Have you ever looked at your friends list only to be horrified at some of the people (distant acquaintances, old coworkers that you never liked in the first place, or even people who you outright do not know) — that get to see your updates? Well, that’s precisely what the ‘unfriend’ function in Facebook is for. The engineers at Facebook, however, in probably one of the best decisions they have made, have opted NOT to notify users about others who have unfriended them, keeping it under the radar instead.

But if you are curios as to who may have unfriended YOU, then Unfriend Finder, a free Facebook add-on, is what you need.

How it works: download and install the script for your browser. The next time you log into Facebook, you will see an ‘Unfriends’ entry in the left sidebar, and clicking on this will show an icon list of people who unfriended you. Moreover, you can click on ‘pending requests’ to see friend requests you had sent out that have not yet been accepted.

But there’s more: you will now start to see unfriend notifications in real time if and when they do happen (see below).

The verdict: a nice free tool that does the job, if you need it, or if you’re curious — and I know you are .

Compatibility: all major browsers.

Go here to install Unfriend Finder.

Let’s say that you have to make a decision between a number of options where you have to take into account multiple factors or considerations. It can be very useful to write these down so you can see them in front of you, but it can also be really useful to weigh the different factors quantitatively by ‘scoring’ them and giving each factor its own ‘weight’ according to it’s importance. This is exactly what Idea Sandbox’s ‘Decision Making Tool’, a free Excel template, is designed to do.

Decision Making Tool is fairly simple to use, and will allow you to work with up to 5 different choices and up to 5 different related factors (which it referrers to as ‘qualities of the decision’). You don’t actually have to use all 5 slots for options or qualities; leave them blank if you don’t need them. Decision Making Tool doesn’t support analyzing MORE than 5 options, and although it can be easily extended with minimal Excel knowledge, it is better to simply keep things simple, and stick to 5 factors as a maximum.

Otherwise, a very simple tool. Decide on your factors, the weights, and the values, and see how much each one of your options scores.

Note: if it seems like quantifying a decision in this way is too simplistic, remember this: the value of this process lies in the exercise, and not so much how much each of the options gets.

Compatibility: multiplatform, requires MS Excel or similar spreadsheet that can read/write XLS files, such as OpenOffice or LibreOffice.

Download the Decision Making Tool Excel template from Idea Sandbox’s ‘brainstorming tools’ page (23K), top of the page.

With all the text messages glutting up the internet, why not ‘make yourself heard’ by sending a short voice message instead. You can do this with Lalo.li, a free text-to-speech tool that can encode your message into the URL, such that all you need to do is share or send it (or a shortened version of the URL) to someone, and once the link is opened it will automatically ‘speak’ the message that you typed originally. Try it out by opening this link.

How to use: Type your message, and if you want you can tweak the Amplitude, Pitch, Speed, and Word Gap until you are satisfied with how it sounds. Next, copy the URL (which will be quite large, and if you need to you can run it through a URL shortening service such a Bit.ly). Finally, share your link via Twitter, Facebook, email, or however you want.

The verdict: okay, so its not really that useful, but I give this one points for originality. Note that this service is different from other text-to-speech services in that it encodes the message into the URL, making it transferrable.

It would be nice, however, if the service supported multiple, better voices, and a few languages other than English (which is more or less standard these days for text-to-speech services).

Check it out here.

What if you wanted to publish something; say, a gallery of images, a ‘for sale’ sign, a community service announcement, a poll, an electoral or political appeal, etc., or any message that is temporary or transient in nature, and you didn’t to publish it on your blog (because you don’t have one or because it is off topic or because you don’t want to), didn’t want to keep it relegated to Facebook, and wanted to be able to share it on Twitter, Pinterest, or any of the numerous other social bookmarking and sharing services.

What to do? Use CheckThis, a free, online service which lets you create temporary public or private ‘disposable’ messages on demand, including a comments section and embedded videos, Paypal payment widgets, maps, images, even custom polls and other elements.

For an example/demo page that I created: click here.

‘Apps’: are the best thing about CheckThis, by which is meant the ability to add a Google Map, add and customize a poll, embed a video, add a Paypal payment function, add images, a tweet, links, etc., and the reason CheckThis is preferrable to similar services previously mentioned such as ShortText. The screenshot above, middle, depicts ‘apps’ being added to the page.

Registration: anyone can use the service without registration; however, if you do register you can take advantage of certain functions/services, such as emails that tell you that your link is about to expire, etc.

Link expiry:  links can ‘live’ for a day, a week, or a month. Your choice. Unfortunately, you can’t get more specific than that, and your link apparently cannot be maintained indefinitely.

Hosting and URL: your page will have a Checkit.com domain and, if you uploaded images from your computer, these will be hosted on their domain as well.

The verdict: temporary, democratic publishing done right and (as of yet) ad-free. As stated, the fact that you can add such advanced elements as Paypal payment functionality, polls, embedded videos and sound, etc. makes this one a cut above other similar services that I have seen. I only wish that it were possible to extend the life of the message beyond one month, or even publish a link indefinitely.

[Thanks to user Panzer for the tip about this service]

Try CheckThis.

Imagine that you found some great information on a website, that you wanted to share with others. Except that the information was buried deep inside the page, such that someone would have to scroll down and look for what you wanted them to see in order to actually see it. Surely, you might think, there must be a way for me to OUTLINE exactly what I want my friends to read, so that they do not get caught up with the irrelevant stuff on top or, more likely, read the top paragraph or title and move on.

Enter InFocus, a free bookmarklet and Chrome extension that will let you highlight specific content or a section on a web page, and send it, highlighted, to others so the see exactly what you want them to see.

A real life example: I was recently looking for a list of US colleges that have “no loans” policies (whereby students are offered grants instead of loans). It wasn’t as easy to find as you might think, and when I finally did find it, it was buried deep within an article.

• The article with the information I wanted (here)
• The article with the content highlighted (here)

Note that you can highlight text or any other element, such as a section in an image. For example, check out the screenshot on the top right, where I proudly point out Waldo in a where’s Waldo drawing.

The verdict: simple and potentially oh so useful. InFocus is extremely easy to use, simply drag the bookmarklet to your bookmarks bar or install the Chrome extension, and use when needed. It provides a wizard like experience in two steps, and is very intuitive.

[Thanks go to reader Panzer for the tip about this service].

Compatibility: any modern browser, or user the Chrome extension.

Go to the InFocus page to try it out.

