Dale F. Ogden & Associates

Company Logo

Select a Category that might be of interest to you

If you find any invalid links on this site,
you may report them to dfo@usactuary.com

Windows 98 Annoyances: Windows 98 Annoyances is the most complete collection of information assembled for and by actual users of Windows 98

Woody’s Office Power Pack (“WOPR”) Woody Leonhard and his associates have created a powerful add-on for Microsoft Word for Windows with separate versions for Word 2, Word 6, Word 95, and Word 97 (each of which is progressively more powerful than its predecessor). There are far too many tools to even begin to list them here; just visit the site and look for yourself. Like most stuff these days, you can download WOPR and decide for yourself. Woody also publishes a free weekly newsletter, Woody's Office Watch, the cool FREE weekly email newsletter about Microsoft Office, a valuable resource for any user of Microsoft Office or any of its individual components. Woody has written a dozen or so books, most notably Word 97 Annoyances, Excel 97 Annoyances, and the more general Microsoft Office 97 Annoyances. All highly recommended.

Windows 95 and Long File Names -- A Myth? This is an essay I wrote about my early experiences with Windows 95, and dealing with the lack of certain backward compatibilities with previous versions of MS-DOS and Windows 3.x. As usual, the “problems” that I initially experienced with Windows 95 have been solved by creative shareware and freeware utilities. You can download these utilities by just clicking on their names:

D. J. Murdock’s terrific utilities: DOSLFNBK (backup and restore long file names in MS-DOS (versions 5.0 and later) without loading the Windows 95 GUI; and LFNSORT (sorts directories better than the old Norton DirSort; LFNSort can use text file input for custom sorts and works in older versions of MS-DOS **and** in a DOS window while the Windows 95 GUI is loaded.

M. Dew-Jones’ Long File Name Utilities (LFNUTILS), all three of which work in MS-DOS without the loading the Windows 95 GUI; includes Dir95 (directory list including short and long file names); ShowLFN (tree style listing of files that have long names; the listing also can be in the form of a batch file for later use, with SetLFN, in restoring the long names) and SetLFN (create, modify, or remove the long name for a file).

Microsoft’s Power Toys: Power Toys are enhancements for users of Windows 95, many of which also work with Windows NT 4.0. Developed by members of the Microsoft Windows 95 team, Power Toys are available to users at no cost (good price). Power Toys are not supported through Microsoft’s official support channels and, as MS likes to say, “Use at your own risk.” There are several cool “toys” included in the package; my favorite is TweakUI, a handy Control Panel applet for Type A personalities. With TweakUI, you can change menu speed, mouse sensitivity, window animation and sound, shortcut appearance and default names, which icons appear on your desktop, create new templates, boot parameters (including whether or not to start the graphic user interface, i.e., boot to MS-DOS 7.0), and more. Also included are FlexiCD (a more versatile audio CD player), QuickRes (change screen resolution and color depth without re-booting), DeskMenu (access your desktop shortcuts without clearing your desktop), XMouse, CabView, and a bunch of other stuff.

The Microsoft IntelliMouse is a fantastic device, and using the new wheel quickly becomes second nature. Unfortunately, only a few applications provide native support for the IntelliMouse. This quickly results in frustration as you instinctively use the wheel, but it doesn’t do anything. Well, it seems the only reason it doesn’t work with older applications is the MS wants to sell you “upgraded” applications. FlyWheel, from Plannet Crafters (the same guys that made PlugIn, a terrific enhancement for the old Program Manager), a terrific new shareware utility that makes the IntelliMouse do what the MS IntelliMouse drivers always should have done. Flywheel allows the wheel to be used for basic scrolling in all applications, including those that don’t have native support for the IntelliMouse! Flywheel also includes support for two totally new wheel features: Window Cycling and Alternate Scrolling Mode. I used it for less than 10 minutes and logged onto their server to register it. I received my registration code within a couple hours. So far it works with everthing I’ve tried, even some old 16-bit applications that use custom (i.e. “non-standard”) windows. You can configure it to ignore any application and it works in Windows NT, too.

