Picasa

Ages ago, I discovered an incredibly useful photo management program that has evolved into one of the best on the market and the best part is that it's free.

It's called Picasa, one of the many properties of the Google family, and is one of the best-kept secrets on the Internet. (For those that used the original and have not updated to Picasa 2, it is loaded with tons of new features!)

Not only can it help you locate and organize all of the images on your computer (no matter where they are), it gives you easy to use tools to improve image quality, an easy way to make slide show CDs for your friends and family, an easy way to backup all your images and simple image compression so you send your pictures in an e-mail friendly format.

It automatically locates and sorts your pictures and videos into visual albums based on the date of the files so you can quickly view all of your photographic masterpieces in chronological order.

Each folder that constitutes an album uses easily identifiable labels that can easily be edited and shows you how many images are in each folder. You can even give a gold star to any photo you love so you can later search for your best of collection.

You can password protect folders, quickly get rid of red eye, optimize the contrast and brightness and write captions that will stay with the picture.

Another great feature of the current version is that it works with most cameras for downloading images directly into Picasa albums, which eliminates the need to install those bulky, poorly written programs that come with most digital cameras.

For those camera buffs that like to work in RAW formats, the latest version works with the highest quality files from camera manufacturers such as Canon (.CRW, .CR2), Nikon (.NEF), Olympus (.ORF), Pentax (.PEF), Kodak (.DCR), Sony (.SRF), Minolta (.MRW), and Fuji (.RAF). New models supported include the Canon EOS Digital Rebel XT (aka the 350D), Pentax *istDS and Konica/Minolta Maxxum7D (aka the Dynax 7D).

The best thing about Picasa is that it is very fast (once all of your pictures have been indexed) and very easy to master yet is powerful enough for hard-core photography types for all the basics.

If you own a digital camera, this is a must have piece of software!

Skype Web Toolbar

The Skype Web Toolbar lets you combine Skype with your web browser. It recognises phone numbers and Skype Names on web pages so you can call them with one click, through Skype.
You can also use the Skype Web Toolbar to:

* Call and chat to your existing contacts
* Change your online status
* See how much Skype Credit you have left
* Automatically send a contact a link to the web page you’re viewing

Test Ping

TEST PING

Festoon

Festoon adds video and sharing to Skype and Google Talk.
Getting started is simple. Just connect a camera, download our free Festoon plug-in, and see each other one-on-one or invite up to 200 buddies to a video call - even if they don't have a camera. But wait, there's more! You can also share anything you see on your screen, even your entire desktop! And Festoon's immersive EyeCandy video effects add fun to your video experience, including funhouse mirrors, motion colors, and crazy cutouts. Whether you use Skype or Google Talk for business or to connect with family and friends, now you can show a presentation, work on a spreadsheet, share photos, or just have fun online while seeing everyone in the call!
Check it out - see why face to face is better!

Brutus 2006

Are you one of the millions of folks out there who think that it takes way too long to shut any version of Windows down? You should just have a one-click option to get the job done, right? It isn’t that the task is hard, it is just tedious. Thanks to Brutus 2006, that task just got a little more simple.
Once you get Brutus 2006 up and running you are given a few options via the program's control panel to choose.

You can have a normal exit from Windows. This option shuts down Windows as it would if you were to go in and do it the way via the Microsoft interface. You can have it "force exit" from Windows. This means that Brutus 2006 will terminate everything that is going on and automatically restart, shut down or log off. The "terminate hung applications" option allows Brutus 2006 to turn off, restart or log off but lets Windows take care of shutting down all the applications that might be running. As you can see, for a simple program and task, you have a lot of options to choose from.

This program gives you the power to log off, restart, or shut down a computer running Windows 98 Second Edition, Windows Me, Windows 2000, Windows XP, or Windows Server 2003 with one simple click. For that reason and that reason alone, Brutus 2006 has earned it's spot on my personal computer.

Picaboo

Picaboo is a tool for creating personalized photo albums from your desktop. Picaboo offers the ability to customize all parts of your album or use several pre-designed page layouts, backgrounds, corners, and covers. You can even load your pics and Picaboo will create an album instantly for you. For a small proce, users can then print out the photos on glossy, acid-free paper, and bind them in a book easily. Picaboo also allows creation of DVDs or computer-based albums complete with soundtracks and transition effects. The software is free to download.>WELCOME TO PICABOO INSTRUCTION PAGE

PixPulse

PixPulse is a unique photo-sharing service for your camera phone or mobile device. Users upload photos or video to their “personal media channel,” allowing multiple friends to instantly see the material on mobile phones or on the net. PixPulse differs from other similar services by offering a social networking aspect similar to del.icio.us or flickr, which allows tagging so people with similar interests can connect to each other. Users can notify multiple friends at once with PixPulse, saving the cost of sending multiple SMS messages. PixPulse supports all mobile carriers and works on any phone with camera or video capabilities, SMS/MMS and WAP 2.0. The service is free.