Little Alchemy is a fascinatingly complex, yet amazingly simple game that is available for free at the Chrome Web Store. It allows you to combine different elements, to see what kind of results are possible and accrue points by discovering new combinations.

Little Alchemy is one of those enigmatic games that is deceptively simple but astoundingly compelling and fun. The basic concept is to combine different elements to make new ones, and you gain points for every new combination you find. See? Simple. However, the concept barely scratches the surface of what the game is really like when you play it. When you first load the game, you’ll be taken to a screen that consists of two parts. The workspace, which is where everything happens in the game’s mechanics, as well as offering ‘menu’ options and abilities like changing settings or getting help and instructions is on the left. To the right is the list of your currently available elements (which has a handy search function for when you get too many to keep visible at once).

To begin, you get four elements, the super basics: Fire, Water, Earth and Air. From these four basic elements, you will be able to combine them with each other to create new elements, and then combine the new ones with each other and with the basic elements to create even more new ones. The objective here is to gain as many points as possible, and while the game doesn’t actually have a timer built in (hint, hint develeopers!) I personally find it amusing and fun to try and get as many new elements as possible in as little time as possible to challenge myself even more. In the upper right corner of the workspace you will see your current score compared to the highest possible score, slash separated. At the time of this posting, the max score is 270, and for each new element you gain one single point. Of course, you start with four points for your basic elements, but after that you’re on your own to make them rack up. Since you can only combine two elements at any one time, but you can have as many elements on the workspace as you want, your avenues are limited while still being open enough to entertain.

This game appeals to me on many levels. The simplicity is almost elegant, really, because the concept and the game play itself are so damn easy to grab ahold of mentally and just run with it instantly. Even very young children can grasp and enjoy this game and while it may not be entirely based on accurate representations of the real world’s mechanics, some of it is educational to the younger kids. For one thing, it promotes logical and critical thinking along with analysis and association skills. Ask any teacher and they will tell you that these are four basic elements to developing a ‘wunderkind’ in the nurture vs. nature discussion. One way I think of Little Alchemy is almost like Chess Solitaire. You’re playing against only yourself, but each move you make opens specific other moves subsequently, so it can be effective and helpful to try and think at least a few moves ahead, especially if you’re going with the personal time challenge, whether it’s because you choose to or because you have only a little time to play at the moment (is the mandatory coffee break really only ten minutes by law now?!) because the boss is giving you the hairy eyeball. For example, you could start by combining water and earth, which gives you mud. Now you have five elements to work with. Now, you can just experiment with the mud but trying to combine it randomly with other elements, but that can be time consuming, as opposed to trying to logically work out which elements would work best to combine with mud. If you combine mud with water, for instance, you get nothing new, just wetter mud supposedly. However, if you think ahead, and logically figure that adding fire to mud might make a brick like in a kiln, then you can save time by skipping the mud and water combo in favor of going straight for the fire and mud to get brick. Now you have six elements and the choices before you have become even more varied and possibly time consuming.

The Verdict: This is one of my favorite casual or browser games. You can see the possibility to lose track of time playing it. I am always a fan of games that are easy to jump into and start getting instant gratification from,and this one is better than most, in my opinion. Within moments, you’re combining and getting new things and there’s that desire to just try one more combo before quitting for now. Hopefully the developers will decide to add a timer but even if they don’t you can always just time yourself like I do. In any case, the game is a lot of fun, educational in some ways, and totally free! Additionally, you have the option to create a login and password so you can save your progress and even sync it between all your capable devices. Until next time, my friends!

Get Little Alchemy here.

Chrome has many different options built in that could make your internet life easier, or at least more interesting. Examples of these include side tabs, preventing duplicate tabs from opening and re-focusing on the existing tab instead, different Google/Gmail profiles associated with different tabs, page pre-rendering for faster browsing, just to name a few.

Enabling and disabling these is a simple process that requires you to access the options through Chrome’s wrench menu. Watch out, though, because these options are experimental!

Before I get into this, I will state that I am running a Windows based computer, so while there are possibilities for Google OS, Mac OS and Linux to do some of these things, I personally only tested the Windows version of Chrome. There are a number of reasons why Chrome is my personal favorite web browser. It’s got a kind of simple, utilitarian style and feel to it, not to mention the solid function and reliability with modern pages. Sure, there are other browsers out there that may even be just as good, but one of the things Chrome has that some of the others don’t is the option to wreak havoc and find unforeseen fun with the built-in, hidden experimental options. That’s right, I said ‘experimental options’ and I meant it. Many people know already, but for those who do not, here’s the deal: Chrome, especially the latest version, has lots of these little options that can do all kinds of weird, neat, or even incomprehensible things. The thing is though, that these options are hidden by default when Chrome is installed, so they aren’t something that absolutely everyone knows about or uses.

The reasons to make these options hidden is largely because they are experiments to see how new ideas can work (or not) with modern web sites. As anyone who has dealt with this kind of software can tell you, experimental is a term often synonymous with words like ‘disaster’ and ‘crash’ or, my personal favorite: “Oh my god, is that smoke coming from the…?” On the other hand, some experiments actually yield good things, and in either case you still get data of some kind, which is the whole purpose of an experiment. Paraphrasing Adam Savage: “A failed result is still a result. We like data!” So, in the spirit of that statement, I set forth to fiddle with the experimental features of Chrome.

The first thing, obviously, is to make the experimental features visible so you can work with them. This is a process that was, oddly enough, not a two second find on any search engine. I had to delve a bit deeper than I would have thought to find the following instructions, cobbled together from a few different sources. To make the experimental features visible:

Step 1. Go to the Chrome web page here, and make sure you have the latest version of Chrome installed.  Before the latest version, it was necessary to go into a much more detailed and involved process that consisted of using the Chromium build (the open source basis for what Chrome winds up being) to access what is called, “Chrome Labs” which leads us to

Step 2. Open a Chrome window, and type (or copy+paste) the following into your address bar:      “about:flags”. Do not include any spaces, or quotes or anything.

