Three months ago, I wrote about AmieStreet.com.  Since then I’ve bought 70 songs and have only spent $5.55.  That’s less than 8 cents per song on average.  It’s also the equivalent of less than 6 songs from iTunes.  I’ve also been telling everyone I know about it (probably annoying them in the process).  Here are the songs that I’ve bought/am listening to.  (I’ll update it from time to time as I buy more songs.)

I had my choice for the June freeware review all set.  Then another program leapt to the top of the Must Review pile.  First some backstory:

At my day job for Northeast Health, we have a website for WebBabies.  The nurses in the maternity ward take photos of the new babies (provided the parents grant consent) and I upload the photos to the website.  Recently, the camera we use exhibited a glitch where it thought the card was empty when there were photos there.  Previously, I was able to retrieve the photos by using my USB card reader.  This time, however, my card reader insisted that the card needed to be formatted.  Disaster!  The photos of 4 babies were gone and all but one of them had already left the hospital.

I used two of my favorite freeware data retrieval tools, but they couldn’t see the drive unless I formatted it.  I did a Quick Format and searched with my usual tools.  No photos to retrieve.  I did some searching for new tools and came upon some for-pay utilities.  These could see the photos but wouldn’t let me retrieve them unless I paid for the full version.  I was about to give up when I stumbled upon MJM Free Photo Recovery.  Not only did this application see the photos on the formatted memory card, but it let me save them back to my computer.  In the end, I recovered every lost photo from the card.  A new camera is on order to prevent future mishaps, but MJM Free Photo Recovery will stay on my system as a good way to recover lost photos.

Now on to the bonus.  Before MJM Free Photo Recovery stole it’s thunder, I was going to review Taskbar Shuffle.  Since I already know what program(s) I’m going to review in July, I see no reason not to review Taskbar Shuffle now.

Taskbar Shuffle is a very simple program, yet very powerful.  It allows you to drag items on your Taskbar and System Tray to reorder them.  It can also automatically group similar items next to each other either with without combining them into a single button.  You don’t even need to install Taskbar Shuffle.  While there is an installer available, there is also a stand-alone version.  It’s one of those utilities that you look at and then wonder “Why didn’t they put this in Windows to begin with?”