Rating: 5 pick

Version tested: 0.91

Description: JkDefrag GUI is a graphical user interface program for the open source hard drive defragmentation program JkDefrag. It enables users to easily use JkDefrag’s powerful defragmentation operations, schedule defrags, perform system file defrag operations on startup, as well as set a wide spectrum of defrag options. It can also be used to quickly install JkDefrag’s screensaver defrag, an option that kicks in the defrag process and displays it as a screensaver whenever the computer is idle.

I don’t usually think about hard drive defragmentation programs as being exciting, but this one is an exception. JkDefrag itself (rater than the GUI) has a number of features that I have not seen in other free defrag programs, and JkDefrag GUI is a well designed program that makes these accessible and easy to work with. Here’s a quick listing of some of these:

• The screensaver option: although JkDefrag does not continuously defragment your hard drive as a process in the background, the screensaver option goes one better in that it kicks the defrag process into action at those idle times when normally your screensaver would run (and will show the visual representation of the defrag process as the screensaver). Extremely cool! This is my favorite feature simply because it provides an automatic install-and-forget solution to hard drive defragmentation. (Note that you can install the screensaver from the ’install’ tab in the GUI).
• Space hogging files: JkDefrag will push files certain files behind directories and regular files to make system operations faster. These space hogging files include files that are 50 megs+, most compressed archive filetypes, data in the recycling bin, and a number others (for a list of the default space hogging files go to the JkDefrag site and look for “what are spacehogs”). Note that you can use the GUI to manually add more filetypes (e.g. avi, mpg, etc.) to the list of Space hoggers if you want.
• Portable: a U3-specific version of JkDefrag GUI is available.
• Safe: ok, so this isn’t a unique feature but a good one to highlight all the same. JkDefrag uses Microsoft’s standard defragmentation API library (which most defrag programs use) and is extremely safe. When interrupted, the defragmentation process will finish the immediate task at hand in the background and shut down. Read more »

Rating: 5

[Note: this review was written by reader Sinkhan, a connoisseur of freeware and open source programs- The Freewaregenius]

Description: War Rock is a first person shooter set in modern times. Players engage in combat as the two fictional sides, the Derbaran and the National Independence Union, or NIU for short., this game is similar in many respects to other existing FPSs, but will not set you back a penny.

This game is brought to you by K2 Network, the makers of Knight Online, and as that game is akin to Guild Wars or World of Warcraft, War Rock bares many similar features to Dice’s Battlefield 2. Some of the main aspects of the game are:

• A nice physics engine is also built into the game. This forces snipers to compensate for bullet drop and leading moving targets when sniping over long distances. Player deaths run on rag-doll physics.
• The graphics are quite decent and are even comparable to other commercial games
• The game is easy to get into and has a very low learning curve in general if you’ve played any other FPS’s before.
• Players can enter a game lobby or right into the middle of an already started game.
• Players have a wide range of movement capabilities. Aside from regular walking, players can crouch, go prone, lean, roll, jump, and sprint with the latter three draining a stamina bar to limit these actions.
• Players can choose to be one of the 5 military classes being snipers, assault soldiers, heavy weapons specialists, engineers, or medics (the game’s only female skin). This is done at a spawn screen when one first enters the game or if the player is killed.
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Rating: 5 pick

Version tested: 4.1

Description: ColorPic is a free app that allows you to pick any color from the screen and displays its code in HEX and decmial. It features a versatile color mixer and the ability to create and save color palettes. It also offers a number of others functions such as a customizable magnification area and the ability to snap to the nearest websafe color.

Most people working with websites and/or with design will invariably need a “color picker” program that can identify the color code of any pixel on screen. There are many such free programs, but of all that I have tried ColorPic is by far the best. Here’s what I like about it:

• Allows you to store captured colors inside pallets which you can come back to later (to the tune of 16 colors per pallet). You can create as many of these as you like.
• Snap to nearest websafe color: once you grab your color a little “websnap” button will appear close to its code on the ColorPic interface. Clicking on this will snap to the nearest websafe color. Very cool.
• Magnifier: this is available as part of the ColorPic interface. You can increase/decrease magnification or overlay a grid.
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Rating: 5

Version tested: 1.3.3

Description: Outlook On the Desktop is a program that displays Outlook as a transparent, interactive object embedded in your desktop. Clicking on any control in the embedded interface will have the same effect as on that screen as they normally would, while clicking objects (such as emails) will cause the normal Outlook windows to be opened and displayed..

