Two good free games: Alien Wars and Real Racing

The web site gametop.com gives away some pretty good games. While these are free, full downloadable games, they are not malware. The only thing they do is loading the site's home page when you leave them.

If you like space shooters, I highly recommend Alien Wars. It is a typical shooter with a variety of stages, weapons and enemies, but with really well done graphics, sound effects, addictive music and balanced, engaging action.

This game, by the way, is exactly the same game as "Alien Stars", which the maker sells on their own web site.

Another great title available at the site is Real Racing, an addictive and cute car racing game.

Taskbar Shuffle - reordering your Windows taskbar buttons and system tray icons

I have wished for a long time for a way to move my Windows taskbar buttons around. Since I usually have quite a lot of open applications, it would be convenient to have the most used ones in the same place most of the time, so I don't have to look for them every time I need them. It would also be nice to order buttons by subject, or importance during a task.

I did try searching for software doing that. What I had in mind was some kind of taskbar alternative. I tried ObjectDock, RocketDock and such, but they didn't do anything like what I wanted. So I eventually gave up.

Then I stumbled upon a solution by sheer luck. When I saw the name "Taskbar Shuffle" in some random freeware web site, I knew I had found it.

It was even better than I had expected. I didn't really want a taskbar alternative. I just thought I needed one if I wanted different functionality. Turns out Taskbar Shuffle doesn't take anything out. Everything looks and works exactly the same, but you can now drag taskbar buttons. And it allows you to do the same with the system tray icons, although I never actually use that.

It seems to have other options, such as tweaking the button grouping behavior. Since I don't use that anyway, I never checked. What I really wanted was this one thing, moving the buttons, and I got it without losing anything else. Just perfect.

Ditto, an open-source Windows clipboard extension

The Australian aborigines believe your Windows clipboard is an extension of your soul. Freud conjectured it plays the role of a computer's subconscious.

If so, then Ditto is both mind-expanding and soul-searching.

How many times have you wished you hadn't copied something into your clipboard and as a result lost that precious bit of information sitting there before? Or that you could copy several separate bits of info from one application before going to another to paste them?

Your clipboard will do the usual Ctrl-X, -C and -V after you install Ditto. However Ctrl-` will open a window showing all previous items that were there before, so you don't lose anything. You can also search for items, associate shortcuts to them etc, although I personally only use the main functionality.

Ditto is extremely unobtrusive. In fact I had to look its name up before posting this because I haven't thought of it for months. It is also highly configurable, although I haven't spent time fiddling with its options; it simply works.