Joystick 2 mouse lets you use your game controller to move your mouse around the screen, and a whole lot more. You can do just about any Windows function with this program, including typing (though this would be a nightmare), all from your game controller.

The reason I looked into this was so that I could control Windows Media Centre from my couch. I had all sorts of problems finding a suitable tool. Eventually I came across this gem. After installing it, I found out that it could do much more than I initially wanted. There is no reason why it could not be configured to control first person shooter games.

It is highly configurable, allowing you to change almost every aspect of it. You can use it to control any application. The only drawback I found was that there was no option to disable/enable this utility from the controller. Disabling it is possible by exiting the program, but without the program open, you can no longer use your controller to re-launch the program.

Logitech users would probably be best using the profiler software which can be downloaded from their website. This will allow similar functionality.

Joystick 2 Mouse 3 is available for free from the authors website, or get it from Tucows.

Most applications are best run at a high resolution to ensure you have plenty of screen space, however some games require you to change your screen resolution to a setting which the game supports.

To change your screen resolution, you would generally need to go into your display properties and tinker with a few settings. While this is easy enough to do occasionally, if it is something you want to do regularly, it becomes quite an annoying process. It gets even worse if you require low resolutions, as they are not always made available to you here. You would need to go further and enter into the advanced section of your display properties to switch between the resolutions.

I constantly need to switch between 1280×1024 and 640×480, as my CRT TV only supports the lower resolution. I used ResChange to setup some desktop shortcuts to make the job much quicker and easier. I can also see this being useful for a range of scenarios such as wide-screen laptops connecting to 16:9 projectors on a regular basis.

ResChange is a command line utility which will do as the name suggests, change your resolution. You can apply a whole range of switches such as height, width, frequency, as well as telling ResChange which monitor to do the change to if you have dual screen setup (defaults to monitor 1).

Once installed, I made shortcuts with the following switches:

For 640×480 I used
”reschange.exe” -width=640 -height=480 -refresh=60

For 1280×1024 I used
”reschange.exe” -width=1280 -height=1024 -refresh=max

While compatibility mode would allow me to run some things at the lower resolution, not all programs support it, so changing the resolution of Windows was best. This has worked flawlessly for me in both XP and Vista. If you need a range of resolutions, you could make a start menu group with multiple shortcuts for various resolutions in there.

(Update 4/8/08: This is now called Display Changer. There are some new features whcih make it even more handy.)

Available for free from Softpedia.

Installing programs which come in the CAB format, onto your Windows Mobile device can be a little tedious at times, as there are many steps involved.

You would normally have to copy the file onto your device and then run it from your device. It isn’t too bad once you are used to it, but when you install multiple programs or are a newcomer to Windows Mobile, it is a challenge. 

CABviaActiveSync makes this job easy as you can install programs directly from Windows Explorer. All you need to do is right click on the CAB file and select CABviaActiveSync. The program then opens up either WMDC or ActiveSync and installs the program using their own program managers.

This is great if you have just updated your ROM or you play around with lots of programs. Many steps are removed, making installations quicker.

There is not much more to say about this program, it does what it was designed to do. Hopefully future versions of WMDC will offer this same functionality.

Download it from Modaco, and as with everything at Inspect My Gadget, this is a freebie.

While Linux has come a long way, especially with the community support of Ubuntu, many tasks are still done by editing text files. These files are very sensitive to grammatical errors, requiring us to enter the data in perfectly for them to work.

The Linux community, especially the Ubuntu community has tried to make editing these files much easier by releasing a number of programs which do the editing for us. All we need to do is put the settings we want into a graphical interface.

GRUB, the standard boot loader for Ubuntu can be changed by editing a text file, which if edited incorrectly will cause Ubuntu & Windows to fail their boot up.

Download Startup manager and change the settings in it to suit your needs, all through an easy to use interface. One nice feature is the “Last used” option which will reboot the last operating system you had open, allowing for automatic updates and the like to do their thing.

Download it from the authors website. You will also find detailed installation instructions on the site. I really appreciate this application as I know the pain I have been through in past years, editing the file manually.

For added security, this program also lets you create a rescue floppy, which will save you all sorts of problems if things were to go wrong.

My music collection was a mess. I copied files from various album folders into artist folders and deleted a whole heap of files in the process. As a result I ended up with lots of empty folders which would have been painful to delete individually.

Another situation where it is useful is when you sort out your camera pictures, as you move the pictures out of the default date folders into your personalised folders.

I needed to find a script or an application that would do the job for me. I wanted it to be simple, safe and reliable. JonasJohn came to the rescue with a little program called “Remove Empty Directories.”

RED scans your computer for empty folders and gives you the option to delete them. It is highly customisable so you can have it ignore specific files and folders. It does more than what I needed, but the extra functionality equates to safer operation.

You will need to be careful not to run this program over your “Windows” or “Program Files” directories as some programs require specific empty folders to work. I would advise you to run it only in folders which have your own documents in them, such as “My Documents” or “My Pictures”.

It’s small and free, and is available from jonasjohn|DE.