Picasa 3.9, rating: 9/10

Good: A bunch of new photo editing/enhancement methods.  My new favorites: Lomo, Boost, Vignette.  Face recognition seems improved.  Side-by-side photo viewing for original versus edited comparison.

Bad: Although admittedly a rare occurrence, I wish there was a way to create two separate photo edits from a single original without making a copy of the original.  I.e. somehow one managed to get two good subjects in focus in one photo and one wants to create separate photos from them.

X Construction (Android)

A very diverting game for engineer types.  Good for burning a few hours at least.  There are 15 levels.  Full version was free for a day on Amazon.

Soundhound Infinity

Was free on Amazon Appstore.  Identifies music usually within 10 secs.

Weather Bug Elite

Was free on Amazon Appstore for a day.  Easily readable multiday and current weather conditions.  Only works when connected.  Cannot see previously downloaded forecasts without data connection.

Firefox 4

Good: Faster javascript.  Allows a higher level of customization to the appearance of toolbars.  Tabs can be above or below.  Saves vital real estate by removing status bar.  Menu bar can be hidden also.  Most firefox 3.6.x add-ons continue to work.  Profiles port from 3.6.x very seamlessly without any loss of history, settings, etc.  Websites can be notified of desire for ‘do not track’.

Neutral: Finally realized that firefox has a system proxy setting (since 3.6.4) which continually syncs it with the OS proxy setting.  This resolves the issue of the special proxy detector used by corporations switching the proxy dynamically for open sessions of IE, but not for firefox.

Bad: Whereas on Firefox 3 had a semi-readable cache organization, Firefox 4 has implemented a way of fragmenting the browser cache to prevent you from picking off youtube videos from it.

Bloomberg App on Android

This app was very highly rated in Market.  It’s might be most useful for people who are fairly active investors, but even if you’re not, the Bloomberg news reporting is quite good.  I noticed it is one of the few ‘information’ apps which works reasonably well off-line (without data connection or wifi).  The trade-off offline is that it will try to poll for data and freeze momentarily [may depend on the speed of your phone] and then eventually revert to using its cached version.  It’s a good idea to start up the app while connected to wifi and you can read in free moments later on.  [A side benefit of offline reading is that ads do not show up.  Shhh, don't tell the app writers. (I'm sure they'll figure out a way to put them back up even when offline.)]

3/16/2011 follow up:  I found out that the app starts to slow down over time.  I think it may be because of some particularly inefficient data structure holding the indices to cached articles.  But there is a simple solution.  Go to settings: applications: clear data.  This wipes settings including news selections and stock tickers (stock quotes are not particularly good however with this app, so I wouldn’t bother entering them; use Google Finance instead).  But it drastically improves responsiveness of the app.  I think it maybe a good idea to do this monthly or even weekly.

6/24/2011: It seems that if you have no data plan, it’s important to go into the settings to turn off data.  You’ll still be able to use wifi to supply your data.  If you don’t do this, then the Bloomberg app hangs waiting for data which never comes — because obviously you have no data plan.

Cygwin: Unix environment for windows

Need awk, grep, perl, sort, tcsh, emacs, or even the mundane unix2dos for your windows computer?   This thing is really going to make your day.  Hint: look under cygwin/home/<userid> for your .cshrc/.aliases files, edit Cygwin.bat to call tcsh instead of crappy bash.

Firefox 3.6

The latest thing is personas (or themes) which allow you to customize the look of your firefox.  Also useful for distinguishing your running browsers, if you happen to use two firefox profiles (for two yahoo or google or whatever accounts).

Recuva file recovery

I had an old hard drive which sometimes made strange noises, but I decided it could work as a backup disk.  I was trying to find some old files recently and the disk had file system errors.  I found this software which is able to scan the disk for both deleted (non-overwritten) or non-deleted files even if the file system gets messed up.  It works pretty well.  There are a fair number of options which was a pleasant surprise for free software.

Microsoft Fix It 50198

It turns out some software makers do some strange things to registry permissions to basically disallow even admin privileged accounts from easily modifying keys they don’t want you to mess with.  This hoses a number of Windows upgrades such as installing XP SP2/XP SP3/IE8.  There used to be annoyingly complex solution which was to use a subinacl tool to cleanup all the strange contorted registry permissions changes by programs like iTunes.  I think after receiving a lot of support calls and complaints, Microsoft finally released an easy tool to wipe all those permissions clean, annoyingly called Fix It 50198.  Here’s the link.

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