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DetoClip is a multi-purpose clipboard manager for Windows that supports a wide range of file types, including TXT, RTF, HTML, BMP etc., allowing you to hold as many clipboard items in its stack as you want. The application is geared towards web developers who deal with dozens of code files, and copy code structures from one file to another. It provides switchable preview between plain text, formatted text and source code for text you copy from web pages, letting you quickly copy the HTML code of selected text to application development IDE. Unlike other clipboard managers, it allows you to edit the clipboard items, making it easy to create customized clipboard items which can then be pasted into required applications.

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People suffering from color blindness cannot always differentiate between different elements of applications and webpages that are in green or red shades, including both text and background color. Most applications, which are designed to reduce the color effects, cater for only some types of color blindness. This means that users end up having to manually adjust color intensity to suit their needs. We earlier covered an application known as Washer, which helped reduce this problem. This time we have another useful application for people suffering from color blindness, labelled Colorblind Assistant. It detects colors from your mouse pointer by providing you with a written name of the color on which your cursor is placed. Moreover, it also provides other useful data about the color, such as the RGB (Red, Green and Blue) values, bar graphs, brightness and saturation. The utility comes with a zoom pane for fine pixel detection.

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Previously, we have covered some very good desktop management applications, such as Desktop Panorama, WindowSlider and mDesktop. All of these desktop managers have their own strengths and weaknesses, some provide you with unlimited side ways scroll capability, while other allow you to preview all the virtual desktops to locate and manage the position of every running application. Today, we have another, very comprehensive, desktop management application for you, which allows you to have more than just multiple virtual desktops on your system. Blacksmith is a portable GUI extension tool and virtual desktop manager for Windows that provides you with the feel of Windows, Android and Mac OS X Lion operating systems. More on Blacksmith after the break.

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Do you often face hard drive crashes and read/write issues while dealing with enormous volumes of data? Perhaps, it’s the time to put your hard disk through a series of tests to measure its overall performance. It happens quite so often that hard disk suddenly halts without showing any type of errors. Using conventional hard drive diagnostic tools in such cases don’t help identify the read/write faults and other like issues. What you probably need is a low-level hard disk diagnostic utility that can perform surface scan of all hard disk volumes to find the potential issues. HDDScan is a powerful, low-level hard disk scan and diagnostic program, which is developed to perform numerous hard disk performance-specific tasks. It supports all types of conventional hard drives including IDE, SATA, SCSI, RAID arrays and external storage mediums including, SD cards, USB, and external hard disks.

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Yesterday, we covered Plastiliq PixelPicker, an application that allows you to view color codes in 10 different formats, such as RGB, ARM, HTML, CMYK, HEX etc. It can detect the color of items on your desktop and lets you view its view in a lot of formats, which can be quiet useful during web designing projects. Plastiliq PixelPicker has its own interface and a memory footprint of around 31 MB, but if you are looking for something lighter, you can check out Instant Eyedropper. It is a system tray based application with a memory foot print of only around 1.2 MB, which allows you to view color values and automatically copy the values to clipboard in multiple formats, without having to access any interface. More on Instant Eyedropper after the break.

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Do you have an annoying boss that keeps spying on you, or is always looking for a chance to catch you off guard. The last thing you need is to appear lazy or irresponsible at work, even when you are taking a break to relaxing your mind by perhaps playing a game, browsing through Facebook or watching a video on YouTube. Let’s face it, all of us need some kind of a break every now and then, before we are able to concentrate on our work. Unfortunately, this is not often understood by incompetent and unprofessional bosses (or, should I say, greedy entrepreneurs that see their work force as nothing more than expendable assets that has no human needs). If your answer is yes, then you need UltraHide. It is a Windows application that hides the active window with the help of a hotkey combination. You can instantly hide the active window using CTRL+Space, which instantly closes and minimizes your active window to the system tray menu. What’s even better, is that this window will only be reopened when you enter your pre defined application password. This means that, even if someone else tries to open these system tray items, they cannot open it without the application’s password.

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Sometimes file directories can have similar file names that can make it nearly impossible to identify a file from within a folder. File Bookmark is a Windows shell extension, which has been designed to bookmark files via the Windows right-click context menu, to find the right file(s) that you have opened earlier from a specific folder. It allows you to automatically mark the last bookmarked file from a folder, so you don’t have to manually look up the file within the folder’s content. This can be quite helpful to avoid  the laborious process of searching out several files from within numerous directories, and to deal with non indexed files (which can be hard to locate).

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Managing your media is very important for you to quickly find what you are looking for instead of wasting time in searching for the required music, video or image file. NextPVR is a Windows application that works as a personal video recorder, media center and media manager for you. It allows you to watch your favorite videos, listen to music and view images. If it’s a DVD or something you have got stored up in your collection in the hard drive, NextPVR plays it all. You can either play the files stored in your PC, or access the ones stored on other devices all across your home network. There is also a web interface which allows you to schedule and stream media from a remote location.

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GonVisor is a Windows application that supports viewing pictures, comics, magazines, content of compressed archives and e-books from various formats, including CBR, CBZ, CBA, CB7, ZIP, RAR, ACE and 7ZIP. With the help of this application, you can create a group of selected images, order/reorder them, add a description (such as the author’s name, date, comment etc), and password protect them. Details past the break.

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Amongst the list of potential hard disk faults and errors, bad cluster is one that doesn’t make it completely non-functional. Hard disk bad cluster, casually known as bad sector, is a small sector which doesn’t respond to read and write requests, and therefore, the device software, which is operating the hard drive, reports it as unusable sector. Bad sectors are usually categorized into two broad types; Physical bad sectors and Logical bad sectors. The former type of clusters on disk need to be mapped out to continue read and write operation on disks, whereas the logical bad sectors are usually reported by the operating system due to its inability to access the cluster on hard disk. In this post, we will briefly discuss each type of bad clusters, and look at some tools that may help you repair bad sectors on hard disk. READ MORE