Software

 

ERK (Encoding Repair Kit)

The ERK repairs documents (particularly emails) that have been corrupted by passage through non 8-bit compliant Internet servers (producing what's called moji-bake in Japanese)..It's rather old now (this version was released in 1996) but as it's mentioned in Ken Lunde's book Chinese, Japanese, Korean & Vietnamese Computing I'm keeping it available. Now that Internet servers no longer corrupt multi-byte character emails (Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese) there's perhaps less need for this software, but if there's a demand for an updated version (maybe Java?) I would be happy to hear suggestions.

 

Comfind

Another ancient piece of software. Comfind finds the serial ports on Windows computers. It was useful in the days when both mice and modems were plugged serial ports at the back of the computer (nowadays most mice use a PS/2 socket and modems are internal or use a USB connection). Often the serial ports were not labelled (or were out of sight anyway), so working out which serial port had the modem attached to it could be a pain. Received good feedback from service engineers :-)