Celestia: Shoot for the stars!

Celestia is an amazing little program for anyone who’s into astronomy, star-gazing or just curious about the universe. Its a simulation of the entire universe! Sounds impressive huh? Well, for a freeware program it is! It includes beautifully rendered planets, moons, asteroids, comets, and some smaller orbital bodies such as ‘MIR’ and the International Space Station.

In addition to all this, you can also download add-ons from the website of more stuff, including some fictional stuff for all you science fiction nerds! Celestia is not limited to our solar system; you can visit other stars, or even travel outside the galaxy. The controls take a little getting used to, but to fully appreciate just some of Celestia’s full capabilities, run it and press D to view a demo.

Warp on over to here to download it.

Ultramon: Double vision

Nowadays most video cards support dual monitors and the prices of LCD displays have come down considerably so more people are using dual monitors than before. Some people find them useful if they do a lot of graphic or design work, as it allows more workspace without having to constantly maximise and minimise windows,etc. Ultramon is software to help you get the most out of a multi-monitor set-up.

It adds additional window buttons, so you can quickly move windows or stretch a window across the desktop.

It also uses a “Smart Taskbar” to manage more applications, so that you have a taskbar on each monitor and each taskbar only showing the tasks from the monitor it’s on.
Shortcut extensions make it easy to position applications on the desired monitor. The UltraMon screen saver and wallpaper manager make it possible to use a different wallpaper and screen saver on each monitor too. It also includes a flexible mirroring feature with support for mirroring one or more monitors, and use different resolutions for each monitor.Its also pretty cool to be able to move windows from one screen to the other!

RSIGuard: Avoid Repetitive Strain Injury

If you spend long periods of time at your computer, you have a pretty good chance of developing a repetitive strain injury over time.This can show in ways such as a backpain, sore fingers or eyestrain. So whats the way to avoid all this or help yourself out if you’re already affected? Spend less time at your computer! Too much to ask for? Then at least take regular breaks!

Try out RSIGuard to help you achieve this, it schedules regular reminders for you to take a break. It can show exercises and stretches, which can optionally be disabled. In fact everything about this program is very configurable.It also has tracking and reporting of statistics to help you know how you’re doing. If you find yourself ignoring the breaks you can make them harder or even impossible to ignore.

I highly recommend this program as i think its designed well and does what it does well. Although being reminded to take a break can be a little irritating at times, but isn’t that the whole point? (but not as irritating as developing aches and pains, so it’s worth it in the long run).

Check it out here for more info and a trial