VLC is a feature rich media players that plays EVERYTHING. No matter what type of file I have thrown at VLC it has handled it without an issue. VLC does not require the installation of additional codecs. It plays most every file immediately after installation. VLC is also skinable so you can customize the way VLC looks.

VLC media Player is a free and open source cross platform (Windows/Mac/Linux)  media player. I highly recommend it.

You can grab VLC from http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

Say you are looking for a camera and you go to Amazon and find the camera you want. While on the page a little yellow bar will appear and tell you if the same product is cheaper elsewhere or if this is the best price. Automatically.

I love this extension. It has saved me a nice chunk of change so far and the best part is that you don’t have to remember to launch it. The invisible hand just appears and tells you the relevant information.

The invisible hand is available for Firefox 3.5+, Google Chrome, Safari and Internet Explorer. You can get it at http://www.getinvisiblehand.com/

What extensions are you using? Let me know if the comments.

Identity theft is a serious problem and it does not look like it is getting any better. People are starting to use strong passwords but they use the same one for all sites they visit. This is VERY risky. Suppose your twitter account information gets stolen. If you use the same username and password on all you sites the hacker now has access to ALL your sites (E-mail/Amazon/PayPal/Facebook …). This happened to a colleague of mine. His Facebook account was hacked and from there the hacker took control of several other accounts including his E-mail. In the age of on-line banking this also can mean unfettered access to your money.

There are published guides on how to minimize the chances of identity theft and minimize the impact if your accounts get hacked. One of the strategies is to use long and complex passwords that are unique per site. That means that your password should be something like 4rtR0!fp<kl for webmail and a different set of random mixed characters for amazon. The obvious problem is remembering all that gibberish. So how do you manage all those passwords?

One solution is to use a password manager that has all the passwords stored in an internal encrypted database. KeePass is a great product for doing that. But that means that you have to have your KeePass database where ever you go, which is not always practical.

The better approach is to use a password hash. This means you use a mathematical formula to combine two strings to generate a unique third string. In plain English  this means you need to remember one master password and the site name and you still get a really strong password.

For example lets say my master password was ‘arisblog’, which is pretty easy to remember. if I use the hasher for the site Amazon I would get a password hash of ‘OQe7ppddC/pfwp1r’ every time. I never need to remember that mess. I just need to remember my master password. If I use the same master password  for the google sites I would get a password of ‘bl78nulbR/Grgcxy’. Those are some pretty hard to guess or hack passwords.

Password Hasher Plus builds this functionality into Chrome. You can set the length and type of your hashed password. I recommend at least 16 characters of both Alphanumeric and Special characters.

This is a port of the firefox extension from the wijjo site written by Steve Cooper. The wijjo site also has an online password hasher that works in any browser. You can use the online version if you are away from home on a public computer to generate the password hash to login to your sites. This is really the simple way of keeping site secure.

What methods do you use to keep your passwords secure? Tell me in the comments.

Also did I mention it was FAST? Chrome is fast at initial startup and fast at loading pages. Chrome has one annoying lack of feature on the Windows version (it is ok on OSX – I have not checked this one on Linux). When you are in full screen mode (which looks great!) you cannot get to the address bar to navigate to a new page!!! This is really annoying.  There is a bug for this issue (http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=8022) and no fix is in site. If you are annoyed by this lack of feature please leave your 2 cents on the bug page.

In addition to the extensions you can install themes which allow you to change the look of the Chrome interface.

Chrome is free from Google.  It runs on Windows, OSX and Linux. You can get it at http://www.google.com/chrome

Let me know what browser or plugins you use in the comments!

SpaceMonger

SpaceMonger is a visual tool that lets you see in an instant the sizes of all the directories on your hard disk. The new version is not free but the original SpaceMonger 1.x version is free and it gets the job done.

You can download SpaceMonger version 1.x from http://www.sixty-five.cc/sm/v1x.php

“I got this .mkv (or insert other format here) video file and it won’t play on my machine. It says I don’t have the right codec. What do i do?”

First let me address what a codec is. A codec is an algorithm for compress and decompressing videos. If your computer does not have the algorithm it will not be able to decompress the video and you will not be able to watch the file.

So how do you get the codecs you need? The best option is to download a codec pack. A codec pack  is a group of codecs .. you guessed it.. packed together. The one I like to use is the k-lite codec pack.

K-lite codec pack

K-lite comes in three flavors basic, standard and full. The standard and full contain more codecs than the basic. I recommend grabbing the full pack. After you install the pack you will be able to play back the vast majority of videos available. k-lite also has the codecs needed for DVD playback.

In addition to the codecs the pack comes bundled with Media Player Classic (more on that in another post).

You can download the k-lite codec pack from http://www.free-codecs.com/download/K_lite_codec_pack.htm

Filezilla allows you to keep a customized database of FTP sites. The database can store site addresses, login credentials, server type and notes.

Filezilla also has a free open source FTP server available for download.

You can download Filezilla FTP client and server  from the website http://filezilla-project.org/index.php

WinMerge

Like WinDiff, WinMerge allows you to compare individual files and directories. However, WinMerge also lets you move different sections between the files with one click. This lets you selectively merge the 2 files with the content you want. This feature is very useful when checking different versions of configuration files or code.

Also WinMerge has plugin support for other formats like MS Word and Excel.

Best of all WinMerge is free and Open Source.

You can download Winmerge at http://winmerge.org/downloads/

sample personal font

You download a PDF template file that you need to print out. You then fill in the letters in your handwrting. After you finish filling out the template you need to scan it in and upload the file to the site.

Wait a few moments and the site will return to you a TTF file which you can use on a Windows, Mac, or Linux system.

You can access the free service at http://www.yourfonts.com/

I hate copying files on a Windows system. The system will start coping a file and if I want to copy another file while the first one is going it does so in parallel slowing down the whole process. If a copy process encounters an error  – forget it. The whole copy process dies and you have lost the queue and have no idea where you were up to. SuperCopier 2 fixes these issues in a small easy to use utility.

supercopier

SuperCopier manages you copy list so that additional copy requests are handled in order and not in parallel. This means all of your file copies happen quicker. You can also pause and resume file copy and move processes.

You can download SuperCopier from http://supercopier.sfxteam.org/modules/mydownloads/

Grab the SuperCopier 2 Beta 1.9 (it is about 1/3 of the way down the page). SuperCopier is free Software and runs on Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP/2003 (Sorry Vista users).

PuTTY Connection Manager lets you manage PuTTY connections in multiple tabs and allows you to maintain a database of PuTTY connections. The database of conenctions can be encrypted. PuTTY connection manager also integrated your existing PuTTY connection database.

You can download PuTTY Connection Manager at http://puttycm.free.fr/#

You need PuTTY installed http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/

PuTTY Connection manager also requires Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0