Blended Living

I’m lately a huge fan of portable apps – applications that can be installed on a USB flash drive and run from there.  Its nice to be able to carry that small device around and know that wherever you plug in,  there is that utility that you love to use.

When learning something new online, its often necessary to take copious notes, and possible in the process to lose the concepts in the minutia.   What if you always had a great screen capture program as near as your portable flash drive? 

FastStone Capture V 5.3

Capture

http://www.portablefreeware.com/?id=775

The other great use for screen capture programs is to grab a screen shot, annotate it sufficiently and send it to that computer challenged friend or relative.  Trust me, this saves alot of time and frustration - even if you have to send the initial instructions on paper and US postal.

There are later versions of Capture, but they aren’t totally free (for personal use)anymore.  I’ve used this for about a week and its proven very useful.  Not that hard to configure, yet has enough bells and whistles for most users.  Enjoy – and save some trees.  [for windows]

The latest version is here: 

 http://www.faststone.org/FSCaptureDetail.htm

Well worth the price if you want the later features or are using it for work.

Ever wish you had a dictionary handy while you were browsing the web?  Here is one that I found recently.  I’ve only used it for about a week, but I find that I use it several times a day.

http://wordweb.info/free/

Useful for that student you may know, or when you just don’t want to bring up another browser.  Just control-right-click and it pops up.  It also has a thesaurus for those times the quotidian just won’t do.

Yeah, if you had WordWeb loaded you could control-right-click on that word and find out what it means.  Free.  For windows.

WordWeb