More Properties for Windows 95 from Imaginary Software More Properties allows you to customize features in Windows 95 that are not accessible from the standard interface. Some of these features improve system performance, some make life with Windows 95 a little bit easier, and others are purely cosmetic. More Properties was originally inspired by a shareware program that the author saw on the internet that had a large proportion of its features disabled until the registration fee was paid. Since he already knew how to effect these changes manually, he decided to write More Properties for his own satisfaction and distribute it for free.

MicroAngelo, a shareware utility from Impact Software consists of five major components: the Browser, the Animator, the Engineer, the Librarian, and the Studio. The Browser will help you locate the files on your system that contain icons. It provides a place to start whenever you want to open a file, and can easily be accessed from the File menus of the Animator, Librarian, and Studio. The Animator will create and edit 16 and 256 color Animated Cursor files (*.ANI). The Engineer will install ICO files to replace over thirty standard Windows 95 icons, and install *.ANI and *.CUR files to replace fourteen standard cursors.

The Librarian has been developed to facilitate managing and editing icons that are contained inside Icon Resource (*.ICO), Icon Library (*.ICL), Application (*.EXE), and Application Extension (*.DLL) files. With Studio, you can create and edit icon images contained in Icon Resource and Library files. It also acts as a server application for the Librarian to allow editing of icons contained inside other file types. Studio can create and edit cursor files in monochrome or 16, or 256 colors.

Ian D. Mead’s UltraEdit is a disk based editor with a 16-Bit version for Windows 3.x and a 32-Bit version for Windows NT and Windows 95. The feature list for both products is almost identical, and both products are fully supported. It’s features are far too numerous to list here, but I’ll mention a few of my favorites::

Hexadecimal Editor
Column Mode Editing
ASCII File Compare
Configurable Tool Bar
Multi-level undo and redo
Multiple Windows of the same file
Find and Replace with Regular Expressions
Multiple files Opened and Displayed at the same time
Syntax Highlighting, pre-configured for HTML and others
Convert Word Wrap to CR/LF’s and R/LF’s to Word Wrap
Convert lower or upper case, invert case, capitalization.
Convert UNIX/MAC to DOS and DOS to UNIX/Mac
Convert ANSI to OEM and OEM to ANSI
Auto detect UNIX or Binary/Hex files
Font Selection for display and printer
and much, much more ...

...and if you don’t need all the power and flexibility of UltraEdit (or if you’re just cheap), there are a couple of terrific freeware editors that are much better than the NotePad bundled with all versions of Windows. The first is RogSoft’s NotePad Plus. NotePad+ has no file size barrier like NotePad and can open multiple files. Features include drag-and-drop of selected text, user-definable fonts and colors, open and save dialog filters, smarter hot keys, and several other improvements over Windows’ standard NotePad.

The other, even better freebie is Eric G.V. Fookes’ Super NoteTab (a grown up version of Eric’s Mini NoteTab). Super NoteTab is a feature-rich editor with some very original productivity tools. Super NoteTab is capable of opening a large number of files (the actual limit is determined by the amount of free system resources). Each document is displayed on a tabbed page, making it easy to switch between them. A separate window, called the Document Selector, makes it easy to find a specific document when a large number of them are open.

One of the most significant productivity tools integrated in Super NoteTab is the multi-featured Clipbook. Clipbook can be used to store any item of text, from a single character to multiple lines, that you may want to paste in other documents. Each item is identified by a short header displayed in the Clipbook window. When you want to paste an item in your document, you just double-click on its header or drag-and-drop it to the desired location. You can easily create Clipbook templates for different tasks. For example, Web masters can create various templates for groups of HTML tags.

Super NoteTab is web enabled, which means that you can use it to activate your browser and open links located in a text file. There is also a command to preview any HTML document you are working on. This feature, combined with the Clipbook, make the editor an ideal development tool for HTML experts.

Scooter Software: creator of Beyond Compare, a Windows-based directory and file comparison tool. I’ve tried dozens and this is the absolute best.

Forte: Home of Agent and Free Agent (as you might guess, the freebie version of Agent) and some other cool free stuff. Free Agent is an excellent offline/online browser for Internet News Groups (aka UseNet). Download headers, pick which messages or files you want to download and let it go. It works unattended (like computers were meant to). And it’s free. If you need more features, you can buy Forte’s more powerful Agent.

