This is a bit of a recap. I wrote this app in April 2015 and now I issued a minor update.
Ambience puts you into the mood for work or relaxation by playing ambient sounds in the background. Whether it's nature or a busy coffee shop that helps you to get into the zone, Ambience got you covered. The app is based on Noizio for macOS and iOS, but it had no Windows version, so I made one.
Ambience – Noizio for Windows
Back then not only I made it High DPI aware, but also created an installer version. I decided to drop the installer due to its issues, the app can be used in portable mode which is better anyway. And with the release of Windows 10, I made a small adjustment in the header to look better with white title bars and compiled the app for .net Framework 4.7 which will be the minimum version for my applications from now on.
Download it from the Apps page!
Platform: Windows (.NET Framework 4.8)
Big thanks to the makers of Noizio for the sounds and images, they deserve all the credit for those. Go and check them out if you've got a Mac, iPhone or iPad.
I'm planning to write about my file backup strategy in details, because I always enjoy reading about how other people manage their backups, and I'm surely not alone with this passion. But before I would do so, I released one of the utilities I developed and use in my backup workflow.
CheckSummer is a command line utility capable of creating a checksum file with the list of MD5 hashes for a chosen directory, optionally recursively for the whole structure, or it can validate the files listed in an existing checksum file, by comparing their current state to the previously created MD5 hash. By this I can spot if a file is missing or whether its contents changed. Since this is used in the context of creating backups, its main purpose to detect bit rot that might happen after a while. This is a possibility on hard disks, flash media or perhaps on incorrectly read optical discs – some bits flip and the file still has the original length, but its content is no longer valid. Images and video get artifacts, compressed files break, text files get modified. By checking the checksum of files, this can be detected and a previous, correct version of the file can be restored from backup.
The utility can be set up in its .config file to run in Automated mode (use the config value true) so it won't need any input parameters and it either creates a new checksum file with recursive file processing, or validates them using the checksum file, depending on whether the checksum.txt file exists in the target directory. And if there is no target directory specified, it processes the current directory, so in most cases I just have to type checksummer and the desired action happens.
Download it from the Apps page!
Platform: Windows (.Net Framework 4.8), mac OS / Linux (Mono)
When it comes to storing information, I'm a big proponent of plain text files. If you are not, you'll understand this in just a few decades, unless you chose your file formats remarkably well. I like Notepad++ but it's quite bloated for my needs that in this case revolves around text editing and some text manipulation, and I don't need to edit code, install plugins or do anything crazy. Sometime in 2020 I started working on a lightweight text editor that is capable of multi-document editing and some text manipulation, and is also capable of opening large log files for browsing and processing.
I've been using it ever since for daily text editing tasks, and I'm satisfied with it enough to release its first version. It's clearly for professionals and power users, so it comes as a portable package and assigning it to editable text file types is up to the user.
Features
- Supports editing multiple text files, with reopening them the next time
- Handles most modern and legacy text encoding formats and codepages
- Built-in JSON editing and formatting capability
- Offers a wide array of per-line text manipulation options
- Polished user experience
The application icon was created by the talented Miral Gosai who I highly recommend to hire for graphics design.
Features to come later
- Settings editor in the app itself, currently the settings can be edited as a JSON file, if necessary
- Workspaces for text file management, to work with multiple files in a folder structure
- Distraction-free text editing in full screen mode to write essays
- Column-mode editing, that will be added eventually using a new text rendering interface
Give it a try if you're interested in text editors, feedback is welcome and I'm open to suggestions.
Download it from the Apps page!
Platform: Windows (.NET Framework 4.8)