Step 3: Hit Enter on your keyboard or press the Go button on Chrome’s address bar. You should now see a page that looks, at least somewhat similar to, this:

Now, take careful note of the Warning given on the top of the page. These features, while tons of fun sometimes, can also break or damage various things that you may not be very happy about. Use these things at your own risk, basically. Up to Step 3, you have not done anything that can cause problems, but Step 4 is to start exploring and trying things out. This is where bad stuff can happen but also where good stuff can happen, as is the nature of any experiment. Each of the ‘flags’ or options on this page will have a brief description of what it is supposed to do and sometimes how it’s supposed to do it. Additionally, most of them have a label telling you what operating system each feature is available for its use. Enable or disable them at your own peril but bear in mind that your usage of these things could wind up being helpful to Google in developing the latest versions. For me, the big appeal is knowing I am getting to play with these options before they become standards or before they get deleted as unworkable. It’s like being a part of the ongoing history of Chrome, and by extension (no pun intended), the Internet itself.

One of my favorite things to use in the experimental features is the GPU compositing and the Threaded compositing for web browsing. It took a bit more research and some plain old observation over time, but I will swear that enabling these two options has not only not crashed anything but has also sped up and smoothed out the responses I get when navigating around the Internet. Beyond that, I am still playing with many of the different options available and it looks like I will be doing so for a long time to come, especially if they keep adding more of them over time. So, now that you know what you can do and how, fiddle around (A.Y.O.R.) and of course feel free to post any results, opinions or other relevant comments here.

Until next time my friends!

Movie Explorer is a handy tool that will help you build a database or a kind of overview of what movies are available on a specific source. It’s really meant for those of us who have a large collection of movies, most likely in a number of digital locations like various hard drives or external storage, but it could be useful to nearly anyone who has a collection they want to keep track of.

I have a huge collection of movies. I have been a film lover for as long as I can remember, and many of my earliest memories are of watching one thing or another on the screen. Therefore, I have more movies than the average person probably does, in both DVD and digital format, and I am always on the lookout for good ways to keep track of my collection, what’s in it, and other kinds of organizational tools I can use to keep my collection straight and easily navigated. Now, Movie Explorer really does appeal more to people like me, that have a large collection of movies on digital storage of some kind, but it also has a lot to offer the average user that just wants to be more organized, or that might be looking at building a larger collection.

The first and biggest thing to describe Movie Explorer as an application is “easy” in my opinion. To begin with, it doesn’t require any installation. It is designed to be run as a standalone .exe file so you can put it on a flash drive or other portable device for quick and easy access to it from anywhere, no matter if you have internet access at the time. Once you’ve downloaded and run the program for the first time, it will automatically scan the drive it is running from, and display results in the open window.

The first thing you will likely want to do is to open the Options menu (via the little wrench in the upper left corner) and change a couple of things to suit your own needs. For example, as a search engine and database, it has imdb.com as the default. While there’s nothing wrong with the imdb source, there is also another and a third option to combine the two. I personally use the combination option, as it offers the best coverage and method to get accurate results, in my opinion. What it does, specifically, is to let you assign either imdb or moviemeter as the database to pull relevant information for each tag section like genre and year of production. After you have made your changes in that area, including the option to have Instant Search turned on or off, you’ll want to move on the to Categories tab. This is where you’ll be able to add different directories for the program to scan. Once given a complete list of locations, Movie Explorer will offer a pretty accurate view of the movies on your system.

The main view in Movie Explorer is the explorer window, where you’ll see relevant information for each of your movie or other video titles. The only major downfall I found in this whole program was the fact that incorrectly tagged or titled files don’t come up accurately, since the database of imdb as well as moviemeter are based on tag comparison. This means that, as opposed to fileprint recognition (like that used to identify audio programs on some popular software) you will have to make sure you have things, at least, labeled properly. If your files are labeled incorrectly, you’re bound to get incorrect info from the database but since that is a problem most other programs of this type suffer from as well, I don’t count it as much of a downside.
Fast, easy to use, no frills, basic and effective and all for free. These things combine to make Movie Explorer one of the solid programs on my list of excellent freeware. If you’re looking for another way to organize your movie collection on your storage devices, this is a great way to do it at no cost. Until next time, my friends.

Get Movie Explorer here.

Freemake, makers of our absolute favorite free video conversion program and many other excellent free software titles, have just launched a tech blog of their own. One of the first articles is an interview with me, conducted via email, which was just published. Read it here.

They say everyone will have their 15 minutes of fame during their lifetime; I guess I’ve finally had mine

Actually, there was another interview on the Appaholic site back in 2007. You can read that one here.

Unsubscribr is a free tool that scans your email inbox and tries to sort out the junk and bulk mail it finds to make it easier for you to deal with it. It also allows you to quickly and easily unsubscribe from most email lists, in batches as well as one by one.

First came email. People were hesitant to use it at first, but then the advert folks heard about this nifty new way to send and get mail that costs nothing compared to snail mail. No matter what anyone else says, I still believe that this was the beginning of the digital explosion that has brought computers, email, and the internet in general, into our homes as a modern, everyday convenience rather than a strange and frightening new technology. Yes, you heard me right. I think that spam is the first culprit to really begin moving email forward as an acceptable form of common communication. See, before the advertisers started using email to send ‘unsolicited’ (and more often unwanted, whether it was technically signed up for or solicited at all) electronic mail to possible consumers, email was mostly used by technophiles of one kind or another. Scientists, computer engineers, software engineers, even just the enthusiastic tech hobbyist were all using email before the rest of us, but when the concept of advertising in email was pushed forth, the advertisers also began pushing the medium itself. After all, the more people they convinced to use email, the more people the could send spam to. Seems odd, but there it is.

In any case, as soon as people discovered that they could get junk mail in their email boxes, they began looking for ways to get rid of it. Just as the first unwanted ad in a snail mail box was thrown into the fireplace to help with the winter heating bill, so too go the electronic counterparts. Now, as time has gone by, more and more ways to avoid spam have come out, but more and more ways to send spam have come out, as well. Every time I look in my spam folder, I wonder at where and how I supposedly signed up to get half of these things. Little boxes that stay checked or don’t get checked, when installing a program or signing up for a web site, are the usual culprit but there are as many sources of spam as there are email addresses. That is to say, an infinite amount.

So, as time goes on we keep coming up with new ways to get rid of, or handle spam. In my own personal experience, Gmail is pretty darn good about filtering spam and also decent at letting you manage it. Additionally, Gmail will even offer an option to unsubscribe automatically when a spam message is first marked. All of that is very nice, but it doesn’t really help you if you’re not using Gmail. So, assuming that there are people out there using other things, and presuming that they aren’t going to switch to Gmail just to make me happy, I am pleased to say that Unsubscribr is a great free tool I can tell them about.

