Description: Desk Drive is a free program that adds automatic shortcuts on the desktop to flash drives and other media when you plug them in, and removes these shortcuts automatically when the drives are unplugged. Supported media include (CD’s/DVD’s, removable drives, fixed drives, networked and RAM drives).

The idea behind this rather original program is to spare you the need to go hunting in “My computer” for a flash drive’s letter number in order to access it when you need it, but rather magically make a shortcut to it appear on the desktop when it is plugged in, and disappear when the drive is unplugged. Honestly this should have been an option in Windows.

The not-so-good news: this program takes up 18 megs in memory, which is surely a lot for this kind of program (and requires MS .NET Framework v2). Also, I’m not sure why but this program did not work on my work computer, but worked just fine on my laptop at home; could it be because I have .NET v3.5 at work? Lastly, I would have liked the option to make the tray icon not be shown.
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As you will no doubt have noticed, my site has a new AJAX navigation system. The purpose behind implementing this: to enable users of my site to view more stuff that they may be interested in.

Please let me know what you think. There are still some tweaks and improvements that need to be implemented (e.g. wasted space in the “featured article” section, as well as a few others). Here’s a list of new functions:

• Featured articles: the left side of the navigation will randomly show one of four featured articles that I have. You can scroll through these using the litte “< >” arrows.
• Tabbed pages: under the Freewaregenius logo. Something that I wanted for a long time.
• Tabbed navigation: bulleted lists of postings, “recent posts”, “popular posts”, “most commented”, etc.
• Category list in the navigation: one that is hierarchical. Note: I will be revamping the category list and adding a “Freewaregenius Pick” category sometime in the future.
• Tags: I don’t have my posts tagged yet, but when I do there will be a tagcloud displayed in the “Tags” tab in the Ajax navigation.
• A subscribe by email formbox: for those of you who want to be notified by email whenever there’s a new post.
• A related posts section at the bottom of a posting: which at the moment is blank because apparently these relationships are bassed on tags, which I do not have at the moment.
• Social bookmarks at the bottom of the page: and a general one at the top near the logo.

Does anyone know of a way to tag and/or categorize postings in Wordpress en-masse without my having to go in and do it for each posting individually? Please let me know.

I do have an opinion on this design, but for now I will withhold it so as not to influence any feedback. Please write with your comments and suggestions.
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Description: FreesSnap is a free program that runs in the background and allows the user to individually maximize any of the four sides of an open window using hotkeys (Win+arrows by default). It also allows you to use hotkeys to quickly shift the placement of a window to the center or any of the 4 corners, and to perform a number of windows resize operations.

You might have been in a situation where you were happy with the placements of windows on your screen, but would have liked to just maximize a window vertically, for example, in order to read the text at the bottom without having to scroll down. By default your only option if you were to do this would be to use the mouse to extend your window down manually (requiring some fine mouse-work if you were to get it exactly to the edge). Freesnap, on the other hand, would make this possible through a simple hotkey. Here are more notes on this program:

• Hotkeys: what I like about Freesnap is that it provides two sets of alternative hotkeys for desktops (using the number pad buttons) and laptops (using the arrow keys or I/J/K/L).
• Resizing: you can resize up/resize down to 5 pre-set sizes: 640×480, 800×600, 1024×768, 1152×864, 1280×1024. These can be useful if you are interested to see what your site or program will look like under the most common screen sizes. If resizing is your main need, check out Sizer, a similar program which allows you to define custom sizes.
• Window placement: you can quickly send the window to any corner of the screen or the center.
• Memory usage: approx. 4 megs, which is about 1 meg less than a similar program, reSizer (not to be confused with the above mentioned Sizer).
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Description: HP Smart Web Printing is a free browser extension for Internet Explorer and Firefox designed to enhance the process of printing webpages or (parts of webpages) from the browser. It allows you to "clip" elements of web pages, aggregate them, re-size and re-arrange them on a preview page before printing or saving them as a PDF document.

This program provides full clipping functionality for any content found on a website, with the purpose of assembling together the parts of a webpage (or multiple web pages) to print without having to deal with all manner of extra content from the website on the hard copy that you are not interested in (and therefore you save both paper and your ink cartridge).

