Unsung software and services heroes ease our days
Full-featured, high-priced products address many users’ needs. But free and low-cost options, sometimes for augmentation purposes, other times operating standalone, also have their place.
As regular readers may already have noticed, I regularly embed FCC certification IDs in my teardowns and other writeups, complete with links to the associated FCC website pages for additional documentation, images, and other information on the products I’m discussing. Long ago, so far in the past that I no longer remember where and when, I came across someone else (iFixit, mebbe?) who was using shortcut URLs of the following format instead of fuller URLs:
http://www.fcc.io/INSERT_FCC_CERTIFICATION_ID
You can tell how old the service is by the fact that it still works using the non-secure version of HTTP. In fact, for a long time, my potentially faulty recollection is that the “https” version of the URL didn’t work at all, although I just checked and it’s now supported, too.
I long assumed this shortcut interstitial URL service was run by the FCC itself. However, motivated by curiosity one day, I entered http://www.fcc.io standalone in my web browser. Here’s what I found on the home page:
FCC.io
What?
A simple search and URL shortener for FCC ID queries.
Why?
I can never find the search form on the FCC site, so fcc.io should be easy enough to remember. Fcc.io provides a way to share FCC ID searches with other people via links, email, IRC, or IM.
How?
The URL scheme is simple:
- https://fcc.io/”FCC ID”
Try these:
To-do
Other search suggestions?
Email to dominicgs@gmail.com
Disclaimer
Neither this site, nor its author, are affiliated with the FCC in any way.
Running on GitHub pages
Good for you, dominicdgs@gmail.com (who appears to be Dominic Spill, formerly “next door” to me in Evergreen, CO per his Github page and now with Apple in Cupertino, CA per LinkedIn)!
Another example, which I briefly introduced recently, are the open source FreeFileSync and related RealTimeSync utilities developed by the FreeFileSync project, and supporting Linux, MacOS and Windows systems alike. The ability to automatically backup or sync (the latter both uni- and bi-directionally) the contents of one or multiple directories to another storage device (a USB-C tethered RAID 1 external HDD array, in my case) became critical to my workflow when I added associate editor duties to my longstanding contributing editor relationship with EDN. The two-utility package has worked without a hitch in the two-plus months (as I write this) since I’ve installed them, and I anticipate further non-drama functionality in the future, too.
Per these and other examples to come, this post will therefore be a to-developer “love letter” regarding software packages and services that have become essential to me, and for personal and/or professional reasons. As you continue reading, think about what similar examples you can derive from your own life. You’ll have an opportunity to share them with us, too, at the end.
Enhanced text editors
MacOS comes bundled with the TextEdit graphical text editor, with others (Nano and Vim) also accessible via the Terminal command line. And if a beefier word processor is what you’re looking for, there’s always the also-gratis Pages. So why on earth would I pay $59.99 (new) or $29.99 (previous-version upgrade) for Bare Bones Software’s BBEdit? Check out this list of features. Or see what fellow fan John Gruber has to say about it, notably in a 30-year retrospective summary published four-plus years ago.
From my standpoint, the ability to automatically re-open one-to-multiple tabs’ worth of content, regardless of whether it’s/they’ve been saved recently (or at all, for that matter), after program shutdowns and restarts and even full operating system reboots, and as long as I haven’t manually closed a tab, is by itself worth the price tag. It’s “saved my bacon” on innumerable occasions.
If you’d like a free “taste” of the full-featured version, a 30-day evaluation time period is supported. And “Free Mode”, the successor to the original freeware TextWrangler software from the same company, will extend the gratis party to eternity if you don’t need access to any of the program’s paid-only capabilities.
What about Windows? Here the seemingly most common enhancement to the bundled graphical Notepad and command line Microsoft Edit editors is Notepad++ (Github link), which is free and open source (not to mention 20+ years old!). Its primary developer is Don Ho; another set of developers led by Andrey Letov recently ported it to MacOS while initially retaining the original name (and notably, without getting Ho’s permission first) and was subsequently compelled by both legal threats and broader community outrage to rename it to Nextpad++ (again, Github link).
And Linux? The already-bundled text editors are generally more robust in this case, befitting this operating system’s comparative “power user” community, but a diversity of add-on options unsurprisingly also exists. Linux users out there, I welcome your suggestions in the comments!
Networked TV services
Windows 7 reached End of Life (EOL) and officially lost extended support on January 14, 2020. Windows 8.1 followed it out the door on January 10, 2023. With them went official support for Media Center, a Microsoft-developed digital video recorder and media player application that first appeared within a special-purpose Windows XP edition in 2005.