Unsubscribr works much the same way that Gmail’s anti-spam system works, in so far as the fact that it will let you manage and unsubscribe from spam lists that you find in your email. It’s interface is supremely simple to use, and while I didn’t find a whole lot of in depth documentation, I felt that it was easy enough to figure out without much help. This is always a big bonus point for any free program or software solution, to me, because there are so many out there that are very useful but require mammoth efforts and learning curves to figure out how to use them effectively. Unsubscribr doesn’t suffer from this particular dysfunction, thankfully.

So, as a test of it’s function rather than it’s form, I decided to try it out on my Gmail account. Whether it is Gmail or another service, the first thing you will need to do is put your email address in the box on the front page of Unsubscribr’s site. Afterwards, you may need to provide some permissions (like Gmail, for example) but relatively quickly you will be up and running, so to speak. Unsubscribr will automatically search the most common folders on your email service for a limited number of days into the past. There is also an option to pay a small one time fee of two whole dollars to get unlimited functionality, like up to 30 days of history scanned, or adding more folders to the scan process, but this option is not in any way required. Unsubscribr works quite well without ever paying a dime, and I would recommend it to anyone at all looking for a good, free way to get their bulk emails or spam under control.

[Thanks to reader Panzer for tip about this service]

Get started with Unsubscribr here.

If you are an expert Photoshop user then this post may not be  for you; for the rest of us, however, the 3 tools presented here will provide high level functionality that will delight and deliver. Smilla Enlarger uses an algorithmic approach to enlarge images without pixellization, Seam Carving GUI performs ‘content aware’ resizing or cropping, that can crop elements or resize elements within your image while keeping the image visually plausible and cohesive, and ShiftN can fix skewed, converging perspectives in photographs in a single click.

The three tools are as follows:

1. Smilla Enlarger: enlarge images without pixellization
2. Seam Carving GUI: selectively resize or crop elements in images
3. ShiftN: fix converging line perspectives for upright objects

1. Smilla Enlarger: enlarge images without pixellization

We’ve mentioned this program before (here and here). Smilla is a simple free tool that can process and enlarge images using a number of enlargement profiles.

There’s nothing magical about what this program does, of course; it merely applies filters and you could in theory do the same using your favorite image editor; however, over the years I have found it extremely useful, and have been going back to it over and over again.

See examples of Smilla’s processing above and below.

2. Seam Carving GUI: selectively resize or crop elements in images

Imagine being able to resize an image, yet keep an element or elements within the image from being affected by the resize. Conversely, imagine cropping only an element while maintaining the way all the other elements around it relate to each other (see the screenshot on the top of this post for an example of the latter).

The video below does a good job showing how Seam Carving GUI works.

More on content aware resizing in this Wikipedia article.

3. ShiftN: fix converging line perspectives for upright objects

If you’ve ever tried to take a head-on picture of an object, such as, say, a building, a painting, a bureau of drawers, or any other object, you know how difficult it is to get a perfectly aligned, 90-degree straight shot that showed it as being upright. Not to worry, though; ShiftN can fix converging line perspectives in images at the click of a button.

The cost? Your resulting image will be slightly cropped at the edges compared with the original.

Examples: (all processed using automatic correction)

Before	After ShiftN

That’s it. If you know of any similar freeware tools please let us know in the comments section.

Kaseya is a free toolkit that allows you to provide remote assistance to another system via Internet connection. It’s free to use, and there’s a wealth of information and support available at no cost as well.

Kaseya is the kind of program that speaks for itself in how it works as well as what it can do. The interface, mostly online, is pretty simple and easy to figure out, even if you haven’t had much experience with this sort of thing before.

The first thing you will need to do is sign up for an account, which takes about a minute or two.  Once you’ve signed into the site the first time, you’ll be able to explore the different areas that are on offer. There’s the main page that lists the computers connected to your network, which you can provide support to, as well as an area for Training on how to use Kaseya. There’s a support page for the program itself, a handy guide to the different Features of Kaseya, as well as a robust wiki and forum section to delve even deeper into the possibilities of the Kaseya system.

Programs like this are nothing special these days, in that you can find at least a dozen possible solutions per search engine used to find them, but Kaseya did strike me as elegantly set up for novices in the area of remote assistance. It would provide a nice doorway into some of the deeper aspects of IT support as well. When first logging in, you’re not really directed much but it’s simple to find the Training section and get started. The first thing you want to do is to add computers to your network, however, and that process was fairly easy to initiate. There’s a giant Add Computers button staring you in the face as soon as you log in, so I couldn’t help but press it. It’s a compulsion. You’ll be given options to install locally, on the computer you’re using to view the site, as well as sending IM instructions or email invitations to join the network. This helps to cut down on the amount of leg work one tech has to do and many people I know in the IT industry would be glad of that.

Each computer you want to install on the system and provide support to will have to install a small bit of software that will allow the interface between systems. I started by adding my laptop to the network. The antivirus software I use immediately pointed the suspicious finger at the Kaseya module, which tells me that my antivirus software is working and that the Kaseya module will probably allow a decent amount of control over a remote system. After adding the systems you want to be able to provide remote access to, you can divide them into different groups and add other users that can access the Kaseya system. All of this is done through simple interfaces that offer decent descriptions for the most part. The program is obviously intended for as wide an audience as possible. While many people will find it easy to use and understand, I couldn’t help feeling it was a bit limited for a large scale corporate IT structure or anything of that magnitude. Smaller organizations may find it ideal, however.

While I didn’t have the chance to test a large network on Kaseya, I was able to check out its features through a smaller number of computers and it worked without a hitch. While I am sure that there is more to the experience, on the surface Kaseya seems to be a viable solution for remote assistance if you’re looking for one. It’s notable that there is also a professional kit of tools and services you can get to go along with Kaseya for a price but if you’re confident in your abilities and don’t need to have any support, Kaseya might provide the answer you need. Until next time, my friends.

Check out Kaseya here.

We recently got access to a new extra screen at the office, so we did the natural thing, and started testing all sorts of free multiple monitor software that we’ve always wanted to try. If you use more than one monitor then this post is for you; it lists 7 programs and resources that add some excellent functionality to your multi-monitor setup, such as extending the taskbar into multiple screens, controlling windows via hotkeys, spanning wallpaper images across different screens, etc.

The programs are: MultiWall, Dual Monitor Taskbar, Swap Screen, SoftTH, Dual Display Mouse Manager, GridMove, as well as some good multiple monitor wallpaper sources.

