Description: AlbumArt.org is a site that provides searchable CD and DVD art in large format.

I’ve always used Amazon to download album art, which doesn’t provide large size images, and is on occasion unable to deliver artwork for some titles. My second resource is typically Google image search, which is unpredictable.

This is why I was very pleased to discover AlbumArt.org. It allows you to search for either CD or DVD artwork and instantly produces (mostly) large format results. It also contains album art from international and/or rare realeses. A search for "Radiohead" produced a staggering 468 results, which certainly says something about the breadth of this resource. And as the folks over at the CD Design and Album Cover Art blog indicate, in many cases the size of the images is larger than that provided by the album artwork resources in Itunes.

[Via the CD Design and Album Cover Art blog]
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Description: Thumbview is an open source program introduces thumbnail support (in Windows’ thumbnail folder view mode) to 19 image types that are not natively supported in Windows, including PNG, PSD and TIFF. It also adds informational tooltips for image file formats that are displayed when images are hovered over by the mouse.

Ever wondered why some image files display a preview thumbnail in explorer (when using ’thumbnail’ view) while others don’t? The reason quite simply is that Windows by default includes thumbnail support for only a handful of image files (e.g. JPG, GIF, BMP and a few others). What Thumbview does is add another 19 image types to this: CUT, DCX, DDS, MDL, MNG, PCD, PCX, PIC, PIX, PNG, PNM/PBM/PGM/PPM, PSD/PDD, PSP, PXR, SGI/RGB, TGA/VDA/ICB/VST, TIF/TIFF, WAL and XPM.

The screenshot above illustrates this; the folder on the left shows a folder in “thumbnail view” under Windows XP that contains 3 image files; the thumbnails for JPG images are showing while the PSD image is not. Once Thumbview is installed, however, thumbnail support is introduced for PSD (as well as numerous other image types not illustrated in the screenshot). Tooltips are now also available whenever you hover over any image with the mouse, which in itself is a very handy feature that can be very useful to have.
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Description: Internet Video Converter is a free program that performs video conversions (including FLV and SWF formats), downloads from a wide range of video sharing sites, and can also play/view a wide range of formats. IVC is a GUI frontend for a number of free tools and is available as an installable version, a portable zipped version, and even as a U3 USB key (.u3p) version.

What I like about this program is that it is self-contained; it includes all codecs/filters that it needs. In fact you could use the no-install zipped version to convert and play a wide range of video formats without writing anything to the registry or having codecs installed and running in the background at all times (consuming resources or potentially causing conflicts with other codecs).

IVC is a frontend that uses FFmpeg or Mencoder to transcode most video/audio formats, Mplayer to play video, FLVtool2 to process FLVs (which is why converting to FLV/SWF is handled separately from other video formats), as well as other tools. It uses Downloader.net to download videos. The rest of this review will contain the following sections (1) Formats supported, (2) Video conversion, (3) Downloading videos, (4) Demuxing audio, (5) Video-to-flash, and (6) Video playback.

(1) Formats supported: FLV, SWF, Vcd/Svcd/DVD, MP3G, MP4 (Ipod, PSP), 3GP, MOV, AVI, and WMV.

(2) Video conversion using IVC: a number of pre-defined profiles are implemented that you can select from, including Ipod, PSP, and 3GP (mobile) formats. When you select a format IVC defaults to a 1:1 aspect ratio which will resize your video to the new maximum resolutions of your selected formats but will keep the aspect ratio of the original. For example if you are converting a source that, say, has a 608×256 resolution and choose the 320×240 Ipod MP4 preset from the dropdown, your video settings will be defaulted to 320×136 in keeping with the aspect ratio of the original. This for me is really exciting stuff because it avoids the blind resizing to 320×240 (or 640×480) Ipod formats that some converters default to which in many cases completely messes up the aspect ratio of the source video.
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Description: Group Shot is a free program that can automatically create a single ’perfect’ image from multiple image sources. It does this by merging the ’good’ parts from other images (typically shots of groups of people) into a final, perfect composite image.

