SpeedFan is a fast and small program for showing and monitoring various temperature sensors on your computer as well as reading S.M.A.R.T. values from your hard drive. It can also read and monitor voltages from most computers. I use it mostly to look at temperatures for my hard drive, for which I sometimes wonder if it overheats. Very valuable to read the S.M.A.R.T. values to see if there are any cluster reallocation, etc. The tool is a must have.
February 16th, 2008
1:34 pm
Office
PDF Exchange Viewer is a fast and lightweight pdf reader. Don’t let the name fool you – it allows you to do some editing, which makes it very valuable tool. Here are some important features at a glance:
- Allows you to add callouts, text fields, highlighting, drawing different shapes, sticky notes, arrows, etc. in a .pdf file
- You can neatly overlay text, which is very useful trying to fill a scanned form
- Deleting, Rotating and Cropping pages is also a worthy feature.
All edits you do are later visible in Adobe Acrobat Reader, so annotating and exchanging notes is easy. All things considered I think it is a very nice addition to your freeware collection.
February 13th, 2008
12:57 pm
.NET
Kaxaml is a nice looking lightweight XAML editor, which features intellisense and live preview of your XAML files. It offers a split view, similar to XAMLPad, included in the Windows SDK. It igves you a chance to play with XAML without downloading the SDK, although for anything serious I would use you Visual Studio. Here is a screenshot to spice your appetite:
A problem I just struggled with on Windows Vista and Visual Studio 2008 on a 120 dpi setting. The problem is that Visual Studio looked really bad by default on a high DPI setting. The solution to the problem is to go to the Visual Studio shortcut and go to Properties > Compatibility and check “Disable display scaling on high DPI settings” (see screenshot below). Other non-high DPI aware programs like Total Commander also suffer from the same problem.
Have you ever wondered how these pictures, composed by only characters are made? Ascgen dotNET is a software that can help with the task. Basically it works as a converter from a real image and then this image is converted to characters. Very easy and intuitive to use in just a few steps. It works best if you have a relatively high contrast image with distinct shapes, so it is easily recognizable.
The program allows you to select a whole or part of an image, tune the brightness and contrast of the input image as well as fine tune the output (ASCII) image. For the output generation it allows brightness/contrast changes, levels cropping and midpoint selection, dithering level. It offers real time view of the changes, so you see what the output is.
It is portable and only requires you to have the .NET 2.0 framework installed (available via windows update for XP and below and Vista comes with it…). Very interesting and fun to play with…
SpeedFan is a fast and small program for showing and monitoring various temperature sensors on your computer as well as reading S.M.A.R.T. values from your hard drive. It can also read and monitor voltages from most computers. I use it mostly to look at temperatures for my hard drive, for which I sometimes wonder if it overheats. Very valuable to read the S.M.A.R.T. values to see if there are any cluster reallocation, etc. The tool is a must have.
