This area is being recovered, piece by piece, from one of my dead areas on another site. Stay tuned, more stuff is coming!

U3 Partition Remover

If you've ever purchased one of those Sandisk Cruzer USB thumbdrives, you likely have noticed an extra partition (CDFS format) on the drive that is designed for use with U3... which is supposed to be a useful source of applications and such stuff. However, in some cases (many workplaces in fact) use of such devices with unauthorized files that can't be removed by normal methods is completely verboten by quite understandable data security policies.

If you have access to a Windows system, you can at least use the U3 Uninstall Utility [1091719 bytes], at one point provided easily on the Sandisk website, to completely nuke the offending crapware and have a perfectly blank, single partition, normal thumbdrive. I have it here because the last time I tried to get it, the site was a near un-navigable hell. Screw that!

It is not known whether there is a utility for Mac or with Unix/Linux systems that finds and kills the extra partition. I hope so... nobody needs to put up with this crap!

TwinFiles and VisiPics

I collect a lot of stuff. Anyone who has taken even the most cursory glance at my links here is probably saying 'DUH!'... Well, as one amasses tens, or even hundreds of thousands of pictures, music, and other internet flotsam, one is more likely than not to run into the situation of duplicate files. For Windows users, there are two utilities that can really save your sanity, and the first is the incredibly simple (and obviously named) Twin Files.

Twin Files finds exactly that... files that are *identical* twins, in directories of your choosing. Simply select the directories you want to analyze, and let it do its thing. Once it has evaluated everything, you will have a list of all the files you have in those directories which are not unique. It shows you exactly where they are, and you simply check boxes of stuff you want to delete, hit the delete button, and you're on your way to a much cleaner filesystem.

There are a couple bugs, and they manifest themselves more on later versions of Windows. As of Vista/7, the program often will not let you search volumes other than the C:\ volume. If your system seems to let you search other volumes, be very happy! Also, if when you start deleting files, the list tries to scroll beyond the list limit, it starts popping up errors. Just hold the ENTER key until it all stops. A third bug that could cause problems for those with international collections, is that TwinFiles HATES non-7bit characters in filenames. That means if you have files with Japanese or Russian text in them, or something like that, the moment the program runs across the file, scanning stops immediately.

This program seems to have had support eliminated, but other than the issues above, it is a truly powerful program well worth your time.

For Unix/Linux users, search out a command line utility called 'fdupes' which can do the same thing, albeit in a text interface that, if you can ever experience Twin Files on a Windows system, you'll be begging for a GUI implementation. Does one exist? I want to know!!

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TwinFiles works with *all* files. But what if it is just pictures you're working with? Been using scripts to scour all the chan sites for juicy postings, and find that a third of the pictures are duplicates? TwinFiles is best for that. BUT... what if the pictures are *near* duplicates? As in, same picture, different resolution? Well, that's where VisiPics comes in. VisiPics is *just* for pictures. Point it at your collection, select how strict you want it to be in allowing for 'near' duplicates, and it will give you a full visual interface with which to look at the results and select things to be deleted or moved.

Notable bugs? Well, for one, it is very dependent on proper file extensions. It will not scan something without a proper picture extension, such as .gif, .jpeg, .png, and so on. For another... on some systems, it doesn't correctly handle GIF, and I'm not just talking animated ones. On *one* of my systems, it flatly refuses to acknowledge a GIF exists. At all. The official site says there might be problems with 64-bit versions of Windows, it could be attributed to that. But even with that, incredible program!

This program is a little more complex, but great help documentation is available.

Visit the VisiPics Official Wiki