The premise behind Outlook on the desktop is the idea that, in order for calendaring programs to be effective and useable they need to be visible all the time, just like a real life “paper” calendar would be. Outlook on the desktop provides a fixed, transparent window embedded in your desktop that encompasses all of Outlook’s different views. Here are some notes on this program:

• Navigation: this program will place a little icon in the system tray that is used to switch between Outlook’s different views (calendar, contacts, inbox, notes, tasks). It also provides controls for resizing, moving, or hiding the embedded window. Although it definitely feels like using Outlook itself would be easier to hone in on what I want, in general it works well.
• Interactivity: your embedded Outlook actually works. You can click on a column in email view to sort by that column, resize it, etc.
• Memory use: while you do not see Outlook itself as a window or in the system tray when you run this program, it does need it to be running in the background. On my machine Outlook.exe was consuming around 40 megs of RAM, and Outlook on the desktop an additional 15 megs. If memory use is an issue you might consider doing without this program.
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Rating: 5

Version tested: 1.0

Description: View Source Editor is a tiny program that allows you to change Notepad from being the default editor when using IE’s “view source” function, and to replace it with the editor of your choice.

If you build, work with, program, or design websites then you’ve likely used IE’s “view source” function dozens of times to look at the code that is generating a web page. IE will typically open Notepad as the default text editor when you do this, which in many cases will prompt you to launch your preferred text editor then copy-and-paste the code into it before honing in on what you are looking for or working with the code.

View Source Editor will help you circumvent this unnecessary step. You will likely run this no-install program just once (or every time you decide to switch text editors), point it to your text editor, and be on your way. Its just a small thing but, as they say, the devil is in the detail!
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Rating: 5

Version tested: 0.9 beta

Description: MappedUp takes the form of a free Screensaver, active desktop, or website widget that displays items from RSS news feeds overlayed geographically on a world map in real time. The news items are shown as either clickable bubbles or little dots that light up on the map itself and display a tooltip/popup window when moused over (check it out in action here).

I have never been one to seek out screensavers, but every once in a while I find a cool and/or interesting one that I like, and MappedUp for me falls in that category. Note that while the screensaver is only one of three of this program’s incarnations, I did try the active desktop part but it proved rather impractical, while the flash widget, though very interesting, nonetheless needs to be more configurable. Here are some notes:

• This program does not function as an RSS reader and, at least at this point in its development, does not allow you to directly define your own custom RSS feeds. Instead it allows you to choose up to 5 of its pre-defined RSS feeds as well as up to 5 general tags/categories (e.g. News, Technology, Internet, etc.) You can easily submit a feed to be included in their feeds list, though.
• The active desktop component: this displays the interactive MappedUp world map (and clickable RSS events) as your desktop wallpaper; however it unfortunately takes precedence over and disallows the windows right-click context menu. I also found that I was unable to drag and select files on the desktop anymore, and promptly uninstalled it.
• The screensaver: this one is my favorite; allows you to use the mouse to interact with the map without closing down the screensaver (press any key on the keyboard to dismiss the screensaver). Looks really cool.
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Rating: 5

[Note: this review was written by reader Sinkhan, a connoisseur of freeware and open source programs- The Freewaregenius]

Version tested: 1.453

Description: Knight Online is a free fantasy MMORG backed by a compelling story with a 10 million and growing member base. Players can fight a variety of monsters with different weapons, trade and sell collected spoils, face others from across the globe online in player vs player combat, and do much more.

After playing this game for a few days, Knight Online to me seemed heavily reminiscent to ArenaNet’s Guild Wars and even a bit to the wildly popular World of Warcraft. Some of the main features of the game are:

• Players can choose between the two main races: El-Morad, which are humans and orcs, or the Karus. From there, a player can decide to be a warrior, rogue, mage, or priest. More refined professions can be chosen once a player reaches level 10. For example, a rogue may choose to be specifically an archer or an assassin.
• The game includes a well conceived combat system. A player with a sword, if close enough to a monster, may do a single downward slash - or, if lucky, a downward then upward slash in succession, adding a sense of random outcome in combat. Read more »

Rating: 5

Version tested: 1.04

Description: Flookey is a free audio player that learns which music you like through observing your listening behavior and looking at your music library’s metadata. It then uses this information to suggest songs from your library that match your listening preferences, to create dynamic playlists, and to provide an intelligent way of navigating your audio library.

