now before i start. I’m not Scott Hanselman, so don’t expect a comprehensive list of cool tools to make your life easier, I just wanted to write down the little nerdy tools I have on my PC that make my life easier / nicer (mainly nicer) - what follows is not big, clever or complete.
Nicifying my PC
- F.lux - adapts the colour temperature of your screen depending on the time of day - reflecting the colours around you, in the day it’s bright and white, at night you pc will have a nice warm glow. this means at night you have a less intense computer screen to look at.
Desktop Earth- Make yourself feel like you are
[caption id=”attachment_253” align=”alignright” width=”300” caption=”Desktop Earth - clouds and everything”]
in the west wing situation room everyday - desktop earth replaces your desktop background with a picture of the earth, and and ever updating shadow as the sun moves across the sky, for added coolness it also updates the clouds every three hours from a composite satellite picture of the current atmosphere.
Daily Stuff
- Microsoft Security Essentials - It saddens me when people are scared into buying expensive virus checkers when getting a computer. there are enough good free virus checkers out there to protect people. Microsoft Security Essentials is the only virus checker that has survived on any of my computers, because it’s low maintenance, and quick and free.
- Picasa - we have lots of pictures picasa handles them well (except for the mega non-movable thumbnail db in my profile)
Internets
Chrome - well of course. but with the following extensions:
- Google+ Notifications
- Screen Capture (by google) does whole pages
- Window Resizer (quickly snap the browser to size)
- Google Mail Checker
- Better google tasks
- RSS Subscription Extension (get the orange logo back)* Google Reader - I’m not going to start a comprehensive list of websites, but I’ve said this before if your not using an RSS reader then you are using the internet wrong. Google Reader recently got updated and ‘lost’ some features. the fact it’s still the best choice is just testament as to how far ahead of anything it is.
Developer Stuff
- Notepad++ - for a long time i held out with Programmers Notepad 2 - and i still think it’s interface is slightly nicer, but notepad++ just edges it on features (but not by much).
- WAMP - it’s my slightly eccentric Apache, php, mySQL install on windows, I’ve never really liked xammp, it’s clunky and demanding, wamp sits in the my taskbar (when I want it to) and just works.
and more - yes there are lots more, I use office, visual studio, spotify, twitter, facebook, and many more, but I just wanted to put some of the less mainstream stuff down.