Insight Software Solutions: Dozens of try-before-you-buy shareware applications, including the absolute best windows-based calculator, SmartSum. They have Applications (Smart ’n Sticky sticky notes), Education (Crossowrd Construction Set), Finance (Mortgage Analyzer), Home & Hobby (Smart Tracker for Coins, Stamps, etc.) and bunches of Utilities (Keyboard Express, SmartKey, etc.)

My favorite for graphics is PolyView by Polybytes, a shareware viewer, conversion, and printing utility optimized for Windows 95 and Windows NT (Intel x86). PolyView supports most popular graphics image formats, BMP, GIF, JPEG, PCX, Photo-CD, PNG, TIFF, and many others. It has sophisticated support for animated GIF creation and playback and TWAIN support for acquiring blocks of images from scanners and digital cameras. Full screen and windowed slide shows. PolyView includes a wide variety of image appearance manipulation and filtering operations, highly effective interpolated zooming, sophisticated color resolution and pixel size manipulation algorithms, Thumbnail and directory browsers for image file management, and DDE communication capabilities for convenient linking to your web browser, news reader, or HTML editor.

The Works Shareware by J. Andrzej Wrotniak: Kalkulator is a powerful yet simple to use calculator and numerical Swiss army knife for Windows 3.1 or 95, with features making it especially suitable for scientific and engineering users, including students of these disciplines. Anyone with some knowledge of programming can write a calculator program and call it “ultimate” or “professional”. If you are a scientist, an engineer or just generally a geek (like me), then you need to check this program out. Just have a look at Kalkulator, use it for a few days and then come to your own conclusions. There’s also a simpler version called Midget Calc, a spherical geometry calculator and some other cool stuff.

Mijenix Home Page: the home of PowerDesk Utilities & ZipMagic. PowerDesk Utilities combines all the best parts of the original Windows File Manager, the Windows 95 Explorer, the Norton Navigator, and just about any other GUI-based file management tool. And ZipMagic makes file archival and compression totally transparent.

ZipMagic (the successor to ZipFolders, a utility that took me less a day to decide that I couldn’t live without it) is the absolute easiest and most efficient way to handle ZIP files (as in PKZIP, WinZIP, etc.). ZipMagic has conversion support for G, GZ, TAR, LZH, ARJ and ZOO archives. ZipMagic also includes support for file encryption, multiple diskette spanning, self-extracting archives, integrity testing and repair, comments in ZIP files, advanced “Zip to” and “UnZip to” and much more.

PowerDesk Utilities is a powerful suite of tools for Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0. It includes PowerDesk ExplorerPlus, the best file management program for Windows and PowerDesk Toolbar which provides quick access to programs, documents, and system functions. It also includes the feature-rich file finding utility PowerDesk File Finder and PowerDesk Size Manager a program for examining how disk space is being used.

QualiType Software is a developer of fonts and the world’s best font management utility programs for Windows, including FontHandler and the Font Sentry system for automatic font management.

Pretty Good Solitaire 97 is a collection of 160 solitaire games for Windows 95 and Windows NT. Nearly every popular and classic solitaire game is included. Pretty Good Solitaire 97 features 256 color graphics, sound, full undo (to the beginning of the game) and redo, statistics for multiple players, user-selectable card backs, background colors and images, automatic game saving, and many other features. Pretty Good Solitaire version 2.2a is a collection of 100 solitaire games for Windows 3.1. It has many of the features of Pretty Good Soltaire 97 [and IMHO a better looking interface] for those who don't have Windows 95.

Professional Web Design by Joe Barta, author of several excellent tutorials about Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML). Almost everything important I know about HTML I learned from these tutorials.

So you want to make a Web Page?

Table Tutor Frames Tutor Form Tutor

Jeffrey M. Glover’s Top Ten Ways to tell if you have a Sucky Home Page!

Jeffrey M. Glover’s Sucky to Savvy or The Top Ten Ways to Improve your Home Page

HomeSite 3.0 is a award-winning 32-bit HTML editor for Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0. HomeSite is an HTML editing tool that delivers the full power of HTML to the hands-on Web developer in an intuitive WYSIWYN (“what you see is what you need”) interface. Professional Web developers and novices alike can create pages quickly, maintain maximum control over HTML coding and execution, and incorporate the latest Web technologies such as DHTML, Cascading Style Sheets, and JavaScript.

