Sunday, August 26, 2007

Because it's the Last Sunday in August Linkpost

2007 LLWS World Championship game still tied 2 - 2, in the 8th inning.

No pressure Georgia and Japan.

Update: Georgia just slammed a home run over the outfield wall.  Georgia wins.  Good job all!

Here are the remaining links I haven't been able to address this week, chopped up and sauteed for your link-dining satisfaction.

100% calorie-free.

Visual Goodies

Welcome to Desktopography | Exhibition III (2007)| Natural Desktop Aesthetics - This is quite a website of desktop wallpapers. 

Desktopography is an exhibition, a showcase of nature themed desktop wallpapers created by designers worldwide.

Designers spend about 90% of their waking life in front of a computer so the most appealing genre for a wallpaper would be one that has beautiful design mixed with the all important aspect of being outdoors.

This year's exhibition of entries includes over 40 images that merge outdoor scenes filled with mood and mystery punctuated with a range of small to strong "modern" elements of technological twists and tweaks.

I'm sure there is something in there that everyone can find and enjoy.  The images are really high quality and come in a range of resolutions depending on the artist.

--spotted and reviewed on freewaregenius.com

IcoFX - The Free Icon Editor - (freeware if you didn't catch that) - Very nice icon editor. Supports Windows XP and Vista icons and transparencies. What makes it even more spectacular is that it comes with over 40 visual effects to apply to the icon you are designing. Icon resolutions up to 256x256 can be created. You can extract icons from files as well as capture images for conversion to icons. ( Screenshots ) 

And the clincher? If you'd like to run IcoFX from your USB drive or mobile HDD you can download the portable edition here

I'm adding this one to my icon utility toolbox to take it's place next to my other freeware favorites: @icon sushi, LionTech's IconShop, and LiquidIcon XP.

--spotted and reviewed on CyberNet News.

Bits of Adobe

I'm a huge fan and supporter of Foxit Reader (freeware) as a high-speed, portable and light-footed alternative to Adobe Reader.

Sure Adobe Reader 8 is probably the fastest and best put together version yet, but I still prefer Foxit Reader.

So what do you do if you don't have any choice due to your corporate requirements and have to use Adobe Reader anyway?  Any way to speed it up?

Tweaks: Speed up Adobe Reader 8 - This Lifehacker tip suggests removing the accessibility.api file.

Jonathan Hardwick : How to make Adobe Reader 7.0 load faster - This post has a number of suggestions which includes disabling some features and remove some plug-ins. I've done this at work and find it really does help.

Adobe Reader Speedup -  (freeware) - this great little utility lets you pick one of four "preset" configurations for plugin disabling (Fast, Turbo, Bare, and Auto-Install Fix) and a restore to default ability if something ceases to work as expected.  It also contains some tweaks and troubleshooting settings. Or if you want to do it all on your own, you can select each and every api plugin you wish to have enabled/disabled.  A very cool (and portable) utility!

Requires running as "administrator" in Vista to work properly.

-spotted and reviewed via Download Squad.

Security Tools and Utilities

Did you see that BitDefender is offering version 10 of their anti-virus solution for free? 

BitDefender Free Edition

Registration is required for download.  Supports the following Windows systems: Windows 98/NT-SP6/Me/2000/XP IE 4.0(+)  (No Vista support yet.)

I personally prefer AVG-Free but BitDefender does get good ratings.

Whatever your preference, there are a wealth of free and quality Anti-Virus Tools for Windows home-pc users to use to protect their systems.  Pick something and use it!

MANDIANT also has a free utility Mandiant Restore Point Analyzer.  The description states it is "a simple forensic tool to analyze change.log files from restore points to determine the original paths and file names of files stored inside restore points."  I assume it works with XP, don't know if Vista is supported.

Foundstone, Inc: Free Tools - My link for this site had gone dead when Foundstone apparently worked on realigning their webpages.  I finally found the download tools page could be reached again and updated by bookmark.

Lots of fantastic forensic and network tools.

RegDllView -  (freeware) New tool from NirSoft that "...that displays the list of all registered dll/ocx/exe files (COM registration). For each registered file, you can view the last date/time that it was registered, and the list of all registration entries (CLSID/ProgID)."

Besides being an interesting (and highly portable) tool, it might be a good utility when addressing a malware infection to see if malware has registered any suspicious files since it displays the registration time/date.

Supports Windows 98 to Vista.

Speaking of Vista

The laptop that Lucky Lavie won a while back came with Vista Premium.  I'm very happy with it and there are very few features lacking in it that Ultimate (Extras) has.

The only main one is DreamScene.  That's the effect that makes a "live" wallpaper effect live under your desktop icons.  It's pretty cool and very pretty.  The best designed DeskScapes are subtle and not distracting.  Sure, you can do a similar effect in Vista and XP by using VLC Media Player (CyberNotes: Play Videos on your Desktop in XP and Vista (like Dreamscene)) but it's not quite the same thing.

Now comes notice of a new free application called SSDream. (Vista only).  There are too many features to list them all.  Check it out.

Then again, if you have Vista Ultimate, and this whole DreamScene thing sounds great, check out the Stardock DeskScape software (free) and the gorgeous DreamScapes...many of which are free.

Me? Well, I'm just sticking with "standard" high-quality wallpapers.

This is my current Vista wallpaper: Elevation.

Vista tip site VistaBase has a great tip if you find that you are constantly having to re-registry applications after you have installed them: Constant registration details on-startup of applications (which you've already registered)

Seems the issue is that UAC may be protecting the registry from receiving the write to registry registration key event.  Solution? Either disable UAC or run the application as "administrator".

Finally, Windows news site Bink.nu had a run at the bank on great Vista and PowerShell - related resource topics this week:

Have a good week!

--Claus

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