Now that everyone has gigabytes upon gigabytes of mp3s and audio files, a new crop of tools and recommendation engines have come up in order to either (a) hone in on the music that we actually want to listen to in the midst of all the redundant gigabytes of sound, and/or (b) generate playlists of compatible tracks that will not play Beethoven’s Ninth or your self-hypnosis audio scripts right after that lone KMFDM track that you like. Flookey is one such program, as is “The Filter“; others I can think of (although admittedly geared towards music discovery rather than dynamic playlists) are the desktop components of Last.FM and Slacker.

How this program works: The process starts once Flookey is done scanning your audio library and as soon as you use it to play any track. Flookey will immediately generate a listing of “compatible” tracks based on the your audio’s metadata, which in the beginning will not be very ’educated’ but will become more refined as you go along. Flookey will observe a number of things, including which tracks in the list you click on (which will be reinforced) and which tracks you ignore (will be de-emphasizes), as well the tracks you play in their entirety and the ones you skip over (I think). Note that it will not necessarily limit its selections to songs of similar genre when it decides which tracks to serve/associate with each other.

Here are some notes on this program:

• On the fly recommendations: for each song that you play, Flookey will display recommendations in the “Suggestions” section. Each song you play will render a different set of recommendations.
• Intelligent Navigation: this works as follows; selecting one or more songs (whether in the history, now playing, or recommendations pages) and clicking the ’boost’ button will immediately prompt more ’like’ or ’related’ songs to float upwards on the recommendations pane.
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Rating: 5 pick

Version tested: 1.06

Description: DivXMachine Shell Integrated (DMSI for short) is a free program that can convert images, audio files and videos across multiple formats straight from the Windows Explorer context menu.

Two things that make this program unique (a) all operations are done straight from the context menu; it does not have an user interface, and (b) it handles images, audio files, as well as videos. You can enable/disable file types, as for example to enable image and audio conversions only but not video. Here are some notes on this program:

• User interface: DMSI is built such that all decisions you need to make when converting a media file are streamlined into the context menu. It works really well; all you need to do is follow the unfolding ’tree’ of choices all the way to the end (see screenshot).
• Mux/Demux: i.e. add or extract an audio track to a video file. You can Demux AVI, OGM, and MKV container formats and mux AVI with up to 2 audio files.
• Batch encoding: you can perform operations on multiple files by selecting them simultaneously then performing the operation via the context menu. Note that all selected files have to be of the same type (i.e. all of them images, videos, or audio files) and that there will be a singel output format for all selected files.
• Tools and codecs: DMSI will install all the different third party tools and codecs that it needs in order to perform all of its operations.
• Advanced options: you can add/enable AviSynth filters to tweak your video output (this is extremely easy to do, just go to the AviSynth tab in the settings and click to enable the filters/options you want and change each of their values).
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Finally, my site is back up. I’m finally moved to a new hosting company. Said goodbye to my old hosting company (Anhosting/Midphase), with their propensity to switch off my site randomly for no real reason every time I get a bit of decent traffic. I will probably write a detailed posting about how POOR their service is if I can muster the energy to do so.

So, that’s a bit of good news. The other good news is that yesterday was my birthday and my wife got me a brand new 8-gig iPhone. How cool is that? I’ve been too busy with work and with trying to get my site back up to open the box, believe it or not.

Moving my Wordpress blog to a new host was an interesting experience. There are still some kinks to be ironed out, but at least for the moment my site and all the links seem to be working again. Anyway, there are a number of changes that I will introduce to this blog, as follows:

• I would like to move away from the idea that every post has to be a full-fledged review. This will allow me to make short and frequent postings that just say "hey, check out this software that does X, it looks like its pretty cool" rather than have to write-up all of the features and pretend to be an expert on each and every piece of software that I want to write about.
• I will probably take out the star rating system altogether. Or only rate posts that are actual detailed reviews. We’ll see.
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Rating: 5

Version tested: 1.0 build 1

Description: YcPod can download videos from YouTube. It can also retrieve videos from the browser cache, making it function as a universal grab tool for almost all video sharing sites.