More info on this program:

• How it works: the first step is to clip what you want off the page. This is done by pressing the "smart select" button on the command bar then simply selecting the content you are interested in off the page.
• The user interface: aside from a button on the command bar, the program installs a side pane on the right hand side that lists all of your clips as thumbnail previews. This is called the "clipbook" and can be easily summoned or dismissed.
• Editing : involves checking the clips you want before going to a "page preview" section. What you can do here is (a) resize any of your clips (useful when trying to fit multiple clips on the same page), and (b) re-arrange your clip on the page/pages. Note that resizing is absolute (much like resizing an image) and affects everything inside your clip.
• Creating a PDF: from the editing "print preview" section you can opt to save your as a PDF document instead of sending to the printer.
• The clips: are saved locally on your hard drive, and you can easily trace back anything that you clipped to its original web page. The Clip Book functions much as some web-clipping notes programs such as Evernote or Local Website Archive, or even as a sort of thumbnailed bookmark carousel, but does not have navigation, tagging or categorization functions found in these programs. Still, it can be quite useful for clipping something quickly and retrieving it later on even if you have no intention of printing.
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Description: Some PDF to Word Converter is a free converts PDF into Word documents. It offers batch processing, a degree of customizablity for the output document, and very good overall performance. Most importantly, it is fully useable and does not require any registration or codes and does not expire within a certain time period.

I’ve previously written a comparative review free of PDF to Word DOC solutions, comprising mostly online converting services. I concluded then that the email/online service Koolwire performed the best conversions; however in many cases a local, desktop based program is more desirable than an online service: say, for sensitive business (or other) documents, when you do not have access to an internet connection, when you  simply do not want to send your documents back and forth online for whatever reason (e.g. you  have a great many large size documents that you want to convert), or when the online service you are using is not responsive, which can occur frequently without explanation.

Some PDF to Word converter does a competent job in general. Here are some notes on this program:

• Handling of tables: does not convert tables; rather, the actual table structure is represented as an image, with a text window overlaid on top that lumps all text from all columns together. The treatment adopted here is not my favorite but its quite functional, given that my experience with PDF to DOC converters in general is that tables are always “worked around” in one way or another, never actually converted as such.
• Handling of images: images imported and placed where they’re supposed to be. Note that you will come across PDFs where the pages are in fact images in their entirety and will be processed simply as images, with no extractable text or other elements.
• Handling of text: what’s interesting is that Some PDF to Word Converter allows you to choose whether or not you want to use text boxes (and whether to merge these to get only a single text box); also whether or not to use line breaks. If unsure as to what you want, simply use the default settings.
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Description: the article will present an overview of 19 free turn based strategy games (empire building or war games). The games are: FreeCiv, TripleA, Stick Figure Strategy, Weewar, Eight Kingdoms, PhpDiplomacy, C-Evo, Advanced Strategic Command, Project W, Conqueror, The General, TriChromic, FreeOrion, People’s Tactics, Lgeneral, Crimson Fields, 1848, The Battle for Wesnoth, and Risk.

I’m a big fan of turn-based strategy and war games. If pressed I would go on record as saying that Sid Meier’s Civilization series are the best ever created… and while I’m at it let me also venture my opinion that turn-based strategy games offer an inherently better design that real-time strategy games, even when the latter profess to be a better representation of what happens in the real world.

This posting could have been entitled “19 games I really would have liked to
play had I had the time”; I wanted to present an overview of the many free turn based strategy games that I’ve come across. Note that although I usually personally try all the software I post on Freewaregenius, I only played a sub-set of these. Finally, it took a while to research and write this article, so please Stumble and/or Digg it! This list assumes the following guidelines:

• Will include empire building and/or war games only; no squad based or shoot em ups (e.g. Worms-style), or role playing games.
• Turn based: no real-time-strategy (RTS) games will be included.
• Focus on standalone, playable games rather than game engines. Read more »

Description: Lebendig is a Windows enhancement that will animate your windows, making them twist around as they open, recede into the horizon when closed, or perform any of 15 different actions when opening or closing. Works on programs, windows, and dialogs.

