Throughout my blogging years and web experiences Filezilla has been of great use. The Filezilla client allows transfering of files through FTP, FTPS, and SFTP. Actually, you can also delete files on your server or rename them.

It runs nicely on Windows, Linux, BSD, Mac OS X, and you can run it through a USB drive with Portable Apps.

If you prefer to run something similar on your Firefox, you may also try out FireFTP.

By the way, get an FTP client from time to time and download all of the server files to make sure you have a safely secured backup.

Launchy, our favorite application launcher which we’ve reviewed before has now been made to work with Linux!

The list of plug-ins has increased a lot since our last review making Launchy an even cooler application.

Download the application for Windows or Linux here.

Duplicate files finder will help you get rid of duplicate files clogging your hard drive. This program runs on Windows, Linux, and since it supports Unix it may work on MacOS X. Any one willing to make this confirmation?

The program is very simple to use:

• choose the directory you want to sweep;
• see the list of duplicates and where each file is stored;
• remove the duplicates you choose and create symbolic links when needed to fill file dependencies.

That’s it! Fast, simple, and easy.

Nowadays it is rare for me to go one week without discovering a new site and having to create a test account. I still remember the late 90s when I had to remember at most just a couple of different email passwords and usernames. Now I have a myriad of information I need to memorize (like it’ll actually all fit in my brain).

Keepass is my solution for this information overload. With it I can store the user name, password, URL of the website and a bit more. You can actually guide it to generate strong random passwords for you.

All of the information is well encrypted and the database is password protected. Just don’t forget the password you use to open the program.

The program is also highly portable and works with several platforms such as: Windows, Linux, Mac OSX, Pocket PC, Symbian, BlackBerry, and PalmOS. Visit its download page and just pick the platform applicable for you. For me, I have the DB file copied on Linux, Windows, and my pen drive so in case there is an error somewhere even inside the system I wouldn’t loose everything.

Windows users are quite familiar with the need to defrag the hard drive every once in a while. It is specially important if you’re moving large files (like movies), installing, and removing programs. Linux though doesn’t have to worry much about this.

In the open source world, you can also find a very nice tool that will help keep your windows running smoother. JKDefrag is a pretty small, nice, and effective, defrag utility program. You can use it without any installation, just by running the JkDefrag.exe, have it as your screen saver running every time your computer is idle, or you can install it like any other software.

While it is running you’ll be able to see what is going on and see how much of a mess the hard drive is in. If it is pretty fragmented, run it a couple of times and it will get better.

You can use it on Windows 98, 2000, XP, or Vista. Better yet, you could do away with Windows and go to Linux without having to worry about this, but that is a whole different blog post.

Get rid of WinZip, WinRAR, and stick with 7-zip. Why?

7-zip is pretty much the only file archiver you’ll need, it works with several formats such as: 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2, TAR, RAR, CAB, ISO, ARJ, LZH, CHM, MSI, WIM, Z, CPIO, RPM, DEB and NSIS. This is an utility I install on every computer I can.

Once installed, you will have a menu of options available when you use your mouse right-click on top of any file. Besides that, if you want you’ll also have the regular 7-zip program you can open and archive or extract files. All of these operations are extremely simple to do.

What is unique about 7-zip? The compression format “.7z”, standard for this program, has a very good level of performance compared to the regular “zip” format. I can even say that its an intelligent compression system because it checks for redundancy in the coding of the files to eliminate unnecessary duplicates. For example, if you have similar files you want to archive – or compact – (two similar programs, text files, etc) 7z will read the coding of the files and compress only the unique coding, removing redundancies. This way you’ll have a very high archiving performance.

Using 7zip format I was able to compact files up to a third of the regular size.

By the way, I almost forgot to tell ya, you can also encrypt your archived files and protect them with passwords.

7-Zip is opensource distributed under GNU LGPL. It works on Linux, Windows, and there is also an unofficial package for MacOS.

Direct download page here, for more info click here, and if you want there is even the portable USB version.