Clif Sipe

Metapad is a replacement for Windows Notepad. I've been using metapad for nearly two years now. It's fast, it's free and it has many features I love using. The most useful feature for me is that web addresses are clickable in metapad and will open a ... website up in your favorite web browser. Don't run Windows without it! From the metapad website: " Once upon a time, one of the most useful programs for everyday use was known as Microsoft Notepad. I realized that Notepad was quite powerful and did a lot of what I wanted in a simple text editor. Yet I found the user interface to be unlike most 32- ... (view more)

I downloaded "Mario Forever", a freeware clone to the original Super Marios 3, and -- wow! -- this game is extremely impressive. In fact, it reminds me of all those great games I used to play on Nintendo. Mario Forever has lots of enemies and levels ... that get increasingly difficult to navigate. I had trouble getting the gamepad to work properly but the keyboard controls really were very good once I got used to them. I also had a hard time finding the keys for playing it, so I'll tell you that "jump" is the shift key and "run/fire" is the "z" key. The uninstall worked well and I found the ... (view more)

Godzilla, the monster, is well known for his powers of destruction but FileZilla , unlike Godzilla, will help you construct. I use FileZilla as my FTP client several times a week while building websites. Over the years I've tried many free FTP ... programs. They all did the job, but FileZilla is the one that I finally kept. It's easy to use and does everything I need. Its dual pane views make dragging and dropping files between the web and my PC a simple task and it connects to my FTP sites with a single click of the mouse, as it remembers all of my FTP logins and passwords. FileZilla downloads ... (view more)

Here are two questions Internet users commonly ask: " What is the best way to download very large files? ", and " What is the best way to distribute very large files? " The answer to both is a file transfer protocol called BitTorrent. A typical ... download is from a single website to your computer. BitTorrent allows you to connect to all the people currently downloading a large file, and get pieces of it from them. In other words, you are downloading from many places at once. This distributes the load so that no single computer is overloaded and it makes for very fast downloads. Most ... (view more)

You may have recently heard about the Windows Metafile vulnerability. Steve Gibson at GRC.com has written the definitive tool to detect if your system is still at risk. He calls this vulnerability "Metafile Image Code Execution" or "MICE" and he ... calls his detection tool, "MouseTrap". Do you still have MICE? Most of you are already protected by a Windows Update. Even so, I recommend you download and run MouseTrap to be certain that your computer doesn't have MICE. If the MouseTrap shows you do have MICE, Steve's article on the WMF page contains tips on how to get rid of your little rodents. ... (view more)

Working at a computer can be very distracting. I've read that most people only stay focused on a task for an average of six minutes while using a PC. Personally, I get distracted even more than that! And this is especially true whenever I'm cutting ... and pasting things from the web. Often times I copy a graphic into the clipboard, get distracted for awhile, and then overwrite the clipboard with something else. Fortunately, I've managed to find a solution to this dilemma. CLCL is a clipboard manager , or more aptly put: a clipboard extender. It keeps a history of the most recent items copied ... (view more)