Shrink Pic

Do you frequently upload photos to blogs and web galleries or send pictures through email (web based email providers or MS Outlook) or share photos through Skype / MSN Messenger? Then Shrink Pic is the image resizing application you’ve always wanted.

Shrink Pic is a free software which automates the entire task of reducing the size of images and allows you to send dozens of photos as email attachments - quickly and with no effort at all!

All you need to do is install Shrink Pic. It automatically detects when you're sending large photo files and compresses them in the background.

How does it work?

1. It runs silently in the background

1. When you are sending a photo, it will automatically detect and resize the photo and store it in a temporary area and send that resized photo. It gives you a message on the compression status.

1. You can control on the compression ratio of the photos via the settings.

1. If you need to send full sized pics for any reasons, you can disable the program from the taskbar.

It works perfectly on Windows XP / 2000 / 2003 / Vista & 7 and supports Vista Mail, Outlook, Thunderbird, Eudora, Poco Mail, Incredimail as email clients and Skype & MSN Messenger as IM clients.

You can also copy the program to your flash drive and add it to your portable list of softwares. You can download this incredible freeware from here

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Softwares I cannot live without

Below is my list of “Top 21 freewares”. While compiling the list have thought of categories and softwares that are essential in order for me to survive in front of a computer for a long time.

Blogging tool: Windows Live Writer

There are very few softwares from MS which have found a fan following from both pro & anti MS enthusiasts and this is one of them. Makes blogging very very easy.

Internet Browsing: Google Chrome

Redefined the meaning of “Fast Browsing”.

PDF Reader: Foxit Reader

Adobe Acrobat Reader is not the only software that can open PDF files. Foxit is a lightning fast pdf file reader.

PDF Writer: PDF Creator

Create quality PDF files from any windows application with advanced features such as copy protection, password control and others.

Text File Reader: Notepad ++

Tab windows is the life line for any multi tasking person. With syntax highlighting, auto completion, ability to add plugins, this makes text editing and programming much much easier.

Compressing software: 7-zip

Fast, light weight, and enhanced compression make it a better choice than any other software available.

File Search: Windows Search 4.0

Inbuilt in Vista & 7, and available as an addon for XP, another product from MS which does exactly what it is supposed to do. Search -> Results –> Open. Quickly. Natural search is also supported.

System Housekeeping: CCleaner

It optimizes system, removes unwanted logs, internet history, temp files and is a must for keeping any system spic and span. It saves on hard disk space and also had a registry cleaner helps in keeping the registry in top shape.

Anti spyware: Spybot Search & Destroy

An anti spyware which is still the best amongst the host of new anti spywares that crop up every single day.

File copier: Fast copy

Fastest copy / delete software on windows. Period.

Codec: K-lite

A necessity because it makes viewing of any types of media files so much easier. know know VLC player is there, but guess habits are hard to die.

File Renamer:

Lupas Rename 2000 – Has been previously reviewed over here.

FTP Client: FileZilla

Forget the command line / explorer to do file transfer.  Filezilla supports FTP, FTPS and SFTP with an intuitive graphical user interface.

Download manager: Free Download Manager

With integration support for Chrome, IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari, there’s no reason why one should choose ANY other download manager. I Keep trying other managers and then keep coming back to using this. Supports video downloads and increases download speed manifold.

Web content filtering: Privoxy

It’s a Web proxy based on Internet Junkbuster with advanced filtering capabilities for protecting privacy, filtering Web page content and removing ads, banners, pop-ups, and other obnoxious Internet junk.

Password Bank: Keepass

The only software that I entrust with all my passwords, except the banking ones, which continue to remain in my head ;), though there is no reason why I should not transfer it on this.

Image editor & viewer: Irfanview

The Best image viewer. Simple yet powerful. You can use this for viewing to converting to creating images. Don’t forget to download the plugins available which enhances the experience of using this masterpiece.

Music Player: Foobar 2000

An amazingly light piece of software that does best what it has to do. Play music.

Audio & Video Converter: Super

Have had a high success rate for converting multimedia files with this software. It might take some time to get used to the interface. But once you are aware of the features, it is a very powerful application. It can convert audio and video files to virtually any format. Their website has the comprehensive list of possible conversions.

Torrent: uTorrent

The homepage of this software says everything, “A Powerhouse With a Tiny Appetite”. Look forward to a future post explaining the whole torrent business, if you are not aware of what exactly is a torrent.

CD/DVD Burner: CD Burner XP

Have tried lots of softwares for burning CD / DVD. The simplicity and reliability of this one makes it a must for everybody.

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Wolfram|Alpha

Most of us have got accustomed to the google search engine for our daily requirements. What if there was a search engine which went a step ahead and gives you a handful of computational answers depending on your search query?

