I figured I would upload this file because it looks like some of my favorite applications are starting to disappear online or go for a paid model.  I have mentioned this one before and it is by far the easiest and best way to manage your MP3 tags.

I am a huge fan of Launchy and it has replaced my start menu totally.  Well today I decided that I would look around and see if I can change the skin a little bit.  Well low and behold our good friends at DeviantArt.com have a whole library of skins for you to download.  Install is as easy as downloading, unzipping and changing the skin in Launchy.  Click the image to see the gallery of skins you can download.

Looks like Mozilla has gone through with their promise and spun off Thunderbird to its own development team.  I think this is a good thing so that Thunderbird can get the attention it needs to become its own awesome application.  I also noted Spicebird is a fork of Thunderbird’s code as well.  Looks like they just released another beta version a few days ago so I will have to keep an eye on that one as well.  I use Thunderbird mainly as an email archiving application and use Yahoo Web Mail for most of my emails.

So if you a frequent user of PuTTY and you are constantly across multiple servers, and are stuck with using Windows this is PuTTY with a connection manager Add-on that turns it into a nice Firefox like tabbed interface.

This makes it a lot easier and a lot cleaner to multi-task

This is by far and away the best application for updating MP3 tag information because you can do thousands of MP3’s at once with the click of a button.  I also used this application to solve some of my album art issues I experienced after downloading the correct album art. A must have for any MP3 collection

So after winning (yes I would never buy) an iPod Touch, I decided I would need to add all album art to my MP3 collection.  Because I have ripped my MP3 collection using tools like Audiograbber, I do not have any album art.  Well after some searching, downloading, and experimenting I finally found one that works.  Actually this was mentioned by one of my blogs the exact day I was looking for it.  So I used the application Album Cover Art Downloader, which is multi platform and then went through and started downloading the album art.  After this because iTunes is retarded and doesn’t notice any change to you music library I used my good old friend iTunes Library Updater to get the job done, which I have spoke about before.  After doing all of that my music files now have album art!  It is just a little time consuming to get the library up to date but what are you going to do?

Have you ever wanted to check out a feed on Google Reader before subscribing to it?  If you add a bookmark with the following code and click it when an RSS feed is available it will allow you to do just that.  This comes in handy if you are curious if the feed contains images or is just headlines without any text, this has saved me from subscribing to some less useful feeds.

Bookmark Code (copy and paste):

javascript:var%20b=document.body;if(b&&!document.xmlVersion)
{void(z=document.createElement(’script’));
void(z.src=’http://www.google.com/reader/ui/subscribe-bookmarklet.js’);
void(b.appendChild(z));}else
{location=’http://www.google.com/reader/view/feed/’+encodeURIComponent(location.href)}

This plugin is one of the best plugin’s I am using for Firefox these days.  This one fixes it so that little screen that pops up after you click an RSS feed link that lets you choose Google reader or iGoogle goes away and defaults to Google Reader.  It also allows you to skin the reader with a few different choices.  I am a fan of the OSX theme (yes I hate Macs but their color schemes are usually the best) this theme is very clean and gives Google Reader a new look.  Also it allows you open the link in the RSS feed right into the browser making it much cleaner and easier to use.

The code is written by our good friends over at Lifehacker, I also like it because I am not a big fan of using Grease Monkey scripts and that used to be the only way to change the look of Google Reader but now this is just a stand alone plugin.  Click the picture to get the plugin.

Looks like someone has picked up Mozilla’s Thunderbird code and started adding to it.  This is a good thing as Mozilla is trying to pass off this application so they can focus solely on Firefox.

This is a quote from their site:

‘Apart from having e-mail, instant messaging and group calendaring, an ideal collaboration system should make ‘working together’ possible – like creating a proposal, launching a new product, developing software, managing group knowledge and publishing websites even while working from different continents. Spicebird - the collaboration suite developed by us, creates a platform to do precisely that. In addition, Spicebird makes customization easy and ensures that the software can be adapted to your business collaboration needs.’

Autoruns is a super lightweight application that allows you with a click of a button to enable or disable something from the Windows Bootup.  This is great for a new computer when you are trying to clean things up.  Unfortunately most of the things that slow my computer down are required to run by my company so not much I can do but I use this application all the time on other peoples computer when they are complaining about poor performance.