Did you notice that whenever you’re taking pictures of people in a group that there’s always at least one person who’s squinting, frowning, or looking away even when you’ve finally managed to get all the other people in the picture flash perfect smiles?

Group Shot from Microsoft Research can take a number of pictures and semi-automatically merge the good parts to construct a perfect output image. If this is sounding a little bit strange, or if it sounds like it might involve a lot of work/tweaking — I have some news for you: it works like magic; a few clicks will automagically deliver perfect group shots that never existed in reality (its almost disconcerting).
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Description: System Explorer is a system monitoring and analysis program that picks up where the Windows "Task Manager" leaves off. It expands on the "Task Manager" by adding many more features, including detailed info on processes, Windows, IE addons, connections, drivers, opened files, Explorer, services, startups, and uninstallers.

System Explorer is simply a fantastic collection of tools for system analysis and diagnostics. I am not going to go over everything this program does; instead, here are my top 5 (actually 6) favorite things about this program in descending order.

6. Displays the path to any process, driver, service, application, etc. that you may be interested in. This is pretty useful in that in most cases you are able to trace a running process to the program that originated it.

5. Right click on any process and instantly search processlibrary.com (or Google) for information on that process. I was not familiar with processlibrary.com before trying this program but as process resources go I must say it is quite good.

4. Right click on any entry (process, app, service, etc.) to instantly upload it to virustotal.com, which will check it across more than two dozen antivirus/antimalware engines for viruses, trojans, and any other kind of malware. Very handy indeed.

3. Process History. If you’ve ever had something happen in your system and thought "what on earth just happened", a quick glance at the history tab in System Explorer will show you a history of every process that kicked in and the time of the event.
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Description: Tunestor is an extension for IE and Firefox that allows for downloading MP3s and adding them to your Itunes library in one fell swoop from the browser context menu.

This browser extension aims to condense what would typically involve 4 different steps into a single, simple right-click command. While normally you would need to (1) click to download an audio file, (2) select the location to save the file, (3) start ITunes, and (4) manually add the file to the Itunes Library, with Tunestor you would simply right-click on the mp3 download link in the browser and select “download directly to Itunes”.

What I like about this is the convenience of knowing that I can download something then find it in the music library when I open Itunes, ready to be synched with my Iphone.

Here are some notes on this program:

• Tunestor downloads files to the “My Music” directory by default. While this is probably a good choice, it would be better if it enabled you to change the default download directory in case the user prefers another location. Come to think of it, having the ability to optionally introduce a “save as” dialog to choose the save folder would also be good (albeit it would add a step).
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Description: Quantcast puts together profiles of the demographic make-up of US web traffic for over 20,000,000 sites. Geared towards advertisers, these demographic profiles are made available for free on the Quantcast website simply by entering a URL in the search box.

If you have a website you might have wandered about the demographic makeup of your audience; are they young/old, mostly male/female, how much money do they make, what level of education, etc. Well, the guys at Quantcast might just have the information you seek, at least when it comes to US audiences; just go over to the Quantcast site and search for the URL you want demographics for, you will most likely find some useful information.

Here’s what I learned about you, my dear Freewaregenius audience (note: the info provided is only for US based traffic).

• Approx. 60% male and 40% female. This one I would have guessed.
• 64% are age 35+, which I wouldn’t have expected (20% are age 55+ and 5% are 65+ years of age).
• Fully 34% of you make $60,000 or more a year, while 12% make more than $100,000. Which is interesting. If you belong in this segment then (a) find the "buy me a beer" icon in the top right corner of this page, and (b) donate some money ASAP.
• 90% are Caucasian. Wow. This is a rather surprisingly high number; therefore, if you know anybody who is not Caucasian whom you think would enjoy this site send them an email and recommend they visit.
• 48% have bachelors degrees and 15% have graduate degrees, making a full 63% of readership college educated in some way. (I always knew you were discerning brainiacs!).
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Description: Shock Desktop is a program that can save the locations of your desktop icons and easily restore them if and when they change. It allows for the creation of multiple profiles and includes a number of useful functions.

