I hate to disappoint, but today’s post is unicorn-free. Instead, the topic for today is how to vastly improve your computing experience with the addition of a couple of awesome utilities.
This is by no means comprehensive, but I hope that it might provide you with a few insightful suggestions for getting things done more efficiently…or at least more pleasantly. This post is going to be Windows-focused; in the future I may provide a similar post for Mac users, although it will probably just be several paragraphs talking about how awesome Quicksilver is.
Without further ado…on with the utilities!
In today’s electronic world, we all have a lot of passwords and sensitive data to manage. You need your Gmail password, your network login, your spouse’s Social Security number, and the private key for your PGP encryption. Well, okay, maybe nobody really needs to worry about that last one. But for everything else, it’s essential to keep these passwords/secrets locked away somewhere other than the moleskin in your Crumpler. And for that, I highly recommend the secure password manager, PINs.
PINs is a totally free piece of software written by a fine fellow by the name of Mirek Wojtowicz. It is lightweight and secure, using 448 bit Blowfish encoding. Yes, I said “blowfish”. If it made you giggle, then you don’t really need to know what it means. Suffice it to say it’s secure enough to store your ATM password, although why you would store your ATM password in a computer file is beyond me.
_PINs Password manager – download_
By this time, everyone is familar with the concept of PDF – or Portable Document Format. It’s a document standard created by Adobe that allows, amongst other things, documents to be created that don’t require native fonts and can basically look the same on any computer/platform.
The ability to open and view a PDF is absolutely necessary these days. If you happen to be running a Mac, this ability is built right into the operating system. If you’re using Windows, it’s a different story. Most people will tell you that you need Adobe Acrobat in order to read PDF files. And while that definitely used to be the case, it’s no longer true. There’s nothing inherently wrong with Acrobat, except that it uses WAY more resources than necessary to do what it does – and it can be kind of slow. Enter Foxit Reader.
The fine folks at Foxit Software have created this incredibly lightweight PDF reader, which is my favorite tool for the job. It’s free, quick, light, and it also has the word “fox” in it, which makes you think of Firefox, which is awesome, so therefore, Foxit Reader gets a little of that coolness by proxy. Give it a try over Acrobat – I think you’ll enjoy it. Well, as much as one can be said to “enjoy” a PDF reader.
_Foxit PDF Reader – download_