Time for another Cool Tools entry, and I have a great one for you if you have any amount of pics and even videos sitting around. It’s a tool called XnView, and it’s available for a bunch of operating systems; Windows, Linux, MacOS to name a few. It’s an awesome picture manager, providing a fast and pleasant interface to thumbnails and even basic image editing tasks. It makes slide shows easy, and can create web pages, and more. It can even thumbnail and play your movies too! There are lots of features in this tool, and it’s free. You gotta love free software, but don’t forget that someone put lots of time and effort into this, and authors love good feedback, compliments and donations that help keep them writing the software we all love.

Now, I am a dad, and I have over 8,000 pics and videos of my kid to take care of and manage, and she’s not even two yet! The point is, XnView makes browsing, viewing, and even some editing a breeze. It has become my default media tool, and has been for years. I highly recommend this, even for the Picassa users out there. Picassa is great, but I don’t think it can hold a candle to XnView unless you are using the Picassa web services to which it joins right up with. So, go check out XnView today!

Since I seem to be on a roll lately with password related posts, and since I linked to PasswordSafe in my last article about Good Password Practices, I thought I would post a Cool Tools entry about it too, because it definitely belongs on your kit!  A quick synopsis for anyone who doesn’t already know (go read the Good Password Practices article!), PasswordSafe is a nifty open source application that allows you to store your passwords in an encrypted database.  It offers some neat-o features like password history tracking (every time you change a password, it keeps a record of x number of old ones, just in case), you can group by category and store notes and more, all safely encrypted in one single file.  It’s a great tool, and a must have.

There is another tool that was mentioned by a reader called Keepass, and although I am not near as familiar with it, I have used it in the past since it runs on Linux among other things.  PasswordSafe is a Windows app, I just use it under Wine when I need it on Linux.  Either way, the point is the same, plain text files and password protected Excel spreadsheets art out baby, encrypted databases are in.  Keep your passwords safe!

One thing that I love is text editors. No, I don’t count notepad in the list, but I do count Notepad++ for Windows. It’s one of the best text editors I have used, and it has some very impressive and awesome features. Now, before I go any further, for the record let me state that my favorite, and the best text editor of all time is Vi/Vim, hands down. Whatever platform, whatever you need, it’s the best (it’s better than emacs, get over it!). It is also however, rather a pain to learn to use and most people who aren’t already using it on UNIX/Linux, aren’t going to bother learning it just to have a good text editor on Windows.

Saying that gets me back to Notepad++, which is a very full featured replacement for little old notepad that comes with Windows. A couple of the main things that I like about Notepad++ is that not only can it handle text files created on UNIX/Linux platforms, it can convert between the two! Yes, I said convert between Windows formatted text files and UNIX/Linux formatted text files, and back again. That alone makes it a damn fine tool. Throw in syntax highlighting, a tabbed interface, installer-less operation if so desired and lots more stuff to get a powerful and free tool for your kit. So, go check it out and you can thank me later!

It’s time once again for another post about Cool Tools, which are tools, utilities, programs, etc., that I have found in my travels that are really cool (in my opinion anyway, but hey, I am an expert in my own opinion!). I think it’s good for admins and users alike to share nifty little gems that they have found that make life a little easier.

In this case, this is a great tool, simple to use, very well written and FREE! It’s called Converber, and it’s awesome for converting one factor to another. Weight, volume, area, computer measurements (Kb to KB anyone?), whatever you want. It sure seems to have a calc in there for everything I have been able to think of. I suggest grabbing this keeping it in your bag of tricks. It has come in handy for me many times. It’s a Windows app, but it runs well under WINE for me in Linux, not sure how our Mac brethren can run it, but if you can I’d recommend it.

As always, feel free to share your feedback about the app, and feel free to recommend something you like and want to share. Either put it in the comments, or send me an email by using the Contact button at the top of the site. Enjoy!

Need a bundle of network tools? I mean one application that can ping, traceroute, nslookup, whois, and more? With advanced features like SMTP open relay checking and DNS zone transfers? A tool that doesn’t cost hundreds of dollars? The list goes on, have I enticed you enough? Good!

I found this app a long time ago, and it is steadfastly entrenched in my kit to this day. It’s called Sam Spade, and it’s named after the famed detective to be sure. The folk that wrote it offer it up for free, and it’s a very handy tool for anyone that ever needs to do network type work. Spend a few minutes reading up on it, and going through setting the settings, it’s worth it although it’ll work out of the box. I think you’ll find it a valuable tool too.

It’s getting on to Friday, and I thought I would post another Cool Tool for your enjoyment.  For anyone who dabbles in domain names, or does much with networking, you have undoubtedly used the Whois command.  Whois is a tool for querying domain name information, like who is the owner of it, the DNS servers, and more.  It’s very handy when you want to see if that domain name you always wanted is taken or not.  Why not just type it into the browser and see if it comes up, you ask?  Well, just because a domain doesn’t show up in your favorite browser, doesn’t mean it is not registered.  Sometimes the domain owner hasn’t done anything with it yet, or they might use it for email but not a website, or it could simply be that a domain squatter has it, and therefore only owns it to resell it.

Aside from that, I have been in troubleshooting situations where I needed to find out some info on a particular domain name, like mentioned above, the DNS servers for example.  Or one time, I was getting spammed to death from one domain, and we determined it was a virus with a little research, so we looked up the domain owner and were able to tell him that his server had been infected.  He didn’t even know!

Regardless of what your needs are, if you need a good, fast, and free Whois client, check out win32whois from gena01.com.  It’s a kicking little program, that I have made sure to add to my trick bag.  It appears to be very well written, fast, and best of all it’s free.   Check it out and happy Whois-ing!