Within Nerd Fortress there is a certain clock that you may enter at a certain hour, after giving a certain skeleton some particularly fine wine to drink. It helps if your friend is a Unicorn, but this is not strictly necessary. Once you enter the clock you will immediately find yourself in the catacombs below the Fortress, among fire-breathing bulls and other pleasantries. And, if you consider yourself quite lucky, you may stumble upon a secret room with walls lined with bookshelves and tables with dual-monitor workstations. This is where we make tools for nerds.
We have been told that magical secret rooms are the best place to make Really Useful Software. It turns out that if you make something Simple Enough, people might actually use it. As a bonus, you can even make the software Do Something Useful. We’ve been told, actually, that making useful software is the best way to get people (other than VCs) interested in what you are doing.
Get Organized With a Good Weekly Meal Planner
Having trouble finding time to plan meals? Dining In makes it fast and easy to create meal plans and shopping lists. When you plan ahead, you will save money on your grocery bills and avoid having to eat out all the time. Give it a try!
Download the Dining In Weekly Meal Planner from Nerd Fortress
SSToggle: Toggle your Screen Saver and Lock your Optical Drive
I originally wrote this when I was a student and using my computer as an all-in-one workstation and digital media hub. Since it sat in the living room, I had the screen saver on a very short timeout (1-2 mins) to keep the screen blank and unobtrusive when not in use. SSToggle lets you quickly toggle your screen saver on/off so it doesn’t turn on while you are, for example, reading a long document or staring at a bit of code too long. You can also watch its icon to see what other programs turn your screen saver on and off (such as Windows Media Player).
The optical drive locking feature was added when my daughter was about 9 months old and figured out how to put things into our CD-ROM drive all by herself (and when Mommy and Daddy weren’t looking). Then, it wasn’t long before she realized how fun it was to pop open the drive whenever Mommy or Daddy were listening to a CD or playing a game.
To install, simply copy to a folder such as “c:\program files\sstoggle-i-love-u”. Then, right-click and create a shortcut that you can then stick into your Startup folder.
Note: The screen saver toggle works on Windows 2000/XP/Vista, but the drive locking is only good for Windows XP (unfortunately, I have misplaced the source code and haven’t taken the time to rewrite the app for Vista).
Download SSToggle and stop letting screen savers rule your life!
Slice It Nice: Podcast & Audio Book Media Splitter
Podcasts can be pretty long, and audio books can go on for hours. It takes forever to seek forward or back through these files on your lame MP3 player you bought from Woot, or that cool car stereo your brother gave you last Christmas. Have you ever been listening to a podcast or audio book track in your car and accidentally skipped to the next file? All you really wanted to do was fast-forward, but some genius decided to overload the function of that particular button. eBooks from your local public library are particularly frustrating to deal with, because the entire 8+ hour books are usually contained in one massive file.
Well, Slice It Nice is a pretty sweet little Windows media splitter utility that solves all of that and more. It takes a monolithic podcast or audio book file in Windows Media (WMA) or MP3 format and splits it up nicely into bite-size chunks. You can choose to output to WMA or MP3 (requires LAME). Heck, Slice It Nice is even kind enough to detect breaks in speaking and split the media only between words.
Try Slice It Nice today for all your podcast and audio book splitting needs. It’s free. It’s malware-free. And it’s useful.
Note: If you want to output to MP3 you will need to download LAME for Windows, and either put the path to LAME in your system PATH variable, or copy the files to the Slice It Nice program directory.
Download the Slice It Nice media splitter from Nerd Fortress or Get the Source Code
