Rating: 5 

Version tested:  beta

Description: InFact Book Search is a web site containing over 14,000 searchable, free ebooks. Unlike most book search sites on the web, all books can be read in their entirety online, or downloaded in simple text files.

This site does not try to hook you into paying for books, nor does it contain any ads. InFact Book Search includes over all free online books from the Gutenberg Project. The books include novels, histories, poetry, short stories, dramas, kids books (including fairy tales) and many classics.

The interesting thing about this site is its proprietory search algorythm; it doesn’t just put all search terms in a bag and point you to where they’re located are when you search for them; rather, it offers offers tips for any term you search for. For example, if you search for Robin Hood, you will see tips which include other characters Robin Hood interacts with. If you click on Little John, you will be shown a list of all occurences where Robin Hood and Little John interacted together. The search algorythm also understands actions; it might find that one of the things Robin Hood does a lot is “give”, and so if you click on that verb, the search algorythm will show you all the instances in the Robin Hood books where this action takes place (see screenshot below). Read more »

Rating: 5 pick 

Version tested:  7.5.430

Description: AVG is a 100% free antivirus program that offers real time protection, on demand scanning, and email scanning. It also features automatic updates and a very small footprint that will not slow down your system. It does exactly what it promises and does it really well.

Although AVG is well known as a free antivirus program, I wanted to review it because the new version 7.5 (Oct 2006) seems to offer better protection than its predecessors

First, the good news:

• AVG is a complete antivirus solution that features dependable real time protection as well on-demand virus scanning
• AVG features auto updates, making it a good install-and-forget solution that you do not have to manually keep updating (some other ‘free’ antivirus programs will force you to keep doing this in order to incentivize you to buy the paid version). Read more »

Rating: 5 

Version: beta

Description: YotoPhoto is a search engine for royalty-free images that indexes a number of free image sources. Advances search features include search by size, by orientation (vertical, horizontal, square) as well as, interestingly, by color.

I did a search on YotoPhoto and found a good number of very good hits. The pictures were located on another free stock pictures provider, but I was able to download them, although I had to sign up and create an account with that site to do so.

Sizes differ but all pictures that I came across were hi-res and print-quality. 

Go to the YOTOPHOTO site

Rating: 5 

Description: Xenon 2000 is a top-down vertical scrolling space shoot-em-up that is 100% free.

In a world where multiplayer games and MMORG’s are all the rage, I wanted to post a good, simple, honest to goodness top down shoot em up scroller. I ended up finding this one on the Bitmap Bros website, a remake of their classic 1989 title Xenon released as freeware.

The graphics are very good, although I sometimes had a bit of difficulty discerning the objects that were in front of my ship (that I could collide with) versus those set in the background. Playability is excellent as well. Recommended! Read more »

Rating: 5 

Version tested:  4.7

Description: Faststone Capture is a screenshot capturing utility that can capture the entire desktop, individual windows or objects as scrolling areas offscreen . It can capture specific regions within a screen in a rectangular, circular, and freehand selections. It also contains a practical editor that can process captured images with features such as resizing, cropping, contrast, sharpen, and text annotation.

• Faststone Image Capture can capture everything that is on screen, including objects such as launchers, open menus, and other applications. It will also capture web pages, including parts of the website that are not visible on screen.
• The post-capture processing options that this program has are sophisticated and really add a lot of value compared to other programs. I’m a big fan or the text annotation functions in particular which work really well.
• The program has a very nice look and feel; it can be accessed through a small floating control panel or minimized in the windows tray area (I’m partial to the windows tray icon, but both work really well). Read more »

Rating: 5 pick 

Version tested:  1.0

Description: Folder Guide provides fast access to your folders through the explorer context menu. A right mouse click is all you need to navigate to your favorite pre-defined folders (see screenshot).

I remember years ago I tried a shareware utility that did the same, so I’m really please to have found this freeware one. Here’s what you need to know about Folder Guide:

• In addition to allowing you to access your defined folders from the desktop, Folder Guide will also do this from and any Save As/Browse Windows dialog. This means that when you are saving or opening files from any application you can use Folder Guide through the context menu to jump to the folder you need
• New folders can be added to the Folder Guide list by right clicking on them, or from Folder Guide’s settings dialog.
• Folder Guide allows you to sort the folders in the context menu as you see fit. Read more »

Rating: 5 

Version tested:  1.8

Description: CDisplay is a program that allows you to view JPEG, PNG and GIF images that are compressed into a ZIP, RAR, ACE or RAR archive in an alphabetical sort order without having to decompress the archive. CDisplay was created as an ebook reader/viewer for .CBZ and .CBR ebook/comic book files.

CBZ and CBR files are essentially image files compressed into an archive and the extensions renamed as CBZ and CBR (for ZIP and RAR archives, respectively). The program is designed to do automatic page sizing in order to present images in the size most suited to ebook/comic book reading, whilst maintaining high image quality. Featured page sizing options are none; fit to screen, fit to width of screen, fit to width of screen if oversized, display at specific height, or display two pages. The program will also (optionally) perfrom automatic color balancing. Scrolling up or down images is done with a single keypress. Read more »

Rating: 5 pick

Version tested:  2.20

Description: BeCyIconGrabber is a very small app that extracts icons contained in resource files (DLL, ICL, OCX, CPL, SRC, ICO and CUR). It also enables saving them singly in ICO, CUR, BMP, or PNG files, or collectively within resource libraries (DLL icon libraries or ICL cursor libraries).

There are many such freeware icon extracting programs. This one is my favorite, however, for the following reasons:

1. It allows you to save icons collectively to resource libraries. Most similar programs only feature saving icons singly.
2. It is very small and has a functional, simple design. Different icon sizes are viewable very intuitively through clicking tabs, and there is even a zoom function.
3. Icon search function; specific director(ies) or all directories
4. Favorites section for all the icons you hold dear

Read more »

Rating: 4 

Version tested:  1.04

Description: MenuApp is a program that enables you to create folder shortcuts that function like start-menu style launchers (see screenshot).

Four steps to get your shortcut launchers up and running:

1. First step is to unpack menuapp in the appropriate place (e.g. “c:\program files\menuapp\”); there’s no installer.
2. Create a shortcut for the main executable “menuapp.exe” and place it where you want to use it
3. Right click on shortcut, goto ‘properties’, then the shortcut tab and in the ’start in’ box type in the path for the target folder (see screenshot)
4. Rename the shortcut appropriately (changing the icon, like I did, is also a good idea, as the MenuApp icon is pretty drab). Read more »

Rating: 5 

Version tested:  1.0

Description: Textwedge is a program that splits text files (including CSV files) into smaller chunks.

Textwedge does this row-by-row in a number of different ways:

• Split text by “number of lines per chunk” (e.g. you could set row count per file to be 30,000 if that’s what you need)
• Split text by “chunk size” in bytes
• Split text by lines containing a certain search string (you can define multiple search strings for this one)
• You can also filter out rows containing certain search strings.
• Textwedge will (optionally) preview what it will do before doing it by marking out different chunks and/or lines that will be filtered out with different colors. Read more »