Description: Looxis Faceworx is a free 3D modeling program that can construct a textured 3D model of a person’s head out of two 2D photos (one from the front, "mugshot" style, and the other profile style from the side).

With this program you can create a modeled 3D head and then export it as an .OBJ file for use in other 3D modeling software such as Sketchup or Blender. As a starting point you will need two well light photographs of the subject whose head you want to model, and, once imported into Looxis Faceworx, the process will require a degree of manual intervention on your part to best map your subject’s phase/features onto the 3D model. Here are more notes on this program:

• The learning curve: is very shallow. Just go to help then video tutorial and you will know everything that you need to know within 5 minutes. The program is very easy to use and come to grips with.
• How it works: once you have the images, you will have to manipulate a line/point structure manually in order to best fit it around the face in the photographs.What you need to know here is that there are different levels of detail that you can work with: you can tell the program to give you more points or less points to manipulate.
• More tips: make it simple by deactivating the line/points structures that you are not working with instead of having them be displayed on screens. Zoom into the images when working with them for best accuracy (with the mouse wheel). Start with as little points as possible then make it more detailed afterwards; the better you "fit" these points around the head, the better the result will be. Deactivate the "blend zone" to begin with and deal with it at the very end.
• The user interface: is very straightforward. Three different windows display your subject’s frontal image, profile image, and 3D model of the head. What is nice about this program is that since it only does one thing - maps images to a 3D head - there is a limited set of tools that you need to use and come to grips with.
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Description: Translate.Net is a desktop-based translation tool that will translate any text from one language to another. It connects with multiple online translation engines and delivers multiple translations at once straight into your desktop.

Although a translation engine where you enter you text and have it magically translated into another language sounds like a fairy tale, the web is full of these services. Of course these cannot provide the textual nuances that a human translator could, and the quality can vary widely from text to text and engine to engine, which is why it is a good idea to run a text through multiple translation engines and get multiple versions/attempts at deciphering the text.

Translate.Net, like the recently reviewed Lingoes, is a straightforward program that will simply run your text through several online translation services and give you a list of results. Here are more notes on this program:

• The user interface: is simple and intuitive and fairly self explanatory.
• Languages supported: the list of "from" and "to" languages is extensive, with 25 languages supported in total, including every major language represented. The total number of translation directions is a whopping 1352.
• The language resources: what is cool is that Translate.Net will automatically identify out the available translation engines/resources that cover your language configuration and use them. As of this writing there were 17 language resources used, including Google dictionary, Google,translator Wikipedia, wiktionary, and SYSTRAN translator (used by Altavista Babel Fish). For a list of these go here.
• History of language pairs: once you perform a translation your from/to language pair used will be stored in the main interface, enabling you to quickly fire up that language combo the next time you need it. Quite useful.
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Description: Google Earth is a fully interactive 3D representation of the globe and (more recently) of space, with interactive representations of galaxies and constellations. Users are able to explore/navigate the virtual world and view and interact with a growing number of "layers" of information that are continuously being added and/or refined, such as 3D buildings, panoramic images of places, real-time weather information, roads, etc. Users are also able to interact with a growing number representations of well known places and monuments worldwide.

We are all familiar with satellite/aerial images used on Google maps. Google Earth takes this a step further by using this information (as well as a number of other information sources) to construct a virtual, fully interactive 3D globe. Astronomical pictures are also used to add a space exploration component called Google Sky (more on this below).

What’s interesting about this world is not just the ability to fly around, zoom in and explore, but the multiple layers of information that you can switch on and off (e.g. 3D buildings, image galleries, borders and labels, weather, etc.) as well as a growing number of pre-defined places that you can visit and explore virtually.

As of version 4.3 there have been a number of noteworthy additions to Google Earth, including a revamped navigation system, 3D "photorealistic" models of buildings, monuments, even entire cities, and time lapse views where you can control the time of day that you are viewing something in or even observe an accelerated sunrise-to-sunset scene at any spot in the world. "Street view" photos are also added, which display panoramic photographs of a particular sport that show you what it is really like to be there (similar in concept to the Panoye panoramic photo sharing site).