Here’s the list.

1. MultiWall: powerful tool for downloading and displaying multi-monitor wallpaper
2. Dual Monitor Taskbar: extend the taskbar to additional monitors
3. Swap Screen: send the active window to various locations on different screens, via hotkey
4. SoftTH: span DirectX games across multiple monitors
5. Dual Display Mouse Manager: prevent the mouse from accidentally moving across screens (or ‘teleport’ it to other screens on demand)
6. GridMove: snap your windows to pre-defined regions on any screen
7. Multiple Monitor Wallpaper sources

1. MultiWall: powerful tool for downloading and displaying multi-monitor wallpaper

This program will automatically span wallpaper images onto multiple screens, but what makes it special is that it provides a large range of images that you can download and use with a single click (you can upload your own images too, if so inclined). Simply fantastic.

There are many, many wallpaper managers for multiple monitors, but I opted to exclude all of them from this post in favor of this one.

2. Dual Monitor Taskbar: extend the taskbar to additional monitors

Every wished that your additional monitors would show a taskbar and taskbar buttons just like your main screen? Dual Monitor Taskbar does exactly that. (Note: I like this one better than Zbar and the free version of MultiMon, because it is simple to use and maintains Windows 7 Aero look and feel, which the latter does not).

3. Swap Screen: send the active window to various locations on different screens, via hotkey

The hotkeys are customizable, as shown above. Swap Screen also allows maximize a single window across multiple screen (so-called ‘supersize’ it).

Note on downloading: this program is a part of ‘Dual Monitor Tools’,  a collection of portable multi-monitor apps that come in a single zipped archive. Other tools I likes in the same pack: Dual Wallpaper and DisMon.

Note that DisplayFusion free includes the same functionality as this one.

4. SoftTH: span DirectX games across multiple monitors

This one for gamers who would like a more powerful gaming experience. SoftTH will span your game display across your multiple monitors, creating an immersive visual environment.

This program is one of those rare occasions where we haven’t tested this ourselves (we did not have access to any of the games on the ‘working correctly’ list), but I just couldn’t resist including it here.

5. Dual Display Mouse Manager: prevent the mouse from accidentally moving across screens (or ‘teleport’ it to other screens on demand)

For those who do not want the mouse to accidentally move across screens, this one will lock it into the current screen unless ‘ctrl’ is pushed or unless the mouse is pressed onto the edge of the screen for a certain amount of time (in milliseconds). It also has a ‘region jump’ option via hotkey, whereby the mouse is teleported into the exact same relative location across different screens.

Also check out Multi Monitor Mouse, which does something very similar.

6. GridMove: snap your windows to pre-defined regions on any screen

This program lets you slice your screen into pre-set or user-defined grids, and to send windows to these on-demand, via hotkey. It is absolutely a great program and it also supports multiple screens.

7. Multiple Monitor Wallpaper sources

We’re a little obsessed with these images. Sorry

• 70+ Beautiful Dual Monitors Desktop Wallpapers
• 2xBG dual monitor wallpapers

Windows 7 is quite good, but there are certain things that can be better about it. For example, you may have tried to rearrange the icons in a folder manually and found, to your surprise, that you can’t. Or perhaps you tried to filter your files by size or by date in icon or tile folder view, but was unable to. Folder Options X is a free program that can remedy both of these issues; it can also disable full row select, which can be quite useful.

AniExplorer, on the other hand, is for those who like to change the way things behave by default, and/or like to add a little twist. It adds custom animations to Windows in the way icons are displayed in folders. The effect is surprisingly pleasant (and can be seen in the video below).

Note, though, that ironically these two programs are incompatible and do not seem to work on the same system together.

Folder Options X: offers 3 tweaks

(1) Enable dragging and dropping to arrange icons.

Open a Windows 7 or 8 folder similar to the one below. Now grab one of the objects and try to re-arrange them; you will find that you cannot. Once you apply the tweak, you will find that the functionality is miraculously restored. The screenshot below left shows the files ordered as Windows 7 wants to order them, while the screenshot below right shows them reordered as per my drag and drop.

(2) Enable filtering in all views, not just ‘Details’ view.

Windows 7 has some nice filtering options, but strangely these are only available in ‘Details’ view. Not to worry though, Folder Options X will let you enable these for all views (see below).

(3) Disable full row select (in ‘Details’ view)

This can be beneficial for a number of reasons. For example, it can prevent you from accidentally dragging and dropping an object onto a subfolder, etc. The new behavior is illustrated in the screenshot below. Notice my rectangle below is not selecting the files; to do that I would have

AniExplorer: adds customizable animation to folder icons

The best way to illustrate the effect is to show in action, in the below video.

Note that if your PC is resource-challenged, then you might want to opt out of adding this sort of eye candy.

Compatibility: these tweaks work on both Windows 7 and Windows 8, 32 bit and 64 bit.

• Download Folder Options X.
• Download AniExplorer. [Thanks to reader Panzer for the tip about this program].

As mentioned above, do not install both of these simultaneously, as they seem to not want to coexist on the same machine.

For one or two jobs and an occasional personal instance, I have had to sign documents electronically. There are a few ways to do so online, for little or even no cost at all so I decided to take a look at a couple of them: DigiSigner and SignNow.

This subject has always been an interest for me, as it is a point of change for humans to be able to sign things, legally, from far away. It sounds odd, at first, certainly, but once taken in the context of moving into a technologically driven and supported society, it’s a big deal. I’ve always been a proponent of technology in general and the advancement of it is a measure of society as well. Looking into the possible or even probably future, where tech is king, software will presumably be far more advanced both in terms of complexity as well as common use, so being able to sign a legal document from the other side of the planet could easily become the standard. In fact, signing documents electronically has been possible for a long time, especially if you count earlier technologies like fax machines or even pneumatic tubes.

All of that is a far flung fancy and may not seem like it has much to do with life today, but signing documents remotely is still a valid and convenient option. There are two sites, specifically, that I looked at for this article. The first is DigiSigner and I attempted to compare it to SignNow and possibly decide between them.

