Windows/Mac/Linux: If you're a coder and haven't tried the free, cross-platform text editor Komodo Edit yet, you may be in for a treat. Komodo Edit supports a wide range of scripting languages and boasts powerful customization and extension options for easier coding. More »

Windows: Spending a half-hour slowly downloading a huge Zip archive only to discover it's corrupt is a pain. Avoid it with Zip2Fix, a utlity that won't fix corrupt archives, but will extract any and all undamaged files from it. More »

Windows only: If you're sick of locking your computer and entering your password every time you come back to it, Predator will ease the process by using a thumb drive as a "key" that instantly locks and unlocks your computer. More »

Windows only: We recently featured Universal Androot, an app that rooted many Android phones, but had a few limitations (and Google's already killing it with a patch). Windows program SuperOneClick is the easiest, most universal rooting app we've seen yet. More »

Windows only: CCleaner Enhancer updates the popular system cleaning utility with support for cleaning up after 270 more applications, so you can keep your system even more crap free. More »

Windows only: LookInMyPC generates a complete report of what's going on in a computer—from hardware to software, and everything in between. After playing around with it, this writer wouldn't start troubleshooting a PC without it. I'm not kidding.
Whether you're a tech guru who knows your way around your computer better than the company that built it, or a novice just getting acquainted with your system, LookInMyPC is a free app you'll want to download and run at least once, even before you need its diagnostic help. It's like a big verbal X-Ray of your PC, detailing everything from the brand of network adapter you have to the number of user accounts on your system.

Everything that a LookInMyPC report generates can already be found in your computer's accessible files if you know where to look, but this utility makes it so much easier. Just open the system inspector and tick the boxes to select all or some of the more than 40 diagnostic checks you want it to perform. Seconds later, you'll have a long report outlining every detail LookInMyPC ferreted out for you. Stash it in a drawer with your computer's owner's manual for a fast and handy reference sheet the next time you need to know what brand sound card you have or what the specs are on your processor.

LookInMyPC is also a great tool for diagnosing computer issues, especially if you're troubleshooting an unfamiliar computer. Instead of spending time poking around your uncle's PC to figure out basic system information, just generate a general report with memory and operating system information, then get down to business. Once you have a feel for what issues you're trying to correct, you can generate more specific reports like Registry Run Entries or Firewall Info. LookInMyPC even gives you data on Windows updates, recent System Restores, and the default email client.

The utility won't make any changes to your system at all, no matter what issues it identifies. The reports open up in a browser window and many of the results—like system hardware vendors and application names—are hyperlinked so you can quickly Google-search things you don't recognize.

One really nice touch that's included in this app is the ability to generate a report that automatically turns itself into a ZIP file and emails it to the address of the user's choice. That's a huge help when you get a distress call from a relative who wants you to troubleshoot his computer remotely.

LookInMyPC is designed to work with Windows 2000, 2003, XP, and Vista, but we ran it on Windows 7 with no issues. Pair this app with screencasting webapp ShowMeWhatsWrong and you'll be the neighborhood PC go-to person in record time. What apps and tools are already in your troubleshooting toolkit? Know of a similar solution, like previously mentioned SIW? Tell us in the comments.

LookInMyPC [via Addictive Tips]

Windows: Ever download a movie from—oh, I don't know—some far-reaching nether-region of the internet, and when your download finishes realize the video is split into multiple parts? AVI Joiner quickly combines those split videos in just a few clicks.
Using it could not be easier. Just run the app (AVI Joiner.exe), drag and drop the files you want to join into the Files to be joined pane, make sure they're in the correct order, and click the Run AVI Joiner button. The app will ask you where you want to save the joined video (name it and make sure to add the .avi extension to the end), then sit back as it fires up a command line and starts the joining process. I joined a couple of 700MB files into a 1.4GB video in roughly a minute.

This awesome little app was built courtesy of the Lifehacker Coders group over at the Productive Geek forums. You can currently grab the download hosted over at drop.io here. We reached the download cap—get the ZIP here instead. (For a portable version, grab the AVI_Joiner.zip file; if you want an installer, grab the setup.exe and install.nsi files. Make sure you grab the newest versions, and if we happen to hit a bandwidth cap at drop.io, be sure to let me know.)

AVI Joiner is a free, open-source application for Windows only.

Let's do a simple AHK project together: AVI joiner [Productive Geek]

Windows: If you want to print a large image off your home printer and be able to reassemble it, it takes some enormous photo editing cut 'n crop patience—or a copy of Easy Poster Printer.
Photo by Paulo Barcellos Jr..

Easy Poster Printer works on a simple principle: your image is divided into sections and fed to your printer chunk by chunk so the end result is a stack of segments that can be reassembled into the large image. The process is commonly known as tiled-printing or rasterbation. You can use online services to create tiled images such as previously reviewed The Rasterbator and Block Posters. Both are great services but they don't allow you the level of customization afforded by Easy Poster Printer and they require you to upload your image and thus have less control over it and less privacy.

Easy Poster Printer lets you tweak the size of the final image, the orientation of the image, the paper used, the print quality, and how much overlap there will be between images for clean border-free alignment. The default set of page sizes is all metric but you can easily add in your own imperial paper sizes—and since you'll likely not be using anything other than 8.5x11 and 11x17, it's not much of a chore to manually enter the sizes.

Easy Poster Printer is freeware, Windows only. Have a favorite tool for getting more out of your printer? Let's hear about it in the comments.

Easy Poster Printer [via gHacks]

Want a wall-sized satellite view of your neighborhood? A full-page street map of the town you're visiting? Google Map Buddy, a free, portable map maker, grabs data from Google Maps and arranges it exactly how you want it.
When you un-zip and run Google Map Buddy, it asks you to choose your Google Map nationality, then opens a browser to let you search out the location you're looking at. Once you get there, hit "Select area," then draw a rectangle around the area you want to capture. After fine-tuning the zoom level and hitting "Create Map Image," Map Buddy goes to work grabbing, tile by tile, your area's map. It generates a generally high-resolution PNG of your area, and provides the individual map tiles to keep and arrange yourself into a larger grid, if you'd like.

The software itself can be described as "picky"—you have to "X" out any particular business or destination that pops up in a dialog box on the map, and after zooming in on the Google Map browser to your destination, Map Buddy asks you for a deeper zoom level than what you've already set. So it's not an elegant tool, exactly, but it does deliver the very printable, full-picture map of your destination.

Map Buddy is a free download for Windows systems only, and doesn't require installation.

The Google Map Buddy [Augmented Reality Software via The Red Ferret Journal]