Open Hardware Monitor – quick efficient PC health check
My common gripe with multi-functional hardware informational utilities like PC Wizard is that they are sluggish and pain to navigate for quick and often needed lookups.
Open Hardware Monitor (via ghacks) is specialized app to display hardware temperatures, voltages and frequencies.
Give yourself a backup drill
My external hard drive had somehow managed to escape out of my notebook backpack and end up under a chair. For good chunk of evening I was pretty sure I lost it. Took a trip back to work because I didn’t like the idea of waiting till Monday without definitive verdict on it.
I caught myself thinking that I had some stuff on it that would be pain to re-create. Bad sign. What if I didn’t find it? Losing your media storage (or at least imagining that) puts backup in different light.
Gazopa – search for images by similarity or keywords
When you have one tool that does fine job it is hard to choose right moment to try out alternatives. TinEye worked fine for me, so pitch from Hideki Kobayashi (project leader) about GazoPa gathered dust little longer than usual.
I got to it today and explored this search engine for images that can work both with similarity and keywords.
LabelControl – universal keyboard usage speedup
Modern graphical interfaces are very mouse-driven. Aside from several generic keyboard shortcuts rest of keyboard controls are at mercy of specific app’s developer. Would it not be nice to have a way to breeze with keyboard through any window?
LabelControl is roughly that – universal interface extension, that allows quick jumps to any control, using keyboard alone.
Pre-archived server backup via SFTP/SSH with WinSCP
When reviewing WinSCP I had mentioned its scripting functions and how issues with Cobian Backup FTP backup grew on me. Fetching hundreds of directories and small files over FTP can be quite slow and I discovered that it simply fails to complete at times.
So I thought about making archive of files on remote server and downloading that single archive. All nicely set up and automated with WinSCP.
SpyDLL Remover – specialized library files lookup app
There are so many things going on in Windows background that it is really hard to manage all of those at the same time. Some utilities try to wrangle them with little to moderate success, like Process Explorer. Some specialize.
SpyDLL Remover is an app that is focused on making sense of currently loaded library files.


