Shanks J's List: Softwares

Windows/Mac: Glow Doodle turns your webcam into an extended exposure camera, perfect for creating hand-drawn light streak art.

We've previously showed you how to use extended exposures to photograph light trails left behind by moving objects, including stars. While your web cam is nowhere near the level of sophistication you'd need for capturing star trails, thanks to the simple app Glow Doodle, you can use it capture images created with bright lights, like LEDs. The red spiral shown above was created using a small red keychain LED flashlight.

Glow Doodle works best in a darkened room, although the galleries at the link below show off ways people have used Glow Doodle under regular lighting conditions for cools effects. If you make a doodle you're proud of, make sure to share a link in the comments below. Glow Doodle is freeware and available for Windows and Mac

Windows only: When you need to access your desktop, it's just a quick WIN+D away, right? Sure, if you don't mind stuffing everything back into the taskbar. Desk Topmost pulls up your desktop for quick file access.

Desk Topmost, when activated via hotkey, floats your desktop over your existing windows so you can access any folders or shortcuts you have there. If your desktop is spartan, the tool won't be of much use, but for people who use their desktops for collection, Desk Topmost is a handy tool. By floating your desktop to the top of the pile, you spare yourself the lag that occurs when you minimize numerous open windows. Desk Topmost is available for Windows 2000 through Windows 7, but be forewarned that the transparency only works on Windows Vista and forward. Desk Topmost is freeware, Windows only

6 great free cleanup utilities for Windows

How to Fix VirtualBox USB Support
Step-by-step tutorial with screenshots

The Suite includes over 200 highly selected portable programs and games (7-Zip, Audacity, CCleaner, eMule, FileZilla, Firefox, Foxit Reader, GIMP, IrfanView, Miranda, Notepad++, Opera, Thunderbird, µTorrent, VLC and many more). Over 5 million users have downloaded it.

MetatOgger: audio tagger with “acoustic fingerprinting” and other powerful options

Metatogger Screenshot coverartMetatOgger is a free, powerful program for tagging and renaming MP3s and other audio files. It offers the functions you would expect from a tag editor (e.g. mass renaming, tags from filenames or path, scripts to perform editing functions) as well as a few that are not so common, such as “acoustic fingerprinting” of unknown songs using the MusicBrainz database, built in album art search, importing lyrics from lyricwiki.org into your audio tags, and the ability to download a massive audio tag database that it can use as a tagging resource.

Freewaregenius 5-Star PickApplying the correct tags and cover art to your audio library may feel like a never ending quest or even an impossible one; fortunately, however, there are sophisticated tools such as MetatOgger to help with the task. I’d previously written about Mp3Tag, an excellent audio tagging and renaming app, but MetatOgger it notable because it has a couple of interesting functions that Mp3Tag does not, including acoustic fingerprinting and audio tag lookups via its own downloadable database.

This software has a lot of potential, but also needs to iron out some significant kinks. Here’s a list of some of the features that MetatOgger has that I like the most, as well as a list of those I do NOT like so much.

My favorite MetatOgger features (also known as the PROS section):

* Acoustic fingerprinting: is your recourse for audio files that has no information whatsoever (or simply for identifying missing info). Acoustic fingerprinting is a process whereby the software “listens” to the audio and compares its digital fingerprint with the huge Musicbrainz community database. MetatOgger can query this database on demand to instantly populate missing audio tags without user intervention.
* Metatogger Screenshot filtersColumn-header filters: you can easily not notice that you can perform this really useful function (see image to the right). Would have

It is not easy as it sounds to transfer a Windows installation DVD to a flash drive. The whole process can be divided into two manual steps. Files from the Windows installation DVD have to be transferred to the USB drive which has to be made bootable as well. Beginners might prefer an easier solution to the manual approach.

WinToFlash has been designed to make the process as straightforward as possible. The portable software program comes with a wizard that helps users transfer files from a Windows installation DVD to an USB flash drive. The software supports the transfer of various Windows installation DVDs, namely transferring Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003 and 2008 or Windows 7 installations to an USB flash drive.

windows installation dvd

The program can also transfer Windows PE installations to USB flash drive. All it basically takes to transfer the files is to specify the path of the Windows installation DVD and the path of the USB flash drive. The program will handle the rest. It will transfer the installation DVD to the USB flash drive and make the flash drive bootable so that users can boot from it and install the Windows operating system from USB flash drive.

WinToFlash is available from the developer’s homepage. The program is compatible with most versions of the Microsoft operating system.

Why SerialNumber.in is a winner:

* • Fast searching. Autofill performs as it should to provide accurate query results, although more generic (basic) searching works well, too!
* • No annoying ads. The site is clean, with no adverts and no unnecessary click-ins to receive serial numbers.
* • No Captcha. That’s right - just search and get your serial results, without having to jump through captcha crap.
* • Add your own. Visitors are able to add their own serials to the database for programs that aren’t listed.

FilePasswords.com is a new database that provides a free feature to search for passwords in files that are downloaded from popular file-hosters. For example; you’ve stumbled across a file hosted on RapidShare, but after downloading it you’ve found the archive (ZIP/RAR) is password-protected. That’s where FilePasswords can come in handy - simply search for the file name (or even an exact URL) and perhaps FPS can come back with the required unlocking password.

Better still, FilePasswords also provides valid download links for a search query and the associated password for it - making it a decent search utility as well. The site works by indexing various DDL forums that tend to add their own special password to the DL links (lame tactic, we know - but one that won’t go away anytime soon).

From what we’ve seen in our search results, only RapidShare links are supported (so far). And you’ll have to go through captcha (at least once) to get to the password required to unlock the download. TIP: The password tends to be the name of the DDL forum from which the originating release was posted, so this provides the source of the files. Regardless you’ll probably still require the password anyways, which brings us full circle to why FilePasswords was created.