Community involvement: what is really exciting is that anyone can contribue to Google Earth, and many of the content is in fact either contributed by fans and enthusiasts or linked from other community based projects such as Wikipedia. For example, fans who have modeled and submitted buildings in their home towns using 3D modeling tools such as Google Sketchup or taken photos and associated them with places on Panoramio. Here are more notes on this program:

• Resolution: different locations have different resolutions, but most of the earth’s territory is covered within at least 15 meters of resolution, and some, such as Las Vegas and Cambridge, MA, have the highest resolution at 6 inches (15 cm).
• Navigation: you can search by address (in some countries), enter geographical coordinates, click on a an entry in the "places" section in the left pane, or simply use the on-screen 3D controls (with mouse wheel and arrow key integration).
• Layers: you can check and uncheck different layers of information in order to activate/deactivate them inside the main display. The amount of information that can be displayed is nothing short of astounding, from Panoramio pictures to related Wikipedia and New York Times articles to Metro transit lines, roads, international borders, weather/clouds, YouTube videos, restaurants, etc. The more you expand the layer categories the more you realize just how much they’ve crammed in there (see thumbnail to the right for the full expanded list of informational layers).
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Description: BitRipper is an integrated DVD ripping and conversion program that provides AVI or Mpeg creation from DVDs in a single step.

I’ve been making terrific conversions of DVDs into video files using all freeware tools for a long time, my programs of choice in this regard being AutoGK and more recently Handbrake. Both of these, however, will start processing your files from the DVD/VOB files after the DVD encryption/protection is removed using another, external, program and in most cases after the DVD had been saved (”ripped”) to your hard drive. What BitRipper offers is an integrated solution that consolidates the ripping and conversion parts into a single process, and then attempts to make it as simple to run as clicking a single button.

BitRipper started life as a commercial product that only recently became freeware. Note that in my evaluating this program I will be implicitly comparing it with Handbrake (mentioned above).

What I like about BitRipper: some cool features

• Decrypts and converts: combines the DVD decryption and conversion processes, so that you no longer have to think of these as two distinct parts requiring different programs. More convenient but also will save you a lot of time and manual involvement with the process.
• Handles any DVD: whether its a normal 4.7 Gig size or a double density 8 Gig+ DVD. “Decryption” mentioned above means that BitRipper will copy most commercial, copy-protected DVDs (includes “3rd party” CSS decryption module. (I am guessing that some very recent DVDs might have protections that it will not be able to decrypt).
• Converts on the fly: i.e. does not save the DVD to your hard drive first and therefore does not require gigabytes of free space on your hard drive to run.
• Installer includes codecs: installing BitRipper will also install a number of codecs that you need to perform a conversion, but the program will also use any codecs that you might have pre-installed on your system. I would advise downloading and using the LAME MP3 codec which provides better audio quality options than the included MP3 codec.
• Simplicity: the program is designed to suggest a simple, 1-click conversion (see screenshot above), where you merely insert a disc and press a button. My experience, however, is that this is the case if you do not want/need to customize the conversion settings, at which point things can become both complex and confusing.
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Description: Daphne is a windows process manager that provides a number of interesting functions, such as the ability to shut down, find, or hide an app or process by dragging and dropping a tool onto open windows with the mouse. Other functions include the ability to set “traps” where processes invoke user determined actions, killing processes by name, etc, in addition to a number of the usual functions that you would expect to find in a program of this type.

This is another process manager that does some cool stuff. It offers many of the standard functions that you would expect from most process managers, but what makes it interesting is a visual interface whereby you could point to elements on the screen with the mouse in order to, for example, kill the process behind them, find the underlying process, or quickly access (and optionally change) the properties and values of windows and controls.

What I will do for this review, as I did when reviewing “System Explorer“, is attempt to convey a sense of this program by listing my top 5 favorite things you can do with it:

1- Killing a process with the mouse: all you need to do is set Daphne to “kill process”, then grab the crosshairs and drop them on the window. This will end the process instantly, and avoid the need to hunt for the name of the associated process in a list and/or going through multiple steps to get it shut down. (Note: you can also do this with Revo Uninstaller; see this posting).

2- Visually finding a process: if you’ve ever faced a situation where you are unable to determine the process underlying an app or a window you’ll appreciate this one; simply drag the “find” crosshairs onto the window to identify its process. I sometimes need this when I am trying to figure out how much memory an app is consuming but find the process hard to locate because it’s named differently.

3- Creating traps for a process: this means that Daphne will automatically take a pre-specified course of action once it encounters a process that you pre-specify or a window that has a certain title. Once it detects this, you can tell Daphne to automatically kill the process, hide it (so it’s not visible), set the process to a priority level that you want, set the window to a certain transparency level, and set it to be always on top (or not).
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Description: Binary Toys are animated windowless vector characters “made up of springs, muscles, and masses” that are designed to inhabit your computer, interacting with your desktop environment in accordance with the laws of physics.

