java jane's world: misanthrope musings of an gen80s chick

EULAlyzer - Quick Scan EULA's for privacy threats

Link: EULAlyzer - Reviews and free downloads at Download.com.

EULAlyzer can analyze license agreements in seconds, and provide a detailed listing of potentially interesting words and phrases. Discover if the software you're about to install displays pop-up ads, transmits personally identifiable information, uses unique identifiers to track you, or more.

Five Star Freeware: Net Snippets

A few people have recommended this and it seems too good to be true, but apparently it is the "real deal". I am downloading this tonight and giving it a whirl. If it does half of what it says it does it earns a permanent place in the Queen of Freeware's 5 Star Freeware Files Hall of Fame. From the developer's site:

The Scoop:

You’re on the Web looking for information. Your web research turns up the information you need, scattered in several sites, a couple of articles, a few lines in a web forum. Now what?

If you have Net Snippets Free Edition, our free research software - now is when you treat yourself to a coffee. You’ve already snipped the stuff you really need out of those pages/articles/forums. A line here, a paragraph there, perhaps a picture. It’s all already organized into folders with source information attached. You did it on-the-fly while reading the text. It was that quick and easy.       

If you don’t have the Net Snippets free research tool, now is when life gets complicated.
You link all those sources to your Favorites and lose the information when its address changes. Or you save them to your computer and worry later about how to find them again, and what it was in them that two days ago you thought was relevant. Or you start cutting-and-pasting text and links into your favorite word processor. When does Computer Rage overtake you? Is it the fifth time you have to tell Word to convert a web table to text? When that picture ends up in the top left corner of the document? Or only the day after, when you see you forgot to copy over a vital link and can’t remember where the information came from?

Net Snippets Free Edition is a totally free research tool designed for anyone looking for a quick, easy way to conduct web research and collect, organize and share online information. School students who need free research software for homework assignments and projects. Individual investors managing their portfolios through the Web. Public library users to collect the information they’ve found, and take or email it home. Patients and their families looking for information about a medical condition. Family history searchers, recipe collectors, E-bay and Amazon aficionados. Net Snippets is the best tool for comparison-shopping! In short, it’s the must-have free research tool for everyone searching the web. We guarantee you’ll ask yourself how you managed without it. (If you’re a business user or professional researcher, and "lite" research software doesn’t meet your needs, check out the fuller features of our Professional Edition).

Key features:

• Capture text and graphics from anywhere into one location.
• Select text and images from a web page.
• Capture entire web pages.
• Simple drag-and-drop operation.
• Save and annotate exactly what you need.      
• Save only the text/graphics you want.
• Save and annotate links.
• Add your personal comments.

Forget about copying addresses. Net Snippets automatically saves the source information for you.

• It’s fast, simple and completely safe.      
• Stable, well-established application, thousands of individual and corporate users.
• Optimized to work fast and download fast.
• No hidden files: you can completely uninstall at any time.
• We guarantee to respect your privacy: no spyware, no usage tracking, your information stays yours alone.
• Share information with colleagues and friends.      
• Email snippets together: automatic conversion to MHT file for delivery.
• Friends who have Net Snippets can automatically import snippets sent them into their own collection.

       

And it’s completely free!

• No ads, no promotions, no "just fill in this 3-page questionnaire". No time limit. When we say "free research software", we mean it. It’s free, period.
• Use it, enjoy it, share it with your friends (if they have it too, you can share your web research with them).
• You pay nothing unless you decide to upgrade.

more freeware downloads to try

i'm going to test drive this freeware app over the weekend, but it looks very promising, especially since i do so many repetative tasks and typing. so far it seems like it's getting great reviews from across the web. i hear the author's "butler" program is another must have "compliment" to a power user's box.

You can download Texptander and Butler from Peter Maurer's website, but here is a quick snippet from the site that describes the app. let me know if you use the program and how you like it!

