Been fairly busy with work (migration & integration) and play (Relic/THQ’s Company of Heroes ftw!) hence no updates at the blog. Here’s a quick post on 3 lifesaving applications that I’ve used recently till I can find the time to do a proper update. First off are 2 small password protected and encrypted notepad editors that are install-less and a couple of KB’s in size and the last application is a small dictionary program.
I needed to store the license keys of some application in a shared folder but couldn’t be bothered with NTSF permission et cetera, so I just dumped the file into the encrypted text file, place a password, go over to the users terminal, open up the text file, supply password, copy insert the license key and delete the text file after I’m done (confident no snoop would stumble upon it or open it during the duration of the install).
Fsekrit
Fsekrit’s weighs in at a mere 50KB and it’s self-contained install-less notes editor (somewhat like notepad) application that uses very strong encryption (256-bit AES/Rijndael in CBC mode).
Download from here.
Steganos LockNote
Similar to Fskerit, LockNote allows you to write, save, and automatically encrypt the notes you write from a stand-alone, install-less application. Also uses encrypted AES 256bit encryption technology from the CryptoPP program library.The advantage over Fskerit is that you can easily convert text files you already have by dragging them into LockNote. The downside? It’s almost 5x the size of fsekrit at 259KB.
Download from here
TinySpell
TinySpell is a cross-application spell checking utility that warns you of misspelled words and suggests replacements when you press the autosuggestion hotkey. If you suddenly change between application, eg. WLW to MSN and back, it’s a little slow in detecting the change though.
Download from here.
September 25, 2006
Too many times we hear the complain that some people just don’t have the time to read, sans the birth of a service called Daily Lit, which basically helps you in this department by sending bite-sized chunk extracted from a book to your inbox. According to the results of a recent survey, the average Malaysian reads only two books a year (But queerly read and respond to many surveys carried out - Reader’s Digest, Durex, AGB Nielsen Media Research, MCMC, to name a few.) Now if you’re one of those Malaysians and fall into the 15% category who quoted the no-leisure-time excuse, keep reading.
Source: Reading Promotion Program - Malaysia National Book Council & NST
On Daily Lit, all you have to do is search for a book you’d like to read from an list of classics in the public domain and receive it in chopped-up parts at a specified scheduled time, via email. There is an option to get the next chunk immediately (especially if you get to a juicy part) , or just wait till the mail as defined by your scheduled time. I think it’s a fantastic way to sneak in a little reading in between the boss’s requests and PHqlARMAqY v1@grA messages. I just got part 1 of 205 parts of Charles Darwin’s On The Origin of Species so that should about make up my quota for this year XD.
September 15, 2006
One thing most people have aside from 2 credit cards (or more) is 2 email addresses (also maybe more). For myself, I have 3 email addresses. Hotmail for personal, Gmail as a online storage and Mailcity as a dummy account (you won’t believe the amount of crap that gets send to the last one). Here’s a screenie.
Alot of us have had to register at various sites in order to;
1. view contents,
2. download stuff,
3. get redirected to another site (some won’t even tell that you need to subscribe but harvest your email anyway - damn them).
Being in the ‘business’ of evaluating softwares, I get my fair share and needless to say, suffer through the inevitable spam that follows. I’d normally enter a dud email address (eg. someone@somewhere.net) to see what the registration wizard does. If it’s a harvest attempt then they can very well have my dud email. If not, then I’ll have to re-register again as the first time confirmation was sent to the dud email account. (Nevertheless, spam still arrive at my dummy account and I had to purge it weekly).
I can cut down the number of steps considerably by using a service provided by Spambox which essentially creates a temporary email inbox and then forwards all mails that goes there to your regular inbox - till the time you specified expires and the temporary inbox gets purged (Spammer will now receive a bounce notification of a non-existing mailbox :)). This might be especially helpful if you’re registering at a site that needs to be finalized with a user-action confirmation email. Just set your Spambox time limit for a day, get confirmed, and your record is wiped clean when your temporary mailbox is purged after a day.
http://spambox.us/
September 13, 2006
I’m looking for a blog editor to do my blogging offline. Right now I’m only aware of 2, namely Qumana and Live Writer Beta from Microsoft. There’s also a Firefox plugin but I’m on Opera. I’d be putting them both head-to-head in a first impression and user friendliness test. Think of it as a “Survivor: blog editor edition”.
Blog Editor Testing
Just downloaded this blog editor called Qumana. First time I’m using one as I prefer to just logon to the blog and do my blog posting from the built-in WYSIWYG web editor. The great thing about using a blog editor is that you can probably blog offline and just upload the post. This post will be written totally in Qumana to demonstrate it’s WYSIWYG compatibility and any quirks that might arise.
Qumana is around 9mb and installation simple wizard driven (a next -yes- accept-next affair). First time you fire this Qumana, you get prompted for your blog’s address, username & password. It will then do a sync and then you’re presented with a dashboard view of your blog post. Somehow, seeing the display post quick preview on the main page gives one the impression that this won’t be a straight forward fire & forget WYSIWYG affair.
Qumana main page: formatting looks way off for existing posts…
Hitting the New Post button brings up a MS word kinda text editor and you get started. It’s suppose to WYSIWYG and inserts all your formatting tags automatically giving you freedom to concentrate on your writing and I guess is nice for those who aren’t fond of them. Everything that’s related to publishing is presented at this juncture like Publish Post, Save (saving a local draft), insert Ad, Insert Tag (advance tag functions), dictionary, pictures insert, Categories tagging and the usual Bold, Italics, Underline, Strikeout, fonts buttons of a text editor. Spellcheck is a great help to seeing that i tend to make many typos and mispelling but the speed is somewhat slow.
Qumana new post: looks good so far…
Download from here. Now for the moment of truth. I’m gonna hit the publish post button.
September 8, 2006
