Nelson Email Organizer (NEO) is an application that implements seamlessly with Microsoft Outlook, and which provides a number of features that good old Microsoft doesn’t yet provide as standard.

The first and foremost of these is the search facility. NEO automatically catalogs your emails in an instantly searchable format, which means that you no longer have to wait while Outlook trawls through your emails trying to find what you are after. For example – you remember that you talked to ‘Terry’ a while back, and want to go back over what was said. Just type in the words “terry share options”, and you will see any emails containing those words virtually instantly. As another example – you remember that you talked to ‘Terry’ about share options, but can’t remember the exact keywords. Just click on the ‘Correspondent’ tab, and then click on Terry’s name. You’ll then be presented with any emails sent from, to, or copied to Terry, in one list. It’s hard to overstate how useful this program can be when you’ve got a bulging mail box.

Overclocking is modding a computer to perform at faster clock cycles than it was designed for by the manufacturer.

It involves pushing a computer to its limits and perhaps, even beyond those limits to achieve faster and powerful performance from the computer. While it may seem like rocket science to many, overclocking, when stripped down to the basics is really about 3 fundamental things; temperature, lifespan and uncertainty. Temperature governs speed – the hotter the chips get, the slower they perform, and this is where cooling systems such as liquid nitrogen injection systems come in to play. Overclocking must also take into account the effect on the lifespan of the components. Simply put, stock parts in a processor were not built to withstand such powerful overclocked output and are therefore more prone to “catastrophic failure” (complete and irreversible) during overclocking. Lastly, with overclocking comes uncertainty or the lack of definitive ways of measuring performance of the overclocked computer. This can be made easier with standard operations to test the workload capabilities of the system.

REAP is a software program that lets you evaluate the merits of a residential real estate investment.

It is offered on the Dolf de Roos website. Dolf is a real estate investor and educator with a multi-country portfolio. The software is designed to work smoothly even if the investment is not US based. You set the parameters for the local market (taxes, normal buying or selling costs, type of mortgages available plus other variables). The parameters are saved as a profile for the country or region. When you enter the information for a specific property you select the country or region that applies and the parameters are applied. The software produces seven pages of output per property. Pictures, graphs and tabular information is output. You can then approach lenders, prospective investment partners or buyers with your deal information. I have used the reports to find investors for my real estate deals. The package runs on PC running windows.

ChucK is an open source audio programming language.

Chuck’s developers claim it is “strongly timed”. This means that everything can be controlled in real time and code may be modified on the fly, while the program is running. Chuck fully supports MIDI, OSC, HID devices and multi channel audio and works under Windows, Linux and Mac/OS. In conclusion it is a powerful yet simple programming tool that allows the user to develop unique audio synthesis programs.

While working with computers for the purpose of writing reports and sometime surfing Internet, I have been frequently using certain key commands or key combination that I found very useful and I wanted to share them here. Hoepfully they will be helpful to general users in daily applications, writing notes or reports or surfing Internet.

Most commonly used short commands are:

• Ctrl+Home : Go to top of a document
• Ctrl+End : Go to end of a document
• Ctrl+L : Go to/Begin from left end of a line
• Ctrl+R : Go to/Begin from right end of a line
• Ctrl+E : Go to/Begin from center of a line
• Ctrl+J : Justification of text/paragraph
• Ctrl+A : Select the whole file/text/document
• Ctrl+C : Copy selected portion/file/text/document
• Ctrl+V : Paste selected portion/file/text/document
• Ctrl+Z : To undo command/commands and also to undo auto commands that often appear while typing in words document but are not needed.
• Ctrl+A followed by Ctrl+j : To justify the whole text/document in one go
• Shift+Home : To select part of line left of cursor
• Shift+End : To select part of line right of cursor
• End Key : Go to end of a line
• Home Key : Go to start of a line
• Alt+OE : To change the case of selected portion from small to capital letters

Each of these tasks can be done with the mouse, but each one requires the user to leave the keyboard for the mouse and then comeback which in the long run is very time consuming. It might take some getting used to, but with practice you will notice these keyboard shortcuts are much faster.

Slackware Linux is a packaged distribution of the Linux operating system, which is free and open source.

With Ubuntu getting all the headlines in open source world, you kind of have to see Slackware as the “anti-Ubuntu”. There is no package management system, the installer is text-only, and you’ll be doing lots of command-line work. It has a “do-it-yourself” feel to it. And beyond that, the system is highly conservative – Slackware doesn’t update a package until it’s been through extensive beta-testing. So why would anyone want to use it? The benefit of Slackware is that it is reliable, stable, and powerful. Everything you would want to do with a system can be done from Slackware, where other distros break down because they weren’t set up to handle the power-user. The saying goes that when you learn Ubuntu, you learn Ubuntu; but when you learn Slackware, you learn Linux!