The world is split into two kinds of people: those who like to customize their desktop and like a lot of eye candy, and those who like to strip their OSs from any software that is not 100% necessary. Those in the former category will like this program. Here are more notes on this one:

• The animation: what’s interesting about the animation is that it is mostly illusionary; your window doesn’t actually, say, spin around, but rather an animated frame precedes the window right at the point of display, creating a very effective illusion.
• Launching and ending actions: Expand/Shrink Rectangles, Spin 180 or 360 right/left, Windows Zoom, Expand/Collapse inward or outward, Slide:top/down, bottom/up, right/left, left/right, Roll:top/down, bottom/up, right/left, left/right, Fade in and Fade out.
• Starting and ending points: can be defined, either from the location of the mouse or another set point on the screen.
• Windows affected: you can select from a number of Window types (e.g. Apps, explorer windows, dialogs, etc.) Make sure you check the types you are interested in.
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Description: Passage is a side-scrolling casual game done in pixellated, retro-looking graphics. The game can be completed in 5 minutes and is meant to represent a lifetime from birth until death. Passage is an art project open to each player’s interpretation.

The description above pretty much says it all. As in life, the only guarantee in "Passage" is death, otherwise you are free to explore as you like. Make sure to use all of the arrow keys to scroll up and down as well as left and right. Whats interesting is that even though your character is made up of a handful of oversized blocks ("pixels") the process of ageing is nonetheless represented so convincingly. I’ll admit to experiencing a genuine, heartfelt sadness when my character lost his mate.

More notes on this:

• Controls: aside from the arrow keys, press F for fullscreen, B to adjust blow up factor.
• Hints: don’t just avoid things, there are objects you can "collect". Also note that you can re-play this game differently, making different choices.
• Installation: no installer, just unzip and run.

But is it art?: I think so. As in all artwork, the author makes sure to point out that the player’s own reaction/interpretation of this is the interesting part. He does volunteer his own interpretation on his site though, but requests that you please play the game first (which is why I’m not going to link to it from this review).
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Description: SysExporter is a small tool that allows you to extract information from any application or window and export it as text, HTML, or XML files. It is designed to retrieve information from programs that do not normally allow you to simply copy/paste info, such as the files list inside a folder or zip archive, list of emails and/or contacts in an email client, registry values in the right pane of the registry editor, error message prompts, etc.

What do you do when you have information being displayed right in front of you that you need but cannot simply copy/paste or export? Typically what I used to do in this situation is simply grab a screenshot and perform OCR (optical character recognition) using a program such as JOCR. With SysExporter, however, I could simply locate the application that I want to extract data from in the SysExporter interface, then simply scroll through all of the dialogs associated with that application until I find the information I seek. Simple and quick. Here are more notes on this program:

• Information you can extract: everything, from a list of checkboxes used by a program or dialog to the list of files in a folder to the HTML of a web page.
• The user interface: simple and straightforward. Scroll throught the different controls/elements in the top pane, and preview the available data in the bottom pane. Note that you could filter across the different controls (e.g. Listview, Listbox, Combobox, Treeview, etc), as the program allows you to activate/deactivate these at will. If you don’t quite know what this means forget about it: simply scroll through all the available dialogs of the program you seek and you will find your info.
• Portable: installer setup as well as zip-only versions available.
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Description: EditURLs is a small program that works with Internet Explorer and allows you to edit and save the dropdown list of URLs that Internet Explorer uses in the address box for URLs that are typed in manually.

I occasionally have the opportunity to observe how people use their browsers at work, and one function that is used surprisingly frequently is the autocomplete for URLs typed in the address box. Which, I suppose, makes sense; bookmarks very quickly proliferate and require maintenance and management, while the address box is quick and easy (and will auto-populate the rest of your URL as you type).

All well and good, except the list of autocomplete URLs will itself grow too big, will frequently contain undesirable entries, and will disappear altogether when you perform periodic system or browser cleaning actions (say with a program such as CCleaner). EditURLs will remedy this: it will let you maintain a list of all the URLs you want to have in your autocomplete list, and will allow you to easily add new entries from any new URLs that you might have typed into the browser.

What I like about this program:

• Can create a desktop "restore" shortcut: go to "help" then "generate shorcuts" and create a "Restore URLs from Master" shortcut on your desktop. This will allow you to instantly restore the list of URLs into Internet Explorer without opening the program dialog itself.
• Does not reside in memory. Use this program when you need it, and the close it.
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