This week I said a sad but necessary goodbye to a faithful Windows utility that I have been using for the last 35 years or more, WinZip.
WinZip was just getting too bloated, too unfocused and too slow for me. And crucially, at times it no longer did the one simple thing I wanted from it: unzip a zip file.
So this week, I uninstalled WinZip and moved to the free, open source PeaZip. And I wish I had done it sooner.
Continue reading Goodbye WinZip, hello PeaZip
Last weekend, my utility smart meters started working again for the first time since July 2020.
Now I can panic about my utility bills in real time!
Continue reading Welcome back smart meter
DevToys is like a Swiss Army knife for software and web developers to help with everyday development tasks such as comparing and converting text and images, testing RegEx, formatting JSON and XML data, compressing images, etc.
It is available for free for Windows from the Microsoft Store.
I wish I’d had this years ago.
Continue reading DevToys—an open-source Swiss army knife for developers
If you are not already using a text expander application then I highly recommend that you start. It will save you hundreds, if not thousands, of keystrokes every month.
As the name suggests, a text expander application is a utility that runs in the background and looks out for you typing predefined phrases which it then replaces with usually a longer text version.
For example, when I type --@e, my text expander replaces this with my full email address: gareth@garethjmsaunders.co.uk, saving me 25 keystrokes.
Continue reading Espanso text expander
It’s now late October, the clocks have gone back an hour to GMT. In Scotland the nights are fair drawin’ in—it is getting dark earlier. All the more important then to make sure I look after my sleep hygiene.
For the last 14 years I have been working mostly sitting in front of a PC. I’m also a bit of a geek so I find myself sitting in front of a PC even when I’m not being paid to do so.
For years I found it hard to get to sleep at night. It turns out that staring at computer monitor for hours is not great for your sleep. The blue light emitted by a screen affects our attention, reaction times and mood (Source) and, crucially, our sleep.
In 2009, I discovered an application called F.lux that detects where you are in the world and automatically adjusts the screen colour temperature to gradually remove the blue as the sun is setting.
Continue reading Helping my sleep pattern with F.lux