CyberNet News » Freeware

Browse Windows System Restore Points

Ryan — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 10:29:34 +0000

Windows only
If you’ve been having problems with your computer you may be contemplating using the built-in Windows System Restore utility, but what if you could browse the backed up files instead and just grab the ones you need? That’s the exact purpose of the free System Restore Explorer that works on Windows Vista and Windows 7.

To use the application all you have to do is open it, select the restore point you want to browse, and click the Mount button. You should see Windows Explorer immediately popup, and the location it is pointing to is a temporary address you can use to browse your computer’s file system at the time the System Restore point was taken. From there you can grab any files and folders you need, and then you can unmount it once you’re done.

System Restore Explorer Homepage (Windows only; Freeware)

Quickly Edit Any Content on a Website

Ryan — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 10:11:16 +0000

There are times where you might want to change content on a site, but doing so with Chrome’s built-in web developer tools can sometimes be a pain. With the Live Page Editor Chrome extension, however, all that changes because you can directly edit content on a site without having to dig through the source code of a page. All you have to do is click the Live Page Editor icon in the Chrome toolbar, and then click anywhere on the page to start typing. You can even remove text that you don’t want there anymore.

Keep in mind that the changes you make on any site will not be persistent, which means as soon as you refresh the page they will be gone. So why is this useful then? Well, if you ever take screenshots of a website that has personal information on it then you’ll find an extension such as this one to be very useful. Instead of blurring or blacking out your personal information you can instead change it to something more generic so that your screenshots look a little cleaner.

Live Page Editor Extension for Chrome

View Free Space and Eject Drives from the Mac Menu Bar

Ryan — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 09:31:40 +0000

Mac only
There is a free app in the Mac App Store called FreeSpace Tab (iTunes page link) that is pretty slick for anyone that needs to monitor how much space is left on their system or constantly eject drives. Once installed there will be an icon in your Menu Bar, and when clicked shows everything that is mounted on your system. You can eject any of the removable volumes (external drives, DMG images that are mounted, etc…) with a single click.

With FreeSpace Tab you can also add informative text next to the icon in the menu bar. That includes showing the disk space available of the primary drive or the percentage of space available.

The only thing I wish was added to the app is an action for clicking on a volume in the menu. Right now if you click on a drive/volume it doesn’t do anything. I think it should instead open up that drive in Finder, or something along those lines.

FreeSpace Tab iTunes Page (Mac only; Freeware)

Free Log File Viewer for Windows/Linux

Ryan — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 12:05:17 +0000

Windows; Linux
We covered a log file viewer awhile back that served as an excellent way to open extremely large files. There’s another app called Glogg that I found recently though that also does a greg job of handling large files, and comes equipped with some really nice features.

Glogg has a really strong focus on searching, which is good because a lot of times that’s exactly what you want to do in a log file. It supports regular expression search queries, and the results are show in the bottom pane. Next to the scroll bar you’ll also see blue lines indicated where results were found, and the two black lines represent the area of the log file you are currently viewing.

In the screenshot above you can also see the little blue arrows along the left side of some of the lines. Those appear when you click on the white circles, and kind of serve as a way to bookmark/flag important lines. Once the line is flagged it will appear in the bottom pane just like with search results. That makes it a little easier to compare important lines from the log file.

There is another nice feature tucked away in the Tools menu as well, and that is Filters. With the Filters you can provide multiple search patterns that you want to find in the log file, and for each one you can specify a different background and text color. That way when you’re simply scrolling through the log file the specific lines you are looking for will really stand out.

Glogg Homepage (Windows/Linux; Freeware)

Free Office-Style WYSIWYG HTML Editor

Ryan — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 10:06:21 +0000

Windows only
There aren’t a lot of free WYSIWYG editors out, and the ones that are available normally have terrible interfaces with limited functionality. I’m not a huge fan of WYSIWYG editors myself, but they can serve as a good starting point if you’re just learning how to code HTML.

The free Trellian WebPage app is nice because it makes use of the Microsoft Office-style Ribbon interface to provide an easy-to-use interface. As you’d expect from an app like this you can edit the content of a page through the WYSIWYG editor, the source code, or a split screen showing both. This program is also helpful if you are working with a free HTML template that you’ve downloaded, which are rather plentiful online.

The only thing I should mention is that when installing the program it tries to install an “SEO toolbar” on your computer, but uncheck the corresponding boxes or choose the “Compact Installation” option it will only install the app.

Trellian WebPage Homepage (Windows only; Freeweare)

View Video File Info (Container, Codec, Aspect Ratio, FPS, Bitrate)

Ryan — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 09:27:20 +0000

Windows; Mac; Linux
If you’re trying to figure out why a video won’t play on your machine it might help if you knew exactly what format you were dealing with. For example, if you’re watching a video but can’t hear any audio it may have to do with the format the audio was encoded in (OGG, MP3, AC3, DTS, AAC, etc…). With MediaInfo you can extract a lot of this pertinent information from your media files.

