Taskbar Shuffle

Taskbar Shuffle is a nifty little free utility for Windows (all versions) that allows you reorder taskbar buttons and system tray icons via drag and drop. Handy if, like me, you often have a lot of windows open and like to introduce a little more order to how they are arranged than simply the order in which they were opened.

It also allows you to close a window/programme by middle-clicking its button on the taskbar, as well as giving you a little more control about how buttons are grouped.

MozBackup

MozBackup is a simple open source backup utility for creating backups of many Mozilla products, including Firefox.

I currently have over 25 extensions installed (although I keep some of them disabled unless I specifically need to use them) - this might seem like a lot but I've heard of people having 60 or more!! I tend to be quite strict with myself about what extensions I actually keep installed. I'll only try an extension if it looks like it offers a significant usability enhancement, and even then, if it turns out to be less useful than I anticipated, I'll uninstall it again.

Nevertheless, 25 extensions, not to mention my browsing history, bookmarks, cookies, etc. is a lot of stuff to lose should things go wrong, so I thought it was about time I looked into backing up my profile. And MozBackup seems to offer a very nice, easy to use way of doing this - and of course, restoring backed up profiles.

Another font manager

Cfont Pro is another free font manager for Windows. I haven't tried it out yet but it's worth filing away in the 'to look at sometime when I've got nothing else to do' tray.

Retain aspect ratio of selected area when resizing images

Seam Carving GUI is a freeware utility which allows you to resize an image while retaining the aspect ration of a specified area.

A similar functionality is built into Photoshop CS4 but for those who can't afford the upgrade (me included!), this could come in quite handy on the odd occasion when I need to fit an image into a space that's the wrong size.

Obviously it won't work for all images, but an example where it would work quite nicely is where you've got an area of background (sky, water, or something where a bit of stretching won't be obvious) that can be resized, while maintaining the proportions of the main subject.

It is possible to approximate this sort of effect by selecting an area of an image in Photoshop and resizing that part, but this tool is a bit more intelligent, allowing you to select irregularly shaped or multiple areas.

KeePass

I've never been very organised with passwords, but with no end in sight to the number of new logins required, it seems like its well overdue that I do something about it. OpenID sounds like a good idea but the number of sites supporting it is still fairly small. Maybe I'll switch to using it for those sites that do support it. But for the rest, in the meantime, KeePass looks like a very nice bit of software for securely tracking passwords.

Lifehacker have a nice article on how to set it up and use it, as well as an article on using Dropbox to sync the KeePass database online so you can access it from multiple computers.

Dropbox

Oh yes! Why has Dropbox never showed up on my radar before? OK, I'm not one of these people that walk around with a laptop, connecting to the internet in every cafe, coffee shop and petrol station I see, but still, there are occasions when being able to access files remotely would be great. In fact, even at home where we have a desktop (which is upstairs, doesn't get used all that much and remains switched off most of the time) and a laptop (which is usually downstairs, gets used a lot, and is on standby most of the time), it would be very useful - and a much cheaper (free!) alternative to a network hard drive.

picasa2flickr

picasa2flickr - flickr upload plugin for picasa is a useful little plugin that adds a button to Picasa allowing you to send selected photos straight to Flickr Uploadr.