Circle Dock  is a free open source dock-style applications launchers for Windows that appear where your mouse is instead of you having to move your mouse to the dock like with other programs. This is accomplished by making the dock a circular or spiral shape so that it can be placed anywhere, even near the edge of the screen. It is activated with a shortcut, the default one is CTRL Windows, and appears always with the mouse as its center. The offscreen portions of the dock are easily reached by just scrolling with your mouse wheel or arrow keys. Circle Dock was another contribution to the Donation Coder Programming Challenge. It was an entry by Eric Wong who contributed not only this but another software program to the Challenge.  Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve been wondering if installing solar panels on our house would be worth it. But, most of us still still hesitate because  we have unvalid information: How much will it cost; how long until it pays off; who’s the best local installer? Roofray.com is a great site to figure this out and give you a rough estimate of how much solar potential your house has. Here’s how it works: enter an address, pull up the satellite image of the chosen building’s rooftop and then using the RoofRay tool based on Google maps, draw your solar arrays. Data on square footage of the system, slope of the roof, power per square foot and total peak power all show up in a chart, and the info displayed depends on how big you’ve drawn your system. Although the site is geared toward California users, It is still able to figure that it would take $50K to install enough solar panels for people to go off the grid  in Wisconsin. Sounds expensive, but that’s not so bad considering our system would pay for itself in 13 years, help save our beloved green earth, and reduce our dependence on oil and energy weasels, both foreign and domestic. So should I go solar? Maybe we’ll wait — in five years it’ll cost half as much and deliver twice the wattage.

Remobo creates an Instant Private Network between users and lets you connect to each other over the Internet as if you were on the same LAN. This app is great for those that need remote access to their PC, work in a secure environment, or just want to know that they’re exchanging files without outside intruders interfering. Remobo creates an Instant Private Network (IPN) between users. It works very much like a chat client meaning it’s easy to add and remove users and suitable for even the most novice programmers and users. Remobo was surprisingly stable and reasonably effective at allowing remote access both to a secondary computer that I controlled and a friend’s machine.
Just login from your computers or add other users to your buddy list and Remobo will create an IPN between these computers, allowing you to. Remote control your home computer and access files while at work or traveling. It also allow you to share privately large files like photos & docs between computers or with friends & family. Then, You can replace your existing, costly and difficult to use VPN software. Moreover, it can run games, video conferencing, streaming media, and secure instant messaging. Version 0.12.2 introduces detailed views for private BitTorrent file sharing and performance enhancements so that Remobo uses much less bandwidth to maintain its connection with peers.

Palette Grabber is a Firefox extension for web designers. It adds an “Export color palette” command to your Tools menu; selecting this command will extract a color palette for the current page and export it to a Photoshop/Illustrator color palette file.
Install it, and Palette Grabber sits in the left corner of your status bar waiting to leap into action. A single click (right or left) exports a selective palette based on your current page in Firefox. Palette selection is very intelligent, producing accurate swatch sets for each of the websites I sampled. Palette Grabber supports Photoshop, Flash, PaintShop Pro, GIMP, Adobe Fireworks, and Mac OS X Color Picker palette formats. Minimalists and power users can elect to save a tabbed text listing of RGB values. For a 25k download, Palette Grabber is definitely worth adding to your Firefox install if you do any digital design work.

When you are annoyed by huge graphical ads smack in the middle of an article. Or perhaps don’t want to waste bandwidth viewing the dozens of images in a review, or user icons in forum boards.  Firefox’s RIP extension  can remove them for good with a single click, which zaps anything out of a Web page, permanently.
First, you will need to download the R.I.P. extension from the Firefox add ons gallery.
For the Big banner at the top to do so, right click on the border of the banner, but not the actual banner itself. That is important, because otherwise, you will not receive the correct drop down menu. After you’ve right clicked on the border, the above menu will appear. Go down and hover over the option that reads Remove It Permanently. You will notice that the banner will flash a red border. That’s just letting you know what will be removed. Click Remove It Permanently and voila, it’s gone!
Now, just in case you ever do accidentally delete something you need, you can undo it by right clicking and selecting Undo Last R.I.P. Finally, if you go up to the Tools menu, followed by R.I.P. Options, you will see a list of all your R.I.P.s, where you can delete them, export them, import them or share them with your friends.