Say "Hello" to My Little Friends

My little friends are small Mac and Windows freeware apps without whom my life would be much less efficient. Most of these apps have been long-time buddies in good standing, having been culled from numerous trial relationships with a large number of wannabee friends.

My Little Mac Friends. (I'm a Mac user by choice.)

Skitch is a free screen capture and markup tool. You can capture the full screen, a selected region, or an iSight camera shot then use Skitch's markup tools to annotate the image. You can drag the capture onto the desktop or upload the capture to skitch.com or other image host.

RapidoWrite makes it easy to type full sentences or paragraphs using abbreviations. This is great for signing your emails with a signature, inserting your address into a form, or typing a long, easy-to-misspell word. Simply type the abbreviation you chose and RapidoWrite expands into the full text.

ClipMenu can manage clipboard history. You can record 8 clipboard types, from plain text to image. To paste a recorded item, you just pop up the menu by invoking the shortcut key or toolbar icon, and select an item from the menu. You can also register texts you frequently use, like e-mail addresses, user IDs and so on, as snippets which you can then paste from the menu, too.
Jumpcut ia another clipboard manager that works almost identically to ClipMenu without the Snippet feature.

Google QuickSearch Box can be used to find the following: programs and files on your computer, search results on Google, bookmarks and websites, calculations, site-specific results, weather and definitions, and contacts. You can even post to Twitter.

Magic Pen is a simple application that gives you the power of an interactive whiteboard to draw on top of content displaying on your screen.

My Little Windows Friends. (I'm a Windows user by necessity. Some of these apps are tools to supplement the functionality which is native on a Mac but missing from XP.)

Easy Capture is a powerful and easy-to-use free screen capture software. It allows you to capture screen shots, including windows captures, scrolling windows, and selected-regions. It also allows you to edit and markup the screen captures.

Texter saves you countless keystrokes by replacing abbreviations with commonly used phrases you define.

xNeat Clipboard Manager is handy and very simple to use. It captures clipboard items as they are copied to the Windows Clipboard, and you can simply bring up a menu containing all the previously copied items and select the item you want to paste. For regularly used text you can make it permanent in xNeat Clipboard Manager's menu by right clicking on it, then select Make Sticky.

EditPad Lite is a general-purpose text editor, designed to be small and compact, yet offer all the functionality you expect from a basic text editor. EditPad Lite's features include opening multiple documents in tabs, unlimited undo/redo, reopen recent files, highly configurable, and much more.

ScreenMarker is an application used for drawing on the current screen using a variety of tools. It gives you the functionality to draw on the screen to highlight existing or provide further information to all those viewing. Screen Marker provides some of the features of an interactive whiteboard without having one.

QuickMonth Calendar adds a tiny calendar pop-up to the clock icon in your Windows XP tray. Just hover your mouse over the clock and up it pops, ready to serve. That's it. Nothing more dramatic. But definitely a bit useful.

Launchy is a free windows utility designed to help you forget about your start menu, the icons on your desktop, and even your file manager. Launchy indexes the programs in your start menu and can launch your documents, project files, folders, and bookmarks with just a few keystrokes!

SumatraPDF is a slim, free, open-source PDF viewer for Windows. Portable out of the box. Sumatra has a minimalistic design. Simplicity has a higher priority than a lot of features. It's small and starts up very fast.
FoxIt Reader is a free PDF document viewer, with incredible small size, breezing-fast launch speed and rich feature set. Foxit Reader currently has over 50 million users all around the world.

PrimoPDF is a completely free PDF creator. Create PDF files from 300+ file types. Make 100% industry-standard PDF from virtually any files that print. Create PDF files optimized for print, screen, ebook, or prepress.

DIY Charging Station

Last night, I finally got tired of having things charging in every room of the house (except the bathroom). I decided to do something about it and paid a visit to the local Home Depot this afternoon. This convenient kitchen DIY charging station is the result.

The shelf has room enough for both my 13" MacBook, my 10" Toshiba netbook, and a couple of smaller devices such as my iPod Touch and my phone. The two hanging baskets below the shelf, which are the key feature to me, accommodate the AC adapters for both laptops, the iPod charger, the phone's AC adapter, a camera battery charger, and a charger for AA/AAA batteries with space to spare. If necessary, a couple more baskets could easily be added. A couple mini hair clips help with cord management.

The shelf unit is Closet Maid item 8279, $15.76, all hardware included. The two baskets are Closet Maid item 3937 at $3.67 each. The hair clips were locally appropriated at no cost to me. Total (with tax of course) was $24.48. Labor, about a half hour. Degree of difficulty, a caveman could do it.

I'm No Longer LOST

I've just started watching the hit ABC TV show LOST from the beginning on Netflix Instant. I now understand why so many of you really like that show. In the past week, I've seen about half a dozen episodes. I just watched the one where Jack goes into the jungle looking for his dead father.

Because LOST was so popular among both my real-life and online friends, I twice tried to jump in and watch episodes on TV, but I didn't understand what was going on and gave up. Now that I'm watching from the beginning, I am hooked! I even find myself talking to the characters as I watch.

It's more like seeing a movie than TV. And not only is it a good story, it's visually stunning as well.