DigiSigner is certainly easy to use, even though I found the splash page to be, somehow, intimidating. Perhaps it was all the text grouped the way it was, I don’t know. What did I expect from a site dealing with legal things? It wasn’t a big deal and didn’t detract from the site’s usefulness, it was just something discordant I felt at the way the page looked. Since I couldn’t put my finger on what it was, however, I moved on into using the site to give it a fair shake. I chose the “DigiSigner Online” option near the bottom of the page and away I went. After verifying that I trusted the page’s own electronic signature, I was taken to a flash page with instructions on signing a PDF format document using the DigiSigner software. It was three steps, simple and easy, but since I didn’t have a legal document to actually sign I can’t testify as to how such a signature would hold up legally, although the site promises it will. in categories of how easy and simple it was, I’d rate it as chimp doable. Not a problem for anyone with the skills of literacy and mouse clicking.

The second site I check out, SignNow, was much nicer, visually speaking, on the splash page. Again, this is an opinion here, but I found it to be much ‘friendlier’ than the somewhat stuffy DigiSigner front page.  The aesthetics notwithstanding, I moved into the site to check out how it worked. I immediately noticed that there are mobile apps for Android and iOS available to interact with SignNow on the go. Also of note on the front page was the promise that I could sign a document right now with no registration needed. Comparatively, I don’t recall DigiSigner asking me to register for anything either. Once I pressed the Open Document button, I was taken straight to the Windows Explorer browsing window to find a document to sign. Fast, simple, easy just like DigiSigner. If you do decide to create a free account, you can do things like saving your documents online and let others sign them later.

The Verdict: I’d honestly have to say that while DigiSigner is a decent site, SignNow has a few points up on it. Most notably the mobile apps, and the overall ‘feel’ of the site and how it works. This is based on the idea that all you want to do is sign a PDF document electronically. If you’re looking for more integrated functionality like embedding the option into some kind of applet or other program, DigiSigner is going to be your better option but that kind of thing has a cost attached to it. The balance means that in the end, for my readers, I would recommend SignNow over DigiSigner. Until next time, my friends!

TrueCrypt is the world’s foremost free/open source encryption program, but running it portably can be a bit of a hassle. In this posting, we will show you an extremely easy and fast method to run TrueCrypt portably from your hard drive or from a portable USB drive. You could also put it in your Dropbox folder, giving you instant access to the same encrypted volume across multiple Windows PCs.

We will use a free, third party program called ‘Launcher for TrueCrypt’.

Follow the steps below:

Step 1. Download, install, and run Truecrypt. If you already have TruCrypt installed go to step 2.

Step 2. Create an encrypted volume.

Note: the steps below will show how to do that. If you are familiar with the process or if you already have an encrypted volume you would like to use, skip to step 3.

• Click ‘create volume’ to create a new volume
• Select ‘Create an encrypted file container’ and then ‘Standard TrueCrypt volume’.

• For volume location, click select file, then create a volume anywhere. In the example below, we created a volume called ‘Test Freewaregenius’ on the desktop.

• Next choose your Encryption Algorithm; the default (AES) is good enough. Click next.

• Choose volume size as needed. For this tutorial we choose 100 megs.

• Choose a password, enter it twice, click ‘Next’

• Finally, select the filesystem and cluster (if in doubt, use the default values), and click ‘Format’

Step 3. Download Launcher for TrueCrypt (TC_launcher.zip). This program will let you access your TrueCrypt volumes without having TrueCrypt installed on your machine.

• Extract TC_launcher.zip in an appropriate location. It doesn’t really matter where, since eventually you will be able to move it around your hard drive or onto a portable drive.
• *Important, pay attention* Next go to your installed TrueCrypt folder, which typically is in ‘C:\Program Files\TrueCrypt\’ (see screenshot below left). COPY this folder to the extracted folder ‘TrueCrypt Launcher\Program Files’ (see screenshot below right. Note that there is already a ‘TrueCrypt’ folder there, overwrite it).

• Next MOVE your TrueCrypt encrypted volume created in ‘Step 2’ above to the same place (the ‘Program Files’ folder inside the extracted TC_launcher folder). Again see screenshot above right).

Step 4. Run TC_Loader.exe from your TC_Launcher folder

• Select your encryption file and select a drive letter. Make sure to choose something like ‘U’ or ‘Y’ that is unlikely to be used on a machine where you might use TrueCrypt from a USB.

• Enter your password in the next screen.

• Your volume should now be mounted (see screenshot below). TrueCrypt should be running in the system tray. Note that this is the portable and not the installed version that is running.

Note that you can dismount the TrueCrypt volume via TrueCrypt in the system tray menu or by double clicking TC_Loader.exe.

Step 5. ** Important final settings **

In the TC_launcher folder (see screenshot below), go to ‘TC_launcher\Data\settings.ini\’, and open it with a text editor such as notepad.

Change the ‘Imagepath’ field such that anything before the actual folder where the portable application resides is removed. For example, in the example below, I removed the ‘desktop’ part from the path.

This will allow the application to run successfully no matter where you move the folder. If you want to rename the folder (i.e. not TC_Launcher but something else) make sure that the new name is reflected in the settings file. Save and exit

Step 6. Final steps

You can now uninstall TrueCrypt from your machine (optional), and move the TC_Launcher to a USB or to some other location on your hard drive.

If you want to use it with Dropbox simply move the folder into your Dropbox folder and share appropriately.

Questions, ideas, thoughts? Please share them in the comments section below.

The internet offers the modern human a multitude of options that previous generations didn’t have. According to a friend of mine, one of those things is the ability to immediately convert almost anything to anything, online, at one site or using one program or another. While this is probably most useful to people who need it on a daily basis, like students, engineers, scientists and computer programmers, there’s also a lot of conversions that the average computer owner can find useful. I took a ‘walk’ on the info super highway and while I got a lot of odd looks from drivers for walking on it, I also found some pretty interesting conversion tools I thought I would share.

The first place I stumbled on was to convert kilobytes to megabytes. It has always been a wonder that the computer still occasionally shows me how big something is in kilobytes. This doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense because so much of what we manipulate on our systems now is in much larger sizes. I do have a decent idea of how many kilobytes are in a megabyte and how many megabytes are in a gigabyte, but sometimes I want to know a bit more accurately, and since I am not a genius I don’t have a conversion calculator in my head. That’s where the site Unitconversion.org comes in handy. You can input a specific number of kilobytes and see how many gigabytes it is, or vice versa. Simple, quick, easy. This type of utility page is the heart of the free and useful internet, in my opinion, and it’s always nice to discover another one to add to my internal database of bookmarks.