DESCRIPTION:

Textpander is a utility that helps you type more efficiently and more accurately. Textpander listens to what you type and inserts predefined text snippets on the fly whenever you enter their corresponding abbreviations. Here are a few examples for what you can do with Textpander: • Insert standard greetings, text fragments, and signatures — including formatted text and pictures. • Insert the current date and time in any format you prefer. • Use editor-independent code templates and have Textpander position the cursor just where it needs to be. • Type special characters without having to launch any special characters palette. • Have Textpander correct typos automatically. • Import text snippets from other typing utilities. Textpander is controlled from its own preference pane inside your System Preferences. Being designed for easy handling, Textpander blends in perfectly with your operating system. This is what Textpander's snippets editor looks like:

so many addictions, so little time...

it's not monday again, is it? i'd feel much better if it were. it's been extraordinarily dry and unseasonably warm here in the Hudson Valley with only a couple days of rain since the beginning of august. i'm not complaining, really! driving this a.m. i noted that it's going to be an unfortunate fall foliage season, as the trees are just drying and turning brown, rather than their usual brilliant hues painting the landscape. oh, well.

i guess i better feed that first addiction and go grab me some more java.

*okay, that's better.*

now onto some other little "addictions" i've been nursing, other than the known coffee habit. freeware, fonts and graphics/graphic programs for starters. my mottos? i've never seen a good font i couldn't live without. i'll never use all of them, but  i sure love to lookie at all of them and know their mine. mostly i comb free font sites, of which i'll compile a handy list shortly, but since i scrapbook, once and awhile i'll shell out (minimal - say two bucks?) coinage for something "special". for that i usually head over to two peas in a bucket and swipe something nifty.

second addiction, good freeware. and there is more good freeware than you think. you just have to be a freeware addicted geek like myself to read all the reviews and download it all like the mad woman i am. first, HERE are just 46 of the best freeware utilities, with details, available. i run much of it on my computer. I'm using an older version of ZoneAlarm (until they de-bug the 6.0 release), Avast! anti-virus (formerly used Anti-vir which was good on detection, but no e-mail scanning and ugly GUI, so I'm liking Avast! better), Ewido for trojan scanning, of course the perennial winners Ad-aware and Spybot. i recently started using Firefox and Thunderbird and am nearly ready to ditch IE and Outlook Express entirely. i just wonder why the heck it took me so long. ironically, even though i have made Firefox my default browser, i still use the IE extension to browse my own Generation80s Retro Radio site as it is not totally Mozilla compliant. I installed one of the main site components, the popular SHOUT BOX, which has really migrated to "simple chat client" and it doesn't seem to display properly in Firefox and i have no idea why. that's on my growing "to do" list, but it's moved up considerably now that it affects me. (ha,ha, isn't that par for the course!) once that tweak is made, it's buh-bye IE.

of course this is some of the basic freeware i use. i have tons more and will plop reviews and links to the lesser known utilities and apps often, 'coz i'm addicted to freeware. speaking of that, i downloaded GIMP, an open source graphics program, last night (see button below for download) which i have installed, but haven't test driven yet. watch for a review down the road.

not enough coffee yet, but what a nice seg into my third, but not final addiction, graphics and graphic programs. you'll be seeing more on that too. right now i'm using a trial upgrade of PhotoShop Elements 3.0 (along with PhotoShop 6.0, unfortunately can't upgrade to CS) and i think it's a nice improvement from a tool standpoint from 2.0, although the interface and selection panes seems to be much more cluttered and require tweaking or it seriously reduces work space compared to the earlier version. again, i don't think you can ever have too many graphics (some of which i'll share on this site in my random graphics album) or plug-ins and a handful of graphics programs helps out as some handle certain functions more easily than others.  i'm really a graphics novice although i sure like to play, so i collect tutorials as well...so you know...when i'm not stumbling all over the web, chatting on my site or blogging while adeptly navigating my "real world" life, social, financial, domestic and otherwise, i can sit down and teach myself a few things. <grin>

well gonna try to empty that coffee pot (a barista vacuum machine, artsy yet amazing coffee) and do some of that "real world" nonsense.

ciao!

"the j-ster"