Free (Simple) (un-Ad-full) Online Backup

FranticIndustries featured a post about free (and simple) online backup services: 5 Simple Ways to Store Your Files Online. These services apparently do not "ad" one to death, don't require special software, and are easy to use. What a relief! Interesting that one of the services mentioned, ewedrive, just became a sponsor of FranticIndustries. Turnabout is fair play! (And to give credit where credit is due, Lifehacker featured a post this weekend about FranticIndustries!)

FaveFreewareSiteOfTheDay

...Has got to be TechSupportAlert's The 46 Best-ever Freeware Utilities. It's enough to make your mouth water! I happened onto it looking for the Last Free Version of XYplorer, a Windows Explorer replacement. Who knows what else a person might find here?!

Check it out, and comment or digg!

Personal Finance Software a la Envelope

Mauder's Money Matters posted A Quick Update on Envelope Budgeting Software a few months ago, comparing two "envelope style budgeting" programs. I found this highly interesting, because envelope-style personal financial software seems to be a rare enough species. I'm currently using--or trying to use--Mvelopes, and my experience has been very similar to what Mr. Mauder describes.

Getting Finances Done has a number of useful posts about budgeting, including How to Create a Zero-based Budget. The links and comments got me started on a long evening's research of (free) personal finance software. Zenhabits' 6 Great Free Alternatives to Quicken & MS Money offers six (!) alternatives, which are multiplied like rabbits in the comments. The paid alternatives mentioned: You Need a Budget, Mvelopes, and myspendingplan.com.

YNAB, the other envelope-style software mentioned by Mr. Mauder, is not free, but it costs a fraction of an Mvelopes subscription of any duration worth mentioning.

I'm on the hunt for alternatives to Mvelopes. YNAB might be worth looking into.

Comments? Suggestions? Have you used Mvelopes or YNAB?

Need a Mint?

Mint acquired Mint.com...and is throwing a party! Leave a comment at the party and get yourself twenty pounds of mints!

Cool, very cool.

Giveaway of the Day

The Giveaway of the Day site does just that...gives away free downloads of otherwise non-freeware. The free download time is limited to the day the software is offered--so subscribe to the feed or otherwise remind yourself to "check back". The offerings are varied!

Productivity Article of the Day

Here's a nice checklist of "things you already know" (or maybe really didn't) for upping your productivity in a day. Check out 9 Effective Ways to Get 200% More Work Done. [Do note, for your Grammar, that "9" should be spelled out :-). I reckon the author can be pardoned if he really gets 200% more done in a day!]
How about an article entitled Double Your Reading Rate? Oldie ideas but goodies. Anyone out there have favorite speed-reading strategies?

ING Direct Electric Orange 4% Checking

The Simple Dollar has a nice article on the author's experience with ING's Electric Orange checking account (entirely online, 4% interest, overdraft line of credit). Trent, the author, outlines the pro's and con's quite nicely. Couldn't have done better myself :-). The comments are very informative as well. Check it out! (no pun intended!)

FaveFinanceSiteOfTheDay

...is FreeMoneyFinance. The thought-provoking post for today is Something Money Doesn't Buy: Life. I also keep a feed to TheSimpleDollar.com. Bankrate.com also has a host of Personal Finance articles, calculators, rate information, and links (I subscribe to e-mails about articles in my own areas of interest). The ten tabs under News and Advice make for some fruitful browsing. You might also want to check out the Mint Blog that I made reference to in a March post. Do you have any favorite Frugal/Finance sites?

How to reduce the memory usage on Firefox?

This article gives you simple steps to optimize your PC memory usage



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FaveFreeware of the Day - StrokeIt

StrokeIt has gotten mention here and there lately: a Download of the Day at Lifehacker, votes in the Top 10 comments, etc. I've tried the MouseGestures extension for Firefox (with not so much success), but the neat thing about StrokeIt is that it is 'global'--and can be set up to work (or not work) in various applications, or in the Windows interface itself. Now that I like! It does take a little bit of training--both of the program and of the user! Having invested so far about a half hour in such training, I like the results. To really be able to get some good out of it, I'd say it's necessary to be geekish enough to be able to match up some commands with some gestures & applications (definitely helps here to be an avid right-clicker). If you can get through the training period, hey--it's all yours! If you check the 'prompt me' box, it will even try to learn your gestures it doesn't recognize. Can't beat that--it's a fast learner :-).

Top 500 Free Fonts

Lifehacker has a post today linking to the web's "top 500" free fonts. The site is probably getting a lot of hits today--I couldn't get "in" until after repeat tries over about a ten-minute period. Way to go, Lifehacker. Wendy, you come up with some neat stuff! Thanks!

Need Two Cents Worth?

Here's some free advice for how to do 450+ things freely with freeware! and more!

GDS Enterprise Version

It recently came to my attention that there is an Enterprise version of Google Desktop Search. Check it out here!

UN-FaveFreeware of the Day

Ouch. I installed ImageSkill's Outliner as a plugin associated to my Paint Shop Pro application. This is what Paint Shop Pro thinks of it:

This copy of Paint Shop Pro has been damaged or illegally modified. Please reinstall from your original source.

So much for that relationship! Uninstalling Outliner brought Paint Shop Pro back on its feet with no apparent hard feelings. I was then able to reinstall Outliner into its own directory, and add the Outliner directory to Paint Shop Pro's list of plugin directories. Whew--they're working together now.

