Ever run into any of the following messages when you try and delete or move a file in windows?

• Cannot Delete Folder: It is being used by another person or program.
• Cannot delete file: Access is denied
• There has been a sharing violation.
• The source or destination file may be in use.
• The file is in use by another program or user.
• Make sure the disk is not full or write-protected and that the file is not currently in use.

I run into these quite a lot, most frequently with media files, .avi especially. I’ve linked before to a utility to deal with this but in its case you frequently need to restart to effect the ‘unlocking’ of the file. I’ve also encountered a batch file you can use on windows to deal with this, but it’s clunky. Enter Unlocker, a donationware Windows utility to address this problem. When you encounter a spuriously locked file, folder, whatever, right click, unlock it, and banish it from the system.

Now if someone would only release a utility to help manage Windows’ retarded usb device management (you can’t eject that device, it’s in use, Windows claims, even though it is not. Ugh. I get closer and closer to moving back to a Mac, I tell you, but for the damned games).

Anyway, check it out, and kudos to the developer for a simple and effective solution to the problem. One wonders why he can figure this out while Microsoft can’t seem to.

Have you got text files sitting on your computer with things like bank account info or usernames and passwords for websites? You might find Steganos’ LockNote useful. It’s a free, open source text editor for Windows with encryption tools baked in. Stuff a text file full of sensitive data, lock it with LockNote , and no one will be able to access it without knowing the password. Simple, a clean interface, and a tiny download. Check it out.

Neomem is pretty interesting. Macs are really far ahead of Windows in this application space, with a ton of tools (Mori, Tao, MyMind, Omnioutliner, Process, Dossier, Devonthink, to name just a few) available. There are plenty of windows outliner/todo apps as well, but the majority of them are clones with little to distinguish between them and most focused primarily on outlining. Neomem offers something more – it’s basically an outliner combined with a word processor and a free form database. It’s free, open source, and under active development. Check it out of your desk is overflowing with stickies, or if you’re a longtime Keynote user who needs something to move your data to now that Keynote’s not being developed anymore.

Assuming you know the url to use anyway. Courtesy of Digg, go get started with Google Notebook. This is immediately useful to me and will displace my personal wiki for some of the kinds of things I end up dumping into it (things to blog, for example) and also will displace some of my uses for the social bookmarking sites. Note that you’ll need to already have an account with google, and you’ll need to be using Firefox because it installs a (very slick!) extension to firefox that makes it drop-dead simple to dump content into your notebook.

I suppose I should explain what this is – it’s an online notebook that you can dump text and urls into. It’s sort of a combination of a bookmarking tool and an online note taking tool.

Free, open source, cross platform and a reasonably intuitive interface – the Sqlite database browser is all of these things. It’s also a tiny download, a desktop application, and well worth checking out if you’re dabbling with sqlite but come from a gui background.

Check out this tutorial on how to configure the firefox ViewSource extension. It focuses on using Vim as the external editor, but you can easily use other programs, so for example I’ve used these instructions to make it possible to right click inside any form element (including my weblog) and pass the contents to Textmate, where I can use a real full-featured text editor to work with instead of the bare bones traditional HTML form area. The same principle applies to images – configure it appropriately and you can right click on any image you’re looking at in your browser and pass it to your favorite image editor. It doesn’t sound like much, I know, but it’s actually really handy. The only downside is there’s no way to pass things back to the browser so you’re still stuck copying and pasting, but even so this is a time saver for me and made it much more likely that I’ll do things like spellcheck my weblog postings.