If you want a tool that can download any video from any video sharing site, you can try Orbit Downloader (with the Grab++ module). Or you can use this tool; I tried it on several sites that offered FLV videos and it worked beautifully (including iFilm, MTV, YouTube, and a number of others).

Technically speaking this program doesn’t download videos from sites directly but can retrieve them from the cache, which amounts to the same thing. Here are some notes on this:

• First thing to do is open the video you are seeking in your browser (assuming its not from YouTube, in which case you can just paste the URL straight into YcPod).
• Once the video has run all the way to the end run YcPod, select Video then Cached video and click the get cached videos button. A list of all videos in the cache will be displayed.
• The video list will contain a number of video formats and not just FLV. Select the video you want and save it. That’s it.
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Rating: 5

Version tested: 0.2.0.5

Description: SysTrayMeter will display an icon in the system tray that shows both CPU and RAM usage. It is designed to have both metrics visible simultaneously in an extremely efficient visual representation.

I have on occasion received emails that would say something like: my computer has recently become unresponsive/erratic/slow, and what steps/software do you recommend to deal with the situation. I typically recommend a checklist of programs (someday I will write a detailed posting, I promise); however it is difficult to really know if these interventions are effective.

I always seem to have performance issues myself, probably due to the fact that I am constantly installing all kinds of software on my machine. However, these days I am thinking that the best way to approach performance issues is to observe what takes place within the system; specifically CPU and RAM usage. I have found SysTrayMeter to be a brilliant, small and effective tool to do just that. Here are some notes on this program:
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Rating: 5

Version tested: 1.3

Description: Google Hacks is an open source program that can find all sorts of files, including MP3’s, Videos, and ebooks using Google. It will construct and execute searches in Google that make it much more likely to find what you are looking for in freely accessible directories all around the web. It also offers a number of other Google related tools, such as backlinks searching and results that are related to your query.

We all know that Google packs some extremely powerful search technology, so it will probably come as no surprise to most people that, in fact, it is possible to use Google to find all sorts of media and other files (including MP3s) that are scattered across the web. It turns out that there are virtual treasure troves of files in so-called unprotected web directories (you’ve encountered these, they look like a bunch of links with "Index of ….." on top). All you need to do is know which modifiers to use in your web search to get to these. I am not really an expert on using/hacking Google, but if you want to know more about this you can check out this posting on the Googletutor website.

Alternately, you can use this program to do your searches, and it will search Google for you and customize your search in order to find the kind of file you’re looking for. Here are some notes on this program:
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Rating: 5

Version tested: 1.7.76.0 beta

Description: FlashFolder a small toolbar that docks onto the Windows’ “Open/Save” and “Browse for Folder” dialogs. It provides a number of functions including the ability to bookmark and quickly access favorites folders as well as quick access to recently used folders. It also offers a number of other related functions.

Another program for tweaking the Windows “Open/Save” dialog, but this one is my favorite yet. This is the kind of freeware find that I love: a tiny program that provides very useful and user friendly functions that make Windows easier to use. Here’s a list of function

• Quick access to recently used folders (through a drop down menu)
• Quick access to favorite folders: define your frequently used folders and you’re on your way. Note that this can use the directory menu from Total Commander.
• Easy access to all folders with currently open files; not sure why I would need these, exactly, especially when most of the folders in the dropdown are system folders that are being accessed by Windows and other background processes. It would have been great to be able to suppress system folders from this dropdown in the ’program options’.
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Rating: 5

Version tested: 1.0 (I think)

Description: SweepRAM is a memory optimization program that forces all memory-resident applications to use only as much memory as they need, freeing memory in the process.

Let me start by saying that I do not like memory optimizers; I’ve used a number of them over the years (both freeware and shareware) and concluded that the psychological effect taking place in the user’s head is probably bigger than any actual performance benefit taking place inside the computer.

Having said this, let me say that I really like SweepRAM. It is different from most memory optimization programs out there in some important respects, as follows:

• SweepRAM is based on the principle that programs occupying RAM is a GOOD thing (what use is unused RAM anyway?) Unlike other memory optimizers, which attempt to lay claim to as much memory as possible before releasing it (therefore squeezing applications of the memory resources they might need), SweepRAM allows applications to take up as much memory as they need but not more, and frees up many extra memory they might have been using.
• SweepRAM is not a memory resident app, but can be run on demand whenever needed. It does not need to be installed.
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