Looking through my old coverdisk CD's one day, I found something I'd been searching for for quite a while: My full copy of Borland Delphi 2! One quick trip to the college library and one '...For Dummies' book later, the first round of Tools was born! Each Tool is a half-arsed solution looking for a corresponding half-arsed problem to solve:

Bit Nick Brick - An icon extractor.
Randomatron - A random file generator.
Dispel/Enchant - A file splitter.
Mad Unkie Smiddy's Media Player - A media player.
The Scone - An open-source text editor.

Bit Nick Brick is basically an icon extractorator, written in Delphi 2.
 
It doesn't offer any sort of enhanced functionality over something like, say, INSERTLINKHEREOMG, and it does not run any faster or have any super secret compression method. What it can do is extract icons from most EXE, DLL or ICO files and can export them into the wonderful world of sixteen colours! You might recognise this as being the Icon Extractor from "Delphi 3 for Dummies" by Neil J. Rubenking, and you might be right, almost exactly right in fact...

Which is why it's here with source!

Basically, this useless thing generates random bytes and saves them to a file... useful if you want to try your luck against fate and try to generate something useful, or it also has the side-effect (on large file settings) of pretty much rendering any computer useless for long periods of time, especially when many instances are created.

Back in reality-land, people use things called 'Floppy Disks' to move data from one computer to another. Sometimes when we did that, we used PKZIP to archive files and automatically spread them across multiple disks.

Nowadays, some archival utils don't allow this option or worse, the darned computer isn't equipped with floppy drives at all! Anywho, what Dispel does is splits files into many smaller files each the size of a cluster, and provides the capacity to reconstruct the original file from it's clusters. Every person who has obtained a copy of Dispel has found a use for it, either for copying a file across floppy disks, or it's obscuring the contents of dubious archives. Either way, it's here if you think you want it.

I think Linux OS's come with this as some sort of 'copy' command switch, or something anyway.

Within Delphi, there's a component known as the TMediaPlayer whose purpose seems to be to simply act as a really lame wrapper thing for Windows Media Player. Following another '...For Dummies' tutorial, I made a really lame TMediaPlayer application! Although this application is totally pointless in many respects, it can be useful in some situations where Windows Media Player decides to be difficult. It also has the side effect of allowing the contents of it's video player pane to be Print Screened without that stupid 'see-through' bug occurring. The usefulness of this is limited due to the fact that Smiddy doesn't possess any sort of player position changing stuff, so you can't rewind and take screenshots with any sort of precision. (Although I'm sure the almighty, yet terribly named, Media Player Classic would be infinitely better in all possible respects.)

Heading back to '...For Dummies' again yields a rather useful gadget: an open-source Delphi RTF text editor.

I'm sure with a little bit of tweaking, somebody can personalize The Scone and give it syntax-highlighting capabilities, or they could make their own menu additions, allowing useful tools to enabled from a single keypress. I've half a mind to make a The Scone fork for editing this site, someday.