System Update Readiness Tool (CheckSur)

"System resources, such as file data, registry data, and even in-memory data, can develop inconsistencies during the lifetime of the operating system. These inconsistencies might be caused by various hardware failures or might be caused by software issues. In some cases, these inconsistencies can affect the Windows servicing store, and they can cause software updates not to work. The System Update Readiness Tool tries to resolve these inconsistencies."

For Vista, Server 2K8, and Windows 7.

This has been helpful in the past for failing installations of .NET and related patches. Takes quite a while to run.

OutlookTempCleaner

OutlookTempCleaner is a support tool for Microsoft Office Outlook. It gives you easy access to the Temp folder that Outlook uses to open attachments. It further allows you to automate maintenance to it via Windows's Scheduled Tasks.

Main Program Features

• Easy access to Outlook's SecureTempFolder used for opening attachments
• Determination of the current size of the folder
• Empty the folder
• Command line options to perform maintenance to the folder via for instance Scheduled Tasks and logon/logoff scripts

Secunia Personal Software Inspector (PSI)

"Used by millions of home users around the world, the Secunia PSI is a free security tool designed with the sole purpose of helping you secure your computer against vulnerabilities in programs."

Free for personal use. Both Microsoft and non-Microsoft software. Windows only.

Sumatra PDF

"Sumatra PDF is a slim, free, open-source PDF viewer for Windows. Portable out of the box.

Sumatra has a minimalistic design. Simplicity has a higher priority than a lot of features.

It's small and starts up very fast.

It's designed for portable use: only one file so you can run it from external USB drive. Doesn't write to registry."

Microsoft Exchange Remote Connectivity Analyzer

“The Remote Connectivity Analyzer is a web based tool that's designed to help IT administrators to troubleshoot connectivity issues with their Exchange Server deployments. It allows administrators to test connectivity to their Exchange domains remotely from outside of their organizations internal networks. In order to use this tool, you must enter the credentials of a working account from the Exchange domain to be tested. To avoid the potential risk of working credentials being exploited and therefore compromising the security of your Exchange environment, we strongly recommend that you create a test account for the purpose of using this tool, and delete this account immediately after you have completed the connectivity testing.”

Ubuntu "Extras" to Add After an Installation

Ubuntu can play many non-free media formats such as Flash, MP3, Quicktime, WMV, DVD, etc. These formats are not supported "out of the box" due to various conflicts in licensing philosophies but they can be installed with a simple command entered in a terminal window:

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras

This link indicates that this is for Ubuntu 9.04, 8.10, 8.04 but it worked for my 9.10 version as well. There is an alternate 9.04 / 9.10 installation option on this link as well but I have not tried it yet.

Additional extras such as Google Earth, Real Player and video codecs can be installed via Medibuntu (Multimedia, Entertainment & Distractions In Ubuntu). "Medibuntu is a packaging project dedicated to distributing software that cannot be included in Ubuntu for various reasons, related to geographical variations in legislation regarding intellectual property, security and other issues."

To add the repository:

sudo wget --output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list
http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/$(lsb_release -cs).list &&
sudo apt-get --quiet update && sudo apt-get --yes --quiet
--allow-unauthenticated install medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get
--quiet update

Full installation instructions are here, in the Ubuntu documentation.

The Medibuntu repository is deactivated by upgrading to a newer Ubuntu version so you will need to run the command again after upgrading.

Note that Medibuntu no longer provides Acrobat Reader (acroread). Instead, enable the Canonical partner repository under System->Administration->Software Sources->Third Party Software.

ASSP

"Stop Spam with the Anti-Spam-SMTP-Proxy (ASSP)

Want to put an end to SPAM? Try the deadly poison of ASSP!

Congratulations! You have just found the absolute best SPAM fighting weapon that the world has ever known! When it comes to killing SPAM nothing is as deadly as an ASSP! Check out the ASSP project site at sourceforge.net! "

http://assp.sourceforge.net/

VirtualBox

"VirtualBox is a powerful x86 and AMD64/Intel64 virtualization product for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). See "About VirtualBox" for an introduction.

Presently, VirtualBox runs on Windows, Linux, Macintosh and OpenSolaris hosts and supports a large number of guest operating systems including but not limited to Windows (NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista, Windows 7), DOS/Windows 3.x, Linux (2.4 and 2.6), Solaris and OpenSolaris, and OpenBSD.

VirtualBox is being actively developed with frequent releases and has an ever growing list of features, supported guest operating systems and platforms it runs on. VirtualBox is a community effort backed by a dedicated company: everyone is encouraged to contribute while Sun ensures the product always meets professional quality criteria."

15 Free Stock Photo Sites

http://sixrevisions.com/resources/15-best-places-for-designers-to-get-free-stock-photos-online/

"I’m not sure if you’ve ever had a look at the prices on some non-stock photography sites (pictures of Gummy bears for $769.00 anyone?), but they reach far beyond the budget of the typical designer/developer. However, many places online allow you to obtain high-quality stock photos for free, giving the average starving artist a chance to create wonderful works of art/design without having to use next month’s rent on stock photos."

KeePass Password Safe

KeePass is a free, open source, light-weight and easy-to-use password manager.

