backup all drivers and you can restore all your drivers whenever you want. This feature can be very useful when you need install drivers on multiple PC with the same hardware configuration. With DriverToolkit, you can save a lot of time when installing your operating system.

Remove unwanted drivers.
To avoid unpredictable driver conflicts, old driver files should always be removed before updating to newer drivers or when removing an older hardware and replacing it with a newer one.
DriverToolkit has the ability to find hidden drivers which are no longer in use and help you quickly get rid of them.”

Free (but they accept donations,) this software may help you not be frustrated!

Antibody Software Wizmouse

“Makes your mouse wheel behave the way it always should have.
Works on 32 and 64 bit versions of Windows 2000, XP, Vista and Windows 7/8

Features

• Scrolls windows under the mouse without having to click first
• Enables the mouse wheel in applications that don’t support mouse wheels
• Optionally reverse the mouse wheel direction (like OS X Lion “Natural” scrolling)

Mouse Touchpad users take note: WizMouse may not work with your touchpad as most touchpad drivers do not send mouse wheel messages the way a standard mouse does when scrolling. If you have this problem you’ll need to use an external mouse to enable WizMouse functionality.

Logitech Mice users take note: Some users have reported issues when using WizMouse with Logitech mice. This appears to be caused by conflicts between the Logitech mouse driver software and WizMouse. Upgrading your Logitech drivers and/or installing the latest Logitech SetPoint software should solve any such issues.

WizMouse is a mouse enhancement utility that makes your mouse wheel work on the window currently under the mouse pointer, instead of the currently focused window. This means you no longer have to click on a window before being able to scroll it with the mouse wheel. This is a far more comfortable and practical way to make use of the mouse wheel.

WizMouse can also optionally enable the mouse wheel in applications that don’t support it. It does this by translating mouse wheel commands into scroll bar commands that all applications can understand and process.

Once WizMouse has been installed and is active, configure it by double clicking on the WizMouse icon in the system tray. If the tray icon has been hidden then launch WizMouse from the Windows start menu or desktop shortcut.”

SendBlaster allows you to send email to a list, and does it in style! The regular version is FREE, and the Pro version adds features, and is $129.00 for a lifetime license.

SendBlaster Email Software

“SendBlaster is the best bulk email software to manage your mailing lists and set up email marketing campaigns in few easy steps. SendBlaster combines into one product the practicality of a mass email software with the flexibility of a bulk email web service. On the one hand you create newsletters and manage lists directly on your desktop: on the other you get a cloud email tracking service to handle reporting and improve your email campaigns.

Our brand new release SendBlaster 3, full of amazing features, is available both as a free email sender software download and a professional one with no subscription needed, just a single payment for a lifetime license. Plus, we are proud to offer a 15 days money back guarantee.”

This is a first! I am posting an update of SpyBot, which I have mentioned before, because it is a very different, and improved product!

Safer Networking – Spybot 2.4

“Why use the Free Edition?

If all you require is to be able to scan and remove malware and rootkits from your system. Or if you want to protect your PC by immunizing your browser and hosts file, the ‘Free Edition’ is the choice for you. If you are a more experienced user you can also check various ‘autostart’ locations using the ‘Startup Tools’. Spybot 2 can scan single files or specific folders and unlike other software it doesn’t matter if the file is located on your local drives or on a network share. Spybot 2 comes with its own whitelist which helps to identify if files are legitimate or not. This useful addition helps to speed up the scan. Even though this fully functioning product is free of charge you can still get free support by emailing our support team.

For home users who want spyware protection for their own or their families Windows based Personal Computers and do not need additional antivirus protection.

Users manually look after own updating.

Can be upgraded to the ‘Home Edition’ if required.”

This weeks Geek Software of the Week will help you recover deleted files!

Pandora Recovery

“How does it work?

When you delete a file on FAT32 or NTFS file system, its content is not erased from disk but only reference to file data in File Allocation Table or Master File Table is marked as deleted. It means that you might be able to recover deleted files, or make it visible for file system again.

