However, it misses a search function, as well as a import/export option. Of course it would have been awesome for it to be able to store the snippets on the web so that they would be accessible for you by using an account or such. Unfortunately it lacks the HTML syntax coloring. Of course there is a lot of work on it still but thankfully it is out there for us to enjoy so let’s be patient with the developers.

Oh, and by the way, to make up for that import/export thing you could do it manually by following the path to the SQLite database file:

“C:\Users\Username\AppData\Roaming\com.snippely.xxx\Local Store\application.db”. And there you have it; you can now be assured that your precious snippets won’t be lost if you decide to work on another computer or any other scenario.

Here are some screenshots to help you make an impression:

Download: http://code.google.com/p/snippely/downloads/list

I, like many other users out there have a dual monitor setup but even so I need to have one or more of my windows always on top due to the importance of their content. The solution would be to buy an extra monitor but until I get the funds I will have to settle with managing my space more efficiently.

After you start this small app, an icon will be shown in the systray. The magic shortcut is CTRL+TAB. Enjoy.

http://softrelated.com/files/always-on-top.exe

As far as portability, I successfully managed to install, configure and use RescueTime on Ubuntu 8.04 and 8.10. However there is still much to do in this direction as there are some issues (for example the terminal window is logged in with a different name almost every time). If you are an advanced python coder and know your way between the lines you should be able to solve this and other problems. Who knows, you might even lend a hand to the boys that maintain the project. Nevertheless, if you don’t need to do some fancy schmancy logging this could work for you. A version for your Mac is also available.

One could argue that saving all that logged data on who knows what server is risky. Well, it’s free, its great features are better than a lot of paid software, no complaints have been addressed yet. No matter how many reasons I find to enforce that RescueTime is so great one thing is for sure: if you can log all your data locally with half the features RescueTime has, do it.

I recently bought a 500GB Western Digital My Book Essential Edition external hard disk and connected it to my also recently bought WL500GPv2 Asus router. I am using the external disk to back up important data from my laptop and as a streaming source for media files. Instead of manually doing all the backup myself every day I searched for an app that could do that safely in the background while I am working. So now, every hour a scheduled synchronization takes place between some directories that are on my laptop’s HDD and some directories on the external HDD.

Super Flexible File Synchronizer is by far the best solution out there. It has all the vital features included plus a whole bunch of extra ones that make it the perfect glove even for those of you who are a little bit more demanding.

Since it can be used to back up your data using protocols like FTP, SSH (SFTP), WebDAV, Amazon S3, HTTP you can use it both at work and at home, needing just an Internet connection. A basic example would be synchronizing your work directory with the one at home using a FTP server. In matter of restrictions… well there are no such things with SFFS. No matter the size of the files, how many they are or what name they have, SFFS will make everything seem easy.

For the ones who don’t want to complicate themselves so much, a friendly Wizard is available to help them create the perfect profile. A profile is more like a task or a job that defines what, when and where is being copied. However if you want to make sure you are 100% in control you can skip the Wizard GUI and do all the settings manually. I would strongly suggest that you at least have a brief look at all the options available especially if you handle important data, also if you want to make sure your files are secured you can choose to zip and encrypt them with the built-in algorithm.

The most important feature that basically boosts the level of professionalism is SmartTracking module. It detects every single aspect related to your files (directory structure, size, timestamp, etc.) and stores all the information in a database which will later serve at identifying even the smallest changes that occurred. An interesting feature that can be very useful is file versioning that, as you already might have imagined, allows you to keep different copies of a certain file. This is very useful because it may serve like an “Undo” option in case something goes wrong. You can specify which directories to be scanned for changes, you can apply a lot of filters for every aspect imaginable or you can simply use “mirror mode” and have an exact duplicate back up.

This is a great application that has so many things to offer. It really helped me a bunch and I strongly recommend it to everyone out there who wants to keep their data safe in two or more places. As far as portability, Super Flexible File Synchronizer can be used on Windows, Mac and Linux.

Nevertheless you might want to check your logs from time to time and of course from different locations, using different machines (you can’t remember the telephone number Eric sent you last night and you need it right away).

IM History can help you in this matter. It can build a chat history in real-time corresponding to certain IM account and let’s you access it from your browser no matter where you are. It runs on Windows Machines but also on Linux distros (no Mac support to my knowledge, yet). It can store your chats from different apps such as Skype, Yahoo! Messenger, ICQ, Windows Messenger, Miranda, QIP, Trillian, Pidgin and AIM.

