E-Musings Mon Immorata

For Now and Forever? While I'm toasting my sunny side, more freeware, and a GMail preview Hey Ho! Am I excited about my first vacation in over 24 months. I'm going to try and stay as far as possible from new-fangled stuff like computers and email. And just chill, recharge and relax. But to give you something to do during my long absence, here's more freeware! File archiving, and extracting files from archives received by email is a daily activity for most computer users. And there are a plethora of utilities available as either freeware or shareware. Have you considered the open-source 7-Zip? This neat tool can extract from, and save to ZIP, CAB, RAR, ARJ, GZIP, BZIP2, TAR, CPIO, RPM and DEB formats as well as its own 7z that features compression exceeding other formats. But the downside being that a recipient of such files needs a copy of the compression software as well. Or you could look at the even more feature-rich, free for non-commercial use IZArc. This supports virtually every file archiving format. Supported types include ACE, ARC, ARJ, B64, BH, BZ, BZ, CAB, CPIO, DEB, ENC, GCA, GZ, GZA, HA, JAR, LHA, LIB, LZH, MBF, MIM, PAK, PK3, RAR, RPM, TAR, TAZ, TBZ, TGZ, TZ, UUE, WAR, XXE, YZ1, Z, ZIP and ZOO. It also handles 7-Zip's 7z format too. And the only formats unable to support are .SIT and .HQX used on the Mac. IZArc appear to be a reverse-engineered version of Power Archiver. The skins for the two software are interchangeable (I checked). And IZArc's menu layout and archive file details are presented identically. Still, as IZArc's free I'm going to continue using it. Of course most of the files I need to extract are downloaded from the Internet. Among all the many such tools I've tested and used, Net Transport stands out. This absolutely free multi-thread file download manager includes an FTP site explorer. Although the latter interface is rudimentary when compared to FileZilla or CuteFTP, it's as good, if not better than the site browser included with GetRight. If you experience intermittent FTP site load issues, make sure you're using v1.8x or later. I also found that sites causing the most timeouts are high-traffic (low-bandwidth?) ones like Mozilla.org which hosts multiple open-source software sites including FreeBSD, OpenOffice, and several other file servers. Other FTP-related problems appear to be caused by mismatches between how Net Transport interprets FTP protocols. As connection logs are hidden, you'll need to dig very deep to figure which sites will, and which won't, work with this software. But these glitches apart, its a great tool that includes a bandwidth limiter. The Windows Troubleshooting Chronicles continue with a discovery of Google's OS-specific search collections. Available for Apple Mac, BSD, Linux Unix and Microsoft their key advantage is you don't need to search data across the entire Google Web Universe; replete as it is with commercially-posted citations that are absolutely irrelevant to what you are looking for! While Googling, I would like to mention I'm a GMail-er. Quite apt since the first two characters are my initials too! However this the much-vaunted service (for which membership invitations were being sold on eBay for upwards of $40 apiece) doesn't equal the hype. To begin with there's zero privacy since all email sent and received is scanned for keywords so that ads may be served. And in an era that highlights categorizing email, GMail's default view remains one huge mail folder mixing received and sent mail. However you can label mail but this is not the default view. There are supposed to be spam controls but so far the only spam redirected into a junk folder is addresses I added to my blacklist! And each time the GMail service is upgraded, all the whitelists seem to vanish. And spam-like message that I want to view are tagged as junk! Luckily blacklists remain unchanged. But what puzzles me the most is how could Google offer an ActiveX-powered mail service. This technology only works with Internet Explorer. And you can access your GMail account without it. Could it be that Microsoft has a secret stake in GMail. Or more plausibly, GMail is targeted at MSN and Hotmail users. Who know. Watch this space for answers! For freeware the Internet seems awash in tools promising to organize bookmarks (Favorites), share bookmarks and more. Amid all the babble shine 2 applications, coincidentally from the same vendor, and both free for personal use. The first is old friend Cogitum's Co-Citer 1.0.23. To use this Internet Explorer-only add-in (also works with MyIE2), begin by selecting text on a web page. Then right-click to view the context menu and "Grab Selected Text .." This open a Co-Citer dialog where you can choose which co-citer database to add it to, as well as the collection (category) you'd like the file the data grab under. The default database is stored in the C:\ root; an unsafe location. Setup a custom named file in your default data folder. As an aside, do consider segregating your hard drive into at least 2 separate partitions. The primary partition (C:\) for Programs like the operating system and other program files. And the first extended partition for Data. Additional logical drives in the extended partition can be used for backup, downloads, music, video, etcetera. And if on Windows make sure to move My Documents from its default location to the Data drive. Make sure too to change your mail folders to the data drive. This way when you next get a virus or some event that junks the operating system, you won't lose data and mail files. Getting back, Co-Citer lets you setup multiple nested collections. The standard view is plain text and unless specifically mentioned hyperlinks are not parsed which is a bummer. Each citation also lists date and time added, title (taken from the web page captured), the text saved, user comments, and of course the source page URL. Each of these fields can be edited. You can export saved citations as a single HTML file, or send a Co-Citer database as an email attachment. There's also import feature to insert another database into your collection. You can also sort and filter citations. And print them too. The second Cognitum software is Image Tracker 2.0 which does for images what Co-Citer does for text. The interface is less developed, and you need to define categories in advance. You can store images in their original size or choose to display all images using a fixed 60x40 pixels. You can export selected images in a collection, or the entire collection to an HTML page. Or send the file as an email attachment. Download your copy today. And with that I depart. So until next month, Stay Safe! Click Here to Email Me