Get the picture: animated wireframe creatures walking, crawling around your desktop, tumbling from the top of one open window to the another, falling on their backs, legs wriggling in the air, and hence unable to move without your intervention (which, in this case, could either be to grab hold of the edge of the creature and flick it around with the mouse, or press “U” to magically untangle it). Not sure if I should categorize this as a “game” or a “desktop enhancement . Here are more notes:

• Interaction: you can grab any of the “nodes” on the creature’s body and drag it around, drop it, etc. Keyboard controls as follows: T/toggle transparency, S/change size, large and small, M/show muscles (really just changes the look a little bit), U/untangle, get back on its feet, R/reverse direction, Space/pause and unpause.
• Creatures: ten in total (right click on a creature to change). You can have creatures change randomly or have multiple creatures running around the screen simultaneously. Creatures include: Amoeba , Bouncy Diamond, Breaking Wave, Caterpillar Pod, Cheeky Triangle, Dainty Walker, Dirk Jiggler, Hairy Caterpillar, Millipede, Wiggly Worm. There’s an option to load creatures from an XML file for future additions.
• Behavior: according to the Binary Toys site: “these toys exhibit complex behavior and are surprisingly life-like”. They really do.
• Memory consumption: around 5 megs in memory.
• Installation: no installing necessary; simply run the executable.
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Description: Kana Launcher is a “pop-up menu” style applications launcher that can either reside in your system tray or appear anywhere on the desktop when invoked by a hotkey. It offers two modes, a regular “context menu” style pop-up launcher with a hierarchical tree structure, and a so-called “floating icon” launcher style. It also offers the ability to install a permanent shortcut to programs, bookmarks, or folders within the system tray itself.

Ok so those of us who have tried indexing, search-box style launchers (such as Launchy) may not be looking for a new icon-based launcher, but we at Freewaregenius are always on the lookout for useful and/or interesting launchers, and have determined that Kana Launcher deserves a mention here. More notes on this program below:

• Two modes of operation: a “floating window” style launcher and a pop-up, context menu launcher. These can be configured separately (i.e. the shortcuts that are displayed in one need not be the same as those displayed in the other). The “floating icon” mode displays tooltips that can help identify each icon as you hover over it. See the screenshot above to get a sense of what these two modes are like.
• System tray or hotkey: the launcher is called by right clicking or hovering over its icon in the system tray (for the pop-up and floating window launchers, respectively), or otherwise both the pop-up and hovering styles can be called anywhere through user definable hotkeys.
• Shortcuts: Kana can open programs, folders, files/documents, or URLs/bookmarks. The popup menu style launcher includes the ability to create a hierarchical folder structure that can be used to organize your shortcuts.
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Description: RipShout saves the audio from “shoutcast” internet radio stations directly to your hard drive. It will preserve the song’s IDv3 tag info and organize recorded audio by creating a folder for each artist and saving the individual tracks within it.

This has to be the world’s most straightforward internet radio recorder/”ripper”. All you need to do is get the URL of the internet radio station that you want to record; however, the station has to use the “Shoutcast” protocol, which is the most common on the internet, and RipShout will record the audio stream for you. Here are more notes on this program:

• How it works: once you find a station you like you can (1) click on the station’s link and open it with RipShout, (2) right click on the shoutcast link and select copy shortcut, then paste it into the box at the bottom of the app, or (3) right click on the Shoutcast link and select “save as” to save the .PLS file to your desktop, which you could then open from within RipShout.
• Don’t have a station in mind? :go to shoutcast.com for an entire directory of these, and a search box to help you find things stations you like.
• Supported stations: RipShout only records MP3 based Shoutcast radio stations, so make sure that you do not choose AAC format stations. Note: some internet radio streams typically give you a choice between 128kbit and lower quality streams; for recording purposes always go with the higher quality.
• Recording: you could either do this silently in the background or you could choose to hear what is being recorded either through RipShout’s own internal player or through WinAmp. This did not work for me, unfortunately (my internal player did not produce any sound, and I do not use WinAmp).
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Description: MailStore Home is a free program that can backup your email from multiple email applications/accounts and consolidate these into a single, centralized archive that it can burn into a backup CD. Also offers the ability to perform advanced searches and quickly view archived email. Supported email clients include Outlook, Windows Mail, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, Exchange, as well as POP/IMAP accounts (including all webmail services that IMAP or POP support such as Gmail and Yahoo), and local files.