FON

FON is an ambitious public service project aiming to spread free WiFi across Europe. Started by Martin Varsavsky, the man behind two of Spain's largest telecom companies: Jazztel and Viatel, FON will use the Wi-Fi infrastructure already in place across Europe and allow anyone with a laptop to access it for free. FON's downloadable software client installs into your Wi-Fi base station, giving you a password of your choice but also accepting all the other passwords of all the other FON members. "FON is based on the premise that Wi-Fi users are only taking advantage of 3% of their capacity on the average or in other words wasting 97% of their total paid for bandwidth." Varsavsky has pledged millions of euro of his own money to buy software and ad campaigns to achieve his goal, and is currently looking for people interested in working with him.

APO USB Autorun v1.0

APO USB Autorun enables you to add autorun functionality to your USB drive. It automatically searches for the standard autorun.inf (as used with CDs) and executes it. This simple, but very handy functionality allows you to create an autorun menu in the same way you would for a CD and use it with your USB drive, or launch playlists, html pages, and any other type of file as soon as the USB drive is inserted. In addition to the autorun functionality, the program also allows you to quickly access the files on the USB drive(s) from the tray icon menu.
[300k] [Win98/ME/2k/XP] [FREE]

FirmTools ShellExtension v2.0

In a world filled with different formats, we all want the freedom to go back and forth, right? From JPG to BMP, there are more image formats out there than I have fingers and toes. FirmTools ShellExtension does what no other program has been able to do for me before. It gives me a free and simple way of converting my graphics from one format to the next. Here is what the author of the program has to say about it: "As far as we develop our products for digital camera users, we know that you can have tons of images scattered on your computer. ShellExtension is our FREE program that we grant you as the BONUS to help you with images manipulation. "This is a very handy application that extends Windows Explorer's User Interface with three useful commands for graphic files. ShellExtension adds an option to context menu that allows you to view a thumbnail of an image, convert it to any of supported formats, and print them." FirmTools ShellExtension currently supports: GIF - Graphic Interchange Format; JPG, JPEG - Joint Photographic Expert Group format; BMP - Windows bit-mapped graphics format; PNG - Portable Network Graphics format; TGA - developed by Truevision; PSD - Adobe Photoshop; TIF, TIFF - Universal Graphic Format for PC and Mac platforms; SGI - Silicon Graphics file format, also known as RGB file format; RGB, RGBA - Silicon Graphics RGB formats; BW - Silicon Graphics file format; PGM - Portable graymap file format; PBM - Portable bitmap file format; PPM - Portable pixmap file format; PCX - PC Paintbrush MS-DOS; and PCD - Kodak PhotoCD format. Now why would you want to change file formats? Well, some places on the Web only accept one or two kinds of graphics. Other graphic formats are larger than others. There are really a million-and-one reasons why you might need to change. What FirmTools ShellExtension does is give you an easy right-click option of moving from one format to the next

Exsate DV Capture Live

Exsate DV Capture Live enables you to capture and convert DV video from your camcorder via an IEEE-1394 FireWire connection. While the program is capturing the video, it automatically converts it to AVI or WMV format in real-time and saves it to your hard drive. You can optionally imprint the DV time stamp into the captured video and choose to have it appear once a day, once an hour, or with every scene. Furthermore, you can choose to capture to a single or multiple files, append to existing projects, and operate all playback functions of your DV camcorder. Exsate DV Capture Live does not offer any editing functionalities, but if you just want to capture and convert your tapes to digital format, this program offers all the functionality you'll need.
[1252k] [Win2k/XP] [FREE]

Foonbox Arcade

Great independant games site from the makers of Hapland.
Eat In
Escape from Rhetundo Island
Avoision
Hapland
Hapland 2
The Pie Game
The Balls Game

Take Away
Blackshift
MindWinder

Guitar Shred Show

Guitar Shred Show is the place where you'll find this quirky site, which puts you in the boots of one of the true masters of shred guitar, Mr Fastfinger. Now, this guy isn't real - at least I hope not with a hairdo like that. It's a cartoon animation that allows you to trigger killer electric guitar moves using the keys on your keyboard, to most satisfying ends even if you have no musical talent whatsoever.

