Tools

And why would you want to do that?

Some of my best thoughts come from conversation.  A phone conversation, a chat, conversations with myself when I am driving down the road.  I think I’m a pretty smart girl.  Quite often, some of my conversations get quite deep.  The answer to something I’ve been looking for is in the conversation.  But an hour later when the conversation is done; so is that thought.  Even if I could write that one thought down, it is dependent on the conversation that came before and the conversation that came after.

While the brain (another thing I’ve always been interested in) is a far better ‘computer’ with far more capability and I’m sure that it captures everything .. we’ve got our lives so cluttered with crap that recollection is hard to come by.

So these are the tools I use …

When you need to rename just one file or just a few, the utilities provided with the operating system work great. But what if you want to rename LOTS of files? What if you want to rename them so that they are consistently named? What if you want to process them in a batch? This is where THE RENAME excels. Written by Hervé Thouzard, The Rename allows you to do all of these tasks – allowing you to preview your changes and auditing for conflicts BEFORE the rename actually occurs. It’s freeware. You may donate to the author or support cancer research via the author’s website.

We have used a variety of FTP clients and servers to transfer data between locations. Typically, our clients (even the big ones) use the FTP tools included with the operating system. It’s great that they are there – and when used only occasionally or to do something quick and dirty – they do the job – but … we’ve encountered the occasional error with these applications because they are typically single-threaded applications and choke when you feed them large files.

An open source application, FileZilla is a fast FTP and SFTP client for Windows with a lot of features. Both client and server modules are available.

We all like something free now and then. It’s even better when it’s something of quality for free …  Picasa® is a digital photo album owned by Google®—one of the (if not THE) top-rated search engines on the internet.