There are a number of programs that save and restore the locations of desktop icons, but I really like this one for the following reasons:

• Profiles: Allows you to set any number of profiles. This can be useful if (a) you flip different resolutions on your display, and (b) if you would like different icon arrangements and not just a single, favorite one.
• Tray icon operation: resides in the tray icon for quick access. Although there are a couple of functionalities that it offers if its running in memory (see below), you really only need it when you’re ready to restore icon locations. (You can switch auto-starting with Windows in the options).
• Usage: Does not require switching off the ’align to grid’ option to perform. This is a strange requirement of some desktop-icon saving apps such as another favorite of mine, DIManagerX.
• Hiding desktop icons (a.k.a interesting functionality#1): there’s an option whereby you can quickly turn desktop icons on and off from the system tray. (For me this comes in handy whenever I want to create screenshots for programs).
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Description: Freeware “My Last Search” reveals searches performed on the major internet major search engines for both IE and Firefox.

If you’ve ever needed to recall searches performed on your PC (”now let’s see… what was that fantastic free program I was looking for the other day I can’t seem to remember!” or “what was I searching for on Freewaregenius the other day?”) then “My Last Search” is for you.

How it works: simply run it and get a list of searches. For each entry you get information as to the search string itself, the search engine, the type of search, time, browser and number of “hits” (not sure what this last one is; not number of results clicked on but something related to it).

Here are more notes on this program:

• Search engines supported: I tested it and it works on Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, and Alexa (search, not traffic comparisons).
• Portable: just extract it anywhere and run. You should be able to plug in your USB drive on a PC and get an instant list of the latest searches.
• Quick Search: you can re-perform the search query in the same engine using a single click.
• Reports: You can save an item or items from the list of searches and/or generate html reports for these from the right-click context menu.
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Description: MP3 Check allows you to audit your library of MP3 audio files for songs that do not meet your desired quality and volume criteria. It lets you define a handful of standards to check you audio library against (ID3 tag presence/absence, bit rate, sample rate, and volume) and will scan your folders for MP3s that do not comply with these.

As your music library grows and grows wouldn’t be great if you could use a tool to identify those songs that, say, are low in (bit-rate) quality or whose volume is too low? MP3 Check is such a tool that will use your own standards to audit your library and identify those audio files that do not meet them.

You can set MP3 Check such that it will **optionally** perform the following tests on your collection; note, however, that you can also choose NOT to perform any of the below tests simply by unchecking the box next to it in the main MP3-Check interface.

• MP3s with ID3v1 tags missing
• MP3s with ID3v2 tags missing
• MP3s that are either under a minimum user-defined bit rate or otherwise over a user-defined bit rate.(If, say. you don’t want it to check for a max bit rate simply enter a very large number in the max kbps box)
• MP3s that are under a given sample rate
• Finally (and this one is my favorite), MP3s that are under (or over) a given gain volume.
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Description: On the NTFS file system, freeware program “Link Shell Extension” provides you with the ability to create clones (called hard links) of your files and folders straight from the context menu.

Clones, if you’re wondering, are not copies of a file or shortcuts. Cloned files look like normal files (except for a little inverted blue arrow) and what they are are multiple instances of a file that point to the same exact data. So, for example, you can have a cloned file reside on your desktop as well as in another directory on the same drive (or even in the same directory under a different name), but in reality there is only a single copy on your drive, with two files pointing to it. Opening any one of those two clones will access the same data, so that if you save a change to the file on your desktop for example it will be reflected in the other one as well. The process of creating these clones is referred to as hardlinking.

