By now, most of us have copious amounts of MP3 files floating around our hard drives. If you’re like me, a digital packrat, you’ll have gigs stored away because you never delete anything. Sometimes, these files just don’t have the tags they’re supposed to. Sometimes, you might even get some bogus copies of MP3s without proper IDv3 tags. Whatever the reason, you need to be able to quickly go through your MP3 collection (or parts of it) and re-tag or rename your music files.

If you’re heavily addicted to Friendfeed, you will be interested in the Adobe AIR application which has just come out called Alertthingy. It shows promise and I quite like it but it’s not yet showing the major mojo needed to tear me away from my RSS reader.

Alertthingy is benefiting at the moment from a big wave of online hype and anticipation which has been surrounding the project for ages. The application, which sits on your desktop, basically acts like a miniature RSS reader and provides you with all the updates left by your Friendfeed contacts. It’s fast and works quite well.

(1) Image Manipulation

GIMP – Alternative for Adobe Photoshop and Corel Paint Shop Pro

GIMP, short for “GNU Image Manipulation Program”, has been written about several times before on this site. However, I felt it was worth another mention because of its versatility as a Photoshop alternative.

Travis has already introduced Windows Live Writer to Make Use Of readers so I just thought I would tell everyone about some features that can be turned on, some settings that can be configured so that you can make use of Windows Live Writer better.

1) Turn on Spell Check

One thing that I missed a lot on Windows Live Writer (WLW) is a spell checker. But when Travis told me that there was a spell checker inbuilt and only that it needed to be turned on, I was overjoyed. Here’s how you can turn it on:

So you have found yourself up into the wee hours of the morning downloading your favorite television series from your childhood (don’t worry we won’t tell anyone it’s the Smurfs!) only to discover that it won’t play?

Maybe it’s the video, audio or even both. What do you do?

I have been using a tool called Gspot for a long time now to figure out what is going on with my videos. This is how it works. First download the Gspot 2.70a package. It requires no installation and works very simply.

After you launch it, you will see a screen like this:

A while back, I downloaded a tiny package called FastKake. I don’t recall where the link came from, but somehow ended up in my browser. At first glance FastKake seemed like a weird application, little did I realize how interesting it was. FastKake is really just a tiny 120 KB file that can do all sorts of handy and useful shortcuts to your Windows operating system.