Windows won’t allow you to rearrange the buttons on your taskbar. If your dependent on having something in a particular location, probably because you’re running it all the time and it’s always on the left side… until it crashes, then Taskbar Shuffle is for you. It allows you to drag and drop buttons on your task bar to any location. It also lets you drag and drop the icons in your system tray in the same way. Better yet, it can hide it’s own icon from the system tray so it’s not taking up any valuable screen space.
Category: Desktop App
You can encrypt just a few files or your entire hard drive with the open source TruCrypt. In the file mode, TruCrypt works by creating a single file that, when unlocked with your pass phrase, mounts itself as a drive on your system. Anything going into this drive is then automatically encrypted. You can then dismount the drive at any time. You can also use it on a flash drive with their own built in utility so you can keep an encrypted file on the flash drive and open it with any computer. I use this in combination with Portable Firefox on a flash drive that I keep on my work computer. I then use it when I’m traveling and need to visit a secure site, such as my bank or credit card. This keeps all of my passwords, account info and all of that sensitive data encrypted and off of my work computer while still leaving me very safe access to it.
Don’t you hate it when Windows says it can’t delete a file because it’s in use. This usually happens after an app crashes, but there are some other times I’ve seen it as well. The free utility Unlocker adds an item to your right-click menu to Unlock the file, or a group of files if you have several selected. It’s as simple clicking unlock and then going back and deleting the file.
Skype is a communications application. You can do instant messaging, video conferencing and voice chat with it all for free. In addition you can use their Skype In and Skype Out services to make calls to and from land line phones to your computer. The rates are quite competitive too, especially internationally. I’ve used it numerous times when I travel to Canada. Pair it up with a Bluetooth headset and I was able to call home for only $0.021 a minute. Much cheaper than my cell phone would have been.
Filezilla is a powerful open source FTP client. It has plenty of built in features to appease any power user, but a simple file transfer is still very straight-forward. I’m particular fond of the nag-once-per-session options when determining which files to overwrite and how. This means when I’m updating WordPress or Gallery that I can tell it to overwrite everything and it will continue to do that until the next time I fire it up.