How this can be useful: hardlinking can be useful whenever your primary method for organizing your files is within a folder structure. As an example, you might organize your MP3s such that each folder represents an album and contains the constituent song files. But let’s say that you also want to have a “best of” folder that contains your favorite songs; instead of making copies of the MP3s and putting them in the ’best of’ folder (or using shortcuts that need to be maintained and might not be recognized by media players) you can use hardlinked clones such that any single song in the “best of” folder will actually exist in both the “album” and “best of” folders at once. This way your songs take up hard drive space only once, and any change you might make to the tags/metadata of one file will be instantly the case for the other (because they in fact the same file), instead of having to be performed twice.

How to perform hardlinking using “Link Shell Extension”; after installing “Link Shell Extension”, you can create hardlinks as follows:
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Description: "More" is an award winning, academy-nominated animated short film made by filmmaker Mark Osborne in 1998. The 6 minutes film chronicles the life of a lonely individual with a colorless existence, but who is nonetheless propelled to change his life by a (literal) fire in his belly.

I watched this film after a friend recommended it. It portrays the drab, colorless life of a guy living in some sort of hyperindustrialized, perpetually grey metropolis. I think all of us can identify with his situation, especially the part when the fire in his belly keeps pushing him towards something different in his life (depicted literally, with our hero opening a door on his belly and peering into the smoldering furnace inside - how cool is that?).

The ending is more ironic than hopeful but thought provoking all the same; and the soundtrack is really pleasing. Check it out below.
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Description: The "What if you had invested" research tool on the Sharebuilder site allows you to go back and calculate just how much money you would have gained or lost if you had invested a certain amount in a stock at any previous point in time.

I know someone who bought Google stock when it was $400. Many people thought it was overpriced then, quoting price-to-earnings ratios that presumably didn’t make sense. As I write this Google is trading at approx $700 per share. I imagine my friend is very happy right now.

I’m not an investor but occasionally look at a certain stock or stocks for some companies that interest me, and, at times, come home and announce to my wife that we simply have to buy stock in company x. We never do as we don’t extra cash lying around to invest, but now that I’ve discovered this tool I can go back and prove the investment wisdom that my recommendations had way back when (or alternately, I can play it cool and forget about it if they flop).

The tool allows you to select a stock symbol plus up to 4 others for benchmarking. It will let you define when your hypothetical investment would have taken place, whether or not you would have reinvested any dividends, and whether your initial investment would be supplanted periodically with additional investment. It will use the same scenario for all of the stock symbols you enter, and allows you to chart comparison indexes as benchmarks (DJIA, S&P 500, Nasdaq).
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Description: "Ebook to Images" converts ebooks in most formats (.txt, .html, .htm, .lit, .pdf) to images that are custom formatted for reading on a mobile device. The idea is that while most portable devices such as MP3 players will not allow you to upload and view ebooks, many of them allow for image viewing on their screens. Hence "ebook to images" will convert the text from ebooks into images suitable for viewing on your particular portable device.

This program doesn’t print documents into images in the manner of a virtual printer (such as PDF Creator or SWF Printer Pro). Rather, it will extract the text from an ebook and reformat it as per your settings. You can tweak all aspects of the output images, including their size (resolution), the font used, font size, orientation (e.g. flip by 90°, 270°), text color, background colors, anti-aliasing and a number of other settings. You can add also a background image if you like as well as page numbering, and you can set the number of output folders to distribute the resulting images to (useful if you would like to upload separate chunks of the ebook at a time).
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Description: Clickzap offers the ability to execute one of a handful of useful tasks whenever you double click your right mouse button.

The number of possible tasks performed isn’t that big, and of course you can only choose one of them, but if you need to execute any one of these quickly and easily, Clickzap delivers.

There are 8 supported tasks in total: lock computer, log-off, shutdown, minimize active window, minimize all windows, close active window, close all windows, and mute sound. The last two are my favorites (although I might note that the ’close all windows’ function causes any programs that you may be running that have invisible windows to become visible and minimized on the desktop).
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