Outliner at least stands a chance now of becoming a Favorite instead of an UN-Favorite!

NTLDR is missing error

Another "can you help me fix this?" situation today led me to some useful instructions at http://ntldrismissing.com/. You might need them if you go to boot up and get the error pictured here! The site has a number of possible solutions you may want to try (before crying 'Uncle!' and heading for the repair shop).

Google Search (experts) can't find lost snake!

This is an ironically hilarious article!



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Paint .NET 3.05 Final Just Released! Best Paint Replacement For Windows

Paint.NET is image and photo manipulation software designed to be used on computers that run Windows 2000, XP, Vista, or Server 2003. It supports layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. The new version includes a new "Pencil Sketch" effect, better vista support, performance enhancements and bugfixes...

This latest version was released March 29, 2007. I'm liking it already!

Get it here: http://www.getpaint.net/download.html



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Today's favorite: send to toys

One in a series of "freeware favorites of the day". These are real-life favorites of the blog's author, worth checking out.



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Today's FaveFreeWare

...is Send To Toys, a nice little tool published by Gabriele Ponti. As its name suggests, it is an enhancement of the system "send to" menu (2000/XP and higher).

This toy was recently updated to version 2.5 on 2/10/07.

I love toys like this! I play with this one a lot!

------------------------------------------------------FaveFreeWare 4/3/07

Freeware Resource

The site http://www.woundedmoon.org/win32_freeware.html advertises itself thus: "Freeware programs that either went commercial after these versions or were discontinued, or are hard to find or just plain good".

The site, in turn, has this suggestion: Check out the newsgroup: [alt.comp.freeware] for some good discussions about freeware programs new and old! A nice place to spend some time...

There are also other freeware lists and links at the bottom of the woundedmoon page.

Happy Browsing!

Prevx

Prevx is going to get a free referral out of this story (don't say I never did anything for them! :-)).
I recently tried to help out a friend whose Useful Internet Speed had decelerated to approximately zero, even when she was using my DSL wireless connection. All of her available bytes, as it turned out, were being eaten by a worm who was furiously calling home about every millisecond or so (give or take 999 milliseconds). Her free antivirus program kept jailing a particular file (repeatedly, with accompanying pop-up notifications), while the real culprit continued the calls home, seemingly unhindered. Hey, at least her AV program could identify that a problem existed!
I took a peek inside the AV jail and googled the incarcerated filename--which is how I stumbled upon Prevx, who had the offender listed as 'bad'--known malware. Sophos also came up in my search, with a cure as well (which was most readily available by installing Sophos and going from there). Not seeing any $ signs around, we downloaded Prevx1, which munched and ate the worm and it troubled my friend no further. (She can now use her internet connections without help from homesick worms.)
Now here's the "catch" with Prevx--it's free! That is, its preventative powers may be used indefinitely at no cost. But if you want to use its curative powers (to munch worms, for example) you must pay. Now you can pay per incident, or you can subscribe. I suppose that theoretically, if Prevx's preventative powers were adequate to forestall any threat (and you had only one single problem to fix at the outset), there would only ever be one incident to pay for. Well, I chose to subscribe, and I'd bet most people do.
Prevx works on a somewhat different principle than your typical AV application. It's kind of like a citizen militia out to protect its citizens. It is advantageous (for Prevx's threat database, which relies on the "community") to have as many citizens as possible join the militia. Oh, wow, I can see it now--"The People's Prevx"! Oh my, I shouldn't have uttered that without asking for royalties :-). Anyway, Prevx works on this concept that 'more members' mean 'more information' and a more effective data base.
By way of conclusion, I do consider Prevx (be it free or not) worth checking out. There are some interesting stats compiled about various threats, and theoretically, it will protect us more rapidly than a paid Force--being comprised of a (hopefully) large number of citizens like you and I!
If you've tried Prevx (or its cousin Cyberhawk) please pitch in a tell us about your experience!

Lifehacker List

Lifehacker just published a "Top 10 Free Windows Downloads" list. The list itself can be much debated, of course--which it currently is being (debated) in the numerous comments. Now, the comments themselves form an extremely useful two-cents-worth of currently available and in-use free downloads! Having a look at the comments will certainly be worth your while.

A new blog by a Freeware enthusiast

Info and links about neat free software and other solution-oriented browsing opportunities!



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My Two Cents is up and running!

Now, I'm always in the market for new software! As long as it's free, brilliant, and helpful!

One of my recent favorites is the little piece of freeware called KO Approach by KO Software. It is billed as "...a desktop Shell Enhancement that enables quicker access to files and folders with a set of hierachical menus. " It really is a knockout, as far as I'm concerned. I click for a couple seconds on a folder containing pictures, for example. A list of the contents is displayed, and as I scroll down, a preview of each photo. Neat. Cool. Awesome--whatever your word is! You'll find more at the KO Approach website. "Striving for convenience," it says. Love it!

I frequent solution-oriented sites such as Lifehacker.com and lifehack.org. I get Google News and Simple Dollar feeds, and e-mails from nearly everywhere (for example, Bankrate.com). I recently came upon a link to Mint, which intrigued me, because I have not yet found a brilliant money-management software--much less a free one. Will MyMint be it? Time will tell. I'm anxiously awaiting the beta version. Check out the Mint blog, and click on the link in the upper left corner.

Stay tuned!