After leaving that page I wandered around looking for something more whimsical and interesting on a lighter side. That’s when I almost surfed right passed Converticon.com before noticing it and stopping. While I have reviewed other conversion software for video and audio, one of the things I haven’t done much with is my playlists. I have a lot of them, normally somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty or so which means that my desktop is often a blur of the same VLC orange road cone over and over again. While this can be mesmerizing while I’m awake at 4am trying to finish a project, it’s not as pleasing to the eye as having separate and distinct icons for each of my playlists. This idea had occurred to me a while ago, but I hadn’t done much about it until I saw this page, which allows me to take nearly any standard image file, and convert it to a multi-size icon file, which I can then use as the custom icon for a shortcut to the playlist. It seems a complex way to do things, perhaps, but it winds up having a customized picture for each of the playlists, and when using medium or large icons on the Windows 7 desktop, gives a nice tiled feel to the workspace. I moved on, happy with the new look to my desktop.

One of the nice things about the third site, Onlineconversion.com, is that the only ads I noticed were ones for the site itself in one way or another, mostly mentions of donations. I know that some people frown on this but some people frown on drinking coffee too. Personally, I feel that a site that avoids selling ad space in favor of asking for donations is brave and filling a specific niche in the software and online worlds. I guess it’s sort of like only eating locally grown organic foods. It just feels more … satisfying, traditional. While that kind of thing won’t work for just any website, it’s nice to see it being done when the site does have that option. The site itself is chock-full of different conversion options, from things like electric current measurements to ASCII engine conversions. Almost anything you can imagine is available to be converted on this site. This is a site that I don’t see myself visiting all the time but it’s like that one special phone number in your cell, that you’re always glad you know it when you do need it.

So the conclusion of my little jaunt into free conversion (sounds like a new age religious movement) on the Internet showed me that you really can convert pretty much anything to anything else on there. It’s just a matter of how much time you’re willing to put into looking. As I said before, I think that sites like these, devoted to a very specific use, are an important but often overlooked part  of the Internet, beneath the slick veneer of e-commerce and advertising that we see more regularly. One could not exist without the other, but it’s nice to know your way around both ends of the street, so to speak.

Until next time, my friends.

OpenStudy is a free web site that helps you connect with other people on the Internet to help you study online via Q&A. It is possibly one of the coolest things I have seen in a long time, because it is so simple and powerful in both concept and design. There’s a lot of free web sites out there for education and many of them are great, but this one truly stands out to my eye as an excellent achievement in sense and usefulness.

OpenStudy.com is a website that, essentially, allows people to connect with each other with the purpose of teaching and learning. From writing to physics, chemistry to history, OpenStudy probably has some people on there who can help you learn about it, and what’s better, they can help you in specific ways with direct answers to questions you might have. Just as, ideally, a teacher would do, if you were in the same room with them. When you’re in a classroom, you can raise your hand, ask the teacher a question, and get an answer, presumably and usually. Well OpenStudy is much like that in some ways.

You’ll need to start by registering for your free account, which can take two minutes or much longer, depending on how much time you want to spend filling out your bio/profile information. That’s up to you, but you can easily be done in just a couple of minutes if you don’t go into a lot of depth on that particular section. Also, you can register using your Facebook account if you’d like, as so many sites are now doing. Once your account is created, you’ll be able to jump right in and start asking and answering questions of the other people on OpenStudy. You can even connect those questions to a Tweet and/or Facebook post.

To start with, you’ll choose a subject you want to study. Don’t worry, you can study as many as you want and it costs nothing, ever, so pick whatever you want to learn about without reservation. This is truly, in my eyes, one of the best reasons the Internet was created in the first place. Science fiction writers like Heinlein and Bradbury, Gibson and Asimov and more I am sure, had all predicted something like the Internet and, moreover, predicted the future would be a better place because of them, in essence. That may sound a bit high-minded or lofty wishing, but if you take a moment to think about it, you may see that the easier it is for each of us to become educated and ‘smart’, then the better our society in general will advance and the overall quality of life will improve. Isn’t that what drives us all? So, to me, this website is a great representative of why the Internet is important to the human race.

So, once you’ve chosen a subject, you’re given two columns that take up most of the screen. These consist of Questions, on the left hand side, and You can ask your own question, like you see I did in the screen shots. On the right hand side is a listing of members currently online who are also studying the same subject you’re currently in. At the bottom of that you can see tabs for the other subjects you’re studying. That’s the screen, basically. You can pick a question on the left side and offer your own answer for it, as well as read previous answers, or you can post your very own question and get answers from other people. There’s a round robin kind of time system they use to ‘bump’ questions, but it works out quite well, from what I could see.

That’s the heart of OpenStudy. There’s not much more to it than that, but that is what makes it so good. It is simple and powerful if people decide to use it. We can all take a few minutes a day to help someone else learn something, and that’s a thing we can all feel good about at the end of that day.The central methodology is almost Socratic. Ask questions, get answers, and ponder them. OK, so not all questions are deep thinking marvels, like “What is the difference between effect and affect?” but those are still very important to answer because whoever asked it, presumably, genuinely wants to know the answer, to further his or her understanding of that subject, and perhaps ultimately, the universe in general. As my father always said: “There are no stupid questions.” Until next time, my friends.

• Learn more about OpenStudy’s mission here
• Check out OpenStudy here.

Why would you want to run multiple Dropbox instances on the same machine? We could think of two reasons (1) you’ve maxed out on the 16 gigs or so that each free Dropbox account can give you as a ceiling, and would like to use another account (or accounts) to add more, or (2) you would like to access another Dropbox account for whatever reason, such as a disposable account used by members of your team or that of someone else (such an ex employee of your company) or somesuch.

In this posting, we will describe how to run another Dropbox account to your WINDOWS machine using a third party freeware program (i.e. to install two Dropbox accounts running simultaneously on one PC).

The application used: DropboxPortableAHK is a free program that can create portable instances of Dropbox, which can be carried on a USB drive, etc. Or it can be run locally alongside your existing Dropbox installation, which is what this post assumes.

Note before starting: the second instance of Dropbox will involve a process (DropboxPortableAHK.exe) running in the background. I have found that this process can use up 2-10 percentage points of CPU usage intermittently, depending on the settings used in the setup. This on my high spec PC was no big deal, but may be somewhat annoying on a resource-challenged machine. The good news is that you can opt to run this (i.e. the second instance of Dropbox) when you need it rather than having it in the background at all times. Or you can reduce or eliminate this if you uncheck ‘Dropbox folder protection’ in step 6 below.

