Practical Ten

Ten Things That Do Useful Things

Freeware caution: always scan free downloads of anything for bugs and other threats before dumping the programs into your hard drive.

ClocX is a free customizable analog clock for your desktop that can be programmed with alarms that play a sound file, launch a message box or run an application of your choice (OS: Win 9x/ME/NT/2K/XP)

Free Virtual Keyboard is a "lightweight, multilingual and finger friendly virtual on-screen keyboard . . . works on any Windows based UMPC with a passive touchscreen (Ultra-mobile PC, Tablet PC and Panel PC). If you spend a lot of time responding to e-mail or jotting down notes on your mobile computer and find your hardware keyboard awkward or too small, a screen software keyboard may be just the improvement you've been seeking. This handy keyboard has keys large enough to be typed with the fingertips" (OS: Win 2000/XP/2003/Vista/7)

For those of you writing at home with small children, Kid-Key-Lock is "a simple program to lock specific keyboard and mouse functions. You can use kid-key-lock to lock any of the mouse buttons, double clicks and/or the mouse wheel" (OS: Windows XP)

Lens is a free screen magnifier that can measure pixel distance, has zoom factors of 1 to 10, will keep its window in sync with the mouse, has a lock view option to keep to a defined screen area and a user defined refresh rate (OS: Win 9x/ME/2K/NT)

Monitor Bright "reduces with a simple trick the monitor brightness. Useful to use the PC at night without getting blind if the minimum brightness that can be obtained adjusting monitor settings is still too high if compared to ambience brightness. Supports multi monitor systems" (OS: Windows 2000 or higher; Net Framework 2.0 or higher)

Pearls is a "small reminder program" that "periodically displays a line or paragraph of text from a file." Good for people who don't use a timer while on the internet and need a reminder to get off and go back to work (OS: Win9x/Me; designer notes that you'll also need the MS Layer for Unicode)

Quotepad "saves the text selected on the screen without forgetting its source"; has a multilingual interface (OS: Windows 2000/XP/Vista/Windows 7)

Reading Ruler is a transparent virtual ruler to help you keep your place when reading from the screen (OS: Windows XP and Vista; designer notes that Java 6 Update 12 is required)

Sanvient is a "input support utility" that "vastly improves your productivity when you must cut and paste repetitive text" (OS: Windows 2000/XP/Vista)

Transmute will "convert, synchronize, sort, organize and remove duplicates from your bookmarks and more"; helpful if you want to try out or work with different web browsers (OS: Win 9x/ME/NT/2K/XP/2K3/Vista)