Merc's Useful Tools of the day

[Mercutio]

Screen to Gif does exactly what it says. Size the program window to the area of your screen that you want to record, hit the record button, do a thing. The program will turn it in to a GIF. Awesome for making little tutorials.

 

[Handruin]

This might be a bit beyond the scope of this thread but Guacamole looks like an interesting tool to help manage systems.

 

[CougTek]

I'd never heard about it, so thanks. I'll try it for sure.

 

[Mercutio]

You Adobe-loving Photoshop Slores should like that Google has made Nik's filters available free of charge.

 

[Mercutio]

Here's a tutorial describing how to integrate NuGet providers like Chocolatey for Windows Package Management.

You can just install Chocolatey directly, but this works with generic sources and as such you could technically roll your own repo or install from multiple sources.

 

[Mercutio]

PhotoPea is a nearly complete clone of Photoshop that runs in a browser. I'm not a Photoshop guy, but I know my way around the UI and core functions and as far as I can tell, it seems identical. You can even do things like import brushes you've saved. I'm sure it's missing out on high end masking tools and there's no doubt it's not doing GPU acceleration. Keyboard shortcuts are the same and the basic filters are all there, as are actions.

I found that it worked very well on an Android tablet with a stylus, but it's a progressive web app if you'd like to play with it in a browser or as a "desktop application."

For those who don't know: some web pages can be "installed" as if they were binary applications, from the system menu of Webkit-derived browsers like Chrome and Edge, and also from Firefox for Android but not desktop Firefox. Google Photos and Soundslice are other neat examples of PWAs.

 

[Mercutio]

Kiwi for Gmail is just a web scrape of various Google Workspace tools, but I'm finding that I really like it since I do spend a lot of time switching specifically between Gmail, Google Drive and the various Google productivity apps. If you have a Google-centric work flow, it makes a lot of sense to put all those things together and segregated from other browser tasks. Kiwi is free for a single user account.

 

[Mercutio]

Czkawka is a multiplatform tool for finding and removing duplicate files. I tried it and thought it was really handy and it's relatively fast.

 

[Handruin]

That's a neat tool, thanks. Written in Rust also!

 

[Mercutio]

This is dumb, but not unappreciated: Here's someone's installer package for the games that shipped with Windows 7. I'm a little concerned that there's no kind of checksum or signature on them, but technically they're redistributing Microsoft IP.

 

[sedrosken]

I think I have a Windows 7 install kicking around somewhere that I can hash-compare these to, if it'd make you feel better. I prefer these to the UWP downgrades anyday.

 

[LunarMist]

I found that at a different site in 2019.

Viewing Windows 7 Games For Windows 10/11 v3 - OlderGeeks.com Freeware Downloads

OlderGeeks.com downloads of freeware and open source software without ads, fake download links or tricks.

www.oldergeeks.com

 

[Mercutio]

Snapchat is finally available directly on the web. This is a huge deal for me, and maybe no one else. Before now, I've been running a remote app view from my phone to see Snapchat. Even better, the web version of Snapchat can operate concurrently with the mobile version; prior to this, only special VIP accounts were allowed to sign in on multiple devices. I haven't fully tested if the privacy features work, but I do see that it blanks the Snapchat tab if it isn't active on the current display.

I also found that there's an App called Good Guardians that is available from the Samsung App Store for Android. This app provides some extra functionality to devices in the form of battery monitoring and use tracking, as well as precompiling small bits of Android software that are normally marked for JIT optimizations. It was possible to do this before using ADB commands, but it's a handy shortcut. I tried it out on a couple generic tablets and found a modest subjective improvement in Firefox and Tumblr start times; I suspect the performance improvement is probably not noticeable on the newest devices though. Here is an explanation of what it does and a link to the APK. I got my copy of it directly from the Samsung App Store using a web extension called APK downloader.

 

[LunarMist]

 

[Mercutio]

I got it to load with Vivaldi with a Chrome User agent.

 

[Mercutio]

Diskprices.com is really nifty and sorts results to include whether or not the drives are new, used or refurbished.

 

[LunarMist]

Used drives are just gross. Who knows what files have been on them?

 

[Mercutio]

Used drives are just gross. Who knows what files have been on them?

Sometimes the answer is nothing. I've been getting drives from my datacenter guys for a while to say satisfy my need for better than SMR high capacity drives and many of the ones I've received have had very low numbers of total bytes written and/or power on hours. I can usually buy 5 used drives for the cost of three new ones, so I think it's worth it.

 

[LunarMist]

Us mere mortals have to buy online and find a sale once in a while.
Data center drives have probably been treated properly, heavily RAIDed, and probably wiped already.

 

[Mercutio]

There's a crypto mining process that fills drives and then doesn't do anything more with the data.
My datacenter doesn't charge for power, so it's popular with miners. I think that's why stuff is so frequently abandoned, too.

 

[Mercutio]

VideoMass: for the day when you want to download an entire Youtube channel, playlist or whatever.

Everyone has access to Youtube. Not everyone has access to Youtube without commercials or other BS messages. I decided to create a few Plex libraries for high quality content that i know to exist on Youtube, like stand-up specials. Videomass made getting all that going REALLY easy.