Little saviours

I was really horrified the other night to find that my digital image files on my SM card had effectively disappeared in my struggling to get them to be read in either my card reader or my camera, plugged into my computer via USB. So, it was a huge relief to find that I could recover them rather painlessly with free software called Art Plus Digital Photo Recovery 3.1. It's small, quick to download, and completely free. Consider me a new fan.

The other software that makes my life happier on an almost daily basis is Google Desktop. If you're not familiar with it, here's how it works. Imagine the capability of google for searching the web. Now apply that to all the files on your computer, divided into categories such as web pages you've visited, emails you've sent and received, and documents, images, and other files you have saved on your hard drive. You can set it to include or exclude certain files, like an external hard drive or a certain folder, or whatever. It is how I magically found the photos I thought I'd lost for good, from my trip to Europe in 2003, that I just posted earlier today. It was also really handy two days ago when I decided I wanted to write some prelim questions for Social Work, and knew I had written some previously, but hadn't the foggiest idea where I'd filed them away. When you search, you can identify what particular type of file you're looking for. . . Yeah, it just rocks.