First things first, download the free program:

Get a free program called DropboxPortableAHK  from it’s program page. Extract the zip volume into an appropriate place on your hard drive. Note: the instructions below assume that your new Dropbox folder will be INSIDE this folder, so take that into consideration when placing this folder. Next run “DropboxPortableAHK.exe” to start the setup process.

Setting up:

01- Welcome: the setup process Consists of 9 steps, as seen in the screenshot below on the left sidebar. Many of these are self explanatory, but we will briefly go over a few.

02- Connection profiles  -  click on the “+” sign to add the Dropbox credentials for the account you want to use. You should see the screen below. Enter your Dropbox account email in the ‘Username’ slot, and the password underneath it. This should be all you need to input, unless you use an internet proxy, in which case you need to fill in the other fields.

03 – Dropbox folder location: here, you can specify where you want your new Dropbox folder to be. My advice, leave it as is (“.\Dropbox”, which indicates that you want it to be in the same folder as the DropboxPortableAHK.exe executable). Note that this is a portable application, meaning that wherever you move the DropboxPortableAHK folder, the Dropbox folder will move with it.

04 – Previous Dropbox configuration: do NOT do anythingon this screen; just click next. I am assuming that you are reading this post to ADD another Dropbox account to your machine; this step is only necessary if you are converting your already installed Dropbox account to a portable installation using DropboxPortableAHK. Otherwise, click NEXT.

05 – Update notification: self explanatory. If you want update notifications from DropboxPortableAHK or Dropbox, check the appropriate boxes. My advice: leave as is and click ‘Next’.

06 – Addons: the settings on this page are important.

Consider the following options. You will need to make some decisions. Note that I am assuming that you are reading this post because you want to run another instance of Dropbox on your hard drive, rather than running a portable Dropbox instance from a USB. You can assume that settings not explained below should be left as is.

Create autorun.inf: For our purposes, do not check. This is not necessary unless you (a) are planning to use this Dropbox install on a USB, and (b) you do not run Windows 7.

Dropbox folder protection: *important* if you plan to keep your second Dropbox instance in the same folder location on your hard drive, uncheck this. (The advantage = significantly less of a drain on your PC’s CPU resources). Otherwise, keep it checked, especially if the folder is on a removable volume that could accidentally have a different drive letter associated with it across sessions.

If you think you may want to MOVE your second Dropbox folder and/or use it portably, keep this checked. This option will keep Dropbox from deleting all of your folder contents on the server if it cannot find the folder anymore (because you moved it) and therefore thinks it is blank.  If you do check folder protection, you can change the checking interval value if you want, although it is not necessary (lower=more CPU usage but less chance of deletion, higher=less CPU usage but more chance of deletion).

Notification about workaround on restricted user accounts: keep this checked.

Make SyncAndGo the default behavior: SyncAndGo is a usage mode whereby you can run DropboxPortableAHK, have it sync your local folder and the remote Dropbox server, and then immediately exit. Check this if that sounds like what you want.

Save Dropbox configuration files for each PC: keep this checked.

For more information on these options, go to the instructions page on the program website, scroll to about the middle of the page.

07- User applications: in this screen, you can tell DropboxPortableAHK to run certain applications before and after it starts and closes Dropbox. For our purposes, leave these blank and click ‘Next’.

08- Dropbox application files: click ‘Download Dropbox files’ to download the latest Dropbox local installation file.

Also in this screen: choose a color for the Dropbox icon to differentiate it from your original Dropbox icon in your system tray, in order to tell which is which.

09- Dropbox setup: click ‘Start Dropbox setup’, keep ‘Start Dropbox after setup has finished’ checked.

Click ‘Next’. The Dropbox desktop client setup will run. * Importantly*, note the following:

• The location of the Dropbox folder that you will specify in the Dropbox setup process will NOT be the actual location used. Remember that you specified a location in step  ‘03’ above. That location will end up being the actual folder location.
• Make sure not to make the default Dropbox folder location in the setup the same as your Dropbox instance already installed on your machine.
• Here’s a step by  step

1.  Click ‘I already have a Dropbox account’	2. Enter your credentials for the 2nd account. Give the computer name a name that identifies it for you	3. Click the free 2GB (it will say 2GB regardless of whether or not you earned more).

4.  Click advanced.	5. You want to make sure that you do not choose the Dropbox folder location to be the same as the folder location of the already running instance of Dropbox.Below, I chose “C:\Dropbox” as the location. Later, I will go back and delete that folder	6. In this step, you can choose whether you want all of the folders in the account to sync, or some of them. It’s up to you.

That’s it. In the remaining screens, skip the tour and click finish.

The DropboxPortableAHK Setup screen will be displayed again. Click ‘finish’

Last steps:

• If you get an error screen like the one below, click Yes, and it should go away.

• Open your DropboxPortableAHK folder. You will see that, as specified in step 03 above, the Dropbox folder is indeed there.

• Go to the location that you specified in the Dropbox setup (C:\Dropbox as per the example shown here) and delete that folder. It is not needed.

Finally, go to your system tray. You will find a new Dropbox icon alongside the original one that was initially installed on your machine. See the screenshot, top of this post.

Questions? Issues? Comments? Please use the comments section below.

Would you like to learn to type faster? Do you believe that you can do so while playing a game? If your answer to the first question is yes, then let me answer the second one for you: yes, you can learn to be a much better typer while playing a game. But what if I told you that the game is such a nice, casual game that you will be coming back just to play, whether or not you are interested in typing. Enter: Z-Type

Z-Type is a fun, fast paced browser-based top-scrolling shooter that is controlled via the keyboard, by typing words to blast aliens.

I found this game while researching my ‘Ten must-see Chrome Experiments’ post, and although I was impressed with it, I passed it over for that post, opting to use something else instead. However, when I found myself coming back to this game a couple of days afterwards, it started to dawn on me that Z-Type was something special.

The concept is pretty self explanatory. Each alien ship has it’s own keyword that you need to type to destroy it. Some ships are motherships which fire missiles and generate other ships. Note that once you start typing a word, you cannot switch to another alien until you finish, which can really trip you.

The verdict: a great little casual game. Easy to get into for a quick game (games tend to be very quick). AND it will enhance your typing skills. If you think you are a generally fast typer then skip ‘normal’ and jump right into ‘expert’ mode.

Go here to play Z-Type (browser based).