Not only that your chat history will be stored online for free but on top of that you can manipulate it even better than the default archive stored by lets say Yahoo! Messenger. You can search with useful filters and organize it the way you like.

For those of you who don’t trust this practices (and on good reasons) I will search a portable app that doesn’t need to be installed and stores all your chat in an encrypted format, on your flash stick. I didn’t have any kind of problems with IM History just yet but I avoid writing sensitive information in IM apps anyway.

Take a look at their tour to make an impression before you decide to install it. Oh and don’t forget it’s all beta.

P.S. Of course Gtalk offers you all this in a minimalistic interface.

So what I will try to do is to pretty much compare a linux feed reader alterantive with FeedReader3. Currently i am using SuSe 10.3 and Ubuntu 7.10 and I have installed Liferea on both. It works like a charm. Unfortunately I am not aware of any kind of sync method between different OS’s. It is kind of annoying to lets say read your feeds on Windows and in the next 5 minutes or a couple of days, switch back to Ubuntu and have alerts regarding feeds that you have already read pop-up.

In terms of design FeedReader3 is similar to Liferea. You can choose between Normal, Wide and Combined layouts. For example I prefer the Wide layout because it looks the same as FeedReader3’s wide layout; the first panel contains your feed directory, the second one the feed content and the third one the article’s content or the built in browser when needed. A drawback is the need of selecting your preferred layout for each of your subscription, because as you browse them you will notice that the default layout for all of them is Normal. So basically you need to select the appropriate layout for each and every subscription.

Above the article’s content corresponding tags, categories and author’s name are shown, just like in FeedReader3. Also you have the possibility of increasing the font size for all of your content. Importing and exporting feed lists is of course a must-have and it can be done without any problems. An interesting feature is the possibility of posting your bookmarks to popular bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us, furl, reddit any many others. You can customize the behavior of popups which notify you whenever something new is posted. Enclosures are available for you to download and if needed a proxy configuration can be set up as well.

Liferea might be considered as a light version of FeedBurner3. It has the basic features of a feed reader and if you are just an ordinary subscriber with no particular high demands, it might do the trick for you.

A more detailed documentation is to be found on the official site. As far as installing, it has native support for Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat, Fedora, SuSe, Gentoo and Mandriva distros. Check out the install page to find out how to install it on your distro. It took me less than 2 minutes to install it on Ubuntu 7.10

Here are a few screenshots:

However if you don’t feel comfortable with Liferea as your feed reader on Linux you can choose to use Akregator, Blam!, RSSOwl or Straw. I will more than surely put them to the test someday.

Yes, as weird as it sounds i have tested Google Calendar only once, mainly because i wasn’t interested in it. I really don’t know what to say about it except the fact that i think all the apps developed by Google speak for themselves. Simple, easy to use, friendly user interface and very productive. I took Google Calendar for a spin and i was impressed but i needed an independent calendar app that could be used offline, without any requirements whatsoever.

Because i am a fan of all Mozilla apps i couldn’t help it and tested their Sunbird. It can be run on most of the operating systems out there and of course it is available in many languages. To make an idea of how Sunbird looks feel free to check out the screenshots. Mozilla has another solution for Thunderbird users. It’s called Lightning and it’s basically an addon that can handle your calendar from within Thunderbird. Practically Sunbird and Lightning are almost one and the same, but Sunbird is more like a standalone app. Unfortunately i’m not using Thunderbird anymore as an RSS reader (Wizz kicks in here) and for the moment i don’t need an email client. So Lightning isn’t a solution for me. Sunbird is a great calendar app but i need to keep things VERY simple and always at hand (for example on my desktop).

The next app i played with was the popular Rainlendar. As far as the differences between the lite and the pro version, there’s no big deal and you can manage without them. Basically the pro version has support for Outlook and for Google Calendar and the possibility of having network shared calendars. If you feel like these features would be of great help, you can have them for only 15 EUR. For the moment i am trying to get used to the idea of planning my schedule based on the calendar. Rainlendar has a really great support when it comes to different languages. You can check the official language page to see the current progress. In order to have a decent integration with the rest of your desktop (theme, wallpaper, icons, etc), you can choose to use skins that can add a little style to your calendar. A clean GUI with all sort of options you might need to manage your calendar is available. Hotkeys support, alarms are considered a must-have and are also available. Along the calendar itself you can also configure a “ToDoList” and an “EventList” which are more than useful. Also a tray icon that provides you quick access to options is always at hand. Fore a complete feature list check out the site. In conclusion, Rainlendar seems to suit me best and i recommend it to anyone else who wants to keep things simple yet organized.

