Editor alumnus Kyle Pott pointed us toward a collection of striking, high-quality wallpaper images, all available free from Microsoft Technical Evangelist Mike Swanson’s blog. The images are mostly nature based and available in common desktop and laptop resolutions. Most are nature-based, and all of them shot with an eye for icon placement and light balance. For more free desktop dressing, including fonts and icons, check out Gina’s Top 10 roundup of free wallpaper, fonts and icon sources.
Recover Any Password in Firefox with the Asterisk Revealer
The Firefox Asterisk Revealer bookmarklet reveals the contents of any password field (i.e., a field whose text is obscured by asterisks) in an alert box using a simple bit of javascript—particularly handy for those sites for which you’ve saved the password but long since forgotten what it is. The post itself just includes the javascript, but you can turn it into a bookmarklet by simply right-clicking your Bookmarks toolbar and selecting New Bookmark, and then pasting the javascript into the Location field.
Synchronize Your Computer’s Time with DS Clock
Windows only: Synchronize your computer’s clock with numerous time servers around the world using freeware application DS Clock. On its first run, it will dock itself on the top right hand corner of your desktop, but you can customize its look and feel as well as its position quite easily. As an added bonus, DS Clock comes with a stopwatch so that you can track the time it takes to perform certain tasks online. Not bad. DS Clock is a freeware application for all flavors of Windows.
Lock Down Your PC with Trust-No-Exe
Windows only: Lock down your PC and prevent unauthorized executable files from running with freeware application Trust-No-Exe. As the computer’s administrator, you can set up a whitelist of clean executable files that you will allow to run and selectively block others. Once installed, Trust-No-Exe adds an entry to your Control Panel, from which you can tweak your whitelist and blacklist. If you’re heading home to fix your mom and dad’s computer for the seventh consecutive year, you might want to add this to your Thanksgiving rescue kit. It’s not foolproof, but it could be a worthwhile deterrent. Trust-No-Exe is freeware, Windows only.
Set Custom “Ringtones” for Your Email Inbox
Custom ringtones on our phones have been making it easy to tell who’s calling (and whether we want to answer) without looking at our phones for years now, so why aren’t we doing the same thing with our incoming email? A frequently firing new-email alert can throw you off a productivity sweep with nothing more than a gentle ding. You rush to your inbox to open this new gift of an email just to find that… oh… it’s another borderline offensive mass email chain from your cousin-in-law. Today I’ll show you how to set up custom alerts with your favorite desktop email client to minimize email distraction without missing important messages.
This post was inspired by this excellent post at weblog Inspect My Gadget.
Nice way to find out who the email is from. Only problem is if you have to many set you may have information over load.
