Willem Nuijen

Student Liberal Arts and Sciences (UCM Maastricht), Exchange @ANU Canberra (July-December '09) || Interested in philosophy, psychology, technology in society, music, film, essaying, Windows 7, audio compression, cd/dvd-recording, virtualization, Windows customization & stripping

MusicBee – Full-Featured Free Music Manager

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Music managers, not exactly a "niche of software" that is badly represented. Large numbers of these, both commercial and free (open-source) have been around ever since the introduction of portable audio formats such as MP3. However, as it is the kind of software you'll use to great extent, it is particularly in this area where you will be most critical towards comfort of use and the availability of features and customizability. MusicBee is an attempt to provide one with a full-featured playing, tagging, organizing, ripping and synchronizing (e.g. iPod) manager. Lot of stuff to go in there, but hell, this manager manages. Read More

SecurStick – Encrypt USB stick data without administrator privileges

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Data encryption tools like TrueCrypt, BestCrypt or FreeOTFE are perfectly well suited for encryption of USB drives or putting encrypted container files on USB sticks. Unfortunately, this does not guarantee a safe and completely portable storage facility. The problem lies with the necessary evil of a driver that needs to be installed in order to mount the encrypted files (or partitions) on the system. If one does not have administrator privileges on the operating system, the only way to be able to use an encrypted volume is to ask an administrator to pre-install the software... on every single computer you might just want to use your encrypted data. Well, not anymore. Read More

Shoot-out: Dropbox vs. SugarSync

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Backing up files in the cloud has become an activity that has been made sufficiently intuitive to actually improve productivity. Easy-to-use automatic backup clients like Dropbox, Live SkyDrive and Mozy give people easy backup or synchronization facilities. SugarSync is another player in the folder synchronization segment, allowing you to have your files available on all your computers, as well as online. A direct comparison between SugarSync and the better-known Dropbox is the crux of this article. Read More

EASEUS Partition Master Professional – Limited Free Giveaway

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EASEUS has a brilliant philosophy when it comes to improving their products: for a limited time, provide the current version to the public for free, so that more people can provide feedback (feedback@easeus.com) in order to improve the next version. Currently, it is Partition Master that's going for free. On paper, Partition Master is a full-featured partition product, but frankly so are all other commercial alternatives. Not all have a decent backup or 1-on-1 copy feature on-board, though. Copying of (system) partitions can be done to smaller and larger destination partitions without a hassle. Read More

Get Classic Menu And Toolbars In Office 2010 & 2007

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If you simply cannot get used to the new Ribbon interface introduced with Microsoft Office 2007 and then added in Office 2010, the free program UBitMenu can help you significantly in the upgrade to Office 2007 or Office 2010. Once installed, you'll get back the classic menus and toolbar buttons as present up until 2003. Read More

Add Shortcuts In My Computer Context Menu

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Some of the options in the Control Panel are used on a regular basis. However, especially with the changes since Vista and Windows 7, they can be deeply nested into the Panel's structure. With some simple registry entries, these functions can be at the tip of your fingers, as you just have to right-click on the Computer icon to access them. Read More

imo.im – Merge Multiple Chat Accounts Online

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If you're not at home or don't have access to your favorite instant messaging clients for any other reason, there's an easy way to still be able to log onto all your favorite chat accounts: the elegant online service imo.im provides a spartan interface you can use for chatting via your Facebook, Live Messenger, AIM/ICQ, MySpace, Yahoo, Skype and Google Talk account simultaneously, without any additional sign-up. Read More

Get The Realtek Equalizer Back In Windows 7/Vista

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Officially, since Windows Vista and 7, Realtek stopped supporting a multi-band equalizer for it's HD Audio chips(present on many motherboards and in notebooks). All that is left are a couple of extreme presets (Pop, Classic, Rock etc.) and the environment presets that are useful to no-one (except for fun). However, together with some people on Tom's Hardware forums, we came to a solution. Here it goes, it's as easy as one-two... Edit: according to user dimar on Tom's Hardware forums, from R2.41 of the driver, the option to change to a graphic equalizer has returned. Looks like Realtek finally listened to its users. Read More

An Online Backup System To Manage Yourself? Use Opera

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Since the latest 10.10 alpha/beta releases (an unofficial release candidate is already there), Opera's desktop browser supports integrated applications/services that make the browser into a personal music player, a media streaming server, online web-RSS reader, scratch pad, proxy server or whatever you want, anywhere. Basically your web browser is now a web server. The great potential this has is shown by the latest Opera Unite application of the week: Document Sync. Read More

Backup Any Folder to Dropbox, Without Moving It

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Dropbox is a great way to automatically backup your data and get access to it from anywhere with an easy to use web interface. It even provides you with a full history of changes (added recently) and a versioning system, so you can always get back that accidentally overwritten file. Your free 2GB is extendable to 5GB just by inviting others to the service (the invitees get themselves another 250MB for free as well).

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Foxmail – A Full-Featured Email Client & RSS Reader

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Granted, more and more people resort to online services for their email and even everyday office work (Zoho Mail/Docs, Gmail/Google Docs), even entire virtual desktops turn up on the net, giving a quite comprehensive set of tools to substitute your local applications with (think of WebOS's like My SkyTop, EyeOS or G.ho.st). But as of yet, nothing weighs up to the speed, responsiveness and versatility of a locally run application. Even so for managing your email. Read More