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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Description: Freeware program Antifreeze offers a last recourse when your computer freezes/becomes unresponsive. Invoked by a hotkey combination (CTRL-Win-Alt-Home), it will “put to sleep all running programs except the most critical ones”, with the objective of giving you back the ability to intervene and close problematic programs.

Imagine the situation: you’ve been working on a project for some time when your computer suddenly hangs. You do not know when was the last time that you’d saved, but you would very much prefer not to hit the reset button, even though by the looks of it it seems that that’s going to be inevitable. The mouse is still moving, but the task manager is not coming up, and everything is frozen.

Thoughts race through your head: why, why why did my computer do this? Is it a virus? Or perhaps I was running too many programs? But how can I go back and close programs and windows when everything is in a virtual coma and not even the task manager is coming up? Good thing I installed Antifreeze; surely now once I press its hotkey combination I will get control of my system back and be able to take some remedial action.

I’ve had this program installed for a few days now, waiting (hoping) for Windows to crash, but unfortunately (?) it didn’t. So there you have it: you cannot count on Windows to crash when you want it to!! I should’ve bought a Mac .
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There is a certain category of item, mostly personal electronics stuff, that although in theory I would love to own, in practice, when it really comes down to it, I will opt against parting with the money. Examples of this are: the Playstation 3 (would love to have, but will simply not buy), a really nice gaming laptop, the Nintendo WII, a color laser printer, a large flatscreen TV, those nice $200 noise-cancelling headphones that they sell at the Apple store (forgot the brand — Bose? Harman Kardon?).

Although the reasons for this are mostly financial (e.g. $200 for a set of headphones!), sometimes it is not strictly the case. For example it’s not just that paying $400+ for a PS3 is too much money; what worries me, rather, is paying $400 and then not being able to manage the logistics of actually using it. As it is I spend 2-3 hours every day on maintaining and creating content for this blog, plus I have a family and 2 kids (and 2 dogs) to take care of, plus I have a full time job, plus I like to find time to do art/painting (I don’t), plus I have dozens of books and magazines that I would like to read, plus I’m supposed to be building the websites of 2 friends. And although there certainly is a gamer that lurks within me, I have always thought of myself as a PC gamer, more inclined to be playing strategy games such as Civilization IV than console-style games.

So, in effect, the only way for me to own any of the above mentioned items (PS3, $200 headphones, etc.) is for them to just fall into my lap.

Which is how I was faced with my recent dilema: I won a brand-spanking new PS3 console at my company’s Christmas party last week.
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Rating: 4.5

Version tested: 1.0.0

Description: Torrent Swapper, dubbed the ’social bittorent client’, is an open source torrent client that aims to use and manage the interconnected networks which underlie P2P torrent downloads in two distinct ways (1) by using these as a recommendation engine, and (2) by making it possible for users to designate other peers as ’friends’ and to use each other’s unused upload capacity. Other features include the ability to view what others are downloading and their city-level location.

By now everyone is familiar with the concept popularized by Amazon.com whereby an item of interest is connected to other items through the "customers who bought this also bought" recommendation engine. Torrent Swapper is a bittorrent client that has taken that concept and implemented it on torrent downloads (i.e. people who downloaded this also downloaded). Here are more notes on this program:

The pros:

• The user interface: is nice, clean and straightforward.
• The recommendation engine: works fairly well. However, I am not sure about the extent of value-added that the recommendation engines provide (see ’cons’ section below).
• Torrent Search: pressing a ’search’ button on the main interface opens a torrent search ’portal’ which can be used to search Google, Torrent Spy, Torrentz.com, BT Bot, and ISO Hunt. Simple but handy, I thought, especially for Torrent novices.
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Rating: 5 pick

Description: RadioLab is a radio show out of WNYC in New York that addresses various issues from an interesting scientific perspective, with an emphasis on those areas where the scientific meets the philosophical (and the unusual). With 5 episodes for each of its season runs, Radiolab has 3 seasons under its belt, with a fourth season to begin in 2008. All episodes are available for online listening and freely downloadable as mp3 podcasts.

Actually, the description of the show on the website is quite good and worth quoting: "Radio Lab is an investigation of an unusual sort. Each episode is a kind of sonic joyride through a different universe of ideas, often slamming on the brakes for closer inspection." The show’s co-hosts Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwhich do a fantastic job.

I started listening to this show based on the recommendation of a friend. I was somewhat surprised, mind you, because this particular friend (hi Khader!) is more likely to recommend shows that are about philosophy or psychology than science. It was clear when I started listening to the show, however, that the show was really about all three of these topics, and about life in general.

Here’s a bit of a preview of what’s on offer in each on of the show’s different seasons. I tried as best I could to provide a brief description of each episode, but you can find a longer description on the Radiolab website iself:
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Rating: 5

Version tested: 4.4.1.0

[Note: this review was co-written by Freewaregenius contributor Pcfreakske2000 from Belgium]

Description: Dreammail is an E-mail client that can handle SMTP, eSMTP, POP3, and web mail (Hotmail and Yahoo). Offers a wide range of advanced functions including multi-user and multi email account support, advanced email search, RSS feed aggregation, viewing email directly from the server, spam filtering, and others.

If you’re looking for a solid email client that is an excellent alternative to Microsoft Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird, then you’ve found it. Dreammail covers a lot of ground and what it does not do very well it nonetheless does quite adequately. Here are some notes on this program:

• The user interface: The user interface is clean, easy to use, and looks good. Employs a navigation pane on the left of the screen reminiscent of MS Outlook that’s used to access the different parts of the program (mail folder, contacts, search, webmail, and RSS feeds).You can customize the columns to view in your email view.
• Multi-accounts and Multi-user feature: You can set up different e-mail accounts in the program for multiple POP3 and webmail accounts. You can also check for new emails for all accounts simultaneously.
• Multi protocol management: POP3, SMTP, and eSMTP supported, as well as Yahoo and Hotmail web mail (yes Gmail is supported as POP3). However, it does not support IMAP email accounts.
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