My doctor just told me I suffer from a bad case of Utilitus Addictus.
And judging from e-mail messages you send me, you're afflicted, too. There's no
known cure--so why not enjoy the malady by digging into some Internet tools
that have become staples of my home office?
Broken Web site links in e-mail messages drive me batty--and pasting the
link into the browser address bar gets me nowhere. So I copy the link to the
Clipboard and grin while Sells Brothers' UrlRun strips it clean and sends it to
my browser's address field. Download the
free
program to your desktop, and drag and drop it to your Quick
Launch bar to give yourself immediate access to this gem. If you use Outlook,
get the
free
plug-in version.
Snipping's a SnapGreat guy that I am, I make an effort to be considerate--at least when
sending e-mail--by using
SnipURL.com, a free site that
trims long URLs to 13 characters. Add the snipped URL to your e-mail, and when
the recipient clicks it, the site invisibly sends them to the lengthy link. For
easy access, I attached the SnipURL icon to my Internet Explorer toolbar (go to
the site and drag and drop the 'Snip This' link to IE, Netscape, or Opera).
I was nearly at my wit's end trying to deal with Internet Explorer's
intermittent inability to open as a maximized window. Then reader Bryan
Villarin of Temple City, California, informed me about Jonathan Dahl's
IE
New Window Maximizer, a nifty tool that does just what it
claims. But this free utility goes one step farther by doing a pretty decent
job of blocking pernicious pop-up ads, too.
Too many Web sites expect me to fill out lengthy forms with
information that I don't want to share. Instead, I use a free JavaScript called
a bookmarklet (yep, it's a real word) to fill in every field with
anonymous. Other bookmarklets do such things as jumping
backward three pages, silencing the music on a Web page, and resizing the
current window to become full-screen. To get the field-filling one for your PC,
point your browser to
Bookmarklets and drag the AutoFill Anonymous bookmarklet link
into your Favorites list or into the Links portion of your browser's
toolbar.
If you consider completing Web forms a waste of time, download Siber
Systems'
AI
RoboForm, which enters canned data into forms automatically.
Browse to "
Dynamite
Downloads" to find out more
about it.
I get a kick out of Tenebril's $40
GhostSurf Pro, a one-stop
privacy tool for Internet addicts. The program lets me surf anonymously,
covering my Internet tracks from my ISP as well as from the sites I visit. It
blocks ads, keeps spyware from reporting on me, and tells me what data is
entering and leaving my browser. GhostSurf Pro is packed with features, but
it's pretty easy to learn (I got a handle on it after only a couple of days of
fiddling). Get a trial version from
our
downloads page and see for
yourself.
Total
Recorder is my last pearl. It's a $12 program from High
Criteria that lets me record audio from Windows Media Player, RealPlayer, or
other players, and save the resulting sound as an MP3 file. I can snatch radio
interviews (by Terry Gross of National Public Radio's Fresh Air, for instance)
for playback on my MP3 player. The $36 Pro version even lets me schedule
everything from opening NPR's site to starting and saving the recording.
At "
Not-So-Stupid Browser
Utilities" you can get the five
freebies and trial versions of the two shareware programs. Have a neat utility
I missed? Let me know about it. And watch for more tools in my upcoming online
newsletter; go to our
Free
Newsletters page to sign up. Now
I have to go download some fresh Terry Gross.
Tenebril GhostSurf
Pro$40High Criteria Total
Recorder$12 ($36 for the Pro Edition)
