MozBackup is a free utility for backing up your Mozilla, Firefox and Thunderbird profiles. Mozilla haven’t yet released an official backup tool, and while it’s possible to achieve the same effect by manually copying folders, MozBackup makes the process much simpler.
Lifehacker points out a quick and easy way to work on two documents side-by-side. Simply Ctrl+click their buttons on the task bar and select Tile Vertically. You can also use Ctrl+clicking to tile horizontally and close or minimize multiple windows at once. I’ve been using Windows XP since it first came out in 2002 and this was news to me!
Alex Feinman’s ISO Recorder allows you to burn CD/DVD ISO images under Windows XP/2003/Vista without the need for a dedicated CD burning application. Lucersoft’s LC ISO Creator enables you to do the process in reverse, i.e. create an ISO image from a physical CD/DVD.
Edit: Alex’s ISO Recorder now supports image creation, removing the need for an external tool such as LC ISO Creator.
Zamzar is a free online converter for documents, audio and video files. Just upload the file you want to convert, choose the output format and enter your email address. Zamzar will get to work and email your converted file when it’s ready.
TeraCopy speeds up Windows file copy operations as well as adding a few much-needed features such as smart error recovery and a pause button. It integrates with the Windows shell completely so you don’t need to run a separate program to reap the benefits. It’s a free download for home users; the Pro version is $19.95 (about £10). Highly recommended!
Thunderbird has the somewhat strange default behaviour of starting replies below the quoted message. Fortunately there is an option to change this, and I’m mentioning it here as it’s a little hidden away and I had trouble finding it myself.
Click Tools (from the menu bar), then Account Settings. Now choose Composition and Addressing which appears under your account name on the left. Underneath Automatically quote the original message when replying (which should be checked) you can then change start my reply below the quote to start my reply above the quote. Easy as that!
There are a number of product key recovery utilities for Windows – Magical Jellybean Keyfinder is the first one that comes to mind, possibly because of the name – but ProduKey is the first I’ve seen that will recover keys from other installations, for example via a local area network or from slave hard drives. It also recovers keys for Office and SQL Server, and at a diminutive 31KB, deserves a place on any technician’s USB drive. It is one of a number of freeware utilities available from the NirSoft website.
Edit: Actually the new version of Magical Jelly Bean has similar functionality, although it’s still in beta at the moment.
Today I needed to recover one of my FTP account passwords from FileZilla. If you find yourself in the same situation, there is a free tool available here which does the trick nicely, along with password removal/recovery tools for a whole host of other programs.
If you don’t feel the need to be reminded of your computer manufacturer every time you use the System or Performance Information & Tools applets, copy the following (italicised) lines into a blank Notepad document and save to your desktop as RemoveBranding.reg. Then double-click the file and accept the prompts to permanently* remove your manufacturer’s name and logo.
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\OEMInformation]
“HelpCustomized”=dword:00000000
“Logo”=””
“SupportHours”=””
“Manufacturer”=””
“SupportPhone”=””
“SupportURL”=””[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winsat\WindowsExperienceIndexOemInfo]
“Logo”=””
If you’d also like to hide the logo from the Welcome Center, rename the oobe.xml file (which you will find in C:\Windows\System32\OOBE\Info) to something else, e.g. oldoobe.xml.
* In case you ever want to restore the System/Performance Info branding, you should first back up the relevant registry keys. To reinstate the Welcome Center branding, simply rename oldoobe.xml back to oobe.xml.
I’ve just been doing some PHP programming and the following error came up:
Parse error: parse error, unexpected ‘)’, expecting T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM in /home/foo/bar/baz.php on line 81
Turns out that Paamayim Nekudotayim means ‘double colon’ in Hebrew and is the official name of the scope resolution operator. I guess it’s the PHP developers’ idea of a joke…
Anyway, the cause of the error in my case was a dollar sign missing from the front of a variable.