Darkoshi

WinDirStat is a nice free utility that shows you via graphs which folders and subfolders are taking up the most space on your drives.

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TeamViewer seems to be a good program, if you ever need to help someone with their computer remotely. It is free for non-commercial use. I only did a small test with it so far, but it worked. The other person only needs to download and run a small program; they don't need to install anything, or search for their IP number, or change any router settings. The program displays an access ID and password, which the other person can read to you over the phone, so that you can then connect to their computer and take control of it.

On your side, you can either install the full version, or you can run the portable version if you don't want to install anything. On Windows 7, the full version starts a process which accesses the internet after you boot your computer, even if you don't have the program set up as a service, and even if you have it set not to start with Windows. Regarding this, the manual says "Note: A TeamViewer service is always running under Windows 7 and Windows Vista. Do not stop this service manually! This service is used to optimize TeamViewer for Windows 7 and Windows Vista." This doesn't make sense to me... if I only need to use the program sporadically, not on a daily basis, and only for connecting to someone else's computer, why would I want a service running on my machine all the time? Why can't it do whatever it needs to do when I start the program, rather than when I start my computer? My first thought was to change the service from automatic to manual startup... although based on the note in the manual, that makes me wonder how it would affect the functionality of the program. Then I discovered that there was a portable version that doesn't even need to be installed and which doesn't start any services, so I think I'll just use that instead of the full version.

Bulk Rename Utility is a useful freeware tool for renaming multiple files at once. It has many options for how to rename the files - you can search and replace text, insert prefixes or suffixes, insert incremental numbers, and more. The GUI is somewhat intimidating at first, but it really is rather simple to use, and you can preview the new file names based on your selections to make sure you have them right, before doing the actual renaming.

GoldWave is a NON-freeware audio-editing utility. It has some neat features. The noise-removal option works well for removing hiss. The pop/click removal option does not seem to work very good - at least not when I tried using it to remove all popping noises from some tracks I had transferred from records. I purchased this program back in 2001 when I was doing some audio stuff, and did not think my license was good anymore, but according to their website, it may still be! I submitted a request with my old info, for a new license ID, and will see if I get it or not.

New version uploaded:
http://home.earthlink.net/~shaku8jinn/mir/mo/zip/KaleidoShine.zip

Added a "Brightness" control, a "Restart a new set of shapes every X minutes" control, and a "Random mode" checkbox to the Settings dialog.

To install the screensaver, the KaleidoShine.scr file should be unzipped and copied to the WINDOWS folder. Previously, I mentioned copying it to the WINDOWS/system32 folder, but either folder will work.

PG Offline is free to use for 30 days, but costs $20 thereafter. It puts the messages into a .mdb format (Access database), and provides for nicely formatted browsing of the messages via the PG Offline tool. But saving it as another format is not straight-forward.

The best way I found is to select "Messages - Show Digest" from the menu to view a certain number of the messages on a single page, then hit CTRL-A and CTRL-C to do a select-all and copy of the text, and then paste it into a text file. The digest window does not always display all the messages correctly, but the data is there* when you paste it into the text file.

The above seems the best option to me; I also tried the below, but it is more complex, and for a group with a lot of messages, it does not seem practical to me to archive them as individual files.

*On further testing, not all of the data is there, after all... some messages seem to be missing the text. Oh well. The *.mdb file can also be opened in MS Excel, but the message texts are not easy to read as they include HTML tags. Also note that the *.mdb file includes the userid/password used for downloading the messages, although in an encrypted format.

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messages-1.14.tar.gz lets you download messages as individual text files. Each file includes a lengthy section of email-headers, and some odd parts at the end which apparently Yahoo adds.
It requires Perl to run. It also requires the Crypt::SSLeay module, which does not come as part of the ActivePerl package, and is not downloadable from the ActivePerl ppm repository, as they are a Canadian company and do not have the required permit for distributing cryptographic software.

A Windows version of
ActivePerl can be downloaded and installed in order to run the Perl script.

Crypt::SSLeay can be downloaded from the uwinnipeg PPM repository using the PPM tool which comes with the ActivePerl installation. I first tried installing it from the command line, but that did not seem to work.
You may also need to add the Perl\bin installation folder to your PATH environment variable (if you didn't select that option during installation of ActivePerl), so that ssleay32.dll will be found when running the perl script.

Use this command to run the Perl script:
[\perl\bin\]perl -T yahoo2maildir.pl {group name} [{begin message id} [{end message id}]]

NOTE: if you enter the wrong password, you get this misleading message:
[INFO] Successfully logged in as [your userid].
Couldn't get message count