This program can backup your email from a wide range of supported applications and services (including webmail services such as gmail) into a single centralized archive. It offers a high degree of configurability in terms of what you want and do not want it to backup, and allows for exporting your email across applications (so, for example, you can export your Outlook email into Thunderbird). More notes below:

• Backup options: you can tell it which folders you want backed-up and which ones you don’t. This might be useful if, say, you send a lot of email newsletters to certain folder(s) and do not care to have these backed up. Note that backups are incremental, such that Mailstore will add to the existing archive only those emails that have been added since the last backup.
• Exporting mail: if you need to you can select a folder structure or email/emails and export these into a another supported application (e.g. Outlook to Outlook Express, Thunderbird, etc.). You could also back them up to CD, save them individually to IMAP or hard disk , or even forward them by SMTP to an email address.
• The user experience: is tremendous. This is a sleek looking program that is well designed overall intuitive to use.
• Supported email clients/services: Outlook, Windows Mail, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, Exchange, as well as POP/IMAP accounts and local files. Archiving webmail: such as Gmail, Yahoo, AOL is possible, but Hotmail is not (Mailstore can archive any service that have a POP3 nor an IMAP server, which Hotmail doesn’t). See this page and this page for more info on configuring webmail.
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Description: Pepsky Free Audio Converter is a free program that can convert audio files across a wide range of formats, burn audio CDs playable with any CD player, burn audio-file CDs in many formats, and rip CD’s into MP3 or other formats.

What’s notable about this software is (a) the wide range of supported audio file formats that it can read and write (b) the nice collection of functions that it brings together at the same place, and (c) a very nice overall look and feel. Here are more notes on this program:

• Supported audio formats: will convert from and to any of the following formats; MP3, WAV, WMA, AAC, AIF, VOC, FLAC, M4A, OGG, AU, FLV, and APE.
• The user experience: is very nice. The interface looks good and the dialogs very intuitive.
• Conversion Performance: provides excellent conversion speed. This is merely my subjective assessment, but I will note that the program is optimized for dual core (Intel/AMD) processors.
• Audio CD creation: it can burn any of the above format audio files into a normal music CD that can be played on any CD player. It can also create a “disk image” file in BIN, APE, SVD formats.
• MP3 CD creation: actually not just MP3s; you can burn audio files of any supported format into CD’s that can be played on some CD players that support these formats.
• CD Ripping: will rip CD tracks into any of the supported audio file formats; surprisingly, however, it does not pull track data from CDDB or an online database, requiring manual data entry of this information (or a later online lookup using another app).
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Description: Cobview is a Windows shell extension that installs a command in Windows’ right-click context menu which can be used to get general file/properties information for most file types

If you’ve been following this blog you may have seen my previous posting regarding getting informational tooltips for most file types. Cobview provides a similar function on-demand as a command in the context menu. Here’s more info on this program:

• Information provided: this is different for each file type. For images, for example, you will get 2 tabs, with a preview of the image in one and the file details (resolution, bit depth) in the other. Syntax highlighting is offered for text files (Pascal, c++, java, html, etc; see thumbnail to the right). For dll or exe files the exported and imported functions are displayed. For MP3 files the ID3 tags are displayed.
• Plug-in architecture: in theory if you write code in any language you could create your own plugins to support any file type that you want. More info here.
• Other options: once the information is displayed you can either save it to a .TXT file or copy any of the rows presented into the clipboard.
• Unsupported file types: video file formats (AVI, MPG, MP4, FLV), Adobe PDF, MS Office file types (XLS, DOC, PPT and variations on those). There are others of course, but these stand out.
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Description: BBox Audio Player (BBoxV2) is a free lightweight audio player/manager that offers a good range of features including CD ripping, audio file tagging management, internet radio, automatic volume normalization, audio library management functions, and others.

This program pulls a very interesting trick: it takes up less than 2 megs in memory for the program itself (apart from libraries/music data loaded into it; more info in the comments section) — yet nonetheless provides enough functionality for most people to use as their primary audio player/manager. Compare this to, say, a program such as iTunes, which consumes 51 megs in memory, Mediamonkey or JRiver Media Jukebox (both of which consume approx. 30 megs).

