DeltaCopy
Anybody familiar with incremental backup knows that the de facto standard of backup utilities is a program called rsync. This is an unfortunate truth for Windows user's however because rsync is primarily a unix/linux application. DeltaCopy is a Windows backup program that takes advantage of rsync.
Find and Run Robot 2
Find and Run Robot 2 is the fastest application launcher for Windows I have ever used. Google Desktop fails in comparison when it comes to speed, and it doesn't make my CPU go crazy when indexing like Launchy. After adding a new directory to the list of folders to index, FARR picked up on the files I was searching for in less than a second. It really is stunningly fast. It registers on my machine as only taking up 12MB of RAM.
Disk Defrag
Every once in a while I'll find an article in my RSS feeds for an amazing freeware application that has yet to be added to my site. This is the best free disk defragmentor app for Windows. In a review by TechRadar they gave Auslogics defrag app a 90% efficiency score. This is even more stunning when compared to the ever-popular Defraggler, which only received a 62% score.
Lala
Lala is a neat online application that allows you to "upload" your music library and listen to wherever you go. Lala has an impressive method of accomplishing this. First it will scan your music library and rather than uploading each individual song over FTP, it will instead match as many songs as possible to it's already existing library, and if your songs match those that are already in their database, no upload will take place, they will simply add the song to your online library. Take it from me, this is an amazing time saver.
Unsatisfied With Today's Operating Systems
So am I! Windows, OSX, Linux, I'm not happy with any of them. I'm going to go through each Operating System and list some of my gripes and those aspects of each which I think should be incorporated together in a single stellar OS.
Foobar2000
Are you fed up with iTunes? Well when the installation for updates was getting to be about 70MB, I decided to find an alternative. Why make people download a 70MB file to apply an update your application? iTunes doesn't just have a large footprint, it is so slow! It shouldn't take five minutes to start up a media player and listen to your favorite album.
Kings
I just finished watching the season premier of Kings, which you can watch until September on Hulu. It is an interesting theatrical modern paraphrase of the Biblical narrative found in 1 Samuel. I say this loosely, because it often strays away from the original narrative, though to be fair, I don’t think the authors intended to be faithful to the text, but rather to take advantage of a popular biblical story. Regardless, the show has some good qualities.
7-zip
As far as file compression goes *.7z is one of the best. This application extends Windows' limited archive capabilities. I primarily use it for extracting archives that I download from the web. All Drupal modules and themes come packaged in a *.tar.gz ("tarball") archive, so I'm unarchiving a lot. The interface is very simple and uncomplicated. Extraction time is minimal, and the installer throws some nice options into the right-click context menu.
Drupal Contact Form and Google Apps Email
Here's the situation. I have a domain established that is set up with Google Apps. A particular email account created in GApps is working great, it can send and receive email fine. I'm using Drupal, one of the best content management systems, and its integrated contact form. For some reason when I associate this email address with the contact form, messages sent by the form are not received. So what's the problem?
2 Essential Safari Plugins
Since plugins aren't exactly programs, but rather extensions of programs I figured I'd post these together in the blog section.