I’ve been running various versions of Media Center since the very beginning, initially to ingest broadcast television coming over NTSC and (later) ATSC antenna feeds, later transitioning to cable television feeds in conjunction with a networked CableCARD receiver, and for subsequent display on televisions in conjunction with both Xbox game consoles and standalone Media Center Extender devices.
And I’ve continued doing so even though, as previously noted, the operating system foundations are no longer supported, not to mention the fact that the service’s built-in electronic program guide was discontinued on January 14, 2020. How? The alternative program guide data I’m tapping into is SchedulesDirect, a non-profit “community” (with, as far as know, exactly one active developer employee) and a $35 yearly membership fee.
And how do I get the SchedulesDirect-sourced data into Media Center? That’s where EPG123 (GitHub link), another one-person development project, comes in. Gary An has worked tirelessly for the past decade-plus (ever since Microsoft switched from Zap2it to Rovi as its guide data provider, even prior to shutting down its EPG service entirely) to create and maintain EPG123, fixing bugs, responding to SchedulesDirect service evolutions, and the like.
He’s also a regular support presence on the community forum at The Green Button website. And while he’s happy to accept donations, he doesn’t charge a penny for his software. Bless you, Gary!
An essential email add-on
Mozilla’s Thunderbird has been my personal email client of choice for nearing two decades now (just as the organization’s Firefox browser is for web access…and SeaMonkey is for HTML editing…), and I access email via POP3 so that I can exclusively retain an archive locally. So, you can probably imagine how voluminous my Thunderbird database is at this point. Everything’s (fairly) neatly organized into per-topic folders, mind you, but there are probably thousands of them at this point, in a multi-email account (plus RSS) and multi-level nested arrangement.
That’s why I heavily rely on an add-on called Nostalgy (GitHub link), which enables me to move (or copy) incoming emails from my inbox to a desired target folder, and more broadly from any source folder to another, using only convenient keystrokes. Why Nostalgy hasn’t been adopted by and natively included in Thunderbird by this point is baffling to me, both because of its inherent benefits and because the constant changes to the email client’s database structure and other factors make maintaining it a headache for a third-party developer alternative.
Speaking of which, the add-on was originally developed and maintained by Alain Frisch. Source code maintenance and enhancement duties were later taken up by Klaus Buecher, who renamed it Nostalgy++. It’s an oft-thankless task, as I gather from the commentary that accompanies both new-release notes and periodic requests for donations. But to that point, and as with EPG123, fiscal compensation is voluntary, not obligatory. Long may you continue to code, Klaus, and thank you for your software service!
Squashing a longstanding File Explorer bug
This last one’s a doozy. For decades now, through innumerable version updates small and large alike, Windows has proven itself incapable of permanently retaining user-requested changes to File Manager settings, either folder-specific or all-encompassing, and related to both file sorting and content display strategies.
I might, for example (and regularly do, in fact) tell it that I no longer want it to cluster together chronologically similar groups of files within a folder, instead displaying them solely in a basic alphabetized list format, and to more globally revise this particular setting. Or to tone down the displayed thumbnail size in image-related folders.
The requested changes “stick”…as long as I don’t move to a different folder, that is. Maybe, in fact, they remain as I’d previously requested the next time (or, pushing my luck, few times) I return to that folder. But usually, they immediately revert to defaults. And my random likelihood of ongoing settings-change-sticking success is even less if I quit and then re-open File Explorer, not to mention after a system reboot. Sooner or later, Microsoft insists that its default way is best.
Back in March, the company finally publicly acknowledged the problem (along with plenty of others) and promised that remedies were on the way. I’ll believe it when I see it. And I’m not going to wait. I’d already found, and happily am still using, an independently developed “fix” for these and other File Explorer quirks called WinSetView:
WinSetView provides an easy way to set Windows File Explorer default folder views. For example, if you want Details view, with a particular selection of column headings enabled across all folders, then WinSetView will do that for you.
For more details, please see the extended summary.
WinSetView is open source. It’s inobtrusive, either running portably or fully installed. It does what it promises, nothing more or less, and changes are easily reversible. And it’s free. Kudos to you, developers LesFerch and Thysbelon. You’ve enabled me to (arguably) cling to my sanity.
Now it’s your turn
These are all just examples, apparently particularly notable ones, because they’ve risen to the top of the list brainstormed and assembled in, and subsequently coming out of, my noggin. I’m confident that the catalog as it currently exists isn’t comprehensive, for me (I may think of and add one-to-a-few more entries before this piece is published, in fact) and certainly more globally. Which is where you come in.
What software and services, specifically focused in function and freeware-or-low cost, have you come across that help simplify your life? Share your thoughts in the comments, please, for both your own resultant fame and others’ consideration, adoption and benefit. Thanks!
—Brian Dipert is the associate editor, as well as a contributing editor, at EDN.
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