Cranial Software’s HTML NotePad is an extension of the basic notepad program supplied with Windows to include the ability to create Hyper Text Markup Language for World Wide Web page creation. You can load this small program and finish your first page before most others have even installed themselves. It can create tables, background images, colours, and lists.

The Cato Institute and the Reason Foundation are my two favorite places to send tax-deductible contributions. Both are rare jewels in the policy-oriented “think-tank” scene.

The Cato Institute takes a more academic approach to policy and produces tons of well researched and rational policy papers to address the hot issues in government. It is the only organization in Washington D.C. that comes up with intelligent, rational solutions to social, economic, and political problems that don’t stomp all over property rights and personal freedoms and that don’t involve more and more taxes and spending. Unlike the alleged “free-market” Republicrats, the socialist Democans, the American Civil Liberties Union, and similar organizations (who wouldn’t know civil liberties if they bit them on the ass), the Cato Institute believes in protecting our rights to life, liberty, and property.

“Free Minds and Free Markets!” Their motto just about says it all. Located on the left coast, the Reason Foundation takes a pragmatic approach to society’s problems. Robert Poole, Reason’s founder, should be the Secretary of Transportation. In my opinion, there is not another human being on this planet that knows and understands transportation issues better. He has spent a significant portion of his life understanding the problems created by government-planned transportation, the failures of which usually result in attempts by beaueaucrats trying to decide where and how we should live and travel. After reading the same liberal nonsense in Time, Newsweek, LA Times, New York Times and Washington Post, (how many government programs have to fail before they figure out that government does almost nothing right?), Reason Magazine is a breath of fresh air. Virginia Postrel, the editor of Reason Magazine, is just plain wonderful.

So, send the Cato Institute and the Reason Foundation both lots of money and subscribe to Reason Magazine. You won’t be sorry.

National Libertarian Party: America's Third Largest Political Party: The Libertarian Party is America's third largest and fastest growing political party. The Libertarian Party was created in December 1971 by people who realized that politicians had strayed from America's original libertarian foundation, with disastrous results. The Party’s founders' vision was the same as that of America’s founders -- a world where individuals are free to follow their own dreams in their own ways, a world of peace, harmony, opportunity, and abundance (a welcome relief from the nonsense that constantly emnates from the statist republicrats). Also see the Libertarian Party of California and the Libertarian Party of Los Angeles.

Advocates for Self-Government: Self-Government is responsibility combined with tolerance. The job of the Advocates is to present the freedom philosophy to opinion leaders, to help them encounter, evaluate, and if appropriate, embrace the ideals of self-government. They also publish the World’s Smallest Political Quiz. Take the Quiz to find your political identity.

I don't recall who said that “No man's life or property is safe while the legislature is in session.” but they were right. So I suggest you visit the California Legislative Information web site (the official site for California legislative information, maintained by the Legislative Counsel of California, pursuant to California law). to find out what new scams are being perpetrated by the legislature.

California Department of Insurance: Read the latest self-promotion, exagerrations, and outright lies from Chuck Quakenbush. You can also occasionally learn about something useful , but I suggest you verify anything you read on this web site with at least two other independent sources before you believe it. The Quack makes Bill Clinton look like an honest man.

THOMAS Federal Legislative Information. On the THOMAS web site, it says “In the spirit of Thomas Jefferson, a service of the U.S. Congress through its Library.” I am 100% sure that Jefferson would roll over in his grave if he knew what statist nonsense flows from the hallowed halls of Congress. Whatever scams are cooked up by the California State legislature are dwarfed by the damage to life, liberty and property perpetrated by the federal government.

California Department of Industrial Relations information regarding workers compensation insurance and self-insurance, labor laws and Cal OSHA, and a source for labor statistics (before you use those statistics, remember that they were accumulated and published by government employees).

EDGAR & the Securities Exchange Commission “the investors’ advocate”): the EDGAR database of Company information and filings, SEC rulemaking, small business information, and lots of propaganda about how the government protects you.

Social Security Administration Research & Statistics (find out just how insolvent the government really is) and remember, all of this information was compiled by people who believe in tht socialist security is good.

