AutoPager Firefox extension

Like everyone, you use Google to search for things and the thing that you're searching for is not always on the first page of results, right? So you click the "Next" button, scroll, scroll, scroll, click "Next", scroll...you get the picture.

Wouldn't it be nice if you could just search and then scroll and keep scrolling through the results until you find what you want? What about popular blogs like Engadget, Gizmodo, and Lifehacker? On almost any popular site you can think of, you're always having to click "Next" when you really just want to scroll.

That's where AutoPager comes in -- when you get to a site that it knows how to handle, it asks you if you want to enable it. Click "OK" and you're ready to scroll through blog posts and search results, never having to pause to click on the pesky "Next" link.

Disclaimer: geek talk ahead. Autopager uses lazy reading, so it won't hurt your browsing performance.

Sorry Internet Explorer users -- this only works for Firefox, which you should be using anyway.

Ultramon

If you have two or more computer monitors, you know how nice it is to be able to move your applications from one monitor to the other to make yourself as productive as possible, or at least appear that you're productive.

I hate to sound like a complete sloth, but moving those windows around can be a pain, which is where Ultramon comes in handy. Ultramon allows you to easily move application windows from one monitor to the next using your mouse or a specified hotkey. It also allows you to maximize your application across both monitors in case you have something really, really wide that you're working on. I can't imagine working on something that wide, but I'm sure someone is doing something like that out there.

One pretty cool feature of Ultramon is that it provides a "smart taskbar", which gives each monitor its own task bar and can show only the applications that are on that monitor. It takes a little while to get used to, but it's pretty cool. If you just want one really wide task bar, you can do that, too.

One annoyance that I've found is that there does not seem to be an option for moving the mouse along with the window. You can assign a separate key to move the mouse to the other window, but I would imagine that you would have that option for $39 USD.

After using Ultramon for a while, I can honestly say that I'm underwhelmed. It does its job well, but I built the same basic functionality by myself with Autohotkey in 36 lines of code.

Ultramon works well, but I'm not sure that it's worth $39 USD. If it were more attractively priced at $19 or $25 USD and also had the option to move the mouse along with the window, I'd definitely recommend it.

Addendum: Reader NewKreation posted a comment about an Autohotkey script called WindowPad that I've tried out and it works great. Save yourself the $39 USD and get this script instead. It's free and offers more functionality than Ultramon. I smell a future blog post...

Sennheiser PX 100 Collapsible Headphones

Did you recently get a shiny new iPod? How does it sound? Great, huh? Well I can assure you that it doesn't sound as great as it could because the headphones that Apple ships with the iPod are pieces of crap. How does music sound through your computer? Pretty bad, doesn't it?

I have a simple and inexpensive way for you to solve your audio problems -- go get a pair of Sennheiser PX 100 headphones because I think they are the best headphones for the money. I don't often rave about products, but I have literally gotten at least five of my friends (yes, I do have at least five friends) to get these headphones. Every time they put them on, they can't believe how great their music sounds, and one co-worker even bought one set for home and one for the office because he loved them so much.

So why are they so great? First of all, they're inexpensive, at around $35 per pair. But the main reason is that they sound awesome, with strong bass and great response through all frequencies. I'm not an audio expert, I only marginally sound like one since I'm writing something that will be posted online.

The only thing that some people might not like is that these headphones are on-ear, which means they won't naturally block out surrounding noise at low volume. Some people don't like on-ear headphones, so if that's the case with you then you probably won't like these very much.

They're light, comfortable, collapsible, come with a nice carrying case, and most of all they sound incredible, especially for the price. No matter what type of device you plug them into or what type of music you listen to, it will sound so much better when listening through these phones.

Check them out here -- you won't be disappointed.

Easynews

I absolutely love Easynews and anyone who wants access to the limitless amount of content hidden within newsgroup servers, Easynews is the best way to get to it.

So why should care about newsgroups and why on Earth would you want to pay $9.95 a month for it? Because newsgroups are the original forums, places where people discuss all kinds of topics in a specific place. No matter what your interest, there are newsgroups for it. Especially if you like binary content. The problem is, you have to put large stuff out there in little pieces, and some of the pieces get lost because newsgroup content is generally not kept around for very long.