PlainSight Desktop Calendar is also an interesting application. Unfortunately this one requires Microsoft Outlook to run (this is a HUGE drawback). I think it would be in their best interest to develop independent apps (especially eliminate Microsoft related dependencies). Practically it is another calendar for which you can choose glossy skins and use it to import and manage data from Outlook. A new feature (available only in the pro version) is the possibility of displaying forecast information related to different cities. It costs almost the same as Rainlendar and surprisingly it has almost the same features (To Do list, Event list), but this is probably because that these features are very common to calendar apps. Desktop iCalendar is also developed by the same company. Here is a complete feature list of it. iCalendar outputs the same information almost in the same manner as Rainlendar (even the tray icons are almost the SAME), so i think it’s needless to say which are its features. Wrapping it up, iCalendar is a real competitor for Rainlendar as there are few differences between them.

Another (this time more professional) calendar application i tested was Active Destkop Calendar. With it’s ultra suggestive name, this app gives back more than you could want. It’s just a little bit more expensive than the above apps (29.90 USD) but it sure is a neat app. It can display data directly on your desktop, it’s compatible with Google Calendar and Outlook, it has quite a bunch of visual customization options like icons, skins, fonts, colors, etc., it can create backups of your data and also export or import from CSV and iCal files and it can share calendar data over the network. It mainly provides the following modules: calendar, notes (maybe an Events version), tasks (To Do version), alarms and contacts.

Also they have improved the “Filter Picker” as now you can filter you songs by album, artist, composer, genre, rating and year. I don’t what’s the importance of the composer option if there is already the artist option. However i admit i don’t pay much attention regarding to who composed the song. I think the artist option would have been enough.
New background patterns have been created for your library and playlist, just to make it more easy for your eyes.
The rating user-interface (UI) has been also modified to keep things clear and simple.
Good news for Mac users. Now they can set-up some hotkeys for a fairly amount of commands.
“Always on top” is yet another new feature that has been implemented in Songbird 0.5.
Unfortunately Songbird 0.5 doesn’t support iPod connectivity. You can choose to proceed and install the addon on your own risk but there are a few problems with it. A stable addon will be released with 0.6 or with the final version which is expected in May, early June.
If you are a developer, then you should know that there are also some new features that might concern you. I noticed that, at least for the moment Songbird is very friendly with potential developers.

Download Songbird 0.5

Google Analytics AIR currently it is at it’s beta stage but i must say it shows off pretty much everything you might need, at least for the moment. Practically with this AIR app you can access your Google Analytics account directly from your desktop without needing to open a browser.

It has a neat animated interface, great user-friendly approach, almost the same functionality as the original browser version. The profile manager section can help you define multiple accounts and easily switch between them. And of course there’s more to come ! Also a great feature is the possibility of having multiple tabs while you browse your reports. This can be of great use if you need to swap between tabs and consult different reports. Also powerful data grids that allow you to filter your displayed stats are present. Finally the possibility of exporting to PDF, XML and Excel is always at hand.

Knowing the fact that both Google Analytics AIR and Adobe AIR are currently beta versions it’s good to see that no major bugs are present. In order to install Google Analytics AIR you must install first Adobe AIR.

Download Adobe AIR beta 3

Download Google Analytics AIR beta 3

 Here are some screen captures and a tiny screencast that show how to install and use the above mentioned.

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

You can use Google Hacks to search the web for the following files:

• Mp3
• Wma
• Ogg
• Pdf
• Txt
• Lit
• Rar
• Doc
• Rtf
• Chm
• Pps
• Zip
• Odt
• Mpg
• Avi
• Wmv
• Divx
• Flv
• Exe
• Ddl

What exactly this tool does, is to add a couple of smart filters to your search input. For example if you want to search for an exe file named “winamp” your search input will look like this:

-inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:”index of” +”last modified” +”parent directory” +description +size +(.exe) “winamp”

As you will see on the results page most of the links will begin with “Index of /” and they will take you to different ftp servers containing your required file(s).

You can also use Google Hacks to search for passwords in the following files: config.php, auth_user_file.txt and passlist.txt or inline url passwords. Lyrics, fonts, torrents, cache and web hosting categories are also available.

As the program itself states: “This program is for educational purposes only”. I don’t consider it a hacking tool or any kind of malicious software program. I like to consider it nothing more than a useful program that applies different filters available to the wide public to your search input in order to provide viable search results.

You can download this tool from it’s official project page over at Google Code.

In the end i want to clarify that the purpose of this article and/or program is not to encourage you to engage into a certain hacking activity !