Slate (also available weekly by e-mail) is Microsoft’s attempt at creating a serious opinion magazine on the internet. Edited by Michael Kinsley, formerly of the New Republic and, I think, one of those talking heads show on TV that I never watched. Slate is now available only by subscription (we charter subscribers get it for the unbelieveable price of only $19.95 a year forever). As you might guess, I paid my $19.95 and believe that it is well worth it.

Map Blast

The Onion is a hilarious parady of the news and is not intended for viewers under the age of 18. Both conservatives and liberals might be offended; therefore, viewer caution is advised. If you think that government has any legitimate purpose or take politics seriously, I suggest you avoid this site.

Yahoo! Real-Time Traffic Information

Southern California Highway & Traffic Maps: Find out where the latest sig-alerts are. See how fast our traffic is moving (at least up to 35 mph (the highest speed shown on the maps).

Since the late 80’s and early 90’s (the time tracking originated), a vast movement of sound and melody arose in the underground music world, dubbed the “scene.” Using dynamic software technologies that seemed to improve by quantum leaps, people everywhere were able to express themselves in a new medium called modules. Unlike midi, modules did not rely upon a soundcard’s WAV table, and was thus easily reproducible as the author's intent on virtually every soundcard made. Now many years later, thousands of trax (modules) surface every year, encompassing all music styles and genres, and being composed by people of all ages and walks of life from every corner of our earth. To help unite the scene as never before, to raise the levels of quality, to allow first time visitors more than a glimpse into the magnificent universe of tracking, and to do this all in style, Trax In Space has emerged as a monumental van guard of the infinite cosmos called the “scene.”

The Kosmic Free Music Foundation is an international not-for-profit organization dedicated to providing free access to original music on the Net, and exploring new ways of distributing artistic creations to the widest possible audience. We aspire to provide a channel between artist and audience seperate from the monopolistic worldwide entertainment industry whose business mechanisms are inevitably at odds with the purposes of art.

KFMF was founded in 1991 as the Kosmic Loader Foundation, and became the Kosmic Free Music Foundation in December of 1994. There are currently about thirty members, including musicians, graphic artists, programmers, and slave laborers. Membership is at this time by invitation only. We write music in file formats that allow you to download our music and play it back on your computer at near-CD quality. As part of our desire to reach the widest possible audience, we also utilize new technologies like the streaming audio of RealAudio and Perceptual Audio Encoding methods like MPEG Layer 3.

Our FTP site and World-Wide Web sites transfer gigabytes of music and information and receive thousands of visitors from every conceivable area of the globe, daily. We also continue to maintain official BBS (Bulletin Board System) distribution channels in over 25 countries; many other BBSes carry Kosmic's music unofficially. Kosmic reaches thousands and thousands of people and is committed to reaching those who haven't yet heard so that we can continue to open minds and ears to new music.

http://www.kosmic.org/ (KFMF main site)
http://www.spaz.com/kosmic/ (mirror site)
http://mir.kosmic.org/ (another mirror site)

MODPlug: Olivier Lapicque originally developed a music MODule plugin player for MS Internet Explorer and NetScape Navigator. He later expanded his offerings to include the MODPlug Player, the most full-featured stand-alone MOD player around. MODPlug now has the ability to add WinAmp-compatible visualization plugins. He also has written a MODPlug Tracker for those of you who want to create some original music and share it with the world.

Jean-Paul Mikker’s home page, MikMak, creator of MikIT, which, as of this writing, is the only Windows-based player for Impulse Tracker music modules (version 0.90 also plays Fast Tracker II modules and Jean-Paul has plans to add several other formats).

Andre’s MOD Page: Andre’s description of his web site: “There are a large number of programs around the MOD format. But only a few of these are really useful. And these programs are exactly the contents of my pages.” Nonetheless, his site is one of the most comprehensive sites about digital music modules and includes players, trackers, tools, converters, samples, a large collection of music, and dozens of links to other related sites. There is also an American Mirror of Andre’s Mod Page, and you can access his downloads more conveniently from the American Mirror site with FTP (like CuteFTP) at ftp.ganknet.ml.org. (Switch to the directory aka (C:\WWW\aka) after you logon.