Search Deleted Files
Search Deleted Files – Click Image to Enlarge
Pandora Recovery allows you to find and recover recoverable deleted files from NTFS and FAT-formatted volumes, regardless of their type – you can recover pictures, songs, movies or documents. Pandora Recovery will scan your hard drive and build an index of existing and deleted files and directories (folders) on any logical drive of your computer with supported file format. Once the scanning is complete you have full control over which files to recover and what destination to recover them to. You can BROWSE the hierarchy of existing and deleted files, or you can use SEARCH functionality to find a deleted file if you remember at least one of the following:
– full or partial file name,
– file size,
– file creation date, or
– file last accessed date

On top of that, Pandora Recovery allows you to preview deleted files of certain type (images and text files) without performing recovery. This feature becomes really important if you are forced to recover deleted files to the same drive. Currently you can preview files having several image file types (BMP, GIF, JPG, PNG, ICO,TIF, TGA, PCX, WBMP, WMF, JP2, J2K, JBG, JPC, PGX, PNM, RAS, CUR) and several text file types (TXT, LOG, INI, BAT, RTF, XML, CSS). Quick Viewer allows you preview file contents as text if it cannot find appropriate viewer for it. To use quick viewer you can select deleted file and or click the Quick Viewer icon or right click on deleted file and select ‘Quick View’. Quick View will then display a preview of deleted file.”

Pandora Recovery Features:

• Browse, Search, Preview and Recover deleted files
• Surface (cluster) scan
• Recover Archived, Hidden, Encrypted, Compressed files
• Recover Alternate Data Streams (ADS)
• Recover Images, Documents, Movies, or any other type of files
• Recovery success estimate
• Review File properties and Drive properties
• Recover to Local Hard Drive, Network Drive, or Flash Drive
• Recognizes FAT16, FAT32, NTFS, NTFS5 and NTFS/EFS

Since Geek Culture entry was animation, I thought that you would get a kick out of trying your hand at animation as well! This program is Open Source, and cross-platform!

Synfig Studio

“Synfig Studio is a free and open-source 2D animation software, designed as powerful industrial-strength solution for creating film-quality animation using a vector and bitmap artwork. It eliminates the need to create animation frame-by frame, allowing you to produce 2D animation of a higher quality with fewer people and resources. Synfig Studio is available for Windows, Linux and MacOS X.

Features

Spatial resolution-independence
Most elements are vector-based, and all layers are parametrically generated, hence even when changing the target resolution of a project, the only pixelation will occur in imported raster images, not the built-in components.

Temporal resolution independence
Animation-keyframes are automatically interpolated by the computer, resulting in smooth motion

High Dynamic-Range Imaging (HDRI)
By using floating-point math in the image calculations, HDRI processing allows canvases to internally understand a far greater range of pixel luminance, resulting in better lighting effects, and improved color composition.

Pentablet-friendly tools
The draw tool already reads the pressure sensitivity channel off your favorite tablets, for natural line weighting, and more to come!

Artist-oriented design
While it may not be obvious in this early state, Synfig (and its proprietary predecessors) has been designed from the ground up with animation workflow in mind.

Path-based Gradients
Unlike purely SVG-based vector software, and most consumer-level animation programs, Synfig has full support for gradient paths – gradients that follow along a drawn shape. This allows artists to easily add soft shading to animation without the trouble of painting it onto every frame.

Layers
Synfig supports a multitude of layers of various types; geometric, gradients, filters, distortions, transformations, fractal and a few others.”

I know not everyone does part-time, volunteer work for an Internet Radio Station, but, hey! You may want to add a player to your own web site! So, here’s the best player I’ve found! It will use HTML5, or Flash, if it is not supported. And, it is free and Open Source!

Muses Radio Player for the Web

“What is Muses Radio Player?

Muses Radio Player is an open source Web Player for audio streaming (radio over the internet).

It supports the most popular Audio Codecs: MP3, OGG and AAC and works great with Shoutcast, Icecast 2, and other compatible streaming servers.

Muses also has some interesting and necessary features that makes it unique like:

• Flash and HTML5 support.
• Automatic reconnection in case of network errors (to ensure that your audience will never get silence).
• Smart cache management (to avoid huge memory consumption).
• XML Skin Support (to let you create your own skins).
• AutoStart option.
• HTML Code Generator for your Website (to make the player super easy to install).
• Multi Language (with more than 20 languages available!)
• Automatic Language Detection
• Bidirectional Javascript API (to let you control the player and get notification events using javascript)
• Reads Metadata directly from OGG Streamings.
• Metadata Loader for MP3 and AAC Streamings.
• Configurable Buffering Time.
• Optional Fallback Streaming (to increase your service quality).
• Introduction Audio Support (to play any audio you want before the streaming).
• Support for blind or print-impaired users reading software.”