The first thing you notice is the loading screens - all made to look like part of the story unfolding. A nice touch the first time you visit the site, but a little annoying thereafter.

Inside the main menu, clicking the plectrum by Show Off Solo will launch a demo of the kind of effects you can achieve, but the real fun is to be had behind Lesson & Jam. With the plectrum pointing at Lesson you can try out the sets one by one, and a printable tablature even appears at the bottom if you fancy trying to recreate them in the real world.

But the pinnacle of the site resides under Jam - the joys of which I will have to leave you to discover on your own.

Powerbullet Presenter

If you have a website or make presentations, you're going to love this next freebie software package. Powerbullet Presenter is a comprehensive package for making impressive, professional animated slide shows and presentations - complete with the option to add sound - using the web-based language of Flash, meaning it's ideal for displaying on websites.

The first step is to download t - then follow the path through to the FTP site at Download.com. After installation you might be a little put off by the amount of buttons and functions on the toolbar. And whilst a lot of them will be familiar to those used to using graphics and word processing packages, a lot of them won't be. But it is worth persevering as it's not actually as complicated as it first looks. There's an excellent and very friendly forum on the website too, where you'll find no end of tips and lovely people willing to help out with advice.

My top tips for getting started - use the options under the Insert menu to add pictures and text boxes - you can animate these to come on and off the page using the Animation and Effects button, which looks like a little wand. Add sound by recording with the mic button, and the page+ button will add a new page for you to work with. Project & Export, or hitting CTRL+E will save the finished work in a file in your Documents folder. You can now publish the .swf file to the web for all to enjoy.

EasyOffice v7

Save money, and help make it less of a Microsoft-run world, with this free suite of office tools. EasyOffice includes word-processing, spreadsheet, database, e-mail, contact management, and presentation applications.

EasyWord is compatible with Microsoft Word, Adobe PDF, HTML, and .zip files; it includes English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Portuguese, Swedish, medical, and legal dictionaries. EasySpreadsheet is compatible with Microsoft Excel, and features one-click e-mailing of your spreadsheets. Both applications have a feature that reads your text to help catch mistakes.

You can create slide presentations with EasyPresentation, and EasyContactManager helps you produce customized form letters and track appointment dates; its contact lists can be exported in Excel format.

In addition, EasyOffice can do some things Microsoft Office can't, such as create PDF files. It also has a dictionary that gives you full definitions and--if you're feeling masochistic--a spelling checker that can alert you out loud about mistakes. Bundled are add-ons such as the EasyCalculator financial calculator and the financial program EasyZip. The software does not need Microsoft Office to run.

Note: The link will take you to a site where you can download the version that's right for you. The vendor also sells a more full-featured version, EasyOffice Premium. go to download site

Killer Flash Games

Here isthe Crimson Room, a Flash game I found baffling:

and IF you manage to complete that game then try the next one called Viridian Room

Note
If you go insane trying to figure out how to escape the crimson room, you're not alone.you will find hints HERE. Very clever puzzle.

---

When your done with those two puzzles then try these two
Hapland 1:
It's a little easier as there are only 25 items to click as opposed to
Hapland 2's 48.

Let me know how you get on
Click items to trigger events in Hapland.

Some may require clicking several times while others require proper timing.

Special thanks to Karen for pointing out the non working links

Feedtier

Feedtier is a web-based tool that is able to generate a RSS feeds for web sites that do not have one. This essentially turns any site into a live web feed, making it easy to get the latest content from a site without checking it constantly. Feedtier works by performing content analysis for a site and syndicating the results via RSS. It is completely automated (although a manual version is expected soon) and requires no technical expertise or in-depth knowledge of RSS. Free to use.

numa numa Video

Go on do yourself a favour and have a laugh.

Remember The Milk

Achieve Domestic Bliss.
Never forget the milk (or anything else) again.
Remember The Milk is the easiest and best way to manage your to-do lists online. Here are just a few of the reasons why it's so cool:

Picasa v2

Its some time now since I mentioned this program but for all those with photos on their computer then THIS program is a must.
Automatically find photos on your camera and share them with ease. If you still have a drawer stuffed with photo prints waiting to be placed in albums, chances are your hard drive is equally full of digital photos waiting to be placed in albums. Picasa automatically finds photos on your camera or photo CDs and organizes your pics. This photo organizer lets you browse photos and watch slideshows. You can touch up red-eye and other imperfections without any danger of saving over the original. And if you'd like to share your photographic wonders with the world, e-mailing a photo is made much easier