emudir

For those of us who started our computing careers with Unix, or a Unix variant, or who were introduced to the system at university, some time in the 1980s, you will have been introduced to the joys (or evils?) of the editor vi. While idiosyncratic, there’s no doubt that vi is, like its predecessor TECO and the like, an extremely powerful text editor. However, it’s a “love-or-hate” program, with idiosyncratic key combinations that must be learned before you can do any real work.

Vim – “VI iMproved” – clones vi very nicely, and responds in the same way any vi afficionado would expect. It also adds a nice Windows GUI to it, with lots of mouse support …read more »

Have you ever tried to safely remove a USB flash drive and been told it’s in use? Well, if you have – and especially when that flash drive contains that one really important PowerPoint presentation you’ve got to give in five minutes’ time – you’ll know how frustrating (or even career-threatening) that message can be. Short of turning off the PC, or pulling the drive out anyway and risking losing everything on it (and yes, that has happened to me a couple of times), you’ll need Unlocker.

Unlocker has what they call a “shell extension”, which means that you can use it without a main window of its own, you just use it by right clicking on what you want to unlock. …read more »

CD Burner XP is a freeware CD, DVD, HD-DVD and Blu Ray burning program for Windows. Not only can it burn compilations to disc, it can create ISO images as well as burn them (useful if you just downloaded a Linux distribution for your other computer, for example). …read more »

Due to having to reinstall this PC, there was no blog yesterday, and today will be a bit… difficult.

Nevertheless, one thing that we did use was Google Pack. If you haven’t used it, then please do – it’s an ever updated collection of free software, such as:

• Adobe Reader
• Firefox with Google Toolbar
• Google Chrome (we prefer the privacy-enhanced SRWare Iron)
• Google Desktop
• Google Earth (world maps, including Street View)
• Google Talk (instant messaging)
• Google Toolbar for IE
• Picasa (photo manager)
• RealPlayer
• Skype
• Spyware Doctor with Antivirus (starter edition, which is free, but can be upgraded to a more powerful version)

Recommended if you re-install a Windows machine…

For those of us whose introduction to defrag programs was back in the Dos days with Norton Utilities, we remember the good old days – when you used to wait ages, watching a black and white animated display (or even left it overnight). And when you came down in the morning – your computer was faster. OK, just a little bit – and maybe it was just the placebo effect – but it felt faster.

These days, especially with Windows 7, defrag is just a service that runs in the background. No fancy display, no interaction – and no notion of whether it’s actually doing any real work.

Auslogics Disk Defrag, on the other hand, is different. …read more »

Have you ever deleted a file and didn’t mean to? Well, no problem – you can find it in the Windows recycle bin, right? No? Well, that’s where Recuva comes in handy…

Deleted it from your iPod, you say? Or your camera? No problem, Recuva can fix that too. …read more »

For those of us who remember the ancient Norton Commander of much fame in the DOS days, or those who remember Directory Opus on the Amiga (now itself open source), there is a free version for Windows in the form of Free Commander.

This program presents two panes of file systems, rather than the folders-and-files view of Windows Explorer. You can also open tabs on each side to have more than one directory open,and copy and move files with impunity. (And if you like the folders view of Explorer, you can put those on each side as well).

One of the nice features is the ability to treat ZIP files as another folder, and to go into them, and copy files in and out just like another folder. Very neat! You can also read files from CAB and RAR files too, and even go into archives inside archives (which makes me feel a little bit like I’ve just dropped down the rabbit hole and a gentleman in a large har will soon be offering me half a cup of tea…)

There’s built in file viewers for text files, images, and even to view files in hex. You can securely wipe files from within Free Commander, search inside files, bookmark your most often used folders, and even create and check MD5 checksums (which many ftp sites provide so that you can check that files downloaded correctly).

Oh, and there’s an ftp client built in. Did I mention that already?

Not enough? Well, you cam compare and synchronise directory contents too. And that alone has to be worth the time to download it…

CCleaner is a useful little application that no computer should really be without. A system organiser with the added benefit of a registry cleaner it deletes temporary files from all the popular browsers, IE, Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari and Opera and will also do the same to your installed software making your computer faster and more reliable. …read more »

Have you ever toyed with the idea of running Linux, but don’t want to delete your existing Windows programs? Or maybe you’ve just bought a Mac but there’s just that one Windows app you need to run. Or maybe you’ve always fancied running OS/2, but you’ve only got that old copy that came with an Escom PC back in 1994 that you’ve never opened? That’s where VirtualBox steps in… …read more »

We’ve all been emailed ZIP files before, haven’t we? And Windwos does a fair job of uncompressing them, it’s fair to say, but creating them can be a bit mroe difficult. Windows will choke if there’s a blank folder, and the compression ratio isn’t great, and – what do you do if you get a file you need to compress that’s bigger than 2GB? Or need to split into parts? Or need a smaller archive? …read more »