You might wonder whether it is appropriate to compare BBoxV2 with these programs, and in many ways it is oranges and apples since the scope of these latter programs is so much broader; however, BBoxV2 does provide an impressive array of functions in a nice little package, and in truth if you preferred a slim and compact audio player/manager that is simple yet powerful BBoxV2 delivers (and delivers very well). Here are more notes on this program:

• CD Player and Ripper: rips tracks and pulls tag info from an online database. MP3 format only with a wide range of quality options (CBR/VBR).
• Tagger: the tagging function is surprisingly powerful, and includes the ability to do auto tagging based on an online search, including album artwork. (Allows you to change the search string used, which is very useful).
• Music library functions: includes quick filters (artist/album) as well as (a very useful) keyword search.
• Internet Radio: with 68 pre-defined stations. Although I was not able to determine how to add my own stations to the list, I was able to add shoutcast (.pls) shortcuts to the music library and add/play shoutcast stations that way. (Update: see comments section for how to add stations).
• Smart volume: i.e. normalizes volume for different audio tracks playing in succession, eliminating any sudden variations in volume.
• Supported audio formats (playback): MP3, WMA, Wave, MP1, MP2, MP4, AIFF, OGG, M4A, M4V, M4P, AAC, AC3, APE, TTA, OFR, SPX, FLAC & CDA.
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Description: Deluge is a full-featured open source bittorrent client that runs on multiple platforms. It is designed to be low on system resources utilization while providing powerful features and a user friendly experience.

I am not sure why, but I’ve been always looking for a good alternative to Azureus or µTorrent, admittedly the two most powerful Torrent clients. I have been using the Azureus-based BitTyrant (more on that one here), but have also had my eye out for some time on the open-source Deluge. And although I have previously tried multiple releases of the Windows version, they have always been somewhat unreliable and buggy; until this one: from the purely subjective experience of a single user I can report that this release (v.0.5.8.9) seems to be a very good, solid torrent client.

It is worth mentioning that as of the 0.5 release, Deluge was completely re-written from the earlier code and supports more features and better stability. Here are more notes on this program:

• The user experience: the interesting thing about this program is that it is very simple and “clean” looking, perfect for regular users who do not want to deal with a lot of complexity.
• Features: as of the 0.5 release Deluge supports encryption, peer exchange, binary prefix and UPnP, and a web UI that works on Firefox (didn’t try it - sorry). Other features include global as well as individual torrent upload/download limits, moving incomplete torrents on the local drive, enabling safe “blocklists” (Safepeer, Peerguadian, Emule), peer exchange, local peer discovery, private torrents, password protection, RSS, minimizing to tray, and other features which I either do not care to mention or do not understand.
• Technical comparison: for a technical features comparison with Azureus and µTorrent, click the thumbnail to the right (table adapted from Wikipedia’s torrent comparison article).
• Plugin architecture: makes this program (a) adaptable and easy to work with, and (b) quite powerful. Note that many of the features mentioned above might require activating the relevant plugins. At the time of this writing, all Deluge plugins were included in the installation package.
• Memory consumption: a mere 15 megs in memory. This is important given that Torrent clients typically reside in the background doing their thing while you work on other applications.
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Description: Moby Gratis is an archive of instrumental music clips created by the alternative rock/electronic music maestro Moby. These are available to anyone to download and legally use in their film projects, provided that these are independent, student, non-commercial, or non-profit films.

One day I will make a film, and it will be fantastic (you’ll see!). When that day comes and I am faced with the issue of finding music to use for my scenes I will go to Mobygratis and check out the growing collection of instrumental/electronic/soundtrack music that might fit the mood. If you are working on your own project you should check it out.

You will have to create an account first, afterwhich you can log in and check out multiple pages of links to music. All of the music is instrumental; you will not find tracks from his albums (or at least I didn’t see any). You can preview the clips on the page through a flash player, and request a license on-the-spot if you want to use it. How cool is that?

See video below of Moby talking about Moby Gratis:
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Description: Unhider is a program that can reveal/unhide any window(s) that belong to applications and/or process running in the background that are not visible. It can do this for programs that are running but not visible in the wake of a crash.

This is one of those tools that you must download and keep somewhere on your hard drive. You may not use it that often, but when you do need it you will be very thankful that it’s there. It is able to reveal any hidden window, including programs that seem to disappear completely after explorer crashes and are not amenable to being brought back using Windows’ Task Manager.

Imagine the following scenario: you are working on something for more than an hour using program A when Program B crashes, or Windows explorer itself crashes, or for whatever reason the system crashes. Your first reaction is to go to the task manager, find the program or process that is causing the trouble and end it (or in the case of explorer crashing, you end the explorer.exe process, go to the task manager’s ’file’ menu, and run a new instance of explorer).

All good and well, except now the window for Program A is not showing. A quick check with the task manager shows that the process for Program A is indeed running, but you have no access to it. Or it’s showing as an application in the task manager but you are unable to reveal it even when you right-click "switch to" or "bring to front". At this point you are prepared to bite the bullet; you’ve already started thinking about not wasting any more time and simply re-creating any unsaved work. But here’s the good news: Unhider will most likely bring the application window back for you, enabling you to save your work before you restart your computer.
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