I like to listen to music with my headphones on. I play that music from my computer. In the meantime I’m surfing the web a bit, clicking on vague links. Then it happens: you surf to a site with background music at about 500% the volume of the music you are currently listening to. You know, the louder the better, because you have to be different than the rest. Or maybe you are just stuck in the 90s.

I’m sure I’m not the only one this happened to, because Einar wrote FlashMute.

FlashMute is a tool which allows you to mute/unmute Flash movies loaded in a browser exclusively, or alternatively all sounds produced by the browser. It lives in your systray and with a simple mouse click it shows a volume slider and mute option. What else do you want?

http://www.indev.no/?p=projects#flashmute

Here is something that I have been using for a while, every now and then.

Maybe you will recognize this problem. You are trying to concentrate on writing something for your blog, an important letter or something similar. But you constantly get distracted by other stuff on your computer, a rss program that pops up some news, a new email that arrives or maybe a new msn message from that cute boy/girl you got the hots for. Wouldn’t it be nice if you were in some sort of room, for a little while, alone with your words?

Hog Bay Software probably had the same problem, so they wrote WriteRoom. A full screen ‘notepad’ with black background and lemon green letters. Yes, that old school terminal look. In the words of Hog Bay Software "A full screen, distraction free, writing environment". Nice! If you are a Mac user …

Luckily a Windows user also liked the idea, and cloned the program to Windows naming it Dark Room. Great! Somebody else even wrote a (Sun) Java version, so all Linux people can use it too.

WriteRoom for Mac
www.hogbaysoftware.com/product/writeroom

Dark Room for Windows
they.misled.us/dark-room

JDarkRoom for Mac/Windows/Linux
www.codealchemists.com/jdarkroom

Notepad++ is a free source code editor that supports several languages. Running in the MS Windows environment, its use is governed by GPL License.

Based on a powerful editing component Scintilla, Notepad++ is written in C++ and uses pure Win32 API and STL which ensures a higher execution speed and smaller program size.

This project is mature. However, there may be still some bugs and missing features that are being worked on.

notepad-plus.sourceforge.net

Removed the link to X-Setup Pro. The program is not free anymore.

Thanks to Remmer for the tip.

RocketDock is a program launcher for the mouse. It is a similar type of program like Apple’s dock or MobyDock/Y’z Dock/Objectdock for Windows. You’ll probably get the idea already, so further introduction will be unnecessary.

RocketDock is fast, stable and very pretty.

I use this side by side with a keyboard launcher (TypeAndRun) so I can quickly launch my programs with whatever I’m using at the moment.

Warning: Once you’re used to RocketDock you will feel very naked if you are behind another computer without this program. The same applies to TypeAndRun too.

www.punksoftware.com/rocketdock

In a lot of programs you can move around columns to set them up in an order you like. uTorrent being a nice example of that. Why didn’t Microsoft add that ability to the taskbar? Grouping of similar taskbar buttons (TweakUI) is already a nice addition, but not really complete.

I know when I’m working behind my computer the taskbar gets overly crowded. So a bit of rearranging would come in handy.

That’s where Taskbar Shuffle kicks in. Drag and drop and rearrange your taskbar the way you like it. Like in TweakUI, you can also set your taskbar button grouping preferences in Taskbar Shuffle. So all in all this is a simple, yet complete taskbar arranger.

http://www.freewebs.com/nerdcave/taskbarshuffle.htm