Enter Easynews -- they keep their newsgroup content around for a long time, much longer than most providers and they make the binary treasure trove hidden within very easy to get to. Music? Check. Movies? Check. Games? Check. It's all out there, tons of it, but you just need the right service to get to it all and get to it easily.

And Easynews is definitely the right service. Check it out -- they have a free three day trial so you can see just how good it is.

Free Commander

It's no secret that the Windows file explorer is pretty much useless for anything other than getting frustrated. When I was looking for a dual-pane file explorer replacement, I found xplorer2, an excellent piece of software that does all kinds of nifty things. The only problem is that it also costs $30. I went ahead and bought it after hearing rave reviews, and then last week I happened upon Free Commander, a free alternative to xplorer2.

The nicest, and most obvious, feature of Free Commander is its dual-pane display, allowing you to view two directories at the same time, and easily copy files between them. Besides that great feature, it also has the following advantages over the horrible Windows file explorer...

• You can click anywhere in the path of the current pane to quickly navigate to that part of the path. For example, if I am in D:\Dev\Projects\SuperWidget, and I want to quickly get to D:\Dev, I just click on the "Dev" part of the path and I'm there.
• Open a command prompt window at the current directory.
• Extra tree view in addition to the flat file/directory listing.
  
• A drive bar over each pane that lets you quickly get to another drive.
• Color-code your files based on certain specifications. For example, I color all of my read-only files blue.
• Built-in archiving and unarchiving.
• Easily access your favorite folders (also allows you to pick a favorite for the inactive pane).
• Easily access your favorite tools.
• Easily access your Desktop, Control Panel, My Documents, and Start menu items from the toolbar.
• Display subdirectory sizes.
  
• Built-in file viewer.
• Incremental searching for files as you type. This also limits the arrow keys to only those files that match.
• Incremental file filter that you can toggle on and off.

There is much more than I could list, and those are just the highlights that Free Commander can do. So check it out, and put away that piece of crap that ships with Windows. Oh yeah, and did I mention that it's free?

TrueCrypt

Do you wonder if your spouse, kids, or network administrator is rifling through your, um, sensitive files on your hard drive? Wouldn't it be nice to know that you could store your pr0n, proprietary source code, or top secret spreadsheets in a place that only you could access? Well that's where TrueCrypt comes in.

TrueCrypt creates an encrypted file on your hard drive that you can mount as a regular Windows or Linux drive. Once mounted, this virtual drive reads and writes just like a normal drive, except that the contents are encrypted and decrypted on the fly. Encryption is 256-bit, so it's very unlikely that anyone is going to be breaking into it anytime soon.

Another cool feature of TrueCrypt is inner and outer passwords. Let's say you're a spy carrying top-secret info, such as naked pictures of Hillary Clinton. Well if Hillary's goons get hold of you, they might try to strong-arm you into giving them the pics. With TrueCrypt, you can store a few files that look secret in the outer vault, but the really good stuff is in the inner vault. If you feel like you're in danger, you give them the outer vault password to get them off your back and hopefully spare your fingers from getting broken. Obviously they don't see the inner vault stuff, so you can rush it to the Enquirer after you've been let go.

To anyone accessing your drive, the TrueCrypt file is just a mass of unreadable garbage, and you can rest assured that no one will be accessing your files. When you are through reading and writing to your encrypted drive, simply unmount it and everything is safe and sound. TrueCrypt is free, has Windows and Linux versions, and also can be used on USB drives. Go get it before your wife finds all of your pr0n...

Screenshot Captor

I thought I had already reviewed this fine piece of software, but due to laziness, parenthood, and my job, it somehow slipped my mind. All bullshit aside, go get Screenshot Captor now, whether you think you need it or not. Because you do -- you really do.

"So what's so damn hot about this program?" you might be asking yourself. Well, I'll tell you. Screenshot Captor (I'm going to call it SC from here on out) can capture all or any portion of your screen, then allows you to enhance the captured image with borders, arrows, text, transparent shapes, and even blur the background to highlight certain screen elements. It will capture long screen areas such as web pages that need to be scrolled, and can even capture its own image if you happen to be writing a software review and need a screenshot of the tool that takes the screenshots.