Here is a list of information you’re able to extract using MediaInfo:

General: title, author, director, album, track number, date, duration
Video: codec, aspect, FPS, bitrate
Audio: codec, sample rate, channels, language, nitrate
Text: language of subtitle
Chapters: number of chapters, list of chapters

There are a lot of different video formats out there, and I can say first-hand that tools like MeidaInfo are a great help with troubleshooting problems playing back videos. It makes it easy to compare multiple files so that you can see what is working, and what’s not working.

MediaInfo Homepage (Windows/Mac/Linux; Freeware)

Distraction Free Writing with FocusWriter

Ryan — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 11:37:01 +0000

Windows; Mac; Linux
Being able to focus on writing can be a tough task, but there are apps that try to help draw your attention to the task at hand. One such free program is FocusWriter that, despite it’s simplistic interface, has a wealth of features and settings available to help you hit your writing goals.

Out-of-the-box FocusWriter will appear as though it’s no more advance than Notepad, but that’s because they tuck away the toolbars into the upper and lower portions of the screen. Just hover your mouse towards the top or bottom of FocusWriter to reveal formatting options, settings, tabs, stats, and much more. Here’s a rundown on some of the features available:

TXT, basic RTF, and basic ODT file support
Timers and alarms
Daily goals
Fully customizable themes
Typewriter sound effects (optional)
Auto-save (optional)
Live statistics (optional)
Spell-checking (optional)
Multi-document support
Sessions
Portable mode (optional)

It should be noted that this runs in fullscreen mode by default, but you can always use it like any other app in a window if that’s what you want.

FocusWriter Homepage (Windows/Mac/Linux; Freeware)

Quickly Manipulate Text in Any Windows App

Ryan — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 11:48:17 +0000

Windows only
Programs like Notepad++ have features that let you quickly manipulate bodies of text, which is something that can be really useful. Unfortunately these features are always restricted to the app you’re using making them only marginally useful compared to what they could be.

Dolphin Text Editor Menu is a great app that bridges the gap by providing a lot of text manipulation features in any program or website where you can type text. After you launch the app you’ll probably want to jump over to the System Tray icon where you can pull up the settings to configure the keyboard shortcut that displays the menu. By default the shortcut is set to Control+Numpad0.

After you’ve got it ready just highlight some text and press the keyboard shortcut. From the menu that appears you’ll be able to sort the text, remove blank lines, change text case, align text, remove HTML, and more. I’ve found this to be a great utility to have, but the challenge is remembering that it’s always there for you to use.

Dolphin Text Editor Menu Homepage (Windows only; Freeware)

Create HDR Photos with Picturenaut

Ryan — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 11:24:11 +0000

Windows only
HDR is the process of combining multiple photos with the hope that the resulting image is clear in both the light and dark areas. Getting good free HDR software that is capable of merging the photos together can be a little tricky since there are a lot of things it has to take into account, such as perfectly aligning each image.

Picturenaut is a free HDR app for Windows that has done a wonderful job with my photos. The program has been in the works for over 4 years, and you can tell that a lot of sweat has been put into making it. Merging your images will generally take just a few seconds, and with the settings available you are able to tweak the resulting photo to look exactly how you want it to.

Here are some of the high-level features offered by Picturenaut:

Automatic image alignment
Exposure correction
Color balancing
Ghost removal
RAW support
Noise level compensation
Full control over camera curve

Picturenaut Homepage (Windows only; Freeware)
[Images used for HDR example are from Wikipedia]

Find and Replace Text in Files

Ryan — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 11:26:28 +0000

Windows only
A few months ago we pointed out that Notepad++ has an option to find and replace text in multiple files, but that is obviously not the sole purpose of the app. If you need to perform a find and replace operation across multiple files I’d highly suggest that you try out a program that focuses on that kind of task, such as TextCrawler. It’s an extremely powerful app when it comes to finding and replacing text.

As you can see from the screenshot above there are a wide array of features spread out across the intuitive interface. Not only can you see what files matched your query, but you can view the exact line in the file that was matched. That way you can make sure the text you’ll be replacing is what you expected, but just to be on the safe side you can still have TextCrawler make a backup of the files before they are changed (just enable this in the settings).

Here are some of the other features:

Search and Replace across files, Insert or Delete text
Fast searching, even on large files
Simple to use interface
Flexible search parameters
Text Extractor – rip text into a new file
Post-process extracted text – sort, remove duplicate lines, remove whitespace
Search and replace using Regular Expressions. Create sophisticated searches.
Regular Expression test tool
Regular Expression library – Save your searches
Create backup files
Highlighted search results
Export Results
Preview Replace Function
Copy found files to new location
Batch Find and Replace

TextCrawler Homepage (Windows only; Freeware)