What is KeePass?
Today you need to remember many passwords. You need a password for the Windows network logon, your e-mail account, your homepage's FTP password, online passwords (like website member account), etc. etc. etc. The list is endless. Also, you should use different passwords for each account. Because if you use only one password everywhere and someone gets this password you have a problem... A serious problem. The thief would have access to your e-mail account, homepage, etc. Unimaginable.

KeePass is a free open source password manager, which helps you to manage your passwords in a secure way. You can put all your passwords in one database, which is locked with one master key or a key file. So you only have to remember one single master password or select the key file to unlock the whole database. The databases are encrypted using the best and most secure encryption algorithms currently known (AES and Twofish). For more information, see the features page.

Used and recommended by my friend Tony.

Macrium Reflect

Macrium Reflect is an image backup program. There is a free Edition (for personal use).

Absolutely free! No strings! The only free XP and Vista compatible disk imaging software with BartPE and Linux based recovery options.

• Create a disk image whilst running Windows using Microsoft Volume Shadow copy Service (VSS).
• Image to Network, USB, FireWire drives and DVD.
• Built in scheduler.
• 32 bit and native 64 bit versions.
• Industry leading compression levels and speed.
• Linux based Rescue CD with Network access and full GUI. Only 6.5MB in size!
• Built in CD/DVD packet writing engine. Supports packet writing to DVD DL media with Windows Vista.
• HTML log files.

Microsoft Security Essentials

"Microsoft Security Essentials provides real-time protection for your home PC that guards against viruses, spyware, and other malicious software.

Microsoft Security Essentials is a free* download from Microsoft that is simple to install, easy to use, and always kept up to date so you can be assured your PC is protected by the latest technology. It’s easy to tell if your PC is secure — when you’re green, you’re good. It’s that simple.

Microsoft Security Essentials runs quietly and efficiently in the background so that you are free to use your Windows-based PC the way you want—without interruptions or long computer wait times."

Works on XP SP2 and higher.

Openfiler

Openfiler is an open-source "storage management operating system" that takes the Linux OS and makes it into a SAN controller. It can all be configured with a web browser. It can act as both SAN or NAS. It supports multiple iSCSI targets with multiple LUNs.

A Step-By-Step OpenFiler tutorial by David Davis: “Use OpenFiler as your Free VMware ESX SAN Server“ and how to configure for a static IP.

Another free option: StarWind. Their free version supports up to 2TB.

jBidWatcher

Since I'm looking at eBay tonight, another utility: jBidWatcher

A Java-based application allowing you to monitor auctions you're not part of, submit bids, snipe (bid at the last moment), and otherwise track your auction-site experience. It includes adult-auction management, MANY currencies (pound, dollar (US, Canada, Australian, and New Taiwanese) and euro, presently), drag-and-drop of auction URLs, an original, unique and powerful 'multisniping' feature, a relatively nice UI, and is known to work cleanly under Linux, Windows, Solaris, and MacOSX from the same binary.

eBay Desktop

If you like to shop on eBay, give the free eBay Desktop a try. It's faster and has a few useful features that the web-based version does not.

YouTube Comment Snob

YouTube Comment Snob is a Firefox add-on that:

filters out undesirable comments from YouTube comment threads. You can choose to have any of the following rules mark a comment for removal:

• More than # spelling mistakes: The number of mistakes is customizable, and the extension uses Firefox's built-in spell checker.
• All capital letters
• No capital letters
• Doesn't start with a capital letter
• Excessive punctuation (!!!! ????)
• Excessive capitalization
• Profanity

Startup Delayer

Startup Delayer by r2 Studios purports to speed up windows boot-up time. Reviewed by PCWorld and highly rated.

From the r2 web site:

When Windows loads it's Startup file, it attempts to load every program in there at the same time. Therefore if you have quite a lot of programs starting when Windows starts, each program will try and grab CPU time so that it can load.

If each program tries to do this at the same time, you soon notice the slow down that occurs, due to your CPU trying to help all the programs to load, and your hard disk accessing multiple files.

Startup Delayer allows you to setup how many seconds after Windows has started, to load each program.

For Example:
If you have your mail program and a special clock starting up, then you can make your mail start say 10 seconds after Windows has loaded, and then the special clock start 20 seconds after Windows Starts.

Prezi

Prezi - an interesting-looking presentation tool. An interesting and creative PowerPoint alternative? Free, online version.

Balsamiq Mockups

Balsamiq Mockups is both a desktop application and online tool for designing user interface (UI) mockups. It sports a simple and powerful interface that makes for quick UI design and idea communication.

An even better option: iPlotz

R-Studio

"R-Studio is a family of powerful and cost-effective undelete and data recovery software. Empowered by the new unique data recovery technologies, it is the most comprehensive data recovery solution for recovery files from FAT12/16/32, NTFS, NTFS5 (created or updated by Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista), HFS/HFS+ (Macintosh), Little and Big Endian variants of UFS1/UFS2 (FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD/Solaris) and Ext2FS/Ext3FS (Linux) partitions. It functions on local and network disks, even if such partitions are formatted, damaged or deleted. Flexible parameter settings give you absolute control over data recovery."