Enter Wolfram|Alpha (http://www94.wolframalpha.com). The next generation search engine which might not kill google but it is definitely an alternative to many of the questions that google does not answer at one shot.

It's a computational knowledge engine: it generates output by doing computations from its own internal knowledge base, instead of searching the web and returning links. Eventually you should be able to ask it about essentially any kind of systematic factual knowledge. You can get an idea of what it covers today by looking at the examples. It gives you real time answers on weather, stock quotes, time zones, all of mathematical computations, chemistry, physics, socio economic, people, culture etc..

You will get hooked onto it once you have started using it. Spent about 10 minutes on the site and found out some interesting details

• My surname is ranked 831st in the world and one in every 7133 people have this surname. So guess it’s not very uncommon.
• I’m 10,377 days old and there was only 11 hours of daylight on the day I was born.
• 1 million rupees is currently valued at $20,980.
• My country is ranked 7, 2 and 12 among the biggest countries in terms of area, population and GDP respectively.
• I’ve learnt the full native name for my country just now. Shame on me!

Stephen Wolfram and his team certainly weren’t short of humor when they built this search engine. People have been finding some interesting easter eggs within Wolfram Alpha, triggered by specific questions or events. Ben Parr has posted a collection of these which at

http://mashable.com/2009/05/17/wolfram-easter-eggs/

http://mashable.com/2009/05/17/better-wolfram-easter-eggs/

Would definitely recommend everybody to spend some time time on Wolfram|Alpha, go through the examples, screencast, community forum.. You will certainly learn something new every time you pay a visit.

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Thread Compressor for MS Outlook

In the usual course of communication via e-mail, there’s a conversation chain. Conversations do usually follow a simple principle. User A writes an email to User B. User B receives the email, reads it and replies to User B. The reply includes all of the content that was send to User B plus the reply. User A receives the email and then replies back, again with all the contents included that he initially send to User A, plus the reply of User A plus his own answer. And so forth.. The amount of data in mail keeps on increasing as we just hit either to reply which by default carries the previous mail data.

Thread Compressor (http://threadcompressor.co.uk/) is an add-in to Microsoft Outlook, which removed unnecessary emails from a "thread" - reducing the amount of storage required (maybe keeping your mailbox within its size quota) and reducing the number of emails you need to read.

Once this is installed as an addin, it automatically compresses all the mails by default which the author also warns on his site “Let me say that again: Thread Compressor, as it is configured by default, WILL DELETE DATA FROM YOUR INBOX.”

With TC, you may choose to have it actively delete content. Otherwise, you could have it move "compressed" items to your Deleted Items folder or some other folder you may create (in a PST file, for example). There's also an option on the Advanced tab to have it not remove mail, but just mark it as read. Or to keep various flavours of mail (like high priority ones).

Installation & Instructions to use can be found from the author’s site. Play around, you’ll end up saving a good quantity of mailbox space.

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Outlook Attach View

To those for whom Microsoft Outlook is second life and their administrator has set limits on the mailbox size, Outlook Attach View is a tiny(78k) portable life saver.

The software program scans the emails of the Microsoft Outlook version that is installed on the computer system for email attachments. These Outlook email attachments are then displayed in a table format which gives the user options to sort the data in all possible ways. The information that are extracted from the Outlook emails are the filename of the email attachment, the recipient, file size and data of creation among other values.

Email attachments can be selected by the user to retrieve additional information about them. It is possible to save email attachments by selecting them and clicking on the Save selected items button in the software program. It is furthermore possible to delete selected email attachments directly in the software as well. This could be a handy way of copying email attachments from Outlook to another hard drive to free up some disk space.

The list of email attachments that has been found can be exported into various formats including text, html and xml.

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Foxit PDF Preview Handler

For many of the people who are using Outlook as the means of communication, the auto preview of attachment is a boon. While the default preview handlers are restricted to MS-Office applications, images & text files, we are left wanting for quite a few other previewers especially zip & pdf.

Tim Heuer has come to the rescue by writing a preview handler for PDF’s using Foxit Reader, which is the best software for reading pdf files, called Foxit PDF Preview Handler.

It does exactly what is required and is very light weight. There is no official foxit support included for this add-on, but Tim will offer assistance in troubleshooting in case of any problems.

It works on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 build7000. You can download the software from here.

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Get alerts on new emails via SMS

GSN SMS Notifier is an application that alerts you about new e-mails via SMS, directly to your cell phone.
SMS delivery can be done via ICQ (for free) or Skype (Skype Credits required).
Currently supported e-mail types are Gmail and POP3.
GSN is FREEWARE.

GSN will need to be configured before it is used.

 

The program has to be running in the background to be able to check the email account regularly and send SMS messages out if new emails have arrived that are matching the rules.

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