Two Free Tools

Yesterday I retired my venerable old Journal program. I'll still keep it around to get to info stashed deep in its 10+ year archives, but my new note taking tool has pretty much left it in the dust. I know gerbeans is using the Journal still. It's a good program, written in Delphi, by a nice guy in Oklahoma city whom I've corresponded with over the years. Its new fancy replacement, for me, is Evernote. I'll just bullet point some of the advantages I see in the switch for those of you who like to research things on the internet, keep journals, or just capture all those nifty ideas bouncing around between your ears before they flit like moths for a brighter bulb.

• The Journal was organized like most note taking apps, you could create folders and tabs and such, but you'd have to navigate to the right place to put in information; this doesn't really scale after you've accumulated lots of stuff and have inconsistent patterns for where you put it.
  
• With Evernote you just slap a new note in and tag it. You can put multiple tags on a note, picking from existing ones or making them up on the fly. So you don't lose any time trying to find the right spot for the info before you start writing. Tags are easily changed, added and deleted at any time.
  
• You can find notes a bunch of ways. Search, date ranges, you can select multiple tags to zero in on stuff, like "Projects", "Home", "This Week" There is no rigid ordering by physical directories or tabs so your cross-referencing can be as flexible and creative as you need.
• You can view with a "chronology" bar that lets you see the most recent stuff you've entered across all interests (or filtered by tags.) This is more useful than it first appears, you can see just what you've been researching, writing or thinking about for the week, for example, without having to go back and collect it from all over.
  
• You can add "to-do" checklists to any note and then you have an additional filter for todos... like "Projects", to-do... when you toggle the checkbox they drop off this list (you can find them on another list called completed tasks if you want.)
  
• It has plugins for your browser, so when you are on any page you can copy/capture a piece of what you are looking at into a note, or the entire page, with a simple right click. It does a nice job of preserving the formatting, images and links on the section captured and automatically puts a link back to the source in the note.
  
• It has a screen capture too as well as drag and drop for images, docs, pdfs and such.
• Any image, including screen captures, it will scan for text and make the text searchable. Haven't played much with this yet, but could be handy, especially scanning in old documents, receipts, etc.
  
• There's a free web piece that syncs folders to an account on the web. I won't use that, my notebooks are private and local to my PC, but it's a nice option for sync'ing work related research for those with day jobs ;-)
  
• Lots of other cool features, but my main attraction is the flexible way to organize material, the low friction input of information and the abiilty to capture stuff quickly and seamlessly that you may be browsing across with powerful ways to find it later. Pretty sweet.

The other free tool is an excellent registry cleaner + alot more. You get those crappy ads all the time on the internet for registry cleaners. But this one has a long and venerable history, and it's free. It also cleans up alot more than just registry: CCleaner. Highly recommended.