Have you ever left your computer logged in when you have had to race off to a meeting or lunch? I used to leave it logged in. One day my boss questioned me about an email sent from my computer, asking her if I could have babies with her. A colleague had played a joke on me. I soon learned to lock my computer whenever I was not in front of it.

Locking a computer is a fairly simple task. The Windows+L key combination will lock your computer instantly. It is still easy to forget though, so why not automate it with a little help from Bluetooth!

Bluelock is a small program that runs in your task tray. It detects if you (your phone) has moved away from your computer. If Bluelock can no longer find your phone because it is out of range, it will automatically lock your computer. When you return, you can type in your password, knowing that your computer was safe during your trip.

There is no installation required on either your phone or your computer. In fact, no software is needed on your phone at all. All that is required is Bluetooth on both your computer and your phone. I found it to be very reliable in my testing in both XP and Vista.

Many devices still have an older version of Bluetooth in them which has a range of 10 metres. Unfortunately, newer Bluetooth signals can reach up to 100 metres on a good day, so for this program to work, you will need to be more than 100m away from your computer.

Bluelock is available for free from Wuuls Website.

A few weeks ago, we looked at Ultra HAL Text to Speech reader. It had the ability to read out dialog boxes and to convert text documents to spoken word in the form of a wav file. It did the job reasonably well, but it had a few bugs and the reading of dialog boxes became annoying.

Since I wrote about it, I have come across another program that can convert your text files to MP3 files, and a whole lot more. DSpeech is a text to speech converter which can convert a wide variety of files to MP3, WAV or Ogg formats.

What makes DSpeech really special is that it supports PDF files, Microsoft doc files and web pages. This is much better than other programs as most I have come across that only support txt files and many of them cost money.

Another stand out point of this program is the ability to change the sound output quality. This allows the voices already on your computer to sound better, as most programs default them to a low setting. I like it that you can see the character talking up the top right of the screen. This can be turned on and off, but it is nice to look at, as each voice has its own individual face.

DSpeech is also capable of converting the audio from your microphone into text. There may be other programs that are better suited for this task, but it is nice to have all these features in the one package.

There are links on the site to some nice voices I had not come across before. They sound almost human and are quite understandable.

There is no installation required so you can try DSpeech out and delete it without any risk of damaging your system.

Get your copy for free from Dimio’s Tools. (Donations are welcome)

Linux has a lot to offer. There are a huge range of programs for the KDE desktop that are nicer than their Windows counterparts. There are also a tonne of tiny utilities that perform specialist tasks.

The Windows KDE project will let you run programs written for KDE on your Windows Desktop. Once all of the libraries and files are installed, you can run the programs as if they were designed for Windows. There is no virtual computer or emulator you need to load up.

The installer is very simple to use. You can select what you want the installer to download and install. The Windows KDE project comes with a wide range of games and utilities that will get you started. The Amarok music player was a highlight for me. Additional programs can be added, but you will need to compile them, or wait for updates.

The project is still fairly young and is still in alpha phase, so there may be some stability problems. I did not come across any in my playing around with it. It worked really well. This is a project that I predict will become hugely popular in the coming years.

The Windows KDE project currently works on XP, 2000, 2003, with Vista support on its way shortly.

Get your copy from the KDE on Windows website.

When your hard drive dies, you would normally need to go through the process of reinstalling your operating system and programs. If you are lucky, and have prepared yourself for a disaster, you might even be able to restore your data. One thing that you are not able to restore are all of the customisations you have done to your system.

Any way you look at it, it is going to take you the best part of a day to have your system up and running again, and weeks before you get everything back just how you like it.

The system restore options in Windows are great for restoring a malfunctioning system back to a fully working state, but they do not work when your hard drive calls it a day.

Plan ahead for such a disaster by saving an “image” of your computer. An image is a compressed file that contains the entire contents of a hard drive. Windows, programs, hardware drivers, settings and data are all backed up in the image. If your hard drive dies, or gets cluttered with rubbish, you are able to restore your system, and restore so that it is exactly the same as it was when you saved the image.

Clonezilla is a program that will do just that. You can save your entire computers contents into a single file. You can then burn the file to a DVD for safe keeping. You will want to read the documentation so that you can find out how to store a copy of Clonezilla on your DVD, and how to make the DVD bootable. This way you will have everything on hand to restore your computer, on the one disk.

Restoration of the image is likely to take less than one hour. Probably closer to 10 minutes. This is a big improvement to a whole days work. There is nothing else that needs to be done, except to restore your incremental document backups. You can save an incredible amount of time if you want to restore the image to numerous computers.

If you are happy with the way your system is running, it is a good time to make your image. In the case that you need to restore it, you don’t wasn’t to restore an image created while your system was not running at its optimum. You will be very thankful that you made the backup in the long term… or possibly even the short! Hard drives are one of the least reliable components of any computer system.

There are a number of programs that will do this same task. Many companies use the commercial package from Norton called Ghost. It basically does the same thing, it just looks a little nicer and costs money.

Clonezilla is available for free from SourceForge.

Here at Inspect My Gadget, we have looked at a number of programs that change your screen resolution quickly and easily. We have also looked at using these resolution changing programs in batch files so that an individual program can load at a certain resolution. This method works quite well, but I have just come across a program that is much tidier and efficient at achieving this.

Res-o-matic is a utility that helps you to create shortcuts to any program, where you can define the resolution, colour depth and refresh rate you want the program to run at.

Res-o-matic couldn’t be any easier to use. It does all the hard work for you. I looked at the shortcut it had created, and its target is:

"C:\resomatic\reso.exe" "C:\WINDOWS\system32\calc.exe" 320 200 32 60

This example loads up Windows Calculator at 320×200 resolution with 32bit colour at 60Hz. When you launch the shortcut, there is no hint that Res-o-matic is working in the background. Closing the program down again will cause the resolution to return to its default values.

Res-o-matic will suck up a tiny 9kb of your hard drive. This program will certainly make my life easier. I need to run Vista Media Centre at 640×480 at 60hz. Up until now, batch files was the easiest way I knew how to do it in an automated process.

Res-o-Matic is available for free from bChecks Apps.