Free Stuff

” Paint.NET is free image editing and photo manipulation software for computers that run Windows. It features an intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. An active and growing online community provides friendly help, tutorials, and plugins.
It started development as an undergraduate college senior design project mentored by Microsoft, and is currently being maintained by some of the alumni that originally worked on it. Originally intended as a free replacement for the MS Paint software that comes with Windows, it has grown into a powerful yet simple tool for photo and image editing. ”

And it is fantastic.

Lovely interface, powerful set of tools. Get it here.

Well this is a very easy to use tool to help you make one.

Now, I do know how to build these things, by hand, from scratch, but this is a superb, simple to use and quick way to get the code together. Great FREE tool.

Well Done Tele Pro!

Go get your form here.

Just save this snippet as a batch script - e.g. getfiles.bat in the folder where you want the listings to start.

@REM the /A switch lists hidden and system files
@REM the /S switch lists subdirectories and their contents.
@dir %1 /A /S > c:\list.txt
@notepad c:\list.txt

Ever wanted to make a project look different, but couldn’t find a font to use? Problem solved There’s a whole stack of excellent free fonts at SquareGear and all the designer wants is an email or postcard in return. Go on, you know you want to!

The problem: You have a document you want to share with other people, how do you make sure that everyone can read it and that what you send is exactly what they will see. Word files are not intended for the purpose, there is no guarantee that the layout will be anything like how you intended when someone else views the file. HTML is a good candidate, but notorious for rendering differently in different browsers.

The solution: PDF - a format specifically designed for sharing documents. For once what you see is not only what you get, but will be what everyone else gets too.

Adobe Acrobat, the professional PDF tool is very expensive and has a battery of powerful features, If you have the money to spare and you send a lot of files, then rush out and buy it. If, like me, you don’t need the expensive features, but do want to be able to share documents reliably from time to time, then there are a number of other products which will do the job. I use Jaws PDF, which is very good, has a PDF Editor available….. and a price tag attached. CutePDF is a good alternative, and (again, the magic word, FREE). highly recommended - everyone should get it. Installs as a printer driver and is painless to use. This is a sample PDF created with Cute.

From CutePDF

“Spybot - Search & Destroy can detect and remove spyware of different kinds from your computer. Spyware is a relatively new kind of threat that common anti-virus applications do not yet cover. If you see new toolbars in your Internet Explorer that you didn’t intentionally install, if your browser crashes, or if you browser start page has changed without your knowing, you most probably have spyware. But even if you don’t see anything, you may be infected, because more and more spyware is emerging that is silently tracking your surfing behaviour to create a marketing profile of you that will be sold to advertisement companies. Spybot-S&D is free, so there’s no harm in trying to see if something snooped into your computer, too ”

Gets rid of loads of hidden nasties, including ones you have been conned into, but may not have realised were there. Invaluable. Get it, and get it now.

Get it from Patrick M. Kolla - Safer Networking

The best recommendation I can make for Ignite is that I used it to optimise the photo you can see here. It does pretty nearly as good a job as Photoshop does, for a whole lot less money (it’s what we call beerware, free to install, but the author would quite like it if you’d send him a tenner at some point ) and a lot smaller headache.

It’s pretty straightforward to use, although you probably won’t feel that way the very first time you use it, but trust me, it’s worth perservering. And unlike most freeware, it actually has a help system, that even has information in it that works! Does it get any better than this?

And as a final comment, I’ve got it, I’ve got it registered, with my real proper email address, and I haven’t been pestered by the author any more than he says he will. Good eh?

Get it here - Ignite

If you ever need to handle compressed archives this is just the ticket. Handles 7-ZIP, A, ACE, ARC, ARJ, B64, BH, BIN, BZ2, BZA, C2D, CAB, CDI, CPIO, DEB, ENC, GCA, GZ, GZA, HA, IMG, ISO, JAR, LHA, LIB, LZH, MDF, MBF, MIM, NRG, PAK, PDI, PK3, RAR, RPM, TAR, TAZ, TBZ, TGZ, TZ, UUE, WAR, XXE, YZ1, Z, ZIP, ZOO file types.

If you are using Windows XP, IZArk will manage zip files much faster than the native “compressed folders” seems able to.

A very handy application and the first software I can recall using which is produced in Bulgaria.

IZSoft says “With a modern easy-to-use interface, IZArc provides support for most compressed and encoded files, as well as access to many powerful features and tools. It allows you to drag and drop files from and to Windows Explorer, create and extract archives directly in Windows Explorer, create multiple archives spanning disks, creating self-extracting archives, repair damaged zip archives, converting from one archive type to another, view and write comments and many more. IZArc has also build-in multilanguage support.

IZArc is the most complete archive utility available today. ”

Get it from IZSOft

Up until I installed this I was getting hundreds of spam messages a day, and a high percentage were conning their way through Outlook’s flters.

Spamihilator has only been on my machine a few hours as I type, so the jury is still out, as it were, but so far, this is a very impressive application. Its filters are very effective and it has an excellent, easy to use interface coupled with good documentation. So, for example, when I needed to work out how to permit newsletters to pass through unmolested, I found the answer in a few seconds.

…update 17th April 2005, it is a keeper, this one. It takes a little work to tune the powerful set of options to tell it to respect newsletters and such, but it is already purging well over 90% of the crap I had been getting…

It works, it does what it says it does. Bloody good.

Get it from Spamihilator

I have tried various FTP clients over the years and for a long time I used LeechFTP, it was a little bit clunky to use, but very reliable. I liked it, it was like on old friend and I was used to its little foibles, like occasionally throwing up an error message in German, when there was no error.

Leech is no longer being developed or supported so, in the end, I decided that I should move on. I tried various alternatives, including the leading commercial FTP product. Which I liked, right up until it stopped connecting after I ran a Windows Update. I couldn’t figure out how to fix it, I simply couldn’t find the relevant check box to tick. I did manage to fix Filezilla, quickly and easily.

I don’t hesitate to recommend Filezilla. It is very good, reliable and well specced. But I don’t think I will ever get to be as fond of it as I was of Leech.

Get Filezilla