About Anything

I hate making icons. And I’m not very good at it — drawing something that looks professional on a 16 x 16 canvas is not a skill that I’m ever going to have. We needed some icons for a new web site recently and after a bit of searching found them — and more, almost 1,000 of them, available for free under Creative Commons.

They are available for download at: www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/

With a little command-line wizardry, helped if you’ve got Cygwin installed, you can rename a pile of files. Whenever I do a batch operation in Windows from the command line, I get nervous. I needed to rename several thousand files that came from a book publisher. They were filled with ampersands, parenthesis, spaces and other characters that can be unfriendly when transferred to a Linux-based web server. This little utility made renaming them easy. It’s now part of my can’t-do-without toolkit. I’ve only begun to exploit it’s full functionality.

It’s available for download at: cerebralsynergy.com/download.php?view.55

For years I’ve suffered through posting web content that was sent to me in MS Word format. A cut-and-paste from Word carried all of the Microsoft-supplied gunk that I’d then painfully edit out by hand. I eventually adopted the trick of cutting from the Word doc, pasting to Notepad, cutting from Notepad and then pasting one more time. It saved the cleanup steps, but was still a pain. I finally stumbled over Pure Text, a simple Windows app that removes text formatting from the clipboard. After I installed it, life got a little easier — and that’s what tools are for.

It’s free, available for download at: www.stevemiller.net/puretext/

After you install it, right click the tray icon, select “options” and check “Automatically run Pure Text each time I log on to windows.”

My collection of simple tools is growing. Most of the posts in this category are about techie tools that do only one or two things, but do them well. They’re specialized and make life at the keyboard easier, sometimes more fun and often less time-consuming. When I find a new one, after adding it to my own collection, I end up sending a few messages to friends and colleagues, but then I forget who I’ve informed and who I haven’t. So, I’ll start posting them here — along with a brief comment about why I like each.