Our QA department was using SnagIt to capture screenshots for reporting bugs, but once I told them about SC, they let their licenses expire because SC did everything SnagIt did, but for free. Even though I don't use it in my daily work, I use SC at least every few days to capture images for software reviews, and for use on my StumbleUpon page.

If you have even a remote chance of needing to capture your screen, get Screenshot Captor. It's a fantastic piece of software and you can't beat the price -- free. The fine folks at DonationCoder have done it again.

Miranda Instant Messenger

I originally picked Trillian as my instant messenger client of choice because it supported multiple protocols and had a skinnable interface. I maintained my allegiance to Trillian until a co-worker pestered me to try Miranda. The only thing that intrigued me about Miranda was that it supported Jabber, and the only way to get Jabber support in Trillian was to pay $25. I have no problem buying software if it warrants it, but in this case it didn't. So I installed Miranda, along with the Miranda IM Pack, and was instantly hooked.

Beside the fact that it is free, supports just about every protocol under the sun, and is skinnable, Miranda does just about anything you'd want an IM client to do. You can customize every aspect of your contact list, and their plugin architecture has yielded a lot of support. RSS feeds and letting the world know what Winamp tune you're currently listening to are just a few of the plugins that are included in the Miranda pack, and there are a lot more out there.

Miranda is definitely my current choice for an IM client because of its cost (free), protocol support, plugins, and customization options. The only complaint about Miranda is that it is almost too configurable, and finding the location of an option to change is sometimes difficult. Other than that, it's awesome.

ID3-TagIT

If you're as anal retentive as I am, you first must ask yourself, "Is anal retentive hyphenated?" Well, I'm anal retentive about some things, and my MP3 tags are one thing I obsess over. There's nothing worse than looking up at your music player to see songs in the wrong case, misspellings, or maybe nothing because there are no tags in the file. Another annoyance is when you have songs named differently because you chose a different scheme when you ripped your songs.

All of my problems are now solved with ID3-TagIT. This software does everything, and I mean everything related to managing your MP3 tags and file names. I'm just going to go over the highlights of what this thing does, but believe me when I tell you it does it all. For free.

• If you are missing tag information, it can either extract tag info from the file names or look it up in the FreeDB database.
• If the tags are correct but the files are named differently than you normally name them, it will rename the files the way you want. You can save different templates if you have different naming schemes.
• If the tags are file names are correct but some dumbass decided to be cool and put everything in lower case, it will correct the case for you.
• Besides merely managing the tags and file names, it also does file management duties like looking for duplicate files, moving, copying, and deleting files. It will also find and highlight files where the tags and file names don't match.

There's not much more I can say about this tool other than it has saved me hours and hours of my valuable time. If you have lots of MP3 files and you want them named correctly with accurate tags, then this tool is for you. Even though it's free, and I don't like to pay for software, I gladly made a PayPal donation to Michael Pleumper for his brilliant and well-written software.

jEdit

If you're in need of a very good text editor, look no farther than jEdit, the self-proclaimed programmer's text editor. It handles any kind of editing task you can throw at it, and I've been very happy with it since I switched from TextPad.

I'll start with my only real complaint -- since jEdit is written in Java, it takes longer to load than native Windows applications. But the fact that it is written in Java is also its strength because it runs on just about any platform. Once loaded, jEdit is a snappy performer and shows none of the lag that I've experienced in other Java desktop applications.

Since it is designed to be a programmer's editor, it handles the normal programmer's editing tasks such as syntax highlighting, auto brace indentation, and auto tag closing (in HTML and XML). It also allows you to write scripts in BeanShell, which is very powerful and something that TextPad lacked -- the easiest way to learn BeanShell is to record a macro and see what code it produced.

jEdit also has a number of plugins and I use several of them -- XML indenter, XPath Tool, XSLT Tool, and the Text tool that supplies text manipulation (such as sorting) that I'm surprised did not come with jEdit out of the box. The Plugin Manager is great -- you find, download, and install the plugins from within jEdit so there's no searching around for plugins.

jEdit also supports code folding (collapsing and expanding blocks of code such as classes, functions, loops, and try/exception), which is very handy for keeping your place in larger chunks of code (the ones you wrote when you were younger and less experienced).

I know that editors are very sacred to programmers, but if you're the slightest bit unhappy with your current editor, I suggest giving jEdit a try. And it's free, so you don't have anything to lose but a little bit of time.