MAZ Music & Sounds: “...you should find the newest and hottest music/tracker related stuff, well sorted, selected and with comments by a guy who's life IS music & tracking...”

MOD Ring: ModRing was created mainly for composers of music MOD's. This is not to rule out S3M's, XM's, STM's, MTM's, IT's, and any other of the many PC-based MOD music formats. The ring allows for composers' homepages to be more widely accessible.

fLAtDiSk™ SoftWorks presents MODSpeak™ Live! -- a choice collection of digital music modules in MOD, XM, IT, and S3M formats for your downloading pleasure. This site is optimized for Microsoft® Internet Explorer 3.x and activated with ActiveX.

Mod4Win, the absolute best Windows MOD player (but still no support for Impulse Tracker files). Try Mod4Win and then e-mail them that you want to buy as soon as they add IT support.

Pirate Pete’s Music Page: Pete describes his own web site: “This page is dedicated to all of those marvelous people with real talent who produce wonderful music that has moved my soul on various occasions in my life...their music has affected me deeply and inspired me to learn how to write my own”

About a dozen a and half versions of PopCorn (the song) in various MIDI and MODule formats.

Awesome MIDI music inspired by Commodore 64 Games

Gerd’s MIDI Pages Gerd Reichinger, at Technical University of Vienna, Austria, has collected and sorted thousands of MIDI files available on the internet and made them available for others to download and enjoy. More importantly, he selects (obviously, his opinion) only the very best tunes from the thousands of MIDI files available on the Internet. Only about 5-10% of the MIDI files are good enough for his collection.

Llerrah’s - MIDI Made Music for Windows is “The Best Jukebox Player on the Internet Today!!! MIDI Made Music is fun, easy to use, full featured animated jukebox for playing the following multimedia files types

MIDI (MID, MIDI, RMI)
Windows Wave (WAV)
Audio Compact Discs
Microsoft Video (AVI)
Apple Quicktime (MOV,QT)
MPEG Video & Audio (MPG, MPEG, etc.)
Audio Interchange (AIF,AIFF)

and a few others. Designed for Windows 3.1, Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0, the Jukebox database can hold up to 10,000 selections or playlists. Special features include: Change Tempo while playing MIDI and Videos; Custom Edit to create your own Sound, CD-Audio and Video clips; and more.

CDCopy: Copies CD-audio tracks (CDDA) to disk. Saves files in WAV, AU, RAW, MPG (MPEG 1, Layer 2) and MPA (MPEG 2, Layer 3) format; also saves MP3 (MPEG 1 Layer 3) with external Encoder (e.g., Xing MPEG). Saves files in mono/stereo, 8/16 Bit, 22050/44100 kHz. Includes CD-Player function, DAO CUE-Sheet generation, MP3-tag-ID information, WinAmp playlist generation, support for lyrics server www.lyrics.ch and MP3 Lyrics Tag. Full support of CDPLAYER.INI and CDDB (CDDBP and HTTP protocol) to retrieve CD-information, CDDB batch mode.

WinAmp Winamp is a high quality MPEG audio player. It plays all Layer 2 and Layer 3 MPEG audio streams. Features, features, and more features: a full featured playlist editor; a 10 band graphical equalizer with preamp and user defineable presets that optionally can load automatically for specific files; built-in visualization, so you can watch your music in a little part of its interface; a plugin system that lets third parties write plugins that change the way the music sounds (effect loops), and plugins that let you “watch” the music like you never thought possible; “skin” support, allows you to use custom graphic overlays that change the appearance of the user interface; windowshade mode (basically, a control bar that has a minimal screen footprint. Winamp can be “always on top” and can remove itself from your crowded taskbar (with just an icon in your system tray). The list goes on.

Syntrilllium: Nothing but cool stuff from these guy: Cool Edit - the best in digital audio processing technology; Kaleidoscope 95 - the screen saver that responds to music; and Wind Chimes - turn off that radio and bring in the music of the wind. Syntrillium Software offers unique technologies and products that enhance individual creativity in the manipulation of sound and visual effects.

SyntheSoft: Psychedlic Screen Saver and CD Spectrum Pro and (an awesome CD Player for your PC)

Compact Disc Audio (CDA format) Information & Utilities

Digital Audio Copy Utilities for DOS and Windows