September 1st, 2010 Software | comments_icon2 Comments

WinMerge – file and directory comparison tool

winmerge_icon I have been hanging out in Theme Hybrid forums lately (it is research for new theme, not having fun solving obscure code puzzles, honestly! :) One of recent inquiries was how to determine if files were modified and what was changed.

One of those tasks you can’t expect human to do reliably (browsing several hundreds of files and thousand of lines – yeaaaah), but computers are wickedly good at. I wanted to recommend something free, light and convenient (instead of heavier stuff I use generally) and remembered WinMerge.

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August 30th, 2010 Software | comments_icon1 Comment

RegFileExport – CLI utility for offline registry access

Windows registry is no marvel but most of the time it works. Until it doesn’t. Being obscure and not human-readable stuff there are very few ways to get information out of registry that belongs to offline (or just dead) Windows installation.

Nirsoft had just released new utility that allows to export data out of offline registry files.

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August 28th, 2010 Software | comments_icon2 Comments

Remove descriptions from Opera bookmarks

opera I had posted on bookmarks in Opera from bookmark basics to killer bookmark techniques.

One of the aspects I hadn’t covered much is performance. Bookmarks are thoroughly indexed in Opera for awesome incremental search functionality. So large amount of them can cause noticeable performance issues.

One of the ways to shred some seconds of that processing is discarding descriptions.

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August 23rd, 2010 Thoughts | comments_icon3 Comments

Is unmaintained software worse?

I often mention that software had not been updated in a long time or development was stopped in downsides section of posts. On other hand plenty of software titles I can wholeheartedly recommend are plain ancient and hadn’t been touched by developer in years.

What’s up with that? Development or lack of one is not always clearly cut plus or minus for the app.

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August 21st, 2010 Script | comments_iconNo Comments

Make sense of WordPress excerpts and teasers

wordpress When a lot of polish is applied to front end of application in some cases internal logic becomes layered and obscure.

Questions like “why posts don’t have read more links?” or “why only some of excerpts have […] after theme?” are one of the most common and about one of the most misunderstood (from my impressions) aspects of basic WordPress elements.

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August 18th, 2010 Software | comments_icon4 Comments

LockHunter – manages locked files, folders and drives

lockhunter_icon There had been some tension around Unlocker among techies, after few recent versions came with stuff bundled (effectively switching app from being freeware to adware).

I caught few mentions of LockHunter (app to unlock plus delete locked files and more) both in and out of this context and decided to check it out.

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August 16th, 2010 Software | comments_iconNo Comments

Tabbles – non-standard take on file management

tabbles_icon Another one of my long-time email inbox residents, Tabbles is an application that took me few attempts to approach.

File management is a topic widely beaten and I don’t actually know (or really believe in) an app that pulls off something novel in usable way. On other hand there are file management sub-tasks that some apps are better at than others.

Tabbles describes itself as document management and file tagging software.

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