Most readers would agree that it’s a pain to resize images. It’s pretty easy to do so when you use a tool such as Photoshop, but consider the system resources used just to resize an image. A simple tool such as MS Paint or Gimp can be used to resize images too, provided you have the time to do it manually. However, the Image Resizer Powertoy can make it even simpler and more efficient to resize images.

With the Microsoft Image Resizer Powertoy, all you need to do to resize an image is to right click the file and click on “resize pictures”. You will then be presented with a window where you can choose from a set of predefined and commonly used resolutions, or you can enter your own resolution into the custom box. The program will automatically resize the image to the given resolution, keeping the ratio so the image does not appear stretched or compressed.

Download the Microsoft Image Resizer Powertoy, a small 521 KB application.

Keeping a secure password is vital to protect your identity and privacy. A secure password usually includes a combination of various numbers, alphabets and special characters. Remembering them can be quite tricky.

We’ve reviewed Sxipper, a Firefox plugin that saved the user’s information including passwords and usernames which could later be used to login using a single click. For Windows however, we have a portable open source password manager called KeePass.

KeePass is a free portable utility to manage all your passwords in a secure way. You can put all your passwords into one secure database and give it a master password. Or if you find it convenient to use a key file, you can choose a key file only you know of to unlock the database.

KeePass uses the AES and Twofish encryption algorithms for security. As an added security precaution, KeePass automatically clears the clipboard in ten seconds after you have used it to copy a password.

KeePass can be installed either on Windows or on a flash drive.

Since it is an open source software, you have access to the full source code.

Download KeePass.

We all copy a lot of text and images, and we sometimes forget to paste or save them. To avoid such situations, we’ve already reviewed Cl.ickable, a Firefox plugin that allows you to save snippets of text to an online clipboard. But what about monitoring your Windows clipboard?

Sure Cl.ickable can do a very good job when you’re online, but for offline usage, we use an advanced clipboard manager called ClipboardCC.

ClipboardCC monitors your clipboard and saves text and images you have copied as files. In other words, you can save the entire content of your clipboard as text or images. You can select between several formats. Text can be saved as plain text (txt), html, and rich text format (rtf).

Quite convenient. =)

Download ClipboardCC for Windows Vista and XP (requires Microsoft .NET Redistributable v2 or higher).

Windows Media Player 11 (WMP 11) is an excellent music application for Windows XP. It has some lovely features in the form of an excellent media library management, a snappy control panel when you minimize it, and many more. The option to have a mini-control panel when minimized is pretty cool and handy. The only problem would be that it takes a lot of space on the taskbar. How would you like to minimize the window to the system tray and yet have all the features and total control that the small control panel gives when minimized?

Windows Media Bonus Pack for Windows XP contains a nifty tool that allows you to do all that from the system tray icon. It’s called the Windows Media Player for Windows XP Tray Control. The little icon runs in the system tray and provides “quick and simple access to your most common tasks in Windows Media Player such as volume and mute control, next track, play, and pause functionality with a single click.”

Once the Tray Control application is started, you can right-click on the icon and select “Hide Media Player”. This will actively hide the main application window from view. You can then pause/play a track by clicking on the icon among other options, effectively controlling the media player from the system tray icon.

That’s one less open window and more space on your taskbar. Pretty cool huh? =) [direct download]

BlackBerry Storm: First Look

Twitter sends out SMS alerts every time you receive a direct message or a nudge, provided you have chosen to receive such messages. However, Twitter does not send you messages each time you get a reply. When using services such as Vakow! to post messages on Twitter, it would help if you were able to get those replies to you via SMS as well. That’s where we at Harmless Geek come in. =)

If you have activated your mobile number with Twitter, then skip to the next paragraph. Else, head over to your Twitter devices page and activate your mobile number now.

Provided you have five minutes to spare, this tutorial should be pretty easy and straight-forward. Follow the steps:

1. Setup another Twitter account. Try to have a short username for this account, even if it doesn’t make any sense. This account is only for you and for the purpose of receiving @replies. For the purpose of keeping the public timeline clean, make this account “private”.
2. Create an account on Twitterfeed or any similar service.
3. In the following URL, change username to your Twitter username (handle). Also change username2 to the second Twitter account you created at step1.

   http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=username+-username2&show_user=true

4. It should look something like this, where 9_6 is my primary Twitter handle, and santoshgs is the second account I created.

   http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=9_6+-santoshgs&show_user=true

5. Now copy that URL and head over to the Twitterfeed account you created on step 2. Create a new feed with the login details of the second Twitter account, and use the URL we previously created. Include just the title or the description, but not both. Keep the update frequency to a minimum. It should look something similar to the following photo. What we have completed till now is making Twitterfeed post the search feed for your username to your second Twitter account.

   

6. All that remains now is that you follow your second account and activate device updates. (Pardon the username in the following crude image. It should actually be your second account handle.)

   

That’s it. You’re done. Now get @replies SMSed to you wherever you are! Remember, you read this FIRST on Harmless Geek.

Printing a web page could not get any easier. PrintWhatYouLike.com lets you edit a web page on-the-fly and print just the information you want. Sounds pretty good, right?

PrintWhatYouLike facilitates printing of exactly what you want from any web page, minus all the clutter. It’s sort of an online web page editor, if you may call it, that lets you edit a web page and then print it straight away from the Web, without having to install any additional software.

You can cut, add, stretch, compress, and more so that your print does not appear broken, filled with ads, or with any other unwanted content.

The only drawback I found was that you could not save the page to come back and edit later. That was hover solved with the help of Scrapbook (which by the way, has some really cool page editing features we missed out).

Check out what we have done with Harmless Geek.

We wrote about saving entire websites and web pages using PageNest recently. It works like a charm, and was more of an offline browser. Only problem was that it’s a 1.4 MB software that works only on Windows. For those of you who use alternative operating systems or want something running out of their browser, Scrapbook is what we recommend.

Scrapbook is a small plugin for Firefox that saves web pages for offline reference. An added feature of Scrapbook compared to other web page saving software is that it allows you to manage your saved web pages very easily, and comes with several useful features integrated. Other basic features include exporting saved pages and combining them.

You can add a comment, a sticky annotation, inline annotation, highlight text for future reference, show all the saved web pages in the sidebar, and much more. (click on the image above to really understand what Scrapbook can do).

Advanced options are available where you can specify the depth of links to be followed, and choose what type of media (JPEG, ZIP) formats should be saved. You can even bookmark a tab for future saving.

I haven’t yet told you the best part of Scrapbook. It’